Best Character Creation

What game, in your opinion, has the best character creation section?

Pool of Radiance
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Saint's Row 2, in my vidalia, had the best options / least restrictions, down to a slider for gender.

In my...onion?

...

anyway Yeah the three latter Saints Row games were really good.

that korean MMO, Black Desert Online has an AMAZING character creation tool

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Those Black Desert shots are amazing. I wonder how it works out for frame rate when you've got 30 characters on screen at once.

I'd toss in The Sims series. My daughter plays in spurts, and she'll spend as much time designing families (and houses) as she does playing.

Skyrim as well, can get pretty elaborate and detailed, but most of that comes about with mods attached to the vanilla game.

Darklands.

It's City of Heroes, right?

Star Wars: Galaxies. Not only did you have the choice of numerous aliens, but the creator was flexible enough for me to create a short, bald, overweight shopkeeper type as my character, which was (and unfortunately still is) virtually unprecedented in gaming.

TheHarpoMarxist wrote:

Darklands.

+1

TheHarpoMarxist wrote:

Darklands.

I think that's maybe a contender for a future CRPG club thread...I've been meaning to give that a try for aaaages.

Dungeons and Dragons.

Let's give the Sims series some love here. Especially The Sims 4.

Also, as much as Champions Online is an average superhero MMO at best, their character creation is great.

Chaz wrote:

It's City of Heroes, right?

Yup! Especially after they added City of Villains.

I could (and did) spend hours in there creating characters that would never feel the air rush through their hair when they superjumped through Paragon City.

pyxistyx wrote:
TheHarpoMarxist wrote:

Darklands.

I think that's maybe a contender for a future CRPG club thread...I've been meaning to give that a try for aaaages.

I poked about my Steam pile and sure enough, Darklands is sitting in there. Then I started reading up on the game a bit. Wow, what an amazing approach to a game for its time. So many of the concepts don't really seem to have been tried again since then.

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

Those Black Desert shots are amazing. I wonder how it works out for frame rate when you've got 30 characters on screen at once.

I'd toss in The Sims series. My daughter plays in spurts, and she'll spend as much time designing families (and houses) as she does playing.

Skyrim as well, can get pretty elaborate and detailed, but most of that comes about with mods attached to the vanilla game.

BDO is by far in my opinion the best out there. I'm fond of a bunch of others over the years. Some already mentioned here, but BDO's fidelity is hard to match and FPS is surprisingly smooth even in large battles with players or mobs (50+).

Some other Korean MMOs come close. Bless (which looks like they're still planning on bringing west) is one that immediately comes to mind.

Another honorable mention is APB. It felt like CoH on crack with the ability to bring in your own designs. Who knew cops and robbers could be so colorful?

Aetius wrote:

Star Wars: Galaxies. Not only did you have the choice of numerous aliens, but the creator was flexible enough for me to create a short, bald, overweight shopkeeper type as my character, which was (and unfortunately still is) virtually unprecedented in gaming.

Actually not any more for a few years now. All the games i mentioned above and more allowed you to be bald and fat if that was wanted.

Spore had a pretty good set of creation tools, especially for kids.

maverickz wrote:

Pool of Radiance
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PoR's character builder was extremely progressive for its time. Long luscious locks and bear-hair pecs? You got it. Bearded with a bikini? No prob!
Though now that I think of it you had to be light skinned?

Godzilla Blitz wrote:
pyxistyx wrote:
TheHarpoMarxist wrote:

Darklands.

I think that's maybe a contender for a future CRPG club thread...I've been meaning to give that a try for aaaages.

I poked about my Steam pile and sure enough, Darklands is sitting in there. Then I started reading up on the game a bit. Wow, what an amazing approach to a game for its time. So many of the concepts don't really seem to have been tried again since then.

Darklands was amazing and sadly one of a kind. The character creator, with a fair bit of imagination, could generate some wonderful origin stories, even as you were trying to min-max an awesome alchemist.

The setting is truly inspired: medieval Germany where all the folklore and superstitions of the times were actually true.

I think the complexity of the game at the time (like at a code level) plus its initial quite buggy release (due to its complexity) made this game an evolutionary dead end, which is way too bad because a game like this set in 800s Arabia or early China or, well, anywhere there is a complex society with a lot of folktales and superstitions would be pretty awesome.

shoptroll wrote:

Spore had a pretty good set of creation tools, especially for kids.

Yup, props out to Spore. You could design creatures with all sorts of monstrous anatomical structures and somehow the animations would still work.

Spore was underrated. If they had figured out how to make the Space portion more like simplifies Stellaris and less like errand running it would have been a true classic.

imbiginjapan wrote:
maverickz wrote:

Pool of Radiance
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PoR's character builder was extremely progressive for its time. Long luscious locks and bear-hair pecs? You got it. Bearded with a bikini? No prob!
Though now that I think of it you had to be light skinned?

This was, in fact, going to be my alternative screenshot to post.
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Also, while all of the character portraits had to be light skinned, the actual sprites could have any skin in the available color spectrum, for whatever that's worth.

I remember Brink's character creation/customization being pretty good, especially with the action figure-like aesthetic of the characters.

Pity about the rest of the game...

On the other end of the spectrum, the Realms of Arkania series had a byzantine character creation system, overly complex. I ran out of patience with it in the 90's, no way I could go back to it now.
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Running Man wrote:

On the other end of the spectrum, the Realms of Arkania series had a byzantine character creation system, overly complex. I ran out of patience with it in the 90's, no way I could go back to it now.
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Pretty much any game that uses the Dark Eye / Das Schwarze Auge RPG system is the same.

it's very....German.

Middcore wrote:

I remember Brink's character creation/customization being pretty good, especially with the action figure-like aesthetic of the characters.

Pity about the rest of the game...

Rest of the game was a blast. Wish people didn't abandon it.

There's really two elements to this. One is the visual appearance of the character. The other is the skill set/personality of the character.

While the Sims, for example, has amazing visual differentiation, the skill sets/personalities of the characters are quite limited. Realms of Arkania looks amazingly complex from a skill set creation aspect, but not from a visual angle of course.

I'd like to see more places in games where the skills and personalities impact how the player looks as the game progresses. There is a Skyrim mod, for example, that increases the body weight (muscle mass) of a character as the character uses physically demanding skills, like swinging a sword. So you can start out a game as a scrawny scarecrow. As you improve your combat skills, you start adding muscle mass. By the end of the game, you can physically look completely different than when you started. It's a little thing, but it adds so much to the immersion of the game.

I think there are two ways to look at this: Cosmetics and stats.

-Cosmetics even though the graphics are more dated than Champions, I believe City of Heroes/Villains offered more unique customization. One of BDO's faults is that they split up the looks among the classes. You could make a convincing Gandalf wizard but you could not duplicate him as a berserker or warrior. Same goes for making Danaerys, you may be able to recreate her as a tamer but not a sorceress or valkyrie. Guild Wars 2 I feel should get a nod here. The presets are plentiful and attractive. Another area it stands out is having very well done "monster" races. I have heard and seen amazing things from the APB character creator. I fear it falls into the trap of other games with so many sliders: that you spend 3 hours adjusting nose height...

-Stats needs to represent the character you want to play well without being overly complex and nuanced. Fallout is among my tops for stats because it doesn't overwhelm you and it includes perks, semi-locked creation stats and an open skill system (by level and drops). D&D is better on paper than in practice. In practice (video games) you practically HAVE TO dump stats. 3E fixed this and honestly is a much better system with some really harsh cross class and race limitations and unclear feat prerequisites/progression. I am tempted to mention UO here and I have to admit I am itching to check out how its open skill system has progressed. But its attributes are way too simplified.

-Honorable mention for Spore. You could make everything from slugs to humans to 8+ limbed creatures. Plus you could design your creation's equipment.

ranalin wrote:
Middcore wrote:

I remember Brink's character creation/customization being pretty good, especially with the action figure-like aesthetic of the characters.

Pity about the rest of the game...

Rest of the game was a blast. Wish people didn't abandon it.

Eh, sorry, have to strongly disagree. The balance and gameplay design were just not well thought out at all. There was one particular model of SMG that was hands-down the best weapon for virtually all situations. The Medic was paradoxically the best combat class. They made a big deal about the ability to free-run like it was a major gameplay element but in reality there were a couple of places per map where you could do a wall-run to get across a gap and in general instead of being designed to facilitate fluid and chaotic mobile battles the maps were full of chokepoints that turned matches into tedious meat-grinders.

And I say this as someone who was so hyped about the game before it came out that I bought it twice - Amazon missed their promised release day delivery so I went to a brick-and-mortar and bought a new copy so I wouldn't have to wait two more days to play.

Middcore wrote:
ranalin wrote:
Middcore wrote:

I remember Brink's character creation/customization being pretty good, especially with the action figure-like aesthetic of the characters.

Pity about the rest of the game...

Rest of the game was a blast. Wish people didn't abandon it.

Eh, sorry, have to strongly disagree. The balance and gameplay design were just not well thought out at all. There was one particular model of SMG that was hands-down the best weapon for virtually all situations. The Medic was paradoxically the best combat class. They made a big deal about the ability to free-run like it was a major gameplay element but in reality there were a couple of places per map where you could do a wall-run to get across a gap and in general instead of being designed to facilitate fluid and chaotic mobile battles the maps were full of chokepoints that turned matches into tedious meat-grinders.

And I say this as someone who was so hyped about the game before it came out that I bought it twice - Amazon missed their promised release day delivery so I went to a brick-and-mortar and bought a new copy so I wouldn't have to wait two more days to play.

Just to keep the derail to a minimum and i'll just say i disagree with pretty much everything said here

Many great ones have been mentioned already, with the three "S" games of Spore, Skyrim, and Saint's Row. Would have LOVED City of Heroes for sure, but refused to pay a monthly fee for any game. Freedom Force filled the superhero void/creation for me.

I really think that Divinity Original Sin 2 is fantastic. Even with the main characters, you have such incredible flexibility in their abilities and paths and aren't confined hardly at all. In fact, you can respec them, continuing character creation mid game if you so desire. Not as much from a graphical standpoint, but certainly from an ability and skill set perspective.

I don't see sports games reflected on anyone's post so far. I think many of them have had fantastic creation tools to kit out your virtual athletes. I still think Sierra Championship Boxing was way ahead of its time in 1985 and gave fantastic freedom to create boxers, fictitious or real, with stat arrays of style, jabs, uppercuts, stamina, etc. as well as physical traits, such as reach, age, height, weight. Not much to change graphically (4 color era) besides white, black, skinny, standard, or kangaroo, but it was quite a robust tool set, long before the days of Madden player ratings. Modern sports games have really moved to a player creation frame as a key component of the game, be it FIFA, NBA2K, and especially the wrestling games.
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That reminds me that the FirePro series deserves a mention. You can create a recognizable facsimile of just about any wrestler in any of the major promotions worldwide in Fire Pro Wrestling World. In fact, someone probably already made one and put it on the Steam Workshop.

Smash Bros for Switch looks weird.