Will you be using the default Brother/Sister Ryder face or creating your own?

It has become somewhat of a habit for me to make a brown-haired purple-eyed female character for the first run on Bioware games (since Mass effect anyway.) I'll just stick to that. The defaults aren't bad tho~

Custom also, though I'm surprised by the poll. I thought a lot of people went with default. The defaults are generally well designed, I replayed me3 standalone with the default Jane Shepard look. But otherwise, at least an hour spent staring at the CC screen is tradition!

Only an hour? Pfft, casual But seriously, it's going to take me a lot longer than an hour to customize my own Ryder, better yet Scott and Alec as well!

Out of curiosity, what do you have in mind?

You cannot deny your feelings!

But seriously, I never really thought about that... That would be a bit awkward. Well, he doesn't look that much like him.


I hope they've learned their lesson and don't have terrible lighting in the CC (or let us change it in the preview), let us rotate our character along all 3 axes, and yeah, not have a cutscene before customization. I don't find the "immersive" character creators immersive anyway. Like in DA:I, by the time I'm finished, I have completely forgotten about the giant explosion that's very important. And starting the game with a face you won't use only to change if during a tense cutscene is quite awkward in itself.

I hope we get to do the customization before even the intro of the game, personally, which is a bit more likely since we're customizing 3 people, potentially.

As an aside, am I the only one who really isn't fond of default ME3 femshep? Part of it is just the face itself, but I suppose it's also because I absolutely love the artwork for her, which is unfortunately not very well translated into the game. So it disappoints me because of that.

I know exactly how you feel! If only I could have my own CC in real life... *sigh*

I'd have a lot more self-esteem!

Not canon, but default



Anyway, to answer the thread question: I will definitely customize my own character! It's one of my favourite features in games that have it. I spend hours tinkering, even if I'm personally not the best at making characters. Which I guess sort of explains the "hours" part... However, the default face for Sara looks pretty good, and I might use it for a playthrough, but I need to see it in more detail before deciding. Either way, it seems like a good base to work off of, so I'll echo the others who've said they hope we can edit the default faces and that they don't have unique attributes.

I'm not sure what I'll do with my canon yet. Most of my characters are brunettes, and quite a few are pale and/or have green eyes and/or freckles. So I was thinking of mixing that up a bit and making a fiery redhead, which is a little funny I suppose, seeing as that was the (ME3) default for Shepard but I didn't use it. Although if I do do that, she'd probably end up being pale with green eyes and freckles as well. I'm not the most original person

I also have to do a self-insert at some point - like super self-insert, down to appearance - to maximize the general awkwardness that will be hearing everyone call me by my first name ingame An experience too unique not to try at least once But since it would be a self-insert, I have no idea what I'd name her...

So I have a few ideas this time around, and am not sure what I'll do first. But for Scott and Alec, I'll do something sort of in between default and customized. I think I'm going to leave their faces and hair how they are, but change more subtle things where applicable to make them seem like they're related to my character, like shared skin tone, or eye colour, freckles, hair colour, etc. I think it's awesome we can edit them somewhat. Hopefully at least enough to do that! And really, there's no reason we couldn't alter the other sibling fully, since all the CC stuff is obviously already in place for them.

I used to play as default DudeShep and default FemHawke, I love the way how they look. But I'll change SisRyder's face for sure. She looks fine, but she could look better. Not sure about BroRyder. For the moment, I don't have any plans to play as him.

For me it depends on whether you can make a cute male Ryder or not In the first 3 games I played with the default Shep because the character creator had very few and poor options. While in Dragon Age I enjoyed making my own chars, since even DAO had a decent char creator.

I always make a custom face, although it might not be too different from Scott's default...

BansheeOwnage , in regard to characters I have long had in mind, but been unable to realize, you asked:

Out of curiosity, what do you have in mind?

I'll put this into a spoiler block, for those who don't feel like reading or scrolling.

I'll probably mess around in the character creator, and then go with one of the defaults if I don't like how my efforts are going.

As someone who prefers to create black female characters whenever the option presents itself, I relate to this post so much. It's so annoying playing through the trilogy and watching as my femshep gets progressively lighter with each game. That and the character creator itself was just lacking in general, as you mentioned. I liked the variance of faces you could create in DA:I's CC, along with the darker set of skin tones, so I'm hopeful that Andromeda will improve upon it further. 

I'm hoping to make my Ryder resemble either Aja Naomi King

or Simone Missick (Misty Knight on Luke Cage) 



I would love to be able to pick a hairstyle like Simone's, but I highly doubt BioWare will be able to pull it off. 

My own. I always play with char creators to build the faces that I like.

Yes, they really need to improve the look of some of the hair colours, black in particular (they can do red fine, but tend not to actually make it an option for some reason). I'm not sure why this is so prevalent/hasn't been fixed, but here are a couple of examples for anyone who hasn't noticed:

Examples of grey/blue:


This is really quite odd considering it's not just an issue for your created characters, but everyone, and there are a lot of prominent characters with black hair in DA:I: Cassandra, Blackwall, Morrigan, Josephine, Dorian...

And as you can also see from the above, this compounds with being EXTREMELY SHINY. Although that extends well past hair in DA:I. It's a VERY SHINY game. Exemplified here:


The radiance doesn't only affect black hair, but in my experience it does affect it the most. Comparison:

It's unfortunate as it's one of the main reasons the hair can look "plastic" or pasted onto a face instead of like... well, hair. Reducing the gloss would certainly be a good way to improve the look of hair in ME:A even without better meshes.

The other reason it's tragic is because it simply sparks such an unsubtle contrast between the quality of the face itself (which is superb), and that of the hair which shapes it. I mean, look at the above. The detail on the lips, the lighting, the freckles, scars... It looks very real. Unfortunately, the hair has catching up to do. Other than this, the ears are oddly another thing that tend to look much worse than the face lately. At least we can cover them with hair, though!

So just like how, in the opposite manner of real life, the faces tend to look better in low-light in DA:I, so does the hair and therefore the whole character. The reflectivity is still present, but downplayed.


So... yeah. I was originally just going to post a picture or two. I'm very passionate. Sorry for the image-spam, but hopefully it gets the point across! Bioware, take notes