It may come as surprise to no one that I am/was among the players most interested in BDO’s character creation process ever since Pearl Abyss released previews. At a first and second glance, the customization options seem wild: change the size and color of your iris, reshape hair – that kind of stuff. Halfway through the developer probably realized that creating long-lasting characters would prove such an immense undertaking for many players at launch, that they decided to make BDO’s character creation tool available as standalone (get it here now). That in itself deserves some kudos and so do FFA online competitions and template sharing hubs made possible thanks to the devs taking MMO character creation seriously.
Unfortunately that’s where my enthusiasm ends because two hours in, I am not feeling the customization tool for Black Desert. The problems are manyfold: for some trivial things the options are endless while not for others (about 20 ways to customize every part of the eyes, only so many hair dues and colors), face editor controls are dodgy and frustrating to handle and the sub-menus are bewildering. Despite so many sliders, it is in fact quite hard and very time intensive to alter default looks: they are very defined, there’s no randomization option to start off from and yes, gender-locks. I could live with the latter myself but I am disappointed where faces and hair are concerned: the choices you are given for every class are very sameish, there are not that many choices and you can’t greatly alter hair either unless you like to do weird things with your bangs (also clipping errors) –
It took me an hour to alter the sorceress face from left to right. Pic 4 shows weird hair controls.
You can easily create ludicrously looking and ugly characters for that online event linked above, with crazy hair, ghastly smiles and star-shaped pupils. If we are talking serious choices and variety though, players will have to spend hours to make their characters look more unique because it’s all tedious manual labor. And don’t let those articles about famous lookalikes fool you – there are one or two ‘famous people’ already worked into the templates’ designs. It’s very easy to make Gandalf or Khaleesi but creating yourself or a significantly different character will take lots of time and understanding the different tools.
In some ways I think the creator is aiming too high; or rather, let’s say I would appreciate more variety in standard templates from the get-go with some extra options of alteration after that – not the other way around. Dragon’s Dogma has achieved this quite greatly for a non-MMO, so I hope BDO will add a bit more practicality to the whole process before launch. There’s a lot of potential to it if they make it a bit more user-friendly and effective.
Okay, I will stop the high-level whining now.
(Dragon’s Dogma is really cool though and finally out for PC, you should check it out!)