The Daily Grind: Can you have too many options at character creation?

@Bigcheez

They can have as many features as they want, but with great customization comes great responsibility...

AND THE NEED FOR A "SAVE CURRENT PROPORTIONS" OPTION!

@Brendan Drain

Yup. I definitely agree with you Brendan.

EVE Online's character creator has the best one I've seen so far. Aion was good but too many sliders.

The one thing I liked about EVE's is that you can literally sculpt your character the way you want to. It's fluid, intuitive and creative. It honestly makes me wish it was implemented in other MMOs.

@Seffrid Agree!

@Lucidus

I didn't realize SWTOR's character creator was finalized and released 3 months before the game launched:P

@(Unverified)

Don't be foolish. If their character creator wasn't more or less done then I'd be extremely worried. This is basically what we are getting in release. We might see some more versions of hair or faces, but this late in they aren't going to introduce a different system.

@Interitus

The last beta video I saw had 9 different sliders one of which was hairstyles that had 25 options. This is hardly in the same class as WoW's character generator. If this were the "final" version I'd be pleased. Why would I be foolish to assume, as you are, that this is even the final version?

@Pylades

Exactly. I'm all for customisation where it's going to make interesting and diverse characters but Aion was at best a joke and at worse totally immersion breaking and ruined the appeal of the game for me.

I can't imagine how they thought, after spending so much time on creating a very beautiful and often glamorous world that allowing people to make absurdly disproportioned characters would be a good idea.

I do question sometimes the amount of sliders on characters faces too, when you rarely see the face and even more rarely that close up to see if the cheekbones were 3 mm higher than that other face over there.

Spend the extra effort making some more hair styles, decorations or colour options instead of 100 sliders for 'eyebrow depth' and 'ear angle'.

@M1sterLee

The thing is, Korean culture places more emphasis on mutual dependency - or, in other words, they had faith in their fellow man to not abuse their given abilities.

And I don't see how Aion was "at best a joke" considering you can easily recreate almost any living human being in the game. That's pretty damn impressive, if you ask me.

But really, again, it's just not possible to give both great customization AND limit it to attractive/not-horrible creations. If you can only make attractive characters it is not good customization, period. Even if you took away some of the absurd body customization in Aion people can still create obscenely ugly characters just by messing with the face sliders - and, hell, even games that are considerably more limited let you do the same: for example, EVE Online, which has some characters that are almost inhuman in their ugliness: http://facecardgame.com/eve/?characterID=336906604

You can bet your arse you're going to see some frighteningly repulsive creations even in Guild Wars 2, I guarantee it.

@Zyrusticae
Just to be clear, I was talking about the absurd extremes of customisation when I said the Aion characters were a joke. They literally make you laugh out loud when you see some of them waddling towards you.
I think it's entirely possible to offer a lot of customisation without going into the realms of physical impossibility, as they did in Aion.
Ugly/beautiful is irrelevant as it's totally subjective, but when the options allow for impossible/nonsensical proportions then that breaks the believability and integrity of the game world.