MMO Wish List Part 4: Vanity Items
This is an ongoing series of articles about what I would like to see in an MMO. I’m comparing and contrasting parts of the MMOs I cover. Last week was cash shops and auction houses. This week is vanity items, other than costumes, which I discussed previously.
Table of Contents
Accessories
Accessories, not to be confused with invisible statted items like jewelry, are items that semi-permanently change a character’s physical appearance without paying for a permanent change. This means you can use this item for as long as you like, but once you put it away your character goes back to its original appearance without paying to make the change. In Elder Scrolls Online (ESO), they recently added hundreds of different accessories, including all of the character creation hairstyles, facial accessories, facial hair, jewelry, and tattoos in inexpensive bundles. ESO also has polymorphs, which change the entire look of your character at once (including costume), skins, which change your character’s skin (and usually eyes), and personalities, which change your character’s stance and facial expression.
Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) has moods that change your character’s facial expression, falling under Emotes in game. They don’t stop once you move your character like emotes, though they do tend to disappear when you go through a loading screen.
ESO, Guild Wars 2 (GW2), and Revelation Online all have auras that apply an effect to your character either attached to another item (e.g. weapon) or applied individually. It is possible to overdo it with auras though.
Source: Amaimon
Mounts
Ground
Games usually have one of two options for ground mounts. Either all mounts have the same speed and capabilities dictated by your character’s training or mounts have individual abilities. ESO and SWTOR are of the former variety, while ArcheAge, Black Desert Online (BDO), and WildStar are the latter. GW2 is finally adding a mount system with Path of Fire where the mounts will have special abilities like water skimming and vertical leaps. In ESO, to upgrade your mount you must visit a stable and pay 250 gold to train riding. It takes 180 days and 45,000 gold to level your riding, but you can buy upgrades in the Crown Store to make this go faster. In SWTOR, your mount speed increases at specific levels in the training system, but you can pay Cartel Coins through the legacy panel to upgrade faster.
Flying
The first MMO I played was World of Warcraft (WoW). Imagine my surprise and disappointment when I started branching into other games to find flying mounts are the exception, not the norm. In fact, the only game I’ve covered that has a true flying mount system is Revelation Online, which goes even further than WoW with flying combat.
Water
Unlike WoW, which has water mounts that work underwater in certain zones; water mounts in the games I cover are all surface water mounts. This is a rarity with only ArcheAge and BDO (and soon GW2) having specific mounts that can cross water.
Gliders
Gliders are mounts that can do some light flying by gliding from a height to the ground. This allows your character to travel further and faster while also helping to prevent fall damage. ArcheAge, BDO, and GW2 all have gliders. While Blade and Soul (BnS) doesn’t have any mounts, characters do have the ability to glide without a mount.
Non-Combat Pets
Non-combat pets are creatures that follow your character around without providing a combat benefit. BDO is an exception to this in that pets will loot dead enemies and have special skills, e.g. dogs can detect nearby enemy players and cats can detect gatherable resources.
Emotes
Emote are chat commands that will make your character do a particular action. Emotes can either be of a short duration or be continuous until you do something to force your character to stop. Every game I cover has emotes. Some of the more common include /bow, /dance, /sit, and /sleep.
Toys
Toys are items that will apply a temporary graphical effect to your character. For example, The Data Entry toy in SWTOR brings up a computer station. Your character sits down and inputs data while also regenerating.
ESO’s ties mementos to in-game quests instead of being cash shop buys.
MMO Wish List
Vanity items tend to be the province of role players, which is something I don’t get into. I do like having many accessory options and plenty of mounts to match to my outfits. Other than that, I’m not terribly particular about them. My perfect MMO would have:
- ESO’s copious amount of accessories
- SWTOR’s ground mounts where mount speed is tied to character training and WoW’s flying / water mounts (I’m cheating since I don’t cover WoW)
- BDO’s non-combat pets with special abilities, since this is the only reason I would use them
- A minimum of /dance, /sit, and /sleep emotes
- ESO’s mementos instead of cash shop toys
What kinds of vanity items do you like to see in MMOs?
In two weeks: Character re-customization
One implimentation of pets that I really liked was Maple Story’s. The pets come in two flavors, one type that picks up coins only, and another that picks up everything.
For accessories like amulets and etc, lore based items be nice. For example, in SWTOR we can get Naga Sadow’s armor, and it’s gloves are actually the Sith Amulet worn by Exar Kun. This provides a lot of potential for those engaged in RP.
With regards to emotes, there are two primary reasons to use them, social interactions where people throw them out for fun, or for RP. Thus I’d say the more general actions, the better, along with a set of more goofy emotes for those main hub dance parties.
I don’t particularly care for toys, I’ll just say that those that cause disturbances to other players should not exist. For example,toys that creates excessive noise and can be spammed will easily be abused by trolls at traders and RP spots.
Mount wise, I’m 110% behind the idea of completely free three dimensional movement. If I were a wizard, I would certainly not waste time on stairs. And this whole thing with everyone in the world not being able to swim has got to stop.
Just came across something the other day, figured I’d mention this one too:
Community involvement. The people you are marketing to probably knows what they want to spend money on the most. The Beskad wanted by Mandalorian fanboys in SWTOR is still currently unavailable, despite what appears to be an in-game item added in 3.2.0. Perhaps regular polls on the next item to be made could work, although it would have to be through an in-game system instead of a website due to abuse potential. Planetside 2 has a very good model for community involvement. The community could literally submit their own armor pieces to the vanity stores, and the creators gets a cut of the profits. This led to hundreds of cosmetics being added to the game with little costs on the dev side of things.
I can’t remember which game it was (Blade and Soul or Black Desert Online) had at least one contest where people created costumes and some of them got added to the game. I like this Planetside 2 system you’re describing. I would be stoked to try to get my version of Genteel Dress in SWTOR.
Back when I played LotRO they did a cloak design contest and a horse barding contest where the winning entries were used in game.
I really wish SWtOR would convert all of the toys to learnable skills to save pack space!
It looks like we will be getting a couple of polymorphs soon. Hopefully they are done well, and hopefully the cantina dancer will have a male variant.
That would be nice. In ESO, the polymorphs change all characters that use it to identical ones. If you are using a female character, a male polymorph will make your character look like a male.
I’d like to see as many as possible of the things you can steal in ESO become tradeable and usable at a basic level. If I find an Arkay mourning shawl, I’d like to put it on; if I find a wicker image of Magnus, I’d like to be able to put it on a shelf (or even into the fire); if I find a whistle to attract fish, I’d like to be able to blow it (and would have no problem at all with it failing to attract fish).
For roleplayers, it would be really nice for SWTOR companions to have a “move to” function and a /companion-draw-weapon function. I feel like it would be easy to implement, but what do I know?
Also several items that would be great for roleplay are limited by cooldown and duration choices. For instance, the holoprojector item can’t be used long enough to talk to another player in character, since it only lasts ~1 minute but has a ~10 minute cooldown. Suddenly having your holo effect break ruins the immersion you would gain otherwise, so typically we don’t even try to see each other when communicating via holo. It would be great to be able to do it in person, so that players could see emotes easily.