I like to dash in a little bit of crazy when I make characters, but mostly make people who seem like they fit well into the world without being too boring.
My Saints Row character was a fro-ed out black dude running around town in a purple bathrobe, purple heart shaped glasses and NOTHING ELSE. He was awesome, but has since been replaced with my closest attempt at current-day Michael Caine.
The first few times, I made a version of myself that fit in the world, so tattoos, scars, and exagerated facial hair. A few years ago, I began developing a fantasy story and now use characters that I have developed as a basis for character creation as well as playstyle.
It is strangely gratifying to take these characters through different worlds and see how each one would react in different situations. It also gives me a reason to play through a game multiple times.
I write and Illustrate stories, so I have a bunch of characters kicking around in my head all the time. Most of the time i try to pick whichever one of them is appropriate for the genre and the tone of the game and create them as best I can. Often times though, I'll create a character based on the kind of experiences the game offers. Like in Skyrim I wanted to do the civil war questline, fighting for the Imperials, so i created a character specifically for that purpose.
I got really frustrated when I launched Skyrim for the first time. I've spent more than an hour carefully crafting the face of my character, but in a few minutes I put a helmet on and never see my face for the rest of my journey. When playing Saint's Row though, I went for the most ridiculous look, hecticly moving sliders. Are there actually games that handle 'cover your face with a mask and never see it again' issues more delicate?
It depends on the game. I often play female characters in RPGs, and in all honesty I think I do try too hard to give them features that I find most attractive in women (bright colourful eyes, long brown hair or sometimes red but rarely blonde, thin nose etc.), but when I'm making a dude I'm way more likely to give him scars and imperfect features. I never make characters to look like me; this is partly because so few games actually give you the option of making a fat character (that's partly because it'd be weird to have my Skyrim dude who runs around the world 15 hours a day and only eats when he's low on health have a big fat gut).
Also, I almost never choose to make characters that are black. This isn't due to racism, and I have played as black characters (had no problem playing a Redguard in Oblivion). I guess I don't have a great explanation for this. Maybe it's because I think it'd be harder to directly relate to a black character, but that argument seems silly, especially in a fantasy setting. I guess it is important to have something familiar in the characters you make. I will make Asian looking characters (especially Asian females) if they are appropriate to the setting, because I'm sort of an Orientalist.
The more I think about it, the more I think that the whole character creation process is a little weird, and it's very easy to overthink it.
Usually I come up with a theme for a character that I think will fit in with what I know of the game world and design one that fits with it. I tend to make pretty ladies.
I write and Illustrate stories, so I have a bunch of characters kicking around in my head all the time. Most of the time i try to pick whichever one of them is appropriate for the genre and the tone of the game and create them as best I can. Often times though, I'll create a character based on the kind of experiences the game offers. Like in Skyrim I wanted to do the civil war questline, fighting for the Imperials, so i created a character specifically for that purpose.
I do pretty much the same thing. Sometimes I use characters I've invented for stories I try to write, for example one of my characters is an athlete turned criminal so he tends to pop up in create a player modes on sports games and was the basis for my Boss on SR the Third, while other times I make characters for a specific game to a game, so for Skyrim I have three characters to choose from to play through the various questlines.
which game do you think had the best Character Creator?
For me it's Champions Online. You can create just about anyone in that editor. ANYONE! Add that the fact that you can give your hero any combination of powers in a the game an d that's a damn good editor.
I try to create a "looks can be deceiving" character. Basically, I'll create a character that looks as least threatening as possible, e.g. "That female Gnome with the pink pigtails just destroyed you".
I don't have any philosophy about creating characters, I just screw about with it until I'm happy with the results.
that being said I do create more female characters, mainly because any attempt I make at a Male character ends up making them look like they've taken a brick to the face.
Haha, I also draw my characters in order to get a better feel for them. As far as skyrim goes, I'm currently retrofitting in one as a breton who moved from High Rock to study at the mages college, who gets caught up in the civil war and trains with the companions in order to be ready to defend the empire.
I'm in with the I try to create characters that look fitting crowd, but there's a couple extra points to it.
I tend to go with longer hair, even on dudes, because I find a lot of the faces in character creators to be not great, and the long hair tends to just make everything work better for me.
Also, I may end up unintentionally making characters look kind of like myself. I have red hair, and recently have been giving red hair to a lot of the characters I create. This isn't to try and make them look like me, I just find reds to be the best looking. Black is a close second.
In terms of gender, If the game permits it's always a guy. Probably mostly because I'm a guy. I never understood the argument of "I create ladies so I can look at their butts the whole game instead of looking at a guy's butt". Why do you spend so much time looking at your character's ass that that is a legitimate concern? Also, I hear there's porn on the internet now.
I'm not one of those types that screws around with all the crazy cheekbone sliders and such. I did that with Mass Effect and I'm pretty sure my Shephard got hit in the face by a space bus. I usually just toggle around the presets for each feature and pick what I think looks the best.
Depends on the game, but I'll either come up with an original character or insert one of mine into it. In Skyrim I found it rather useful to go in to it with a pre-existing personality, since it prevented me from having to agonize over decisions or what kind of path to take. Was able to let him do the thinking for me.
I usually make someone who looks like me - a fit black dude with short hair - unless there's an alternative that suits the fiction much better. My Skyrim character, for instance, is a light-skinned Nord with scruffy blond hair.
which game do you think had the best Character Creator?
For me it's Champions Online. You can create just about anyone in that editor. ANYONE! Add that the fact that you can give your hero any combination of powers in a the game an d that's a damn good editor.
Attractive people, usually of the female persuasion. If I am going to be with a character for 40-200 hours, I'd rather they didn't look like something that crawled from a toxic waste dump. That might be fine for an hour or two, but when I really become invested in building the character, I don't want it to look like some sideshow attraction. In my imagined universe, all the women are stacked and all the men are cut. The first thing I did when playing Skyrim is look for better face (and body) mods.
Personality wise, that is if I get to choose a voice sample, I go with feisty and exotic over cutesy or angry. When I created my character in Saints Row the Third, I picked the Russian accent and made her look like a younger pre-scarred version of Balalaika of the Black Lagoon anime franchise. I didn't set out to recreate that character, I just wanted to use a specific hair style and then I discovered the Russian voice samples and put it all together.
I never create myself. For me, role-playing means being something other than yourself, hence the "role".
I usually only give myself two options. I either make myself, and if they end up looking weird I made a hot bad ass woman (who happens to be very sarcastic). It's not that I like looking at their butts, I just am a fan of a strong female lead. That's why I'm playing through Vanetica of all things now.
I usually create hardboiled mercenary types, but I've been trying to branch out a little more lately into more diverse characters. I still try and make them a neutral and morally ambiguous person as many of my favorite characters in sci-fi and fantasy are like that.
Basically this for me. I usually dont like taking to long on the character creator, so I take the default guy, change up a few things, them throw the best looking beard on him. Every character I made in Fallout 3 had the biggest, bushiest beard possible.
I spend little to no time in character creators. I usually pick one of the starting faces and then mess around with hair, beards, scars and tattoos for a bit and call it good. If there's a randomize button I'll hit that for a bit to see what may come of it.
@yeah_write: You are awarded +20 points for the Ferro comment. I applaud this!
I can never do very good create a characters, but I have this odd tendency to always make my first or second character a blond Asian with handlebar moustaches if I can.
Yeah I go about the same way, I usually try to make my lady look the same in every game, that's why my lady Shepard is also a skilled "soul burning" fighter , lone wanderer, Monster Hunter and soon a 3rd street Saint.
I used to pay attention to that stuff, but I dont anymore. I just try to find a look that makes the game look good, which usually involves having a bald character (hair needs to get better in games) and stuff like that.
I make them like me because for me the point of having a customized character is the chance to NOT play as someone else for once. I don't make "Hot ladies" because i'm not attracted to animations.
I get a real face in mind and then work from that. I'm not aiming to duplicate the real-life face, it's just easier to work off something real than to try and create a human-looking face right off the top of my head.
So I'll start with something like Clark Kent:
And end up with Kurt: Obviously not the same guy, but using Mr. Reeves visage as a template allows me to blow pretty quickly through the boring parts like bone structure and head shape before I start on the finer details that draw my character out.
Sometimes I'll try for a closer resemblance, or trying something like "I wonder what Zorgs son would look like...in the wasteland?"
So Zorg... The red button. ...begat Jack: What red button?
Sometimes I do just make a character from scratch, and then I start asking myself what the important parts of the characters story are as told by the game. So in something like Dragon Age where I pick a human noble, he's most likely going to be well-groomed (he's a noble), stoic (he's a noble), fair-skinned (as a Caucasian anyway, having to not work the fields and such...he's a noble) and so on. You know Jesus was black, right? Although, I have to say, no matter what facegen I use, any male character viewed from 3/4 behind (so you're seeing the back of one ear and the side of the face) all look like the same character, no matter what I do. WTF?
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