Lazy Anet recycles the fem ele body again

I agree, this is something any normal person would probably never notice. Thats right, you guys are abnormal! Anyway, i'd rather anet spend their time on just about anything else, than on making sure each female model has their own unique body model and posture. come on.

Just in case anyone doubts these models are identical.....

Thanks for that. I now doubt they are identical. Details, you ask?

Both the Paragon and Dervish models are overall thinner than the Ele, look closely at their calves and you'll see what I'm talking about.

However, the Paragon and the Ele have similar long necks, the Dervish doesn't.

They all three have different shoulders, look closely.

The Paragon and Dervish appear to have similar, thin arms, potentially like the Assassin.

Other than those differences, yes, they are similar, but not the same.

I noticed the Dervish seemed to use many of the same animations as the Mesmer -- I think the Mesmer and the Elementalist may be the same, or mostly the same.

I have to say I'm somewhat disappointed that the Dervish doesn't seem to have original emotes (aside from Dance). In general I would like more emotes, more command variations for emotes, and distinctive animations for the different classes.

Although Nightfall is looking really nice overall, I don't think going in and posing the skeletons in slightly different ways for the new classes is too much to ask.

I'm sorry, but you have no idea what you're talking about. They are identical. Make an elementalist and a paragon or dervish to scale, and toggle between them on your character select screen, and you will see that they are exactly the same. And I do mean exact.

The only things that will change when you toggle are 1) length of neck and relative position of head 2) on dervish, extension of right arm from body.

These differences aside, it's quite obvious Anet used the same 3D model for each of these professions. I think the Ritualist is the same, but I'm too lazy to make one to scale. It just so happens that my ele, paragon and dervish are exactly the same size and are located next to each other in my character select screen. So when I toggled between them it was obvious the only thing that changed was the head.

I am sure this will sound a little crude. Anyone that has made a study of breasts would be able to see that the female Rit does not have the same body model as the female Ele. It is such an obvious difference that I am amazed that people say they have the same body model. The female Rit also has different shaped hips, more similar to the female Necro model than the female Ele. I haven't bothered to make any other comparisons at this time, I don't really care enough to bother.

This thread is useless. Any true GW player understands how much time went into this chapter. If gazing at your female character, pretending she was real and that she could take your virginity were the purpose of the game then it would have the OP's name in the title. This game deserves our praise. It is a masterpiece.

Wow... kitty has claws.

You got PS skills? Do an overlay comparison. Be sure to get screenies of them in the exact same position and animation frame (breathing). See for yourself.

I'm not going to do this because it's not my claim to prove. In fact, I even half-assed agreed with you until you showed that pic and they looked (obvious to me) different. Not pushing an agenda here, just stating what I see.

Agreed with you here, there are slight differences -- At least in the Dervish model. I think the Paragon and the Elementalist look identical, aside from scaling, though.

Nevertheless, it's clear from the animations of the emotes that the Dervish is using the same skeleton as E/Me/etc, and thus shares the same animations for emotes.

Oh, here's the ritualist btw. I guess people can decide for themselves if it also uses the elementalist model.

IMHO, there are differences. Again, I said they were similar, just not the same, so technically no, none of them use the elementalist model except the elementalist.

Here's something to mull over... all the classes were most likely built off of two original models, a male and a female. Those models were then tweaked and tweaked some more to become different. Polygons were added in some areas, and removed in others all to create 'differences' in the models. Suddenly, all the models looked different, albeit slightly in the case of certain models.

Now, where the most 'disturbing' similarity is, is the animations. The most notable, how the character is standing when idle. This is the biggest difference between all the models. If the female Necro also stood exactly the way the Ele did, you'd be swearing duplicates there, too.

I think that's where you're gathering most of the similarities. I agree that this could be attributed to laziness, to a degree. However the models themselves are most definately different, or as different as GW models get. I'd be the first person to jump on the bandwagon that the Warrior (and potentially the Dervish and Paragon) females need to be bulked up a bit to reflect their field of expertise.

I think the people who make the models do a fantastic job, and aren't "lazy" in the least. Case in point: Do you realize how much work is involved in modelling each piece of armor for each character? I know I don't. But I do know it's probably a lot. Why would they just cut & paste the model of each character, but then spend an inordinate amount of time on the armors? Why not just cut & paste those (Nightfall warrior armor excluded - that was a tad lazy)? They even modelled their undies differently on each model!

If there is any reason for model similarity, it would be because that is what is pleasing to the eye. Remember the outrage directed toward Anet when everyone saw the Assassin? Lots of differences made to that model to make her 'sleek' and 'tone' to fit her profession, and instead people said she looked more 'anorexic' and 'child-like'.

Show me the differences between the core professions.

I think you have way too much time on your hands and you're paying way too much attention to this. Get a grip and just play the game.

Basically, if the differences are too small to notice casually then the models are effectively the same. No one really cares if one model has calves that have 1 world unit more radius to them than another model. The Elementalist, Mesmer, Ritualist, Dervish, Paragon, are all effectively the same. It seems a bit much.

With Prophecies we got at least 2(?) male and 2(?) female bodies, plenty of animations and plenty of customization options for all of them. I don't expect quite the same amount of content for Factions or Nightfall ... But both Factions and Nightfall are priced as standalone games. I expect a reasonably comparable amount of content if they are charging the same price as for Prophecies.

Re-using models and, in particular, re-using the skeletal animations, is disappointing to me. It may be that ArenaNet's artists feel that people don't want any other bodytypes than a slim, big-breasted woman so that they don't bother producing anything else -- a notion that may be true. But utilizing the same animations strips any derivative classes of any unique carriage, demeanor, and body language they might otherwise have had.

Are ArenaNet's employees lazy? Of course not. I'm sure they're working their butts off. I do 3D modelling and animation as a hobby, and it's certainly time intensive (although not a black art as you seem to make it out to be, arcanemacabre). Is it possible for them to deliver a $50 product (id est, Prophecies) on a six-month schedule? That's the real question we need to be asking. Personally, if they can't devote enough resources to produce a full complement of art options (id est, faces, hairstyles, body types, animations) on a 6 month schedule then give it two more months, or four. I'd rather see ArenaNet producing polished product than rushing out content every six months in a race to the bottom.

Holy crap, WTF is it with people and the "6 month schedule" deal? There are TWO DIFFERENT dev groups, on staggered 1-year cycles. The team that did Factions is presumably deeply engrossed in Ch4 now.

As far as differences in models, first off they're limited in the kind of models people want to play. I guarantee you, if they put in fat female models, almost nobody would play them. Second off, making a whole new model from the ground up takes quite a bit of time, and if they've decided that they need the expansions on a 1-year dev cycle to stay in business, then I'd prefer the modellers spend their limited time making NEW MONSTERS, instead of new character models that will end up looking a hell of a lot like the old ones any way.

Did you not consider all the other models those same artists are working on? Monsters and NPCs to be specific. I'm sure the level designers take care of landscapes, but still, that's a lot of models. That's what I mean by a lot of work. It's not just the characters. It's not just the armors. It's not just the NPCs, it's all of it, and it's only one team. That's a lot of work, I'm sure.

I have done a bit of modelling myself (working with 3ds max and Maya), though I wouldn't even consider myself an amateur, I can still tell when something would require a lot of work, despite one's skills.

The differences matter only because, as I said, people enjoy the appearence already, and are used to the super-model symmetry. It's a hard, cold, sad fact of life, but people like things perfect and can immediately tell when something's off (to them). The current models can only be tweaked ever so little without stepping outside that comfort zone.

You feel like you could do better, go ahead and send in your resume.

OR, a way to increase the amount of models without increasing the development time would be to hire MORE artists. If they had just one more artist working full time, year round, on player models, I'm pretty sure we'd have at least a few more bodies and faces to play with. And it's not like it's terribly expensive for a company like anet to do that, either. All they'd need to be able fully pay an artist, I guess, would be to sell somewhere between five hundred and a thousand copies of the game yearly; we know they can sell A LOT more than that, and I don't believe their budget is so tight as to not allow this extra expense if they wanted...

The fact is, they probably don't pay much heed to this problem; they're hardly going to sell any extra copy of the game because they have one more player model, and that's that. While the game becomes a bit less polished because of this, it's still a great game. All we can do is hope they find some time to improve the customization aspect of the game some more, since the lack of options there is one of the things that keep the game from being a true masterpiece.

I agree. They obviously put a lot more effort into individualization of characters with the first release. If it is a tradeoff of that versus content, playbalance, streaming technology, etc., then I would say it's not important. But, I don't believe that. GW has already made a lot of compromise already on the ability to individualiza a character and create a unique identity. Isn't that why we play games like this, the fantasy of occupying another body, another soul for a short while. If we all walk around looking like everyone else and not being able to express ourselves uniquely, then this game will loose the very thing that keeps most people interested.

I really don't think this matter... as long as we still can identify one class from another while looking decent.

In battle they have different animations.

Thats what should matter.

Ritualist doesnt swing a hammer the same way an ele does.

Although they do shoot bows the same way....