Embarking on any video game mission is an endeavor in the name of vanity, really. Repelled the alien invasion on an arcade cabinet? Tell the world about it in three initials on the high score screen. Just scored a goal in FIFA? Time to bust out the salmon celebration while the other player furiously stabs X trying to skip the cutscene. Beaten Elden Ring, have you? Well, that’s all very well and good, but what did your character look like while you did it?
These are virtual spaces where we get to be the god-king, the center of the universe, or in the case of Saints Row IV, just a swole dude in a purple three-piece suit who can somehow fly. Having some agency over your in-game avatar, then, is crucial to the experience. It lets you invest all the deeper in the fantasy that this is you, achieving these impossible feats, becoming the NBA’s all-time great, chokeslamming random pedestrians… yep, Saints Row IV again.
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Elden Ring’s wonderful player character creation tool got us thinking about the other titles with similar granular customization and awesome player-made works of art. Presented in no particular order, these are they.
NBA 2K22
At one and the same time, a fearsomely powerful and genuinely stunning creation tool capable of capturing your look and then allowing you to build a player archetype with subtlety, specialization and a long tail of upgrade badges to work at over the seasons and pure, pure nightmare fodder, NBA 2K’s creation tool is the stuff of myth at this point. When it likes your uploaded face scan, good times, get ready to see yourself in the NBA dunking on KD and posting Jokic-like numbers every game. When it doesn’t – prepare your eyes for Guillermo Del Toro’s vision of the NBA.
There’s a lot of debate about the MyPlayer build system and how much it restricts you to a particular position or role. Only a few games ago you could basically specialize in everything, the seven-footer with a Curry-like soft touch from the line and crossovers responsible for more ACL injuries than a greased floor. Now you commit to a role, and spend hundreds of hours perfecting it with platinum badges. Grindy, yes, but rewarding.
Elden Ring
Bleeding-edge visuals were never a component of Souls games until Demon’s Souls turned up on PS5, and now the even more gorgeous Elden Ring. With those sumptuous visuals comes the chance to build some really detailed characters… and then, obviously, uncover the hidden sliders, break the game completely and make a bunch of abominations.
We’ve seen some pretty accurate Kratoses, Solid Snakes, Bart Simpsons and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles walking the Lands Between, and frankly the latter are even more disturbing than the Eldritch horrors FromSoftware’s design team have spent years crafting. It’s the best kind of character creator then – powerful enough to make a really detailed build you can feel invested in, and to mess around in until you’ve made something that makes you a bit scared of yourself.
Dragon’s Dogma
Dragon’s Dogma had many great innovations and tricks up its sleeves, but its approach to character creation might be its best of all. In most RPGs, your appearance and character attributes are separate things, one a bunch of sliders, the other some numerical values on the next menu. Here it’s all the same thing – make a really tall, heavy warrior, and they’ll move slowly but climb larger enemies more easily. Small, spry characters gain increased movement speed, but they’re easily knocked back or brushed aside by massive enemies.
It’s a subtle addition, but one that makes you really think about the kind of hero you want to embody from the start. Thanks to its pawn system, whereby you create and recruit party members throughout the world, you can experiment with some extreme builds and have them tag along with you too.
Saints Row IV
Saints Row is like the guy you work with who thinks ‘loud’ and ‘funny’ are synonymous. Wherever it sees an opportunity to end a sentence, set-piece or even menu with a joke, it takes it, consequences be damned. You’ve… kind of got to respect that, however often that joke revolves around giant purple sex aids.
Saints Row IV’s character creator embodies the spirit of the series. There’s not an ounce of subtlety in any of its sliders, not a neutral in its wardrobe, but there is enough silliness to get swept up in and decide that, yes, for the next 30 hours you will play as Nic Cage in a pirate dress, or Thanos, or a version of yourself except wearing a hazmat suit the whole time. Don’t go changing, Saints Row.
WWE 2K22
From one bastion of subtlety to another. WWE’s character creators are the stuff of legend, bringing to life only the tackiest and most musclebound cheese dreams you’ve ever imagined. In addition to spookily real-life wrestlers past and present who didn’t make the official roster, the community has also made no shortage of celebrities, superheroes, fantasy characters and… well, even metaphysical concepts expressed as yoked dudes.
This is a game that asks you exactly how veiny you want your wrestler’s arms to be. What kind of nipples they have. Not just the color of the tassels on their boots, but the material of those tassels too. You can get lost in the details for – and we’re not exaggerating – hours at a time.
Spore
It’s the logical conclusion of the video game character creator: a manifestation of a gamer’s imagination that doesn’t just walk about and do that gamer’s bidding, but forms an entire ecosystem, using the strengths bestowed on it to master its environment, and doing its best to navigate the weaknesses it was cruelly bestowed. It’s philosophy, natural history, and poetry, all at once.
Or at least it would have been, had 100% of Spore players not elected to make a phallus.
PES 2021
Journey with us, back through the eons of time, to a different and lost era. Coronavirus was in the news, Olivia Rodrigo was on the airwaves, and PES was good. We’ve traveled back to the year 2020.
Become a Legend was a fantastic mode in Konami’s soccer series. The visual aspect of building your player was pretty detailed, although slightly low-fi in comparison to its peers on this list. But then, it also gave your agency over your crossing animations. How you’d celebrate a goal, in five variations. Which outlandish haircut you’d go for when you made that big money move to Real Madrid. Let’s have it back soon please in eFootball, Konami.
Skyrim (Modded)
There’s a unique satisfaction to wandering around a land populated exclusively by ruddy-cheeked potato-men, Jarls with faces like a cautionary tale about UV exposure and ratty-haired serfs, knowing you are by far the most beautiful and stylish being they’ve ever seen. Forget the fact you’re Dragonborn, have you seen those cheekbones? And nobody can figure out how you get your long, glossy hair to stay immaculately quaffered like that while scrabbling around in ditches for nirnroots and smacking wolves to death with a giant hammer, but they want to know more.
While original Skyrim offered little chance to elevate your visage among the ranks of the common oafs of the land, over a decade of mods have turned it into one of the most powerful creation tools around. There are even imported hair meshes from other games, like The Sims and The Witcher 3. The class system and backstory is looking a bit basic and long in the tooth now compared to Larian et al’s efforts in recent years, but on a purely visual front it’s still king.
Cyberpunk 2077
Depending on your choices in Cyberpunk 2077’s character creation menu, V might be a jacked meathead with crazy, bulging eyes and a shaved head, a heavily augmented petite girl with a more elaborate hair dye arrangement than 6ix9ine, someone who bears a passing resemblance to you but cooler and with a bunch of tattoos you’d never get, or someone else entirely.
While it doesn’t have WWE-levels of customization, what’s especially impressive about it is how much it tells you about the world you’re about to enter. The character creator itself is an exposition tool. ‘Huh’, you think to yourself, ‘I guess people are really into dyeing their hair in Night City’. Body mods: also in bigtime. The options themselves speak to a cyberpunk world’s sensibilities, one rocked by technological advancements that ravaged it, and the societal sense of self-image along with it.
XCOM 2
It doesn’t really matter how deep and varied XCOM 2’s character creator is, because you and I both know exactly what we’re going to use it for: really accurate representations of ourselves and our friends. Maybe your friends are just a lot cooler and edgier than mine. Maybe they really do wear aviator shades and Skrillex haircuts dyed luminous colors. Perhaps you know someone with a green beard. But as long as it can just about capture the broad strokes of your immediate social circle, it’s done its job.
No, but seriously, this is a very good creator.
Written by Phil Iwaniuk on behalf of GLHF.
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