game girl advance: Children of Heroes - Avatar Aesthetics

Children of Heroes - Avatar Aesthetics

Posting photos of your online MMOG characters is kinda like showing people baby pictures maybe? There's a measure of pride, and definite investment. After seeing Professor Burke's post on City of Heroes from last month, with a picture of his own character Faust, I was inspired to foist these photos on you folks.

As I wrote in my first GGA post on City of Heroes, I was laughing and chortling and enjoying myself immensely designing my characters for this game. I like to experiment with different character types in MMOGs so I end up with a number of lower-level characters. This is fun in CoH because I get a chance to develop my character-making technique, to improve my avatar aesthetics.

	Phyrric - Technology Blaster Virtue Server My first character - let's make him look like a gleeful idiot! I thought - Phyrric, a victory that defeats. And it looks like fire - many of the powers in City of Heroes are based around the elements, so making a fire character was easy. And making him look silly, like a winner who has lost his marbles, was easy too - wide grin, silly glasses, tall hair, lines on his chest, non-sequitor radiation symbol on his chest, pink fingerless gloves, flaming metal jodhpurs, boots with fins. Then I found out I'd mispelled Phyrric (I used Google as my spellchecker) and I felt even better about the whole thing.
	Delphine - Mutant Controller Pinnacle Server You ever notice: in many role-playing games, men are the brutes and women are the enchantresses? I didn't exactly break form here - I wanted to make a more magic-type of character, and play with playing a woman. City of Heroes offers three gender choices - male, female, and giant brutish male. And astonishingly, the fashion choices for women are rather limited if you don't want her to be wearing a bikini or bustier. I was working on a mutant controller - someone who can manipulate gravity and energy to help friends and hurt foes. Powers of the mind, unknown, perhaps erratic - like the Oracle at Delphi! Delphine was her name then. Playing on this idea of someone from the Mediterranean, near the middle of the old world, I outfitted her in a mix of dark, formal Western business attire and the closest I could get to a muslim head scarf, or shadour. Beneath that, glowing eyes and a beaming third eye. Subdued pink and black colors, with just some superhero freak freak happening in her legs.
	Maggma - Magic Tanker Protector Server A friend was on Protector - I wanted a character on that server. And I wanted to play one of the thick characters that could charge into combat without fretting hit points so much. The brutish male gender-type was a natural for this style of play, and the chracter class "Tanker." It would be differently fun to play a tiny shrimpy person who was a tanker, yes, and a brutish male healer maybe. But this was not the image I had in my mind. I wanted something earthy thick and powerful. I was playing with the different effects in the character designer, the tattoos and art you could inscribe on your hero, and I found this electricity effect on his shoulders might look like lava if you colored the lines orange on a brown body. So I created this idea of a volcanic force - power of rock, power of fire. Born of unspoken magic, that's why he has those goofy glyphs on his pants, and celtic boots. I wanted him to have bare feet, but that's not an option here yet. Magic horns on his head. Deep earth tones with orange accents. This is my latest character, and probably my favorite to look at.

Part of the fun of City of Heroes is playing through these character creation choices from an aethetic point of view. Not - I'm a sneaky archer who can make robes. But I'm a volcano-inspired creature of magic who wears earth-tones. It's an important evolution in these kinds of games to be able to approach character creation from the outset as an aesthetic experience. Accordingly, the gameplay is filled with people expressing themselves, using the City of Heroes toolset to make some kind of personal statement on heroism, play and identity.

Here's a screenshot of Delphine standing with a fellow adventurer named Messiahnator, who fights with a large gun, yelling "bless you my children" as he shoots people down:

delphine with messiahnator - mmm, sacrelicious

As expansive as the City of Heroes toolset seems after Dark Age of Camelot, for example, it's still nowhere near as fun as Second Life. But the gameplay here is different - City of Heroes players are in a much more structured environment. As the medium of massively multiplayer online games evolves, these tools for personalization and avatar customization should continue to expand to allow for more play. And that's fun!

Posted by justin at June 27, 2004 11:47 AM

Snowmit - I say limited primarily based on the number of options available to women in the world at large. When you look at the range of shapes available to women in fashion in general, in the Western world, they can wear various shapes of pants, of skirts, of dresses. Tops include shirts, and wraps and jackets and tops of all sizes. There's only really one style of jacket in CoH, for example. No halter tops. No chance to wear something like a nice blouse and style that out. Why would a superhero rock a blouse? Well, why would a superhero have fins on their boots?

For both men and women, I found the categories for tops, and bottoms unduly limited. For example, for pants, there's tight, and baggy, and cargo pants. What about pleated? What about pinstripe? What about short-shorts? What about bare feet? So many permutations of dress - I must sort of forgive the designers for not including every permutation. But when you get down to it, they offer categories of dress in CoH without offering a range of dress within them. So you can select suit jacket, but it's only one cut. Soon, I suspect, they might expand those options. More choice - more creativity - more entertainment value!

Posted by: justin on June 28, 2004 01:43 AM

Posting photos of your online MMOG characters is kinda like showing people baby pictures maybe?

It's more like telling your D&D adventure stories, but perhaps slightly better than showing the artwork you've drawn of your D&D characters.

Posted by: Baines on June 27, 2004 01:33 PM

Forgot to add that looking at Phyrric makes me think of Fiery Blaze & Friendly Fire (from The Tick live action series). Though from the sound of it, that is the kind of design you were looking for. :p

Posted by: Baines on June 27, 2004 01:38 PM

Women character wardrobe limited? I'm suprised that you say that. The only place where you can end up with a bikini or bustier is "tops with skin" whereas there are a whole ton of other catagories for the tops (armour, tops without skin, suit jacket, etc.).

Though I just joined last week, so maybe they added new clothing options recently?

Posted by: Snowmit on June 27, 2004 05:28 PM

What, no one else has pictures?

Due to time constraints and recent admission into the WoW beta, I'm not on as often as I'd like to be. Guardian server.

Kid Cuttlefish, Cephalopod Champion.

(Messiahnator is brilliant)

Posted by: ChrisA on June 30, 2004 02:09 PM

I actually found a bare foot option the other day. It only appeared with certain combinations of bottoms and boots (which I can't remember, sorry). It was for women; dunno if they have one for men. Has anyone tried the new costume store in Steel Canyon? I've been happy with my costumes so I haven't gone to tweak them.

Posted by: Irony on July 1, 2004 08:51 AM