Posted by ReDDoT in Blue Milk & Cereal | 14 Comments
Blue Milk & Cereal: Will You Customize Your Companion Characters?
No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal. Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!
BioWare games have always allowed the player to fully customize their main character. From gender to race, body size to hair styles – not to mention the choices you make in the game – we’ve seen it all. However, the companions that followed our character around on their adventures and quests didn’t have any real customization available to us. Perhaps only changing their full armor sets, but that was the limit, even in the more recent creations like Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age 2.
But those are single player games. You’re never going to be standing next to another player with their very own Carth Onasi. In an MMO, that could be prove to be more than slightly immersion-breaking. Well, that’s all about to change.
From the official TOR panel at last month’s Comic-Con, as well as from the various Q&As held by BioWare, we learned that that companions in TOR will be fully customizable. Check out this quote from James Ohlen:
“… we’re obviously letting people dress them (companions) up, so they’d have different clothes on, but now with the full customization they’ll look different. We’ll have companions that look quite a bit different than others, so the immersion breaking will be a lot less.”
This will certainly solve some issues for some folks, but potentially create new ones for others. For example, which companion character look is canonically correct? We all know that in KoTOR, the light side story is canon, and that Revan was male. Does any of that matter to you with your companion in TOR? Or is it more important for them to be unique?
Personally, I am going to try and experiment with the looks as much as I can – I am extremely excited about this particular feature as the whole notion of “clone companions” running around the game world was one of the big issues in my mind. Not anymore!
So with that in mind, will you try to customize your companions as much as you can? Or will you try to stick to the most default, or “canonical” look? Let us know below!
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Will the real Vette please stand up?
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I’ll be amazed if anyone votes no to this!
lol, instantly amazed! :P
One other thing, given the options for Vette that we’ve seen, I can just see hundreds of red bad-ass looking Vettes instead of blue boring ones.
I’m really curious as to the customization of Blizz, the BH Jawa companion. I mean there is a certain look for Jawas that you just don’t F’ with. I mean imagine a jawa with like pink robes or polka dot robes… doesn’t really work. I’m sure they won’t do that (obviously) but there is a certain appearance that is iconic of Jawas. I’m just wondering how much customization you can actually do.
Yea good point. And there are bound to be other companions (like droids) that have similar limitations. Will it be a “slider” type customization, or will we maybe just be able to choose between Blizz 1-6? We’ll see hopefully soon!
HELL YES! :D
I will definitely do some customization, but won’t go overboard with it. It’s nice to have anything in a game that isn’t set to the default colors.
I will most likely do some customization. But I am not one to put more than a couple minutes into it. Still glad to see they put companion customization into the game. They definately listen to the community and are willing to make changes if it is not too off the wall (of crazy).
I wonder if this was something that came from tester or community feedback, or if it was always planned? It’s hard to say, since people are so reactionary on the forums and immediately started yelling about clone companions everywhere. Could be Bioware always had it under control and we just had to give them time to do it.
Of course, part of the question will be about just when you can do the customisation and the potential for immersion breaking from that…
After all, if you can’t do it until after you’ve met them in cut scenes or wotnot and interacted with them in the story before you get them as companions and they have the “standard” look… You turn around and randomly commit cometic surgery on them after that? ;)
Hopefully we will be able to tweak their combat abilities and that plays out as well. Playing a jedi knight first so wonder what customization u can do to a droid but can’t wait until I play as a sith warrior I will have vette look like darth talon. That’s what the red skin reminded me straight off the bat of
As a Role-Player I am very happy this has been done. Even if only for not trying to pretend they’re aren’t thousands of clones all over the place…
Ironically though, as a RPer companions don’t really excite me. I see them more as an OOC mechanic than a RP vehicle. The big challenge is the shared story. However, at least through customization I don’t have to shut off that part of my brain.
I will but not if it’s major customization. For example, the twilek I’m not gonna change cause the color is a really big change. But if I was just changing like a hat on a companion and I liked 1 more then the other, then I’ll change a simple hat. But I’m not gonna change the whole skin color of the twilek
who says no to this question. O.o
I will customize, in part, just to make it easier to spot my own Companion in crowded areas. And…it’s just fun to customize!