So far, the characters I’ve shown you were humanoid females. I usually do play a female ingame, I tend to forget if I try to play a male, and then my chats get rather confusing. I’ve tried it before, it’s not very pretty. 🙂

But, to be honest, I’ve really been going with whichever gender the game brings up when I click on “Create.” Today, the game gave me a male Breton, which I named Carl. And Carl is going to show us the parts of the Character Creation screens.

On the right side of the page are the character creation options.
I have already set Carl’s race (he’s a Breton) and class (he’s a Templar in every picture but the next one, apparently I had changed him to a Dragonknight for that photo).

If you look to the right in the picture, the options across the top are Race, Class, Body, and Head. Race and class will be the focus of another post, today we’ll focus on the body and head tabs.

Body Type

The first choice you have is to choose body type. Do you want your character to be large, thin, or muscular – or some combination of the three?

Features

You should be familiar with the next section if you’ve read either of my previous posts. This is where you choose your skin coloring and where the Body Marking slider is located.

Upper Body

Next is determining how your upper body will look. By the way, I just double-checked, and the options are the same for either male or female characters.

Lower Body

And then there’s a similar selection set for lower body options.

I have played a few games that gave more options to how your character looked, but only Second Life was online, and it’s not really a game. Overall, I’m very impressed with the character creation options and how the different races are still distinguishable from each other, even with the multiple options.

Okay, now it’s time to go from the Body tab to the Face one. Clicking on this zooms in to your character, giving you a close up of what his/her face looks like.

Face Type

The next selection option is one I have fun with, when I’m creating my characters.

I recommend starting at one corner and then jumping to each of the other two corners, watching the changes in your character’s face. Then find a spot that gives you the look you want, whether it’s a baby-faced Nightblade or a battle-hardened sorcerer.

Voice

You have a choice of 8 different voices. Considering that most of the times you hear yourself you’ll either be shouting in battle or grunting as you make a jump, having 8 different options is really not bad. You really won’t be listening to yourself all that often, at least in my experience.

Hair

Hair is another option where each position on the slider is a different choice. I plan to do a whole series on the different hairstyles for each character.

Features

Features has 2 sliders that are set up similar to the Hair and Body Marking sliders. Each position on the Adornment and Head Marking sliders gives you a different look. I will be covering these in future posts.

Age gives you the option to go from a new recruit to a battle-hardened veteran, whatever your choice is.

The next sections will let you adjust the look of your character however you want. There are limits to the range of the sliders, you can’t turn a Breton into an Argonian, for example, but you could create an elf-mix by sliding the Ear Tip Flare slider all the way to the right.

I’ll show each section, and point out the ones that will be covered in later blog posts.

Face

These are all self-explanatory, giving a good range of choices but nothing really surprising.

Eyes

Each slider is really measured in small bites instead of steps, so you’re not going to be able to move the eyes to the side of the head or make anime-style big eyes, but still, if you’re really into how your character looks, you can have fun with it.

Brows

We will cover the Eyebrow slider in another post, since once again, each position of the slider is a different style. Eyebrow Skew was a surprisingly fun slider, with the ability to add a little human-ness to your character (one thing I learned when creating characters for Second Life was not to always make both sides equal, it makes the character feel fake because we, as humans, are all asymmetrical. And although it’s not always noticeable when we view others, the lack of any asymmetry feels fake when we look at a character.

Nose

Nose shape will give you far more playing room than any other facial adjustment we’ve seen so far.  The rest is pretty basic, from what I’ve seen.

No hidden designs here, but I am happy with the fact that my character can walk around with more of a smile if I want her to. Slide Mouth Curve to the right to give the smile if you want one.

Ears

The last section before your character is ready to play. With the Breton, at least, you can turn your character into a pseudo-half elf by adjusting the Ear Tip Flare.

Well, that’s all the basics of the Character Creation screens. Hope you’ve enjoyed it. 🙂