Human Females. This was originally going to be a rant, but

Ive seen that before, and i only have one question, what are the stats of that demo computer?

I miss the game that video talked about.
Back on topic tho, I use SOGA for most all models. The original models for the most part look.. gah.. like they have genetic defects either in their face, their body proportion, or their feet.
Granted SOGA has issues as well, at least they're prettier to look at.

Huene@Crushbone wrote:

It was probably rendered rather than done in real time. One reason they went away from that art was it was way too punishing on computers, no consumer computers at the time could have hoped to play the game with any kind of framerate with that armor.

I use SOGA models, 1000000x better looking that the malformed, hate to say it smacked with a frying pan look that everyone has in the "normal" models. The Ogers where better looking in Normal, humans, much better in SOGA.

I always thought it was all too easy to make a deformed human female face. You had to work at it to get a decent face. You don't use the random generator unless you want to be traumatized. I do see a distinct difference between the early human model and the released model.
That said, I'm not so convinced all possible female models have to be "beautiful" by human standards. I know having everyone a "pretty person" is very popular in Hollywood, but I'm happy to see a wider range of game characters.
As a funny sidenote - I have absolutely no clue what the SOGA viewers are seeing for my characters when they switch to those alternate models. I took a look a long time ago at what the models looked like via the character creation screen. I'm not an anime or anime-inspired fan, but that had nothing to do with it (in fact I liked that they didn't have such massive chests). The original models just always seem to me like the real inhabitants of Norrath.
edit - ...well, the real inhabitants with heavily padded push-up bras on....

The human in the original looks like Sigourney Weaver smacked upside the face with a skillet. And I like Sigourney Weaver.
Also, the game they showed in that demo clip is AION. It sure as hell looks like AION, anyway.

What about this human female model...

Tyrus@Butcherblock wrote:

That emote is still in game. /clickheels. I love it.

Powers &8^]

Rottenapple wrote:

Gorgeous. 100% better than the current ones. I seriously wonder what went wrong here. Any old-time art devs left?

Powers &8^]

Rottenapple wrote:

Here here! This is one of the screenshots that convinced me that I NEEDED to move from the original to this new version when it came out.
I wonder what made them decide to change their body to the one they have now (with the undefined boobs) and the incredibly sad & tired looking faces? I have a couple of human characters now and I've made them look nice enough to suit me but these models in this picture were so much better. The models they had on the character creator disc you could get before the game released looked much better. Then the game released and we got the haggard bad sports bra wearing models we have now. Needless to say I was very disappointed and my first few characters were not humans despite humans being my favorite to play in MMOs.
They need to at least extend the slider ranges on and smooth the skin bump maps or something.

I play a human female as my main. I do like the character, but honestly - they did a -crappy- job with these models. I have two main complaints:

1. It is almost impossible to make them pretty, or even half decent. There is an issue with their lips, and the face looks sad, tired and generally unattractive. I cannot fathom why they were made this way, honestly, especially since they obviously HAD another model that was WAY better! (I could add that I don't particularly care for the saggy boobs either.)

2 Size. Human female models are too frikkin' large. Not everyone who plays a human wants to play a 6'5" tall giant, and it also does not fit the description in the racial tables. Would be great if this could be adjusted, or at least made a little less restrictive.

Just to be clear: Talking only about the regular models now, not SOGA.

On the Human females in particular, the mouth is the worst part of the rendering, then the eyes. I agree, they need to extend the range of the sliders, but the mouths need fixing.
I prefer my Ayr male in Soga, he is not supposed to look like a pouty welfboy, but a man and a warrior.
Personally Koada females look ok to me in either view, if a tad too skinny in Soga, granted they are elves...
Teir females look way better in originals, the head shape is just wrong otherwise.

Bah, what we need is to change it so that the other player sees your character the way you want to have them seen, drop the Soga/original views, put the options up for all and let us get more variety. However I am not one of those crybabies that will threaten to quit if I am "forced" to look at either view.

I believe that these models had 40,000 or more polys. That's why they had to be trimmed down and cut back. I was on EQ1 at the time, but I'm pretty sure that's why they aren't in game.

Non-SOGA model human females look stoned, sad, tired, and their boobs are WAAAY out of proportion. Underwire anyone?

SOGA dark elf females drive me nuts. Its that white line that separates their lips. Makes them look like mouth breathers.

It's all definitely a matter of preference, but the human females look like they have downs to me unless you work really hard on them. I don't really like the SOGA humans either, but it's better than the original. I actually prefer original human males though, since sometimes people accidentally have a comb-over and I love that it prevents everyone from looking super heroic and identical. The only models I play with SOGA on are high and half elves, dark elf males, and half elf females. LOVE original wood elf females for some reason...

My guess is that if they had to redo the models due to limitations on how complex they could make them that the human females just didn't translate aesthetically well to a slimmed down version and there wasn't time/resources to do it properly at that point. At least I want to assume that no artist could have looked at the human female and said they were ecstatic about how it turned out.
They probably should have created a few distinct archetypes of faces for each race/gender combination and allow people to customize off of those - other games tend to go that route, and it usually works out for the best.

Verrie77 wrote:

Holy crap, that's amazing, How have I played this game this long and never seen this video before?
Why are females not this hot and why can't my paladin where that style armor? OMG!

Roslyn wrote:

This.
The human female is the only original model I dislike and still use it over SOGA because they don't feel like they fit in Norrath to me.
I've only been playing about a year and a half and had never seen early possible female humans...those are so much better! It would be really nice if they'd fix these girls.

ttobey wrote:

Even the ones they sent out on the pre-order character creation disc? The human female models on that looked different than the ones we ended up with. I poked around in my stuff, found the disc, installed it and played with the creator just to make sure it wasn't time putting a rosey look on things.
The little insert even says that if you save the character you created you'd be able to load it up and us it when the game shipped. When I got the CC disc I recreated my human ranger from eq1 with plans to play her in eq2. When I received the game, loaded my preset char looks in, she looked well like humans do in game now. So I ended up rolling a half elf ranger instead.
I compared the looks of the elf races, and those seemed very very similar to how they are now, save the posture change all characters got. Gnomes & barbarians suffered a bit of a slider change (their young slider don't smooth them out as much now as they did on the cc disc). Halfings as well to some degree, but human females got different bodies and features of their faces were changed for the worse.
Here's a shot of something I whipped up in the old preorder CC with little difficulty:

*****All this being said, it does look like something has been done to the human models since the last time I paid close attention to them. My human characters are alts and I've not really played those particular alts in the past few months to any extent for other than crafting.
Their faces look...smoother for lack of a better word. It looks terrible in the character select screen (like someone went wild with the blur tool) but actually looks pretty good in game. The lips still look awful but something's different in a good way. Maybe someone's tweaking stuff and not mentioning it ?

It would be great if we could have those high poly count human chicks for an optional model.