Why the complex clothing on charcaters.?
-put it simply why is it most popular game characters seem to have high detailed armour and variations in size, e.g big and bulky.
Even though the game mechanics are fantastic behind the character the clothing adds issues with the mechanics.
-for starters charcater has a big cloak which helps hime hide in crowd but during running and building leaps the cloak is still there no matter how much training an individual recieves you will trip over that cloak simple solution would be a backpack or folding system for the cloak. (I fill this should have been a responsebilty of the charcater designer)
-The colour palets for the charcater, besides looking awesome I fill this is heavily impacting the blend mechanic they have to hide from gaurds, white, brown, blue, and red, who wouldn't notice someone wearing these in the middle of brown cloaked monks. Fair enough players can change the colours of the clothes but I feel there was room to add a mechanic there (if you choose to wear colourful clothing that makes you stand out then hiding in crowds isn't an option for you.)
It seems more or less that in characters development the need to make the charcater stand out more takes over more that the actuall necessity of the assets he has. This is a major downside even though correct these issues would improve the look of the characters and aspects of the game play it seems a nessecary sacrifice in order to make the game functional this could have been a fault the character designer having to work with a brief of whats needed on the character and what he/she cannot do to alter the character, a way of fixing this is to make more character designers who start with mechanics and focus their way up and teams talking and judging the charcaters and asking why they need certain assets.
-judging from this it seems best that if your designing a soilder to go with the standerd soilder look and feel with your own added designed to it but if your characters required certain abilites of movement skills his armour or clothing reflects that, a simple mechanic of adding and removing armour during gameplay would be a cool way of informing the player of what he/she character can do when put a situation that they have more or less armour.
- The best area of character design is hollywood in my opinion. This is based on the fact that all their assets in terms of armour and clothing are created for actors to wear if something is too big or too heavy its scraped as its not realistic enough, not ammount of futuristic or medevil armour can break the simple law that if an actual person cant walk or move in it why would it be the best armour for battle. The main reason they have this advantage over games is that the assets are made to add a sense of realism to what otherwise would be a digitally created world, popular cities are used in movies to add that sense of emerssion in the cinema so people can imagine and see what would happen if Gozilla really did run through Manhattan.An example of this is the armour seen in "Pacific rim" created for actors with a combination of prop and 3d creation a pefect armoured suit was created, e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qBfMPFmmm4
If this process what combined in games I think a new level of characters would emerge ones players would be able to easily accept and belive in their capability of movement.
