Character creators! How long do you spend in them? Do you pick a premade face and just breeze through? Do you pick a template, tinker a bit and then settle? Or do you adjust absolutely everything, take all evening and it still doesn’t look right? I feel your pain.
We’ve come a long way from picking between a couple of different faces. These days, we push bone structures around, pick multiple tones for our hair colour, and plaster ourselves in all kinds of make-up and body markings. Who do you want to be? It’s not an easy question to answer. But I look forward to character creation. It’s part of the ritual of the game for me. The warm up, the settling in phase, the getting you ready for the adventure ahead. A role-playing game wouldn’t be the same without it.
Don’t forget to share your picks below.
BDO has the best character creator I know of. I remember it causing a stir when people found out about it. The characters looked so real! And they still do. It’s a great marketing tool.
But how much does your painstakingly made face actually matter in the game? Not a lot. I don’t remember paying particular attention to how anyone looked. There was so much else going on in the game – the active combat is wonderful.
Or maybe I wasn’t looking because I find the idea of beautiful dolls running around a bit unsettling. Who made them? Why? It gives me the shivers.
There’s nothing quite like traversing the galaxy as an insignificant civilization, running low on energy, only to finally encounter another empire that’s hostile and headed by the very creatures you designed. Sounds almost Biblical, doesn’t it?
Despite its complex structure of five stages, the running thread throughout Spore was its creator. It formed the true heart of the campaign, and bundled aesthetics and strategy into one. Do you choose to be a carnivore and take an aggressive approach, herbivore as a friendlier (and perhaps harder) route – or omnivore, the true most efficient way to evolve? Do you want to sacrifice flight for a better pair of horns… or would that ruin the look?
As the creator could be accessed separately to the campaign, it essentially became a minigame for me and my friends, and something of a group activity. Creatures designed by committee, if you will. I think the appeal was both the cartoonish art style, but also how alive the creator felt: painting a creature would cause it to shake like a dog, while popping it into the test drive phase would make it squawk in surprise. If you chose the beak, that is.
Lots of games have funny face glitches, or mods which break faces so they look ridiculous, but the Saints Row series lets you make them as standard. It’s a series that, once it realised it was onto something by being over-the-top, really doubled down on it.