User blog:Spinfx/Character presets

Welcome to Spinfx's Bitching About Usability, Part 2 :D

This is actually related to my previous blog post, inventory management. This time I'm going to talk about presets. Or "templates", or "configurations", or whatever the lingo is.

To clarify, I'm talking about how you're unable to save the current setup of your character - both skill-wise and equipment-wise. For example, if you were leveling as a mage, then decided to take a few levels timeout to level as a fighter, then return to being a mage... do you remember what you originally had equipped as a mage? Both equipment and skills?

Granted, Dragon's Dogma is hardly the only offender - the vast majority of games don't really have this feature. However, Dragon's Dogma is among the few that can really benefit from it. Consider: in most other games you don't usually get to switch between character classes on one character, which reduces the need for this. (It would still be useful, however, to be able to equip character B with the same items & skills as character A, for example.)

From a programmer point of view, it's not even difficult; all we need to save are the values of the items/skills currently equipped in the character slots, then save/load those. Trivial.

How does that look like? Well, have the character model stand in the middle, then rotate left or right between the various saved templates - there, even the interface I've just imagined for it looks stylish, rather than yet another plain and boring menu list.

Since I'm totally crap at visuals, here's a sample of what I'm talking about: Template wheel example 1

Granted, that wheel has a tad too many selections on it - to keep it manageable I suggest 3 templates, i.e. to match the three base class archetypes (fighter/strider/mage). It doesn't have to be head on 90 degrees like that, the wheel could be tilted, kind of like the Golden Axe arcade character selection screen: Golden Axe character selection

The three choices (dwarf, barbarian, amazon) rotate on the skeletal palm, with the main selection being the one in the center. Same concept as the first example, except that the character models are standing on the circle, not ranged around a central 3D character model.

Additionally, a nice touch would be being able to press Triangle (dunno what the corresponding X360 button is) like during character creation to make the character show different animations, or facial expressions if zoomed in. Hell, code recycle: just copy over the code from there.

Ta.