I love a good character creator.
Hair? Yes. Faces? Yes. Body options, makeup, tattoos, scars, colours, voices? Yes. Let me rotate the character properly and see what I’m doing while we’re at it. My considered position on character customization is essentially: yes.
I’m also surprisingly easy to please. I’m not going to spend three hours complaining because the game doesn’t contain the exact nose I had envisioned. Give me a decent selection and I’ll happily work with what’s there. But I’ve realised that when I say I want “more options,” I don’t necessarily mean I want 150 hairstyles. What I really want is more parts of the character that I can change.
That distinction makes a much bigger difference to me.
More options doesn’t necessarily mean more hairstyles
Imagine two character creators. One gives you 100 hairstyles but only a handful of choices for everything else. The other gives you 30 hairstyles but also lets you change your face, body, skin details, eyes, markings, makeup, scars, voice and other individual features. I’d take the second one.
Hair is important, of course. I have standards. But adding another 40 ponytails eventually stops giving me substantially more control over who I’m creating. I’d rather have fewer choices within each category and more categories of things I can make choices about.
I want to assemble a character from lots of little decisions until the combination starts to feel like mine. That’s what Baldur’s Gate 3 gets right for me.
Baldur’s Gate 3 gives me lots of little decisions
Baldur’s Gate 3 gives players a wide range of appearance and identity options, and Larian has explained how choices made during character creation can continue affecting dialogue and interactions throughout the game.
But around those presets, there are a lot of individual things to choose. Depending on your character, you can customize body type, identity, voice, skin colour, maturity, scars, freckles, vitiligo, tattoos, piercings, eyes, makeup, hair and more. Some fantasy races also get their own features such as horns, scales or tails.
That’s much closer to what I mean when I say I want options. Not necessarily 300 noses. Just let me make decisions about lots of different parts of this person. It also means two people can start from the same basic face and still end up making characters that feel quite different.
One little choice may not transform a character, but a dozen little choices together can.
I love FFXIV, but its character creator is pretty limited
This is slightly awkward considering I’ve spent nine years being enormously attached to my Final Fantasy XIV character. FFXIV does give you plenty to choose from. Race, clan and gender come first, followed by appearance customization, and the broader system includes things like facial features, hair colour and voice. Square Enix also improved the FFXIV character creator in Patch 7.0 by adding natural lighting and the ability to preview combat voice lines.
But when I compare it with more flexible character creators, it feels limited to me. A lot of the customization comes down to choosing between presets rather than having extensive control over individual features. And yet, here I am nine years later, deeply attached to the character I made with it.
I think that’s an important point in itself. A character creator doesn’t need to provide control over every conceivable millimetre of a face for you to create someone you’ll love. It just makes the process of getting there more fun.
And then there’s Valheim
Valheim is an interesting case because I absolutely love how the game looks. The surroundings can be gorgeous. There are moments when I’m wandering through that world and the lighting, landscape and atmosphere all come together beautifully.
Then there’s my Viking.
Valheim does have character customization. You can choose between two body types and select different hairstyles, beards and complexions, and the Barber Station lets you change your character later. So my problem isn’t really that Valheim forgot to give me options. It’s that I can barely see some of the details I’m choosing.
The characters have a deliberately low-detail, stylized look that fits Valheim’s overall visual identity. That’s an artistic decision rather than a character-creator failure, and plenty of people may prefer it that way. For me, though, it reveals another thing I want from character creation: I want to be able to appreciate the character I made.
If I spend time choosing facial features and then can’t really distinguish those features once I’m playing, the choice matters less to me. I have successfully selected a face. I would now quite like to see the bloody thing.
Let me see what I’m doing
This sounds obvious, but presentation is part of a good character creator too. Give me useful lighting. Let me rotate the character. Let me zoom in and out. If their appearance is going to change dramatically under different lighting, give me some way to preview that before I discover three hours later that my carefully chosen hair colour becomes radioactive aubergine in daylight.
FFXIV adding natural lighting to its character creator in 7.0 is a good example of why this matters. The customization options themselves haven’t necessarily changed just because you’re looking at them under different lighting, but your ability to make an informed choice has.
And ideally, the character I create should still look like the person I created once I leave that screen. Character creation isn’t a separate minigame I complete before the real game begins. I’m making the person I’m about to spend the real game looking at.
The best options are the ones that say something about the character
There’s another reason I prefer breadth over enormous quantities of very similar options. Different kinds of choices let me communicate different things.
Scars can suggest history. Makeup and tattoos can be part of someone’s style. Age changes how I imagine a character before they’ve said a word. Body type, voice, hair, markings and all the other little pieces gradually create an impression of who this person might be.
Sometimes that person is meant to be me. Sometimes they’re absolutely not me. Sometimes I’ve barely decided who they are until I start moving sliders around and suddenly realise, oh. There you are.
Baldur’s Gate 3 takes this idea further because some of the decisions made during character creation aren’t purely cosmetic. Race, class and other character choices can affect dialogue and how the world responds to you, so the identity you’re building can carry into the roleplaying itself.
That’s where character creation gets particularly interesting. Appearance lets me decide what my character looks like, but an RPG can also let those choices become part of who they are in the world.
Character creation is the first little bit of attachment
I’ve been thinking about this differently since writing about why we get so attached to RPG characters. Before you’ve spent hundreds of hours with a character, before they’ve saved anybody or met their companions or acquired an inventory containing seventeen objects you’re afraid to sell because they might be important later, there is often just the character creator.
That’s the first time you get to say, this one.