Beast Races in games

[Almack]

So this is something that has been plaguing me for the past little while in rpgs and that is the lack of options for people you choose to play beast races. There seem to be very few options for people who don't want to play humans or humanoids (humanoids being elves, dwarves or plant people in the case of gw2). For example I play a charr Guild Wars 2, there are very few armour sets in which my tail doesn't clip through my armour and the helm looks like something that should actually be on my head. OR in skyrim where the majority of helms in the heavy armour class will turn you into a human with a cat or lizard tail

What is the reason for this, simply not thinking that enough people will play them for it to matter or not enough time to make the new meshes for beast races OR in the case of skyrim being fully aware that people will just mod it to make it work. needless to say this bugs me and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

 

[shrekfan246]

humanoids (humanoids being elves, dwarves or plant people in the case of gw2). For example I play a charr Guild Wars 2, there are very few armour sets in which my tail doesn't clip through my armour and the helm looks like something that should actually be on my head. OR in skyrim where the majority of helms in the heavy armour class will turn you into a human with a cat or lizard tail

Khajit, Argonians, et al are humanoid.

Humanoids are just beings with appearances resembling a human. They all still have (mostly) the same skeletons as the human models in the case of video games.

As for why it's like that, simply because it's easier. Look at the Bioware Mass Effect companion thread about almost having a non-humanoid companion. The fact of the matter is that to model a non-humanoid, they would need to model, render, and animate an entirely new skeleton with an entirely new set of animations for interacting with everything within the game. It's a lot of work that can usually be better put somewhere else.

I don't necessarily agree with it myself. I'd like the opportunity to play some non-humanoids for once outside of Okami. But that's why it happens.

As for armor and weapon clipping, that's nothing specific to beast races and generally more down to how much effort has been put into modeling and animation. In the case of Bethesda, Skyrim has the best animations they've ever put in a game and it's still rather lacking comparative to other titles. But you can see clipping in all sorts of other games, including Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Assassin's Creed, Torchlight, Diablo, Starcraft, Dishonored, Dark Souls, and the list goes on and on. Hardly any games even actually model clothes/armor as something that isn't just a part of the character, with only a few concessions given toward capes or other things that would be extremely obvious if they lacked any sort of physics.