Monster Circus | wen
Some time ago, the domestic game "Bright Memory: Infinity" was released, and before playing it, I bought a swimsuit DLC for the first time.
Then, I immediately fell into the sage's thinking: this is obviously an FPS game, so why should I pay for a protagonist's skin?
Vaguely, I felt like I had thought about it more than once, and I had seen someone discuss it more than once. If you think about it, more and more FPS games are selling protagonist skins, whether they are multiplayer or stand-alone, no matter what platform they are on.
Obviously, it's profitable to sell skins in FPS games. So what is it that is supporting the majority of players to buy clothes for their own invisible game avatars?
Practical effect
If you only talk about "Bright Memory: Infinity", the reason is actually obvious. As soon as I logged into the menu, I immediately determined that the money was worth it, in the menu, the production team not only did a variety of poses for the heroine, but also thoughtfully added a multi-camera lens zoom function, you can enjoy the skin you bought.
In addition, during the game, whenever a cutscene appears, or the heroine squeezes through a gap, the game switches to a short third person. In short, while Bright Memories: Infinity is an FPS game, its skin does keep brushing its presence.
However, many FPS games, even if the protagonist's body has no sense of existence, is still selling character skins, such as Overwatch.
You've probably seen the famous OW meme, which was used to mock Blizzard for not doing anything, adding only a few game skins to each update. Just by relying on this stem chart, we can see how much "new skin" accounts for OW operations.
However, OW is indeed an FPS game, at least in terms of the way it is presented. You might be surprised at how many players suddenly realize that the skins they bought don't have a sense of existence, and since the release of OW, it has occasionally made people fall into self-doubt of "I'm obviously playing FPS games, why buy so many skins".
OW does have a "best of the game" setting, and after each game, it will show the most eye-catching player performance in the whole game. However, this segment is still first-person, but there is a close-up of the character before playing, which may be the strongest presence of OW skin outside of fan culture.
This forces players to play the third person in custom mode
However, OW's best close-up of the whole game doesn't seem to be the only reason players buy skins. Because except for a few versions, it is difficult for the auxiliary characters to snatch this scene from the output characters; the best probability of the Iron Fist in the strong period is much greater than that of the angel who is resurrected by the cut group, but the angel's skin is obviously more popular than the iron fist skin.
So for the player himself, the OW's skin presence may still remain in the hero selection interface, the win close-up, the death replay, and the two hands with the weapon.
So out of the terrier that used Tobion to look at the ass
If you think about it, this is very unreasonable: if the character skin is just the seasoning for the update content, it would be fine, but Blizzard actually used the character skin as the main content of the update, supporting a game in the form of FPS until it was scolded bloody because of this update strategy.
Another example is Call of Duty Mobile. Every once in a while, you'll see people questioning why the game sells so many character skins, which have a lower presence than OW skins. If you use first-person mode, you won't see parts of your body except your hands for most of the time.
Although you can also switch to the third person, the first person can not see the skin of the lower limb modeling, or suspected of laziness, after all, this requires an additional process. Because you will find that in fact, from the beginning of Black Ops 3, COD is adding legs to the characters, but the mobile version is removed.
The frenzied sale of FPS for character skins has sparked two kinds of controversy. Some people think that selling such weakly existential items to players is a very unskind thing; others think that developers are skewing a lot of resources to the production of new skins, which is very detrimental to the development of more practical content of the game, and is a waste.
CF also sells a lot of character skins
So is this a major consumer scam in the contemporary gaming world? In fact, from this, you can see a major confusion faced by FPS games today - whether to highlight the presence of the protagonist.
Have you ever noticed the legs of the protagonist of an FPS game? In some FPS games, the player can see the legs of the character, but not in more FPS games.
And footsteps: to show that the protagonist has feet
In fact, the question of "whether the protagonist of an FPS game should have feet" has been discussed in the game circle for more than a decade. There's even a term for this, "Full Body Awareness," which you can understand as "the cognition of the character's whole body."
CF used to kick the leg sniper
The idea, in a nutshell, is that people think that with the development of FPS games, their always hidden protagonists are slowly crawling out of the camera and looking for their own presence.
Both Chinese and foreign, there are a group of players who have been paying attention to this problem. The first thing many people do when they enter FPS games is to look down at whether their character has feet. In the Chinese FPS circle, there is even a joke that "the FPS that can see your feet is a good FPS"; similarly, overseas, there is also a saying that "the FPS of your feet is higher in the starting score".
See the previous paragraph for the translation
If you have watched the live broadcast of the game a few years ago, you can also see some streamers screaming excitedly when they play FPS games because they find that they can see their feet.
Many FPS enthusiasts are actually vaguely dissatisfied with the weak presence of the protagonist of today's FPS games (although many people like this weak presence), and they hope that this presence can be enhanced to the point where it can be decorated.
Metroid also had FPS titles
Why is the presence of the protagonist of an FPS game so weak? One reason is that FPS is a very old genre of games, and for decades after its appearance, computers were unable to perform complex calculations. At that time, adding a pair of visible legs to the character wasted too many unnecessary resources, after all, few players would look down at themselves.
This was not simple at all, because the camera of the FPS game was not in the position of the face, it had to be on the same plane as the weapon, and the speed and angle of rotation were not normal. When you're doing FPS games, you can't simply get a character model and turn its eyes into a camera.
So a lot of first-person games that are changed to third-person by folk mods look very weird and funny.
Another reason is that when the concept of FPS games was born, it did not contain the idea of "hiding a person behind the camera".
Many people, like me, have long mistakenly thought that the first FPS game ever made was Doom in 1993. However, this is indeed wrong, and the origin of FPS is not the earlier Wehrmacht Headquarters 3D, it originated from a NASA project in 1973.
This project was originally just a program that was simply used to simulate 3D mazes, but later the developers thought it was too boring, so they added a shooting function and simply made it into a game called "Maze War" - the real FPS originator.
So you see, the starting point of FPS games is actually not simulating people's vision.
However, these reasons were many years ago. Today, with an engine like Unreal Engine 4, you can easily make a model that switches between third-person and first-person perspectives, and it can see not only your legs, but also your normal reflection.
Tutorials for this process are usually not long
But still, in most FPS games, we can't see our legs. There are two "reasonable explanations" for this, one is that for FPS games, it is still not necessary to see the legs of the character.
The other is that this leg can block the view, after all, the player often needs to look down to see if there is ammunition on the floor, at this time, if two legs appear, it will block the view.
Some first-person games add legs because they need to use legs, such as F· E· A· R's flying kick.
Or a first-person parkour game like Mirror's Edge, where players rely on the protagonist's legs to determine where they land. There are even rumors that the reason why "The Edge of the Mirror" chose a slender woman as the protagonist is because her legs are very thin and do not cover too much vision, so you can't see her waist.
However, neither of these explanations is very reasonable.
Because classic FPS game IP such as "Crysis", "Escape from Tarkov", "Rainbow Six", "Battlefield", "Wehrmacht Headquarters" and other classic FPS game IP, there are works that can see the legs of the characters. People don't feel that their vision is blocked in these games, and many people may not notice that they can see the character's legs.
Why do we have to talk so much about the legs of FPS protagonists? Because this may illustrate that many game manufacturers are making money on the benefits of Full Body Awareness, but they are not willing to put in the effort to promote the advancement of this concept.
Among OW players, there are a lot of LSPs who focus on the legs of the game characters. Every time a game produces a new skin, you can see a bunch of people analyzing the legs and feet of the new skin.
Blizzard makes each character's footsteps different, which is a good shape for the protagonist's sense of existence.
This was even controversial because Blizzard had a lot of bare feet when it launched the first few skins. But later, such skins became less and less, and women's legs and feet were all covered by heavy shoes, which made some players deeply dissatisfied, so when DVA's barefoot skin reappeared, it was warmly welcomed.
Obviously, a lot of people want to see the legs and feet they buy skins for, so should Blizzard include the option of showing the character's legs in the OW?
But Blizzard didn't do that, and the only two characters you can see with legs are Zen Yata, who hovers and attacks with his feet in melee combat, and Alyssa, a heavy robot.
Not only does Blizzard not update the campaign and heroes, desperately trying to make money by producing new skins, they are not even willing to add visible lower limbs to the character, adding a sense of presence to the skins that players pay for. If you think this kind of appeal from players is ridiculous, then from a certain point of view, it is also a ridiculous thing to agree that FPS games sell character skins.
This change may affect the balance of the competition, but this statement is very weak, because as mentioned before, Alyssa has feet, and no one thinks that her legs affect the game. Moreover, the game can make the display of the lower limbs switchable and forced off in the ladder and in the competition, just like in the official competition, the player can only use the original model.
This is also optional for other games, but when a game starts to make a lot of money with character skins, it has an obligation to enhance the player's sense of existence when buying items as much as possible, which is the attitude of responsibility.
Players must have such a demand, look at the various game mods to understand. For example, the real-life perspective mod in The Elder Scrolls V is designed to show the body of the character and enhance The Full Body Awareness, even if it sounds LSP.
There are many other ways to increase the sense of presence, such as adding a third-person bridge like in Far Crysis 6, but many companies don't bother to study it.
Now, back to the original topic: Why would players buy skins for their characters in FPS games?
It may be because many players have been hoping to enhance the presence of the protagonist of FPS games. They buy skins for invisible models, not just to see their presence in close-ups, and not just to show them to others.
It may also be a bit like wearing sexy/winning underwear: its presence makes sense even if no one sees it, or it can be like a driver who can only see the inside of the car most of the time but still wants to decorate the appearance of the car.
In short, this matter has a certain significance for the player's display psychology and self-awareness, but this meaning is still not enough, so the player himself often falls into self-doubt. It just got to the point where some players were paid for it, and it couldn't convince everyone to pay for it.
Killing Floor 2, which sells skins, also loses legs, and players have to do it themselves
Players can get a little satisfaction from this ethereal meaning, which does not mean that the merchant should stop here. Merchants should "meet people's hidden needs", but unfortunately, now they are not only not meeting the hidden needs, but have been taking advantage of this incomplete demand to make a lot of money.
Meet hidden needs: When customers need faster horses, give them cars (Henry Ford).
In fact, looking back at "Doom" now, you will find that even the original FPS game is still trying to enhance the presence of the protagonist. You can see the protagonist's face at any time, and as the injury worsens, that face will change and show anger – 20 years before the technology was immature, ID Software was still trying to enhance the protagonist's presence.
Perhaps for making money, more is better than less, which is the eternal credo of the businessman.
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