EQ2 - Farewell Skeletal Revamp

One of many players' gripes with EQ2 is the blandness and lack of variety in the armor. We were told the reason for this was the tremendous amount of time involved because each racial model had its own unique skeleton. So when one piece of armor is designed, it has to be reworked to fit each race in the game.

The past couple years, however, things were looking a bit brighter as we were told a skeletal revamp was under way so that they would for the most part use the same skeletal structure for all races, making it easier to implement new armor styles. Looks like that idea has been scrapped. According to a recent dev chat:

Kirstie: The skeletal revamp has been through a lot of iterations internally on the EQII team and is now a bit of a misnomer. The original technology that we had planned to use didn't work out as we expected (software, who knew).

Kirstie: And we are also being careful not to drastically change the character models. We don't want anyone to log in one day and not recognize their favorite character.

Kirstie: What we are focusing on now is ways to customize the look of your character with what we're referring to as "snap ons" that will change your characters profile or silhouette.

Kirstie: There are also a few other plans to enhance the look of characters that we'll be talking about more once we are more confident that they will work within the EQII framework.

No idea what these "snap ons" are or how they will look and work but I suppose it's better than nothing. How long it will be before it sees the light of day, however, we can only guess. But I imagine it's at the bottom of priorities and will be a long way off.

As much as I enjoy EQ2, the armor appearance always has been disappointing to me. But the clothing is worse. The tailored dresses are all identical except for color variations, and they look like granny dresses. The high end dresses purchased with status take it to the other extreme and are of the red light district variety. Having no toes, but just square stumps aren't helping either.

Ah well at least the Guild Halls are still coming!