Game with the best character creation (aesthetic) options?

[aozgolo]

This is specifically about where you design the LOOK of a character, not D&D style rolling your character (Baldur's Gate had excellent character designing, terrible aesthetic selection). So which games do you think gave you the most options to truly create a character that looked and felt unique to you and what you truly had in mind?

I think by far the best I've tried was Saint's Row 3, it's one of the few games I've seen that LETS you play a fat person and I think that's amazing, and I wish more games gave you options outside the "super fit bodybuilder" type of frame. I love the amount of depth games give you in designing faces but very few gives you much in the way of body options.

My close favorite is the character creation for the MMO Dragon's Prophet, it just lets you customize so much more of the body than most games do, though I have to deduct points because the facial options are rather limited and hard to really tweak just right. Oh but it does have 5 sliders JUST for boobs, so +5!

For faces I think Skyrim has me spoiled there, there's very little you can't do with a person's face in Skyrim though more options couldn't hurt.


So what games did you feel had the best character creation system and why?

 

[Corven]

Even though you spend Nearly 100% of the time as a spaceship, EVE online has a pretty well realized character creator.

 

[Aeshi]

Champions Online has an absolutely insane amount of options for its character creator (if you can imagine it and it has 2 arms and 2 legs then you can probably make it) I haven't played the game itself in ages, yet I still log on from time to time just to mess around with the character creator.

I'll also second EVE Online, the Character Creator in that game is bizarrely well done considering all you're going to see of your character for 70% of the game is a tiny portrait the size of your thumb (and 20% of that remainder is the same portrait, just larger)

 

[Thr33X]

WWE Game series from Smackdown!: Just Bring It to WWE2K14
-Getting past the whole "WRESTLING IS FAKE" bullshit comment that comes up whenever WWE is mentioned, their games developed by Yuke's and now published by 2K Games (formerly published by THQ) have had one of the most robust creation tools around, with an entire community of content makers who recreate everything from wrestlers not in the game to their own original characters to even celebrities, comic and cartoon characters with great levels of detail.

 

[Juste Goose]

Saints Row 2 by a landslide. SR3 wasn't a just step back, it was a step back that made you fall down some stairs.

SR2's "Max skinny" option was seriously skin-and-bones. Not an ounce of fat or muscle. You know, skinny. SR3's was a swimmer's body, and still relatively muscular. SR3's "Max fat" option looked like a fat guy you'd see walking down the street. SR2's looked like a guy you'd see on a TLC special.

SR2 let you layer clothes. Layers! You could pick your undershirt, regular shirt, outer shirt, and jacket separately. You could even pick different patterns for most pieces of clothes, and choose how you wore them. (Open/closed shirts, sagging pants, hat tipped backwards and to the right, etc.)

I was massively disappointed when I got three. At least I'll always have SR2 for all my fashion needs...

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

Saints Row 2 by a landslide. SR3 wasn't a just step back, it was a step back that made you fall down some stairs.

SR2's "Max skinny" option was seriously skin-and-bones. Not an ounce of fat or muscle. You know, skinny. SR3's was a swimmer's body, and still relatively muscular. SR3's "Max fat" option looked like a fat guy you'd see walking down the street. SR2's looked like a guy you'd see on a TLC special.

SR2 let you layer clothes. Layers! You could pick your undershirt, regular shirt, outer shirt, and jacket separately. You could even pick different patterns for most pieces of clothes, and choose how you wore them. (Open/closed shirts, sagging pants, hat tipped backwards and to the right, etc.)

I was massively disappointed when I got three. At least I'll always have SR2 for all my fashion needs...

Honestly, I was surprised at how annoyed I was by the massive reduction in character customization in 3 considering how little the main character means to me as a character. For example, if you want to play the 10th Doctor's psychotic parallel twin, in the second game you could get everything perfect. In the third you had to make dozens of compromises.

Still, SR2 remains one of the most impressive character generators I've seen but it has a problem that goes hand in hand with that: it takes quite a bit of effort to get what you want out of the whole ordeal.

 

[RJ 17]

Hard to pick from the games that I've played, but I can tell you which game has the WORST character creation: GTA Online.

Seriously...wtf's the deal with "Pick your grandparents to determine what your parents looked like and thus determine what you look like!" Just let me make my own frickin' face! It's not that hard of a concept!

As for Best....hmmmmm...I'm tempted to say either the Mass Effect or Dragon Age series. With the exception of hairstyles, you can get pretty creative with those faces.

To be fair, most of the games I play don't allow for character generation in this sense, so my pool to pick from is rather limited.

 

[captainballsack]

All those Korean MMO's have great aesthetic options for character creation. I don't think a lots of options necessarily means great character creation though, because too much can leave you indecisive or your character looking like a turnip.

Final Fantasy XIV maybe? Either that or like, Perfect World or something. One thing we can all agree on is that Dark Souls' character creation, aesthetically, is essentially a create-your-own-butt machine.

 

[K12]

Saints Row 2 was bloody good. A slider for gender makes so much more options in terms of types of characters. You can play as a flat-chested woman or a girl boy, brilliant!

Plus being able to have properly customization body shape is rare. Usually "large" is rugby player and "skinny" is tennis player. Bollocks to all the "nose sellion depth" and having 20 sliders for fucking eyebrows what I want is the option to be a sumo wrestler or famine victim!

The only place it falls short is skin colour. I was making a character based on a guy I worked with in Tanzania who had the kind of mega dark skin that looks almost blue and it only lets you go to a sort of milk chocolate colour.

RPGs usually fail becuause putting on a helmet makes you look like any old prick.

 

[Flatfrog]

I know it'll be controversial but I like the Mii creation system. My kids spend ages creating cartoon versions of the family, superheroes and characters from Primeval.

 

[Me55enger]

APB: Reloaded. Hands down.

Say what you want about the current quality of the game at large, but the character creation is second to none.

 

[RedmistSM]

Dragon's Dogma had a surprisingly robust one. The heigth differences were most impressive to me.

 

[Something Amyss]

I think by far the best I've tried was Saint's Row 3, it's one of the few games I've seen that LETS you play a fat person and I think that's amazing, and I wish more games gave you options outside the "super fit bodybuilder" type of frame.

Have you never played Saints Row 2 then? Except in shininess, it blows SR3 out of the water.

 

[Mikejames]

Off the top of my head, I enjoyed Dragon Age's. But now I remember that it gave the option that led to me inadvertently choosing the exact same hair style as main supporting character Alistair.

That probably bothered me more than it should have once I noticed.

 

[Gottesstrafe]

Saints Row 2 by a landslide. SR3 wasn't a just step back, it was a step back that made you fall down some stairs.

SR2's "Max skinny" option was seriously skin-and-bones. Not an ounce of fat or muscle. You know, skinny. SR3's was a swimmer's body, and still relatively muscular. SR3's "Max fat" option looked like a fat guy you'd see walking down the street. SR2's looked like a guy you'd see on a TLC special.

SR2 let you layer clothes. Layers! You could pick your undershirt, regular shirt, outer shirt, and jacket separately. You could even pick different patterns for most pieces of clothes, and choose how you wore them. (Open/closed shirts, sagging pants, hat tipped backwards and to the right, etc.)

I was massively disappointed when I got three. At least I'll always have SR2 for all my fashion needs...

Agreed. There aren't many games that allow you to play as an afroed, morbidly obese ginger paler than freshly fallen snow dressed in nothing but a pair of boxers, a crown, and a stained bathrobe who also has a penchant for attacking people with Capoeira styled martial arts by somersaulting up into their faces and wrapping his legs around them. Saints Row 2 is one of those games.

Seriously though, half of the fun I had with Saints Row 2 was purely in the levels of customizability it allowed me to have over my character's appearance. They really dropped the ball in the next installments by reducing the amount of body types and clothing options that were available. I still remember how genuinely excited I was the first time I figured out how to simultaneously equip gloves and a shirt & tie I could wear a jacket over.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

SR2, APB: Reloaded, DA:O and Mass Effect 1 and 2 had the best character creations for me. Especially Mass Effect series because I could create myself Commander Shephard, down's syndrome hero (not for humor but for me to play a Special hero even though the dialogue options didn't match my RP style).

 

[Feraswondervahnn]

City of Heroes/Villains had an awesome character creator until it went Free to Play. I spent so much time just creating random superheroes, playing for a little while, then deleting them and making another. There was just way to much choice for me to stick with one thing. I think only one of my character slots was taken up permanently and spent a lot of time in game. The rest other slots were just used for messing around in creation.