Well, there seem to be a few different ways to alter a character’s appearance, in ascending order of magnitude:
- Change one or more colours/tints (blue to pink)
- Change one or more textures (metal to leather)
- Change actual equipment/clothing models (change a sword to an axe)
- Change heads
- Completely change the entire character model
I do not mind games that take extreme liberties with these when there is no competitive multiplayer, but competitive multiplayer games need to be very careful about anything past a texture swap because you start to change the recognizable silhouette of a character. For example, you could make Montana pink or change his clothing to look like bear skins, but he would still look like Montana and you as an enemy or ally would know who he is and what he is about. But as soon as you start going much further that can change.
Hit box aside, it would be a bit unfair if Montana suddenly looked like a gun-toting bear (OK, he kind of looks like that now…
). You would not know how to deal with that until you knew that was Montana and had committed all of the possible variations of all Battleborn to memory. Granted, before a match you should have a good idea of who you are playing with and against, but it still can be jarring.
The more I think about it, though, the more I wonder how useful appearance modifications will be. This is a first-person game, and people usually buy such things for themselves, not for others - as much as we like to think they do, most other players do not care about your character, only their own. So, if we cannot really see the changes for most of gameplay (there are some third person parts, I am aware), how important are they?