Just something I've been thinking about a lot recently:

I know a lot of gamers could really care less about the face creation tools offered in a lot of videogames these days. And of those that do have a vested interest, most probably aren't excruciating over their character's face at the beginning of the game to the extent that I invariably do. But it's something that's caused me a lot of grief over the years since they started introducing this feature into roleplaying games.

Maybe it's because I'm coming at this from a fine arts background. Maybe it's also something to do with preferring to play in third-person when given the option (which means I'm seeing my character a lot more in these games than those who are going through in first-person.) Or the realization that (almost every time) the choices I'll be making will be set in stone for the rest of the game. Most likely it's a combination of everything.

What's been the bane of my gaming experiences in most of these games where you can create your own character's face, is that I love having that option, but I continually find I'm struggling with the options available to me. It's rare that I find myself with an end result that's at all similar to what I'd set out to create.

The finality of these decisions is also very troubling to me. Often it's only after playing with my character for a couple of hours that I'll notice his nose is slightly too low on his face, or his eye just a bit too close together. I have Skyrim on PC, so in that case I can simply bring up the console and re-enter the facegen to make my tweaks. But in almost every other game, I don't have that option (even when I do have them on PC instead of console.) There's rarely any chance to go back and make any tweaks to what I've created.

Which means I have to either learn to live with these minor imperfections on a character I'm going to be playing with for months (or in the case of Mass Effect, for example, over the course of three games, ostensibly.) Or restart and go back to the very beginning - hoping that I can remember my original settings, and then tweak from there (and then pray that I won't notice any other problems down the road.) Going back to my Mass Effect experience - I can to this day recite verbatim the first half-hour of dialog in that game, I'd gone back so many times.

I just don't see why these games have to make (what, to me, is such an important feature) so final, at so early in the game - most times before you've even seen what your character will actually look like in-game and during dialog. I remember Oblivion, for example, at least gave you one last chance at the conclusion of the tutorial, to go back and make any tweaks you feel you'd need.

I also dislike the general setup of most of these tools. Again, as an artist, starting out with a fully-formed face and then morphing features from a given starting point is counter intuitive to me. I don't know how else you'd go about it - but I'd love to see a game some day that lets you start out deciding the general characteristic (head shape, proportions, etc) before having to worry about the fine details. (Say, by starting out with a fuzzy and featureless image that gains more resolution as you come closer to your end result.)

As well, I find most of these games either don't have the sliders I most want to have (for example, rarely is there a slider that lets me morph a face along the 3/4 axis in a simple way.) Or have sliders that really should be extraneous. Barring specific exceptions, most human faces fall into the same proportional rules, generally. I shouldn't really need sliders to move the nose up and down the face individually, or morph the eyes together and apart. Rather, a slider that alters the overall proportions of the face makes a lot more sense, without making the player deal with coming up with a human (or alien, or Khajit, etc) face that doesn't look like a mutant, would (I think) be a lot easier for everyone involved. (And I believe Oblivion, at least, had these sliders, at least to some degree.)

In short, I really, really like the option to design my own unique face in roleplaying games. To me, it adds a lot of extra personality and customization. While not a necessity, I always find it a welcome feature in videogames. But it's also led to a lot of extra stress on my part, and often leaves me with settling for something other than what I'd intended. It's a neat feature that I always welcome - but I also think there's loads of room for improvement in this department that I don't think we've even begun to scratch the surface of a really workable solution that straddles the line between ease-of-use, and giving players the options they'd like.

Anyway - am I the only one who puts this much thought into making their characters in these games? Does anyone have any stories about their own trials and tribulations with tools? Games that included this feature exceptionally well (or exceptionally poorly?)

Nope, character customization is an important feature to me as well. If they implement it in a game, I'd prefer that they make it as deep as possible.

Oblivion was a weird case, they had a lot of options yet it was almost impossible to make anything that looks good. I think Skyrim is improved in that area though, and the NPCs don't look as terrible either.

And yet, I always just keep the default face in Mass Effect. I think it's probably because I connect the default case with the canon Shepard that's in all the videos/artwork.

I put a lot of work into it, which is weird, because I'm terrible with faces. I can't describe, envision, or even remember any face, so no matter how good the customization system is, I don't have the slightest idea what I'm doing. I just kind of bump sliders around at random until I think it looks decent.

Yeah, the stress exists. Inevitably, somewhere down the line, after paying attention to a face you yourself took a lot of time crafting, you start catching all sorts of imperfections. But truth be told, I think this applies to everything we take a direct and personal hand in in real life. Artists catch all sorts of flaws in their work that fly over the head of the general public. If I re-read a story, poem, or regular block of text that I wrote a few days after creation, I always feel some urge to alter it in one way or another because it simply put does not live up to my personal standards. And truth be told, it probably never will.

Fact is, it doesn't really matter how in-depth the tools are, how many sliders are available, or what properties of a face we can alter and change. Good tools are preferable, and I prefer some game face-makers more than others, but human nature will always make us our own toughest critics.

Hell, take a long hard look at your own physical face. Chances are you're going to pick up all sorts of "flaws" that only you really notice in it that you wish you could change.

EDIT--

See? I edited my own post just to clarify a point!

EDIT 2--

And I edited the edit!

I both hate and love character customization.

I think it's almost essential that RPG's should have a decent character customization, and I love creating my character. I can spend as much as an hour just making my character and be sure that everything looks the way it is supposed to be. Unfortunately facegens and such tends to bring unecessary stress along with it, for instance you become very aware of everything and strive to make everything into perfection.

As you mentioned everything may look good as you finish creating your character, but during your journey you start to notice your characters visual flaws, and god are they annoying. I swear these mistakes have driven me to begin an entire new playthrough (I did this in Skyrim on Xbox 360). Imperfections such as these bother me to no end, even though I know I should just ignore them and move on. This is one of the reasons I hate facegens, but at the same time it is close to essential in a RPG (in my opinon as I stated earlier).

I really like your idea though, about building your face entirely from scratch rather than modifying a default face. It will surely help contribute on getting your character closer to the look you imagined in your head. When I see a default face, it's difficult for me to start creating my own face without it having been influenced by the preset face subconciously. For example some features from the preset face seem to be prominent on my characters face aswell just because it looked natural or something. This is kinda annoying so hopefully we'll be getting even more improved character customization in the future.

What I find that works well for that problem is the randomize feature that most facegens have. Randomize until you get something that looks approximate to what you want, and then fine-tune the details.

I love face creation tools when they're available, but they're been too limited (so far) to be really satisfying. For both Oblivion and FONV I was never really happy until I was able to use combine facegen with cosmetic mods. I'd create a face in facegen, import it into the game, and tweak the face into the final version with in-game tools. It's the only way to get a truly unique looking character that was close to how I'd imagined him (or her).

I've tried it several times earlier, and usually I end up looking at a freak (Oblivion comes to mind). I haven't used it alot recently though, so I might give it a shot in Skyrim or something when I eventually decide to pick it up again.

I felt the opposite: a lot of automatically-generated Oblivion characters looked awful but it was quite possible to make decent-looking characters with some effort (though nords invariably looked like they'd been cross-bred with horses), whereas in Skyrim I found myself really struggling to get my character to look the way I wanted and wasn't really all that impressed with the way any of them looked. But I guess by its nature it's a subjective area.

The time and effort too come to http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/648748815397037371/E37C3E1DCB2B774938ACB2FCCC17196742F4ED7B/ is probably a lot more than you would think. I understand how you feel OP. I have typed in showracemenu enough times in the console to fill 2-3 pages I would imagine.

When it comes to Mass Effect, I knew I'd never be able to create a face myself that looks good under all circumstances. I knew if I had to take a face through 3 games that are roughly 30 hours long, it needs to be perfect. I wasn't going to change my face half way through the series, that's for sure.

So I looked up other people's faces and found one that was also tested thoroughly for how it looked in dialogue, so it looked pretty good regardless of Shepard's expression.

Though in Mass Effect 3 everyone seems to have somewhat angry eyes.

I thought it was less important in TES to get a really nice looking character since I don't see my character's face very often. In Mass Effect you see it in every conversation and cutscene, and there are lots of those.

Thats funny my femshep had the angriest eyes and meanest mouth, i ended up making 3 faces only the 3rd was it closest to my original, the first 2 looked great on the character creation screen and looked like apes ingame.

My Shepard seems to be slightly cross-eyed: seems that the eyes don't move to take account of the face width, or don't move enough. She's ended up looking like that woman off House Doctor.

But back to the point, at least they smile! That's what really got to me about New Vegas and Skyrim: no bugger ever smiled and they just seemed a right bunch of miseries.

My take on FaceGens is that I just try to make the best of it, and I perfect my first face so that I will re-use it later. The Fallout character in my avatar, for example, is the only face I've used for male characters in both F3 and NV.

Facegen is the most challenging section of most videogames.

I found it very difficult to make decent faces in Oblivion. Not exactly impossible, but very time consuming. I found it much easier in Fallout 3 and NV.

I preferred the greater morphological freedom we had in those games, compared to the preset features of Skyrim. I understand that Skyrim's restricted system lets them make more refined and less doughy faces, but I like the slider options we used to have.

So yes, it's very important to me. I often have to change the face once I get out into the game because it doesn't look right.

I don't care about the face thing that much, as far as letting the player make their own face and so on. The more important aspect for me is that this allows the developers to give each and every NPC in a game a unique face.

I do agree with this though, the finality of it is a bit annoying. I'm only at the beginning of Mass Effect 3, but there are face adjustments I want to do. I won't bother though, cause I don't really feel like replaying anything, even if it's just half a hour or so

Remember you can use the savegame editor to transfer faces between ME3 saves. Assuming you're playing it on your fancy new PC, that is!

Well, glad I'm not the only one who puts that much thought into this sort of thing.

I do find with myself that it's kind of hit-or-miss with me getting a face that I'm happy with in the end. And I don't really know that there's any real way of telling beforehand how much trouble the tools are going to give me. For example, there were plenty of sliders in Oblivion, and I still ended up just throwing up my hands and making a Khajit in the end. (Also, because I think they're kind of cool - but I do find I'm a lot less OCD about creating a non-human face in these games.)

It's also quite often played a big factor in what gender I'm going to be playing as. I remember when Fallout 3 came out, I spent a day or two trying to get a male face that looked even close to what I was going for, and nothing seemed to work. But I had a much easier time creating a female face with those particular tools. When New Vegas came out, I didn't even try making a male character.

But really my all-time biggest pet peeve has to be a lack of options for going back into the face creation once the game has started. Maybe I got spoiled a long time ago with Tiger Woods. But I remember in those games (can't remember what year it was introduced - something like the second or third iteration of the series) they had really quite a full-featured create-a-golfer tool. And you could go back in between courses and continue to make tweaks. Heck, I've probably invested more personality into that golfer, refining features and adding backstory, than I have in many actual role-playing games. Simply because I was allowed to continue refining those features.

I mean, it's not like my squad is suddenly going to not recognize me if I were to head into the med-bay in Mass Effect and tweak my facial features a little bit. And I don't see it being all that hard to include an option to continue going back in and editing. And it drove me insane in Mass Effect particularly - that's a character that I'm supposed to be keeping for what turned to be, what, 5 years or so?

To me, roleplaying in a videogame and defining my character is an ongoing process. Most of the time I start with little more than a basic concept, and I tend to fill in the details and a lot of the backstory as I play along and get a sense of what the context and boundaries of that role are going to be. So it just seems natural to me that my character's appearance evolve in tandem with that process. And yet so few games give me any means of doing that...