Will character customization be robust enough that we can create recognizable individuals who can be identified simply by looking at them?
TL;DRYes, characters should be recognizable thanks to higher fidelity, and more distinct heads, scalps, necks and faces should make friends identifiable at a distance as customization expands later.
Sure. I would hope so. But I guess I don't understand the question. Do they mean...
In World of Warcraft, for instance, you can't identify a person. If you strip your orc and his orc and his orc of their armor, you'd be hard-pressed to tell who was who without the name floating on their head, because there's only eight variations of orc. They're saying, would the character customization be unique enough that you could see somebody without a name and go...
We've got a couple more polys to deal with. We've got a lot more, to use the buzzword, fidelity on our characters than some of those other titles that you mentioned, which means that, yeah, sure, of course you're going to be able to recognize them. Again, we've got these AAA actors within Squadron 42, and they're pretty recognizable. So if you can imagine that you'll be able to push your character to quite that level, yeah, you're definitely going to be able to recognize the difference between your buddies. That's a pretty important part of it.
When DNA comes out and you're no longer choosing one of nine heads, I think that's going to be where you really start to see that more.
And Ivo touched on it in his talk, which hopefully goes out pretty soon here: some of the things that you use to recognize certain people, we had kind of taken away from the players a little bit in this early customizer so that we could fit all the hairs, all the helmets, and everything like that, by unifying the scalp and the neck. There's a profile difference, but the reason why, like you say, in another game you would strip them of all their armor and everything and they look pretty much the same is exactly that problem, because they've unified to some description so that they can fit all the different assets on it. So being able to have different scalp shapes, different neck shapes, different faces, dramatic differences, will make it easy to identify from a distance. And I think Ivo's talk spans almost 10 minutes discussing that. So I think that will be a pretty important and valuable thing.