Was gonna make a thread in the skyrim forum complaining about the character creation (specifically how straying from the presets invariably deteriorates appearance) but I just got to thinking complaining about skyrim has been done to death and my real interest here is character creation in general. I love character creation and I feel like there must be some great character creation systems I don't know about. I'm a long time gamer but also a very shallow uninformed casual gamer and I just know I'm missing out on stuff.

Best character creation I know about is probably the tiger woods golf series, but once you create a cool character all you can do with them is play golf. Are there any obvious directions you guys can point me in as a lover of character creation? Hopefully after the character creation giving me a bit of freedom to do cool stuff other than play golf? (killing people would be an improvement, but the more freedom to do anything at all, the better).

I just in the last 20 minutes or so got curious enough to search about character creation and it seems the money character creation is with mmorpgs, which is a world I haven't dared to get involved in. But I was convinced enough to try and download champions online, would have gone with dc universe online but I'm just on a laptop and I want to see if champions will work first.

It's still taking it's time, looks to be at about 1 percent by the loading bar... ugh.

I generally don't play any pc games anymore, let alone mmo's, so we'll see how this goes.

So anyway, what are some great character creation systems? What are some bad ones? Seems to be a lot of bad ones lately, as much as I love skyrim and fallout I don't understand why there's so much emphasis on colouring your neck when you can't change basic things. I can create a face I like in fallout, but not any face I like, it pretty much has to be creepy moustached white guy or else it's crap. Can't change the body at all so again they kind of force you towards a character that is interesting only because they're creepy (and presumably a pervert). Conversely in skyrim I can create a character that looks like a badass mothereffer from afar, but up close the customisation of the face is very limited, too detailed in pointless aspects you don't care about and then lacking in important stuff. Creating females is even more annoying because you can't even change their body, they have to be either a skinny model or a slightly inflated scaled up skinny model. There's no other body type available, which is kind of grossly offensive to women and also grossly insensitive to me as a horny bastard who likes stocky women with thick thighs and bulbous buttocks.

I find it odd how great character creation is a bit of a white whale in the gaming world, is it that hard?

Then there's also the issue of games that would have been amazing if they just had character creation. Was just watching assassin's creed 4 previews and it looks like such an amazing game, only then ruined by the fact you have to play as some other nerd's created character who I'm sure he thinks is totally awesome, but why TF would I? Spoils the whole thing, I doubt I'll even play it, but if I could create my character I'd probably consider it the greatest gaming achievement in the history of the universe. Nice one, devs of assassins creed, I hope character creation is THAT hard, to justify you forcing people to be who you want them to be.

Saints Row 2 has the best IMO. You can change the voices, the emotes, the way you walk, and you can have just about any body shape/skin colour/hair colour combination you can think of.

I don't really pay much attention to character creation, unless it's so long that it detracts from my enjoyment of the game.

What I do remember really disliking was the character development in Fable 2.

No matter what I did, my females always ended up looking like she-hulk and I don't particularly find the woman body-builder type attractive.

Hmm thanks for that suggestion, I kind of subconsciously black listed saints row because I was a gta fan and it seemed like (heh, "seemed like") a rip off, and it also seemed kind of [censored], but since GTA betrayed me with gta 4's utter awfulness I should feel free to give saints row a chance, if only for the character creation.

I thought Dragon's Dogma had the best character creation. You could do everything from height, weight, skin, frame, hair, eyes, and facial features.

And the best part is that you could earn an ingame perk to let you customize your character at will from the menu.

Yes, but in Dragon's Dogma you can only choose from preset parts. There's no sliders like in Beth's games.

Though that's not necessarily a bad thing.

The Sims is great for character creation, I would pay big bucks for a Sims game that lets time progress as you play (so you can have a kid, who grows up, goes to college in the 40's, his kid grows up in the 50's and so on. Potential is massive, go through WW2 as a family, losing a father etc.)

Best= Saints row 3.
Worst= Oblivion.

It seems to be an area that varies an awful lot. Unlike many people, I was reasonably content with what I could do with my characters in Oblivion, though it's possible that Oblivion's idea of what a character should be simply coincided with mine; not so impressed with the other Bethesda games, Morrowind using too many pre-made bits and FO3 and Skyrim being too inflexible or too far away from what I wanted. Bioware's games, specifically the Dragon Ages and Mass Effect kind of looked potentially good bur turned out to be too restrictive in the case of Mass Effect and too unpredictable in the case of DA.

I agree with Saints Row, both 2 and The Third seemed to have really very flexible character creation systems. And The Sims (2 and 3 in my case), though the resulting characters were somewhat stylised, I was happy with them.

The most pointless were the Two Worlds games, where it seems that other than height and other basic attributes, nothing you did made any difference at all. I did eventually manage to create a female character in TW2, though she looked nothing at all like I wanted.

I guess at least the games that weren't very good at it tried: unless there's a strong story-based reason why there shouldn't be character creation (my usual example being Geralt in Teh Witcher) then they should provide it, but many games don't offer any customisation at all.

I always thought the character creation system for Dragon Age: Origins was quite robust. Especially since it directly affected your story.

The "Origins" part was excellent. I think I played through them all, although I inadvertently chose the "you got a ladder?!" voice on one of them and consequently spent ages with a savegame editor to get rid of it! My main problem is that the in-game appearance was significantly different to what you might expect in the character creator, something that was widely complained about, and my characters never looked quite as unique as I'd hoped, particularly the elves.

I do like Skyrim's variety, although it pisses me off we can't slick our hair back short like elves can in the game.

Saints Row the Third's was horrible, but mostly because it was so dumpy compared to Saints Row 2's.

Can you elaborate? I dont think I quite get what you mean. My characters all looked like they did in the creator as far as I'm aware.

I think I preferred The Third of the two, though as with Oblivion it's likely it's because it had more overlap with what I wanted my character to be.


Not specifically, just that my characters looked different in-game to the way they did in the character creator. The variance wasn't consistent, though, which might be why some people complained about it and others didn't. The worst was my human noble and the least different were probably the dwarves, though I suspect that the racial elements weren't the key but probably my particular character design. I remember my human in particular was rather boggle-eyed and appeared to be wearing clown make-up, neither of which I'd intended! There was also my elf whose appearance I spent a lot of time tweaking using the Toolset until I finally got what I wanted... I reimported her into the game and she looked almost identical to her predecessor, rather frustratingly. I could see that my changes had been applied, but a bit half-heartedly, it seemed.

Fml, I just ordered saints row the third. Seemed to be a lot of people saying it was better despite having slightly fewer options? People saying clothes and hairstyles were way better but I guess that's subjective.

I think the origins were a little too good, because I would have rather played all of those stories without joining the gray wardens

Huh. I can't say I ever noticed that problem in my game. Far as I'm aware, my characters all turned out exactly as I intended them to (just as rugged and handsome as myself of course).

Well, obviously the Sims 3 has my personal favorite level of customization.

Oddly, I still kind of judge just about every game's customization against Tiger Woods Golf. I can make a wide variety of characters with it, and best yet I get the ability to continually refine it over time - something I find is actually kind of important if I'm going to be playing a game for awhile.

Actually, that's a really big deal for me, for the most part. Maybe it's because of my own art background, but I get very OCD over character creation and there's nothing worse than getting 2 hours into a game only to realize that maybe my character's nose is two notches two high up his face. I eventually got to the point in Mass Effect that I would write down the values for every slider, for tweaking later, go through the opening of the game until I could finally see what my character actually looked like in-game, and then restart and try again.

In Skyrim and Fallout 3/New Vegas I play on PC so luckily I have access to the console commands to go through and make tweaks as I need. Because I know I will at some point. But at least in those games you get some time to play with the character before getting one last chance to make any changes without having to go through the console, so that's nice. That said, I do find the character design to be a bit wonky in the older Bethesda games. I thought Skyrim was really good in that, though. And in the Fallout games I tend to kind of wish they had a few less crazy beards and maybe a few more hair styles.

Well, I found a face for my PC, but I just found clothing style SOOOOOO limited compared to Saints Row 2, I loved basically customising my suits down to the fine points, but in SR3 it's all basically 'pick your coveralls and shoes and gtfo of here.'

It depends on what you want, if you want wacky and gangsta junk, plenty of that, but IMO, the high fashion suit styles were pathetic compared to how well you could design them in Saints Row 2.