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Most MMOs, if they allow it at all, make changing your avatar’s appearance a time consuming and possibly expensive task. In Star Trek Online, a trip to in-game tailors on any space station allow you to change everything from your uniform, to your hairstyle, to the smallest detail of your appearance. You can store up to five appearances at once which you can swap with a keystroke at will.
No other MMO offers that.
In my Vulcan engineer’s long career in Starfleet, the years and the burdens of command have taken her from the fresh enthusiasm of a newly minted ensign to the grizzled veteran of years of campaigns against the Breen, the Borg, the Devidians, the Romulans, the Klingons and all the other myriad enemies of the Federation.
Thanks to the tailor system, not only has her appearance changed — making her more distinguished with age and authority — but all her previous appearances are saved to my local hard drive. I can load them up at any tailor.
If your characters are more than just manikins on which to drape raid gear with increasingly bizarre shoulderpads, you might like what you can do with them in Star Trek Online.
Bonus feature: You can do the same with every member of your bridge crew and away teams as well. Want to make your crew change from the young crew of the original Star Trek series to the aged geriatric crew of Star Trek V?
That can happen.
(By the way, I designed the uniforms T’pral is wearing).
“No other MMO offers that.”
City of Heroes has a base of four, five if you get the Halloween slot and you can purchase up to ten total. All can be changed at the tailors or any trainer and switched at will.
Do you have a crew who comes with you on missions that can be similarly completely customized?
City of Heroes does have a great character customizer, but it’s only for the one character.
I wonder if Champions Online does this or not.
Then again, isn’t this in support of getting players to buy all those many costume items with Cryptic Cash, or just subscribing ?
Great job on the uniforms. They look very Star Trecky 🙂
Several games let you swap appearance slots in and out at will for a single character, but no others that I am aware of give you a whole NPC party to do it with. COH and STO are also the only ones I am aware of that let you change your hairstyle and face at will.
There was some gorgeous (at least in screenshots) party based MMO I never got around to trying. Maybe that ones has appearance slots? Googling “party based MMO” brings up a ton of MMOs I’ve never heard of and are not the one I’m thinking of.
Gods & Heroes? Not sure they let you dress up your henchmen, but I haven’t played it.
I did a bit more digging, and I believe this is the current iteration of the game I was thinking of:
http://www.gamersfirst.com/sword2/
I’d be shocked if there are any appearance slots, and the game does not look nearly as good as my memory suggested. Still, just on general principal I may check t out 🙂