Only Human: SW:TOR

Something Shintar posted today set me thinking about a puzzling aspect of Star Wars: the Old Republic. It's a game with galactic reach, set against a backdrop of unimaginable complexity. According to Wookieepedia there are "over 20 million sentient species known to the galaxy". Wikipedia lists more than 250 of them.

Among that multiplicity of intelligences there are thinking plants, arachnids, slugs, rocks, wasps and jellyfish. There's even sentient fog. Not to mention the seemingly endless variety of AIs, housed in droids of every conceivable shape and configuration.

And what do we get to play? Humans with funny heads!

TOR has eleven playable species: Cathar, Chiss, Cyborg, Human, Miraluka, Mirialan, Rattataki, Sith Pureblood, Togruta, Twi'lek and Zabrak. Maybe that means something to someone but in case not I'll break it down, based on the headshots:

• Cathar - Human. Looks a bit like a cat
• Chiss - Blue Human. Looks almost exactly like a Dark Elf from EverQuest 
• Cyborg - Human with a few bits of metal stuck to their head
• Human - Um, Human, obviously
• Miraluka - Blind Human
• Mirialan - Green Human
• Rattataki - Human with goth facepaint
• Sith Pureblood - Red Human
• Togruta - Varicolored Human with horns and big, dangly head-tentacles on each side
• Twi'lek - Varicolored Human with no horns and big, dangly tentacles going down the back.
• Zabrak - Human. Looks a bit like a devil. Or Hellboy.

Shintar was talking about what TOR players might want to do before the next expansion arrives in five months time. Since I've barely made any headway in the core game, it's not really the kind of help I need right now, but I was interested to see that one of the features of the Onslaught expansion is a new playable species.

This is a Twi'lek.
For Nautolan add more droopy bits and color green

The latest addition, bringing the total to a round dozen, is the Nautolan. As far as I can see, the Nautolans, described by Shintar as "the undisputed fan favourite at Star Wars Celebration" is a human with an octopus stuck to the back of their head.

Technically, the Nautolans are amphibians. Much good may it do them in a game where the deepest water comes to just above your knees. Maybe there's some waterworld later on I don't know about.

I was looking at the picture of the Nautolan and wondering why BioWare were so insistently humanocentric when several blindingly obvious answers struck me all at once: animations, gear, demand and cost. Cost is both the most and least important: I'm sure money would be found if the payoff was worth it.

Animations are one reason we do sometimes see given for why new mounts or playable races in other games are obvious re-skins of existing models. I know nothing at all about 3D modelling but even I know that creating animations from scratch is a very time-consuming and skilled job.

That explains why we don't get new, complicated creations with lots of moving parts but look at one of the few non-humanoid races we do see plenty of, albeit as NPCs, The Hutt. There's vast potential for playable characters with next to no animations when you have races with hardly any visible limbs.

It's not even as though they need to move about much. All a Hutt ever does is sit there. Occasionally they might smirk. How hard would that be to animate? There must be some species that could just squat on a hover-disk and float. It was good enough for Zirk. I bet those sentient rocks wouldn't need a lot of animations, either.

The issue isn't so much about the cost of animating new, weird alien lifeforms. That could be sidestepped. It's more about whether anyone would want to play them in the first place. Most F2P imports offer nothing more in the way of "racial" choice than pretty humans, big humans, short humans and pretty elves (who look like pretty humans with pointy ears). The ambitious ones might stretch as far as humans with tails (catgirls) or wings (fairies as imagined by a five-year old).

The reason they do that is cost, yes, but also because experience has taught them almost no-one chooses to play anything that doesn't look human. Even in Western MMORPGs, whose players are considered to be more willing to experiment with appearances, the less human the race, the fewer people choose to play it.

Let's say BioWare did decide to take a chance and add a non-humoid race anyway, choosing an easy-to-animate one that looked nothing like a human. Maybe without a head or obvious limbs. The next hurdle would be gear, with its twin functions of buffing stats and looking good.

Sheena's in a Goth Gang. (Mildly NSFW!)

TOR isn't Guild Wars 2, with an endgame that consists almost entirely of playing dress up and posing, but it does have a fairly elaborate wardrobe system and an income from armor sets in the Cartel Market to consider. Hutt, to pick on them again, don't wear much in the way of clothes. Or, indeed, anything, most of the time. I can't imagine sentient rocks are big on designer labels and as for fog...

Then there's the stats to consider. The whole system is predicated on everyone having the same number of arms and legs, not to mention heads. The paper doll gives that much away. I suppose you could keep all the slots and just rename them - Top, Middle, Bottom, Left, Right... Sounds bit generic. Or you could have one piece of gear, like a belt, and put lots of slots on it...

Whatever solution you come up with, it's going to be a kludge. And take a lot of work. Why would you bother? If you'd had non-humanoid species from the get-go, you could have come up with something elegant - or at least something that worked. Too late now.

There are probably lots of other very good reasons to stick to humans but the ones I've given are more than enough to convince me we're never going to see anything thatt deviates from the humanorm by more than a few tentacles and a respray.

Which is a shame. I'm one of those peculiar players who likes to go for the least humanocentric option character creation can offer. I'd play a sentient rock.

Okay, probably not as my Main.