Monthly Archives: December 2024

During SWTOR’s 7.6 livestream, Eric Musco announced to everyone’s surprise that the game’s character models were being updated, and my initial reaction was this: “I hope they know what they’re in for, because if they don’t get it exactly right, people are gonna freak.”

And they did. I was one of them. The very first version of the updated characters we saw on the PTS was very rough indeed. I posted my shocked first impressions on the forums, but I kind of regret it. I fear I helped stir the pot and encouraged the frenzy that we are seeing in some corners of the community. That was never my intent. I believe what Broadsword wants to do is a good idea and I want them to succeed. I want to be careful in my comments and criticism, because I think we’ve seen improvements since the initial version of the PTS, and I believe the team is determined to get it right.

First and foremost, I have no experience with 3D modeling and I don’t know what specific challenges the art team faces in working with SWTOR’s teenaged game engine. My initial gut-reaction has been these aren’t the changes I would’ve made. Let me be perfectly clear, that is not useful criticism. To say “I would have done differently that thing I don’t know how to do” is not helpful at all.

If you’d like the perspective of someone who does know what they are talking about, definitely check out the commentary on this subject by Sultana on Bluesky. Sultana has experience with 3D modeling, has played with the game’s assets and has fascinating insights.

As for me, I do think I can fairly talk about the aesthetics of the changes and how I am reacting to them. I am absolutely not the first to point out that SWTOR’s characters tend towards a more animated style, and swinging too far towards realism clashes strongly with how we’ve come to see our characters over the years. The sweet spot would be for our characters to appear naturalistic without necessarily being realistic. This is a tough line to walk, especially as the environments and objects and outfits around us have become more realistic in recent updates.

We have seen, to different degrees, animated properties from Star Wars’ own The Clone Wars and The Bad Batch shows to Arcane on Netflix and the Spiderverse movies blur those lines between the semi-realism of their setting and the stylistic flourishes of their character designs, and I believe  SWTOR should be able to strike that balance as well.

The main focus of the developer’s attention right now is on our characters’ faces, and I think what we saw with the launch of 7.6 is on the right track. Star Wars is predominantly a cinematic property, and I think ultimately the goal is that we should feel like our characters look like movie stars, as dashing as Harrison Ford and Oscar Isaac and as beautiful as Natalie Portman and Daisy Ridley.

For the most part, I think the male faces are there. I like the heavy lower eyelids, but their lips still seem dry and parched to me. As for the females, while they’ve come a long way, they’re still not quite there. For better or worse, hard contours work on males, but on female faces, they need to go, especially on the neck and where the cheeks meet the the mouth and upper lip area. Light and shadow should be all we need to define those shapes when the character is smiling or shouting, but the transition between the two areas should be smooth as possible in neutral expressions. My main issue is that sometimes the characters’ appearances can change dramatically in different settings and lighting. On the character select screen a character can look fine, but in darker location with higher contrast, the textures on the skin comes off as too stark.

Regarding changes to the bodies of characters, Musco has made it clear that these are even more so a work in progress, and it shows.

The six pack abs on the portly Body Type 4 males has long been the source of jokes, and we can see with the new iteration that they have given these characters a more naturalistic appearance. That is a very good change. Comparing a Nautolan that still uses the old textures to an updated human, we can see more definition around the collarbone, shoulders and arms on the Nautolan, but because they’ve turned down the intensity of the textures on the human to soften wrinkles on other parts of the model, those details feel soft now.

Looking at the back of one of my female characters (on the left, below) we can see the opposite problem. The updated model seems to use the original textures (as seen in the middle) but they are now more intense; those old textures have not aged well. The Trapezius muscles are overly prominent, and the textures on different parts of the bodies don’t quite connect to each other You can see this in the shoulders, especially in how they don’t quite match front to back and in the gaps of the armpits where they should join the torso.

My larger point is that I would like to see the character updates focus less on muscles and anatomy and more on flesh and blood. Yes, there are all sorts of muscles on the back, but in real life it’s the shoulder blades and the curve of the spine that define a person’s back. The result of the over-definition of the older textures is that characters can look literally thin skinned and even emaciated (especially Body Type 1s). The emphasis on sculpted muscles works for Body Type 3 characters who are supposed to be jacked, but everyone else should look like a real person and not a greased up body builder.

“Just make the hard parts look hard and the soft parts look soft!” That’s easier said than done, but it doesn’t mean I want Broadsword to give up. I do believe many of the changes have been improvements. The extra glint of light in the characters’ eyes is a subtle touch that adds a lot of extra life to our characters, and to me, that Body Type 4 human looks better than his Nautolan counterpart.

MMO-RPGs are works in progress, and sometimes not everything works the way we want it to. That sucks sometimes. I don’t love that my characters look off right now, but there are things about games like this that I hated more and have endured longer. As players and customers, we should be engaged with the developers about this process in constructive ways. Screaming and shouting feels good and makes for solid click bait, but it doesn’t help the good people at Broadsword make the game better.

That’s the goal. That’s what we all want.