Why do games go out of their way to prevent you from creating realistically ugly characters?

I mean sure in some games you can have scars or tattoos in specific places etc, or really overt stuff like one eye and an eyepatch but in pretty much every game I have seen.....

Characters are symmetrical.

Symmetry is the main thing people look for beautywise.  Subconsciously it is often the reason why person A is hot and person B is not.  It is genetically imprinted and goes way back through the other animals.

I mean essentially the perfect symmetry of the characters in games is what keeps the characters all pin-ups.  You can move the eyebrows say up and down in a game or expand the musculature or lengthen the arms -- but it is always in tandom.

If you want ugly characters available you have to be able to skew one side from the other and have the eyebrow on one side be HIGHER than the eyebrow on the other -- or have the arms slightly different lengths etc.

In essence you need a skew function where you can have each action on the slider be up to 3 steps out of synch with each other. 

Symmetry is why even orcs in most games have a certain beauty to them when they really shouldnt.  I mean the default orc should have lots of asymmetrical elements while the default high elf might be perfectly symmetrical.  A human or dwarf would be somewhat inbetween.

hmmm, in general I think this is true, but have you seen the ork females in DF.  Enough to give you nightmares.

EVE, Entropia universe, Xsyon... There are plenty of ugly chars in mmos. But maybe not in mmos you play. Asian grinders tend  to have busty girls and sixpack boys just as if I was watching a victora secret catalogue and not a computer game. But sex sells so don't questions it, it's quite common to make up for lack of quality by excessive sex, not just in games but in movies, music videos etc.

Originally posted by Spiider

EVE, Entropia universe, Xsyon... There are plenty of ugly chars in mmos. But maybe not in mmos you play. Asian grinders tend  to have busty girls and sixpack boys just as if I was watching a victora secret catalogue and not a computer game. But sex sells so don't questions it, it's quite common to make up for lack of quality by excessive sex, not just in games but in movies, music videos etc.

See though -- the thing is you can create (on paper -- and in real life) truly UGLY characters who have six-pack abs.  All you need to do to make a busty girl significantly less attractive is to have one side be a D+ cup and the other side be a C.  Then have one be a little higher than the other and you can have a feature that is large but repulses. 

Even gritty characters in games where you have tremendous amounts of customizations keep symmetry.  You have to actually go back to truly old games where you had no customization to see asymmetry is some of the ugly race characters (the 15 face type games). 

Thing is if you had the tools to create homely through ugly characters -- a lot of people would NOT do that simply because they want to look like an amazon princess.  However I would figure a sizable number would(people who want a female character who is NOT hit upon by an example), roleplayers, and people who want their brutish barbarian to truly look brutish -- repelling as opposed to compelling. 

The other thing is if you could create ugly characters then the beautiful characters would stand out more.  As it is, it is like being on another planet -- In a world of perfect 10s none really stand out.

Originally posted by Spiider

EVE, Entropia universe, Xsyon... There are plenty of ugly chars in mmos. But maybe not in mmos you play. Asian grinders tend  to have busty girls and sixpack boys just as if I was watching a victora secret catalogue and not a computer game. But sex sells so don't questions it, it's quite common to make up for lack of quality by excessive sex, not just in games but in movies, music videos etc.

Yeah OP, don't questions it. Just sit around like a drooling braindead lump and take what is given to you.

Good work there Spiider, by your own logic I shouldn't bother playing any of the games you mentioned because none of them have a fraction of the subscribers that Wow has.

It would be interesting to lock beautiful features based on a character's Charisma stat (which can be non-combat related entirely if it normally isnt in the game).

That way anyone who wants to be a beautiful skinny amazong princess with enlarged bouncing breasts will have to be a worse warrior, mage, rogue, combat player.

Anyone who wants to min/max to be the best has to be ugly. Very ugly.

It would be very interesting, as most of the world would be ugly, but the beautiful people would REALLY stand out.

I take it you never played Everquest 2.  The Trolls and Ogres are ugly, both the males and females.

i'm sure people probably don't think of it when you think "ugly characters" but Aion you could make some really butt ugly characters and a friend of mine strived to make his as ugly as possible lol he had one that looked like Michael jackson and others of his own design. he told me he made them that way for PVP to really piss people off, something about getting ganked by some ugly ass super deformed midget REALLY got people goin lol his character page  on Aion was just loaded with people telling him off and askin why the hell would he make something so ugly, he loved it lol he never "ganked" lowbies and watched him pick apart a full group of people higher level than him, fly in kill one fly off stealth come back kill the same one again or next up making his rounds in the group.

Beauty is really in the eye of the beholder.  I see lots of ugly characters in my travels too mmo land.

You obviously have never been in Aion and seen some of the masterpieces inflicted upon the rest of us by "creative" types.

Originally posted by Emergence

It would be interesting to lock beautiful features based on a character's Charisma stat (which can be non-combat related entirely if it normally isnt in the game).

 

That way anyone who wants to be a beautiful skinny amazong princess with enlarged bouncing breasts will have to be a worse warrior, mage, rogue, combat player.

Anyone who wants to min/max to be the best has to be ugly. Very ugly.

 

It would be very interesting, as most of the world would be ugly, but the beautiful people would REALLY stand out.

Now this is taking game balance and opportunity cost in an interesting and new direction. Good thinking! :D

I was trying to do a fugly looking necromancer wench in Rift, then gave up since it always turned out to be a "hotty". :)

I have and will always love the idea of a set charisma score (with its variability of change minimum) detailing the options at character creation.  I know many will disagree, saying charisma encomasses more than looks, and while I agree, for a player it would be one of the options that help make this attribute important.

To the OP, I think the idea of asymmetrical characters adds a lot of work to the programmers; quite possibly more than the reward.  Any programmers out there who can verify this?  It's what I've been told, but do not take as gospel.

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Originally posted by penandpaper
I have and will always love the idea of a set charisma score (with its variability of change minimum) detailing the options at character creation.  I know many will disagree, saying charisma encomasses more than looks, and while I agree, for a player it would be one of the options that help make this attribute important.
To the OP, I think the idea of asymmetrical characters adds a lot of work to the programmers; quite possibly more than the reward.  Any programmers out there who can verify this?  It's what I've been told, but do not take as gospel.

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It's not hard to design a class to handle this. In fact, it's easier from a programmer's PoV than say an Artist's PoV as the programmer just needs to make the derived class (if they were smart and did it so from an abstract class, this would be doubly easy) to represent all the needed components to a given PC/NPC, but afterward you have to give the artist the ability to work on meshes in such a way that fits with the tools he's using. Usually this is where it could fail because if the meshes are just one piece for each part (like horizontal cross sections), then it may be harder to do than it seems. But there are tricks to get around it, but I don't know them all. Simply put, it's just easier for the artists than it is for the programmer.

No ugly characters in a mmorpg? Ever played Alganon? :)

You want ugly? Mortal Online. You won't get any pretty there.

Originally posted by Emergence

It would be interesting to lock beautiful features based on a character's Charisma stat (which can be non-combat related entirely if it normally isnt in the game).

 

That way anyone who wants to be a beautiful skinny amazong princess with enlarged bouncing breasts will have to be a worse warrior, mage, rogue, combat player.

Anyone who wants to min/max to be the best has to be ugly. Very ugly.

 

It would be very interesting, as most of the world would be ugly, but the beautiful people would REALLY stand out.

I like the idea, but I don't. It's not really realistic. Ok the girl with the way too big breast and is super skinny being the worst I understand, but why would someone with a beautiful face be the worst?

Well to answer the OP. I think companies don't have asymmetry because it isn't worth the time and money. While you may want asymmetry, in reality I don't think most people are not going to play a game because it lacks asymmetry. It's the last thing anyone would really invest money in, even for someone trying to make the most realistic game in the world. Just look at the real world, while nobody is perfectly symmetrical, there are very few people with such dramatic asymmetry that it detracts from the other features of the face. I mean if you looked at me right now the first thing your going to notice my eye shape, nose shape, overall head shape, hair color and stuff like that, not what is asymmetrical about me.

Basically what I'm saying is that putting money into getting a huge variety of features is overall more important than adding asymmetry.  Adding asymmetry would likely piss more people off then plese too, I know I would be annoyed if I spent more time trying to get my person to be symmetrical instead of on getting the features I want.

If you ask me, all the characters in LotRO are unintentionally ugly.

I have yet to see a game where you cant make ugly characters.