They really need to add the option in creation to change viewing stage. We have all these nice stages with different lighting and can't create/view our characters in them. This was a basic standard feature in sc4 and others I believe. This time we are stuck with the same crummy stage all the time. Having 3 times of day settings in the same stage gets very boring and seems like a bit of an afterthought.
This would be near the top of the list of my own asks for the editor, but I think the reason it is not present in this game, where it has been in others, is in just how poorly optimized this game is for the hardware it runs on. I'm betting that if they were going to do do this, the load time for the editor would be insane, and the transition between stages when working on a character far from seemless. For whatever reasons (and I do think bad coding/design is a part of it) this game slows to a crawl (at least in fighter terms) in many respects on the console releases--which is kind of a glaring issue when the game doesn't even look particularly good on those platforms. Part of the reason that I still don't get enthused to play this game for long periods--despite some considerable improvements to the gameplay over the last year and a half--is that it just fails to pull me in like previous titles, and a big part of that is owed to how blurry, out-of-focus and overall lo-fi the backgrounds of the stages are.
I’m thinking that unless they change the basic engine or however you want to call that they’ve had since IV, I don’t really expect much of these common issues to go away. They’ve been a nuisance since IV. Same with the other common suggestions like facial feature changes or clothes not fitting well.
Don’t mean to be cynical but we realistically can’t expect much to change.
Well, as a technical matter, i really do think the editor is a fundamentally different software module each time: they just chose to retain a lot of the core assets--both as regards the GUI and the options you have access to for building the basic features of the model and tweaking surface characteristics. But there were some pretty fundamental changes under the hood this time around too, as was necessary to add body scaling and base model options, among other new features. It's just that they keep leaving in a lot of problems that result from a combination of too little fine-customization for the user and too little fine-tuning on the developer end (the unforgivably floaty components are a good example of this.
All of that said, I do share your hope (and skepticism that it will actually happen) for a fundamental shift in the next edition, moving the editor a few steps closer to a true modeller in some respects, or at least allowing for some degree of placement and scaling of standard wardrobe items, an increase independent item numbers and options, and an overhaul to the system for fine detail work on surfaces.
Meanwhile, and also on the topic of poor optimization in several respects, the quality-of-life feature I would like to see in the current editor (and which should have been in from the get-go/could be added relatively easily now) is a quick switch back and forth between the customization for a piece of equipment and that item's color/surface properties. Holy f***, how much of my life has been washed down the drain in an unending mass of seconds lost here and there backing-up out of nested menus and then going back through others to get between these two options for the same asset?? Why is the interface designed this way? it needn't be, by any means, and there could easily be a one-button work around. When you combine the poor menu design with the afore-mentioned shitty optimization that causes each step of this process to take a second or two on most platforms, this setup just becomes such a painful drag on time and patience when you are fine-tuning designs. This really should have been fixed ages ago.