They're smarter, though, right?

Eh? I think it`s much better than the jaundiced face types of Oblivion. My Nord is quite buff and rugged looking, perfect for his new world.

I actually like the way the characters look. Rough and rugged. Fitting for a place such as Skyrim. Cyrodiil was a more civilized province, so it was expected to have the characters be more 'cleaned' as it were.

variety would still be nice though, elves and bretons are known for being upperclass types and eventually i will want to role play as something other than a rugged and rough adventurer.

This must be a troll post, as i can't understand how anyone can think this is a worse character creator than oblivion. Oblivion had a horrible creator, there where no beards and characters always turned out to look like idiots or some ghoulish creature, and moving sliders caused other sliders to move with it.
It was a horrible creator that i thought was one of the worst parts of the game, i just picked a preset in that game because creating something yourself was impossible.
Character creationg in Skyrim is great, i instantly found my Nord character to look like a real man, with great looking beards and much better features sliders.
This is not the best creator, but it is much, much better than all the games from Bethesda. And this is the first game from bethesda that i have been satisfied with how my character look.

The 19 year old protagonist in Fallout 3 looked about 35 too. There are rugged, alpha-male, manly-men in the Bethesda art department who just look in the mirror to design male NPCs!

Preening pretty boys don't survive long in Skyrim. The mudcrabs are picking their bones.

I'll play around with your sliders

I think the character creation is by far superior to oblivions. There are only a few things i miss:

1. The Mouth is not very customizable. You cant change the height(most of the standard mouth-types look like they r pumped up with silicon), if there is a smile or the width.
2. It would be nice to set how broad a face is. It has all the same width. And on my breton girly this is "moon face"-width. Ugly!
3. Nearly all woman hair types have a special "Parting". In germany we call this special parting "Poposcheitel". Don't know the englisch word but the direct translation would be something like "bum parting". How about a few other hair types?
4. And what would you think about a few Hair colors without strands. Whats yer problem with single-colored hair, bethesda?

In my opinion the character editor of Skyrim is a major upgrade from the one Oblivion had. The design of the characters fits the envoirement.
And in my oppinion the simply looks way better than the ones in Oblivion

If you can't make a young looking character you haven't tried hard enough....

I don't have the game yet, so I cannot judge on what is and what isn't possible with the character creation, but if I suppose what TC writes (in an exaggerated manner, I guess) to be true, explaining it with the "harsh environments" ect. doesn't make much sense.

Since the game starts with the character being an empty page, you have no idea about what life (s)he led up to that point unless you invent a background story yourself which does not necessarily involve living in the dumpsters. Life in a rough area doesn't automatically lead to a rough appearance, because under normal conditions, people find ways to protect themselves from it. Like tents, huts, houses and clothes. Towns. Personal hygiene. I'm sure Skyrim has all of it. Also, from what I've seen on screenshots, there exist normal and even pretty persons in the game, so if they aren't forced to look like bums'n'hags, why should the player character.

As I said, this only applies if, indeed, TC's claims are true and also depends on what you consider pretty in a realistic term.

The characters look fine to me. If you fine tune it you can get a 20-ish looking character. A lot of the NPCs look a lot nicer/less deformed than the player character presets, so it's definitely possible. I went with Khajiit though, because I've never played one before, so my character is a badass pitch black metal cat.

lol

I agree, the characters are pretty ugly.

Character creator is excellent IMO. The faces and bodies are massively improved from Oblivion. I thought this would be the last thing to be complained about.

"Harsh environments" is always brought up, but with what I have been able to do with changing "age" is basically only with the what 4 complexion options? and they still look 50. Also if the weather makes smooth skin impossible why do nearly all the women have smooth skin????? I think the decision to make women look like supermodels and the men like dirty homeless people is a little sixist. But I have found that you can make some decent looking men, although they pretty much have to have facial hair, and still look over 40, 2 things I DON'T want. I just want to look like myself, why is that so unreasonable, this is a fantasy, I am NOT suggesting that we should have to option to dye our hair pink or have rainbow horses, I'm just asking for an option to make a human character look like me, is everyone implying I am not realistic? I mean I understand the land is harsh, but why don't all the women look harsh, and as I said before, look at LOTR and Game of Thrones, there are still going to be attractive people, and so far it feels like there are 2 ages for males in the game: child and middle aged, I mean was there really a 30 year gap between when males were being born? Talk about breaking immersion.

If you can show me a screenshot of a young looking male created in the creator I'd be very grateful, but unfortunately there are only about like 4 complexion options, and even if you were to get one, they might still be ugly.

I can't agree with the OP that NPCs are ugly. What we see are a lot of variations on how people look and that's fine with me. Generally, folk look a lot more "natural" than in Oblivion.

The character appearance creator is brilliant. But first thing you need to do is minimise facial dirt, scars, and warpaint. Get the face as you want it and then add your scars, warpaint and dirt. I could never build a nose that I liked though — there always seems to be a bunch of lo-res pixelation at the end of it. I'm hard to please I guess.

I will award A+ for the overall character creation. It's not 100% because what I found confusing was the need to click Done without having named my PC first. I searched high and low, confused as to why I was apparently going to have to carry the name Prisoner for the entire game. However as we know, naming the PC is the next job after chargen is done.

Quite the contrary, the characters creator is better than anything that was thrown on Oblivion so far.
It lacks maybe a bit of face base models, but i hope moders will change that.

Yes, Oblivion's character creator definitely had its problems, I spend probably more time on it creating the character I wanted (which was only an Argonian at the time), but my point was that atleast I could get the suggestion of what I wanted my character to look like, which with the graphics was almost the only thing you could do. In Skyrim, although the beast races, Orcs, and females are really well done, the human males (less so the Elves, although I still find them a bit wierd which is probably the idea) however are very rigid in their design and isn't the whole point of the game, as Todd Howard points out, is to be whoever you want and do whatever you want in a fantasy setting? I mean obviously there should be some limitations so it isn't stupid or doesn't fit with the aesthetic, but having normal looking people is not unrealistic! I'm fine with a majority of them being rugged, sure, but a world without diversity in age, appearance and attractiveness is creepy, unrealistic and lazy.

Just change your name to THEB0YWH0WHINED.

The game is amazing. The look of the males and females are meant to fit the environment of the game, and the harsh living environments. The males are out pulling heavy labor on a daily basis. The women during this time were dealing with the chores and the children. The women who fight and carry a reputation would obviously want the charisma to blend with their fighting skills. So deal with it.

If you have a problem with the game. Take it back. That's all I'm going to say. There's no room for your pickiness in the Elder Scrolls. There's already too much detail.

http://skyrimnexus.com/imageshare/images/57416-1321006609.jpeg

What disappointed me the most was that you can't have fat people.

I'm in the same situation as the op--unable to proceed past character creation as I can't make a character that I can stand to look at. I've yet to find a combination of features that looks at all passable out of the female models. Imperial and Breton women apparently do not exist under the age of forty anymore. Nord women have noses broader than most pigs I've seen. Elves now look like mutants, in the worst ways possible.

For the year in which it's been released, Skyrim's character creator is a joke. They have a slider for dirt, but nothing for nose width, eye tilt, or character height. Most of their options are pick-from-list types with no viable choices, leaving one to try to find the least off-putting of the bunch.

I've been a fan of the Elder Scrolls series since Daggerfall. Right now I'd like nothing more than to get into this game and play it, but it looks like I'm stuck waiting for mods that allow me the option of playing a decent looking heroine.

...or maybe the game is glitched right now to only offer male nose options for females. Maybe the complexion options that might make one look young enough to not fear the onset of alzheimer's more than the coming of dragons got lost somewhere during my Steam preload. I could hope that this is the case and that a patch is on it's way to save this game, can't I?

Not at all. I really like the character design. I find the rugged look far more interesting than everybody running around looking like 12-year-old anime characters (looking at you Final Fantasy).