Photo-Receptor Focus on: Character Creation
by Maer
Creating my characters is one of the things I love about gaming. Since I hope to play that character for a long time, I take special care on everything: class, race and appearance. I can spend hours going through all sorts of combinations to get the look that I think is exactly what I want.
So how does SWTOR stack up on my appearance meter? I’ll give it a seven out of ten.
More after the jump…
We have four body types which I think is ok. There could be more, but at least we have some. I do love having the option to choose a heavyset character. I haven’t used it yet, but I like having that option there for the future.
The head options aren’t bad at all. Again, there could be a few more options because there were some mouths I’d prefer with other face shapes, but overall, I ended up with face shapes I liked.
I’m not loving my Sith Pureblood’s mouth, though, but it was the best I could do with the choices I had. There is a weird dark line around her lips, not one that actually outlines her lips because that would have been fine. I tried all sorts of combos to get rid of it, but the ones that worked were weird colors and were worse overall.
There are scars available which is very cool. I didn’t use any of them yet, but they’re cool anyway.
Ditto with the complexion choices. Cute freckles are available, as well as beauty marks. Some of the choices were bizarre looking, but I’m sure some people will choose them. Those weren’t appropriate for my Inquisitor, but I did use a small beauty mark on my Bounty Hunter.
I like the eye colors available, too. Overall they work with each race and I didn’t have much trouble choosing. Except my Chiss had no choices, so I found interesting. I like her red glowy eyes, though, so it’s all good.
Cosmetics is where things start to break down a little. I would have preferred my eye makeup and lip colors to be separate choices. My fave eye makeup didn’t go with my fave lip colors and I was forced to choose a compromise that didn’t have either one. Which could account for the weird line on my Sith’s mouth. So my wish list would include separate eye and lip controls.
The cybernetic choices for cyborgs are ok, but again I was having to compromise and didn’t quite get what I wanted. I would have liked one cybernetic eye, but only had the option of sort of cool looking glasses. So I had to go with no glasses on my Imperial Agent. I hope this will get beefed up in the future, as there are some cool things we could do with the cyborgs.
Skin color options are also good. I was able to get colors that look good ingame. Except on Hutta where all colors look bad. I took my Chiss Bounty Hunter up to fleet and put her into a bright light to be sure I had the right colors on her. It only took remaking her five times to get it right, too.
And now let’s talk about hair. This is what brought their character creation rating down to a seven. What were they thinking? First off, all hair colors need to be available across the board. Seriously. My poor Sith had awful hair color choices. Just awful.
Limiting hair color by race is a bit silly, in my opinion. The one thing that people in real life can easily change is the color of their hair, yet we don’t have that option ingame. We have some race-specific colors and that’s it. Not good. Please, please, please change that. Barber shop for the win with all colors available.
And the styles! There are a few styles for the female characters that are good and the rest are terrible. I’m actually surprised some of these styles made it into the launch version, to be honest. Needless to say, I did not choose to wear cinnamon rolls on my ears.
I do wish the hair had more movement to it and wasn’t so stiff. Some of the styles are very cartoony looking, which is weird considering the other options look realistic. However, the lighting effect off the hair as my character moves is a very nice touch. So, that part was very well done.
SWTOR’s choices are better than some games, not as good as others. I mostly like what I ended up with for each of my girls, so that’s a good thing. A really good thing, since I plan to play for years to come.
Well, that’s my two credits. What’s yours? Did you love the character creation process? Hate it? Didn’t care at all?
Ready…set…discuss!
I agree, about a 7 out of 10 for me too.
The fact we do have so many options, relative to how most MMOs are, all in all Bioware has done a good job. Like you mentioned with cosmetics, I would like options for tattoo colors separate from which one is selected. One issue I do have with the head options is certain facial hair will not work or look completely different. Body types are an area that I wish there was one or two more options, but again fairly good for typical MMO standards.
Maybe they will later allow you to make some changes to your appearance, which could be another money-sink. However, how many of us are going to do all these changes and keep a helmet or hood pulled over our character? 😉
Great article Maer!
I was more disapointed with the lack of cyborg implants than anything else. The fact that only humans can be cyborgs didnt really bother me. But to limit the choice of cyborg implants really hurt. I was hoping for cyborg arms, legs, fingers, eyes. I was thinking that it would be cool to make a half human-half cyborg bounty hunter. So much for that idea. What they gave us was circit boards implanted into differant parts of the head.
But yeah you are right about everything else. For hair choices you have “hair 1” “hair 2” “hair 3” “hair 1+2” “hair 1+3” “hair 2+3” “hair 1+2+3” then they say they have 7 choices for hair styles.
Complextion was one of those that you have 50 choices but 1-10 look very much the same except one has one more wrinkle. Another has a shade more color. Towards the end I started thinking “No one is acutally going to looking THAT close at my character. I will just stick with this one.”
Those are the only things I really had any issue with. I liked all the scares they had, kinda help create the backstory for my characters.