[RampantCoyote]

Having recently played through (part of) Geneforge 4, this concern is a little fresh in my mind. The setting, environment, creatures, politics, powers, technology, and everything else is completely alien to the new player. This means a steep learning curve, and it can be off-putting to new players, and drive them away. It's a lot of work to learn everything.

Whereas, you put the player in the basement of a tavern with a knife and a nasty giant rat, it's not too much of a stretch. Call something an ogre, or a troll, or even an orc these days, and players have enough of a background from books, comics, cartoons, movies, and maybe even old D&D games that they can immediately recognize it, even though they understand that the details are going to be different from their mental model. That ogre might not be exactly like Shrek, but they do understand that it is supposed to be big and physically poweful. If you called some little winged fairy-looking thing an "ogre" and gave it lots of magical powers, people would get confused and frustrated very quickly.
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Tales of the Rampant Coyote - Old-School Game Developer talks Indie Games, RPGs, and the Games Biz

[BadMrBox]

Tolkien was a fan of norse mythology and everything he could find here about really. Names on people and places, names on race's and creatures. Tolkiens trolls works as in our folklore, eats people, likes gold and turns into stone if they are in the sunlight. For me, a troll has a tail, a big nose and is really damned hairy. Neither Elves are a original creation, not the name at least. Long time ago, people in the southwest side of Sweden (or was it Norway? It was so long time ago I read about this stuff) was called elves (alver).

[Mattias Gustavsson]

Yeah, I'm totally with you on that one, trolls have a tail and are really hairy... I wish I could do that in Poser :) I might give it a go at some point, but I think I'll have to buy some more stuff for it then... so maybe for the next game :)
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www.mattiasgustavsson.com - My blog
www.rivtind.com - My Fantasy world and isometric RPG engine
www.pixieuniversity.com - Software 2D Game Engine

[Hajo]

Hairy, that reminds me of a problem that I ran into some time ago.

I wanted to make a texture that looks like fur. I'm using PovRay, which excels at procedural textures and normal maps, but can also use image maps as textures. I was experimenting some weeks but could not get a good looking fur texture.

At some point I even tried to place hairs algorithmically on the surface (PovRay can do that rather easily) but it's very slow to render some million hairs, and actually didn't even look very good.

How do you do hair or fur for your models?

[DeveloperX]

Maya
or even the free Anim8or can be used to make the model for fur.
Using the gimp will give you all you need to create a high quality texture for the fur or hair.

I'm going to bed soon, so I can't give examples atm.
But if you want, I can make some fur textures for you.
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Rambling Indie Games, LLC

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[Mattias Gustavsson]

well, a texture alone is not enough to get nice looking fur, you need some volume as well. Good results can be achieved with a shells/fins type of fur-renderer, even for realtime 3D.

But probably the best result is achieved by rendering thousands of individual strands... I know poser has some functionality to do this, but I don't know how to use it properly... And there's plugins for max and maya which does the same...
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www.mattiasgustavsson.com - My blog
www.rivtind.com - My Fantasy world and isometric RPG engine
www.pixieuniversity.com - Software 2D Game Engine

[RedSlash]

I think I've tried it once using fur texture and multiple layering of those textures strategically. Worked out not the best, but suitable enough for real-time rendering.

[Hajo]