Calix Reneau · Senior Systems Designer

Yeah, so that's one of the things that we're trying to do for the V2, to make those decisions less segregated. We want to make it so that you're able to jump back and forth between all the elements that really impact your choices much, much more easily. So we want to bring the skin selection into the same screen as where you're doing a lot of the head selection stuff. That's some of the stuff that we're exploring right now. And yeah, that'll definitely help that process. Because right now, if you want to see what this feature would look like and you start going towards something, like, oh, the skin tone doesn't really feel right anymore, I want to go towards something lighter or darker or different, then you need to navigate away from the thing you were just doing. It's definitely a UX problem.

Spencer Johnson · Associate Gameplay Engineer

Yeah, it's like context switching. You totally lost the perfect framed shot of what you thought that person would look like with a different tone.

Calix Reneau · Senior Systems Designer

I mean, V1 of this character customizer with blending is all about how do we communicate how this novel system works to new players. One of the things that was really important is it is not a sculpting system. So we don't want to use any tools that operate similarly to what you might use in ZBrush or Max or anything: I'm going to take this thing and move it over here. That's not how the data works. It's not something that's going to be able to actually get you towards the result that you're expecting from that. And the moment you try to do something and it reacts incorrectly, you immediately have a break of that mental model and you immediately have a bad experience. So step one, not sculpting, we need to communicate that. And then step two was trying to communicate that when you're blending these things, you have the full breadth of choices at every step. So one of the initial things is, we keep showing you the heads, they come in and out and they do all that stuff. Because we felt that it was important to try to get across that when you go to edit the nose, you don't need to be using the same pool of four heads to manipulate that nose that you used for the brows. You can have a unique head selection on every single one of these features and blend them independently. That is a level of control and minutiae that, the feedback has proven, is a little bit beyond what is helpful. So we've sort of keyed in on the thing that worked, the thing that was nice about the way that we set it up, which is trying to make the coarsest, broadest choices early and refine from there. So each choice is how do I get closer to what I'm looking for, instead of how do I identify which thing I need to change. So it's focusing in more on the next step: I want to look more like this guy. I want to look more like this. I want this skin instead. So bringing that into the same panel, making it so that you don't have to go to a different step, is absolutely part of that process of how do I give you the clearest, broadest choice such that you can refine from there.

Sean Tracy · Technical Director of Content

So for the V2 stuff, what we've talked about a lot is, currently, with the UX and the way that people end up making their characters, we're not feeling like they're actually getting the result that they necessarily want or expect. And a lot of this is experimentation, but rather than being beholden to what your result is, because I think a lot of people play with it, and they'll get to a result that they're kind of happy with, but it kind of takes you there rather than you taking it there, if that makes any sense. In the V2 version of it, that whole mentality is kind of switching, where we'd rather you have very precise, as Calix talked about, ever-increasing complexity controls within it, but get the result that you want out of it a little more directly.

Calix Reneau · Senior Systems Designer

Yeah, if you go into the system with an idea of what you want, we want you to be able to get it. Currently, that's a bit more difficult because you have to sort of comb through the system for the tools that you need. And that was in service of trying to explain this novel system, but it muddied up those choices. And so we're trying to clarify those choices so that they can be a little bit more useful and available when players want to use them.