One of the most intimidating first bosses that any Role Play gamer has to contend with is the character creator- that moment when you are well and truly confronted the limitless potential of eternity and told to whittle everything down to split second- life changing decisions! Anyone who doesn't spend a good ten minutes looking over the options available before even seriously getting started making their face will never understand the sheer horror of looking back on the toil of a thousand petty slider movements only to realise- oh my god, I've created the most boring/horrifying creature ever conceived- back to the drawing board! And with many games that you wouldn't expect getting surprisingly varied and approachable character creators in recent years, I wonder about the philosophy behind what such creators are even supposed to achieve.
The spurring of these thoughts came at the insistence of Dragon's Dogma 2 to launch early it's character creator for the purview of the curious. Through this we've been able to enjoy one of my favourite iterations of a slate of creation tools that I've seen in a game to date. Versatile and varied, Dragon's Dogma 2 enters into the nitty gritty of miniature slide management whilst bridging the gap for those that can't be bothered for the granular improvements by a wide slate of pre-set options making the art of coming up with a unique face a matter of a few moments work. Which I suppose is what empowered the team to fill the world with, reportedly, up to 1000 NPCs that seem to be hand-made- not just generated! I always love when the players get their hands on some slither of the full breadth of creation tools- because that is when the sky is truly the limit in character creation.
With Dragon's Dogma you start with 6 pages worth of pre- generated faces, and when you click one you'll receive a new page of faces similar to that choice, and after that selection you'll get another page of subtle facial structure alterations to pick from. From there you'll have your default character, and that is the canvass upon which you'll make the subtle tweaks to the rise of a cheekbone or the curve of a nose- as well as enjoy the decently robust scarring and tattoo system which allows for mostly free-form placement along the entire body so you can create the image from your imagination to a tee. It's this perfect meeting of complex and approachable which I can see really getting aplomb from all sides- a solution few were actively seeking but I feel that most all can readily appreciate.
Bethesda are well known for their character creators, ever since Skyrim decided to do away with the honestly mediocre systems of Fallout 3 and Oblivion and instead cobble together the most really robust slide-based system. That slide system was limited in it's functionality afforded to the player, however, which is why most people consider the commonly available mod that unlocks those sliders to their fullest potential an automatic download on even a casual playthrough. But there's a problem with that- with it's full potential unlocked, and even to some small degree in it's vanilla state, the Skyrim slate of options are just so vast- it's a bit overwhelming to be honest.
When you get to the sorts of games that offer several hundred slides for each slight tweak of a nose it can get to the point where you're just testing out what a slide does, figuring out you don't like it and immediately going back to defaults. Unless you have a crystal clear idea of exactly what you're going for, it's hard to maintain a unified design philosophy that guides your process. And when the options overwhelm you and you can't get a handle, you'll be less inclined to experiment which will lead to more generic creations. God knows I give up pretty quickly everytime I try to make an interesting player character in a Souls' like game for this very reason. Too much choice can be a curse in itself.
Baldur's Gate III on the otherhand veers into the direction of simple to such a degree that it is shocking how successful the character creator turned out! You literally only select between a small collection of faces and chuck some hair on top alongside some racial features- there isn't a slider in sight when it comes to building your character. Which to be fair is a lot more than they really needed to do given that this was supposed to be an isometric game- but Larian's obsession with making a fully cinematic RPG masterpiece necessitated high quality character models so I guess they were stuck between a rock and a hard place- and choosing to make every single character creation choice a curated 'body part' or 'extra feature' was certainly a bold choice indeed.
This could easily have turned out as utterly pathetic as Destiny's character creator (which still doesn't have any option to change after the tutorial despite this franchise closing in on over a decade old later this year.) Larian really honed in on all the character appearance choices that also crossed over with class building, including race and Class options, and threw in as many high quality assets as possible to give as much variation possible. Scales, Horns, pigmentation, there are even selectable genitals are in the game for some reason. The result is perhaps on the best simply character creators of all time, lacking the range of Dragon's Dogma 2, perhaps, but creating no less as memorable and unique love dolls for lonely BG3 players to vicariously find companionship through whilst convincing themselves that they'll also fall madly for some hyper interesting personality one day.
At it's very least a good character creator should give us the ability to conjure some rough approximation of ourselves to self-insert into a video game for the truly imagination deprived. But at it's best character creators invite players to launch themselves into tailor made shoes of their own conjuration, dreaming up a whole life to roleplay. Those who spend all those hours getting someone just right, as generic or fantastical as they ultimately end up, feel that pull of the other letting them step out of the shoes of the mundane into another life for a brief few hours. Maybe those who simply can't connect with that would be considered healthier individuals in a traditional setting- but name one mentally healthy person that's fun to have drinks with! Exactly!
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