Now I know this may be flogging a dead horse (I love flogging so I'll continue), but I believe it could be a fairly straight forward and workable solution to the missing player likeness issues that have been long discussed and debated, be they for unlicensed teams or legitimate licensed teams (both of equal merit I might add).
Alastair, how feasible is it to include an extra pool of players in the game that are not associated with any team... a list of Free Agents so to speak?
1. This would be a large pool of players with no nationality assigned to them (they are "nation-free" we might say)
2. The players in this pool would be a list of randomly generated names, positions, skills and attributes.
3. The Free Agents players would however be comprised of a range of player models of pre-defined height/build/skin colour/hair colour types (more detail on these types later down below).
4. The Free Agent players may only be modified in the same way as any other player in game, e.g. name, position, attributes, special abilities
5. Within the player editor, an extra option should be added to assign/swap a player into a RWC squad for one of the games default RWC squad members. (If nationality is an attribute or variable used in the games coding or ingame, then this "assign/swap" option is only available on Free Agents and not players assigned to the default RWC squads.
6. The player who has just been swapped out from the default RWC squad (be they licensed or unlicensed) does not become a Free Agent, he's simply dropped from the default squad until the squad reset option is used. (By making HB's created players unusable from this point on protects the rights of the players or unions that have endorsed their license for use or those who did not).
The player models to be used in the Free Agents pool would all have the same generic face but otherwise be simply copies of already created player models (this should remove the need to create any new models, more a copy and paste multiple times job, hopefully meaning little development time needed/used).
In terms of the options needed to cover the majority of player builds, here's what I think would be needed:
Height:
from 5'6" up to 6'6" increasing in increments of 2" to keep the quantity down, which would give a total of 7 height variants.
Frame/Build:
Bulky (prop-esque)
Strong (showing alot of gym time there buddy!)
Normal (run of the mill rugby physique)
Lean (you need some carbs!)
Skin Colour Samples:
White
Coloured
Polynesian
Oriental
Hair colours:
Blonde
Black
Brown
Red
Bald
Scrum Cap
Now, taking each section as a multiplyer (7 x 4 x 4 x 5) gives us the total number of player models needed, albeit only one of each variant, which is 672.
This number could be trimmed back considerably as there are very few 6'6" Bulky Oriental Red-heads (and other such extreme combinations) to provide a more workable number of Free Agent player models to include.
An obvious major concern is the quantity of players needed to cover all bases and the actual disc space that their models would take up - as there is quite a limited number of teams, players and game modes shipping with the retail version of the game I would be hopeful that enough space does indeed exist on the retail disc (I hate to do comparisons but Sidhe are able to include 95 different teams with I expect similarly sized squads, so that would take up arguably even more space, but will still fit on a game disc).
In the event that disc space is an issue, how about releasing further Free Agents for this pool as DLC, to then take up HDD space instead?
So, in summary, a system like the above would allow me for example to swap into my England (fully licensed) RWC squad a player type that would be representative of Delon Armitage's (who will need included as a last minute replacement to the squad after the game has hit retail shelves) appearance from an ingame gameplay camera viewpoint. On closer inspection it could be seen that this player looks incomparably different to the real Delon Armitage and so not infringe on his or his Union's IP, in addition to the fact that it is a home user modification and no profit can be gained from their likeness use.
What say you HB-AJ (or any other HB rep), is something like this possible? And if not, I'd love to know your thoughts and reasonings behind it.
What if we did a poll on TRF and requested it as DLC, with enough interest would you guys consider it then?
