JHe: We have had very in-depth, long conversations about that and it's definitely something we want to get to. For me, from just the general sci-fi experience, introducing other alien species is obviously a big deal to break away from the mold of just being a pure human game. But even altered humans, something where they are still human as a species but they've changed, is something that I think we need to break up the landscape of what you see. So whether it's skin colors that are not in the normal ethnicity range of what we see now, maybe they are, to use John Carter, on a red planet and their skin turns red over time from the atmosphere, or, I think if you drink or inhale lots of copper, your skin can turn blue.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I'm thinking of a person who grew up on Hurston their entire life, and whose parents grew up on Hurston their entire life, and whose grandparents grew up on Hurston. Is their skin texture different than what we would think of a human?

JHe: That would be the plan. And as far as the pointed ears, the more specific physiological things, all that would really take is either us finding an actor with pointed ears and putting that into the DNA pool, or it takes us changing and sculpting that actor or some actors to add that to the DNA pool.

Sean Tracy · Director of Technical Content

It's totally possible. And I want to talk a little bit more about this because I think we have some cool ideas here that I talked about a little bit in an interview a little while ago. This is something that I'm keen to work on with Josh as well as with David Haddock. So we've been looking into this. And actually, just literally this week, I have a huge document from Andreas Rohr, who also did one of the talks there with Ivo on the gene splicing stuff, which has been a real close thing to my heart anyway. So how that whole system works, as Ivo described, is that we have this proto mesh and we have a bunch of different heads that are within it, so we have a little gene pool. What I'd really like to do with this is phenotype a gene pool per starting location. If you think of this in relation to this wide gene pool, we've got a bit of a problem, because we've got hundreds of heads within this gene pool. And to expose those hundreds of heads to you in a creator is not very intuitive. There's a lot to go through, and there's some redundancies here and there. What I'd like is to restrict it down to just a subset of people from Hurston, and then we do all the visuals that Josh is talking about. So let's say your starting location is Hurston or your starting location is ArcCorp. I'd like that gene pool to be kind of phenotyped for that particular area. Now, I'm not talking as on the nose as a lot of other games go, to reference Elder Scrolls, for example, and not saying this is a bad way to go. It's a very overt and obvious way to go. If you're Redguard, you're African-American. If you're Nord, you're a Northern European Caucasian. That is super on-the-nose stuff. What I'd prefer is to put some subtlety into this, which is reality, how it actually works. Because to be a phenotyped American or a phenotyped Italian or even a Canadian for that matter, there's going to be subtleties within that. Now, generally, we all kind of look similar-ish. But you might have a gene pool that's a little heavily weighted to one side versus the other. So then on average, when you're blending those particular guys or those particular textures, I hope that the subtleties will show, so that you will have an idea that, oh, all these NPCs, everybody is coming from this particular gene pool, so they all kind of look one way. And then all these other guys on ArcCorp, and all those players that have started on ArcCorp, kind of look another way. So I don't know if this will be as obvious as I want it to be, but I think it mimics reality a little cooler. And it also makes character creation a little more interesting, because you are sourcing from a different gene pool depending on where you start. And of course you are, because like you said, if you grew up in Hurston, your father grew up in Hurston, you're going to have a certain phenotype, a certain haplogroup, whatever we would call it. I think that would be an interesting way to try it. But it won't be quite as overt, I would say, as some other games really treat it. This general kind of, oh, Hurston people kind of look like this: they've got a strong brow, they've got high cheeks, whatever it is. I'm just making up stuff. But that would be really cool. And I know when we first brought this idea to David Haddock, he returned a document that had some insane-level stuff. It's really cool, super creative, but here's the flip side. As we've talked about with gene splicing and DNA, we've talked about human ranges and how we keep it within a human range, because you're always sourcing from a human. So we'd have to come up with sculpts or these kind of things to source from guys that had some weird things, like the big ridges in the head or white eyes or whatever it is. So I don't know. I think it's a neat approach. It's something that hasn't, to my knowledge, been done exactly like that before. And I'd love to see what the results could be. And it doesn't actually require a huge amount of extra work. It's a data management problem. We've just got to juggle our gene pools around. It's going to be very weird, like playing God a little bit: oh, yeah, who evolved together? This guy, this guy, this guy. It'll be fun.