Character Creator & Character Customization (Official Thread)

I haven't played a default character in a BioWare game since Jade Empire, and I'm not about to start now, just because of a short-sighted, featureless character creator. I will do the best I can to make a character that looks like a version of my pale, northern self.

"This is my Ryder. There are many like her, but this one is mine," will be my mantra for the coming days.

On the positive side the creator looks a little more robust than Mass Effect, adding in some of DA:I features like in depth eye colouration, so that's something at least. Though it's also a step back in some respects as there's less facial hair, haircut and scar features.

Honestly it's weaker than I expected. The hairs just not up to the quality you'd expect in a new gen title. Plus the lack of decent facial hair options just isn't acceptable given there were games last gen that had better examples.

Inquisition had to deal with four races in their character creator, not just humans, and still looks like it had more options. Setting aside all that, those presets are the most uninspired creations I've laid eyes on. They look like background characters masquerading as the main character. Not the first impression you want to make in your CC.

Ian Frazier has replied to some of the CC concerns. Theres hope!

Heh, thanks. That aside wasn't aimed at you so much as the people who said they can't see much difference between face options in previous CCs; was trying to point out while I do use some recurring themes, there's still a wide amount of variety that doesn't look currently possible with Andromeda's CC. If this is what face-scanning limits us to, I'm more than happy to go back to the random preset faces (just... with better sculpting and detail than the MET)



Agreed on all of the above. (I too love tinkering with nose details, particularly nostril rotation, flaring, etc...) A strong, realistic preset is the ideal - I just don't want that at the cost of versatility to divert from the preset. Honestly, I like the presets - good variety, big improvement in ethnic diversity - in that area it's a big improvement. But the fact we won't be able to change details much beyond those is where the CC stumbles greatly. For instance, male preset 1 is structurally close to what I want to go for... but preset 9 has a near-perfect nose for what I wanted for my bro Ryder. If we could even just swap eyes/noses/lips between the current presets, that would be a huge improvement. As it is, I'm now not sure if I should use preset 1 or 9 to make my Ryder and see big pros/cons with each... I'm definitely more eager to get at the CC in the trial now so I can actually fiddle with it more, however limited. I'm good at manipulating even limited CCs, so any reassurance I can get something kind of close to what I was hoping to work with will be a big relief at this point.

It doesn't make the CC any less seriously lacking, but it might put some energy back into my hype. My husband's already worried this is going to be another "ME3 ending situation" (he was traumatized by my anger and depression over that, I think ) because I went from nonstop hyper excitement to "meh" in a day. He's one of the people considering going with the default now too - he's not into CCs as much as I am, but even he thinks the options are way too limiting.

Mind I'm not cancelling my preorder and there are things I'm still excited about and I still think I'll enjoy the game - this is just like... my #1 area of importance in RPGs so it's a big deflatment to my excitement until I can tinker with it myself. I might even share my results on here in the next few days to show what I was able to finagle to give others an idea. I think it'll still be too obvious what presets were used, but who knows? Maybe I'll be able to squeeze a little more details out of it than I think I will now.

I do hope future updates will improve our options, but I'm not holding my breath over anything changing much. Time will tell.

It is clearly NOT the original ME CC. Come on now.

DAI's CC had some pretty blatant issues if you will excuse me. While I love DAI I thought the CC was deplorable. We had more colors yay! And in fact MEA inherited the color wheel, so thank goodness for that. But DAI's hair was ATROCIOUSLY bad. 

The sliders in MEA has a smaller range then DAI, but honestly considering messing with the sliders too much ended up with some messed up heads rather easily in DAI I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. 

Heh I was hoping for a few more options myself but I can't say I'm super mad about it. At least the choices we do have are decent. As for the tattoos, colors and scars not looking right, well that's where the fade comes in handy. These videos show the CC at it's most contrasting so we can SEE the choices, however that's not how most of us will end up using them. 

I know! I don't want it to be salt on wounds or whatnot, but that's the first time in any game and any CC with every kind of sliders when I saw I can have a character that looks exactly how I want her to look. I am in heaven. And the hair/eye colors look natural. I mean, wow.

Heh, if we posting DA:I pictures to illustrate our points, here is my best take on dangerously cool and ageless Asian faces I happen to be fascinated with in DA:I slider CC.

Boy (he has a manbun, so he must be! And look at those hair and eye color!)



Girl... yep, that's my best Asian gal... see how flexible the creator was? Amazingballs! Totally ninja...



So, yeah, I tried and tried, and I ended up with exactly the same stuff everyone else has. Sure, they are appealing, but certainly not what I wanted.

I still can't believe that they didn't think about it. It's basic thing in CC. 

Excuse me but have you seen the face scans? They all look like they had a very rough life. And that's being kind. The custom characters in Inquisition weren't butt ugly, and you could make some really good characters if you took your time. Most importantly, you could make unique characters.

Like DA:I, I expect that within a month (if not less), there will be several character creation mods available for the game. I used several of them for ME:3 in order to make my Shepard look exactly how I wanted.

The point of face scan is not to have the prettiest people on Earth, it's to have the same level of details as the default faces (and it probably fit better the facial mo-capping).  It's a single texture applied to the face morph.

I've seen plenty of good looking MEA custom characters from people who already have the game and I have yet to see two that looked the same outside of people using the default face or using default presets or it being the same character.

You're right, there were actually more structural options in the OT that you could tweak within each facial structure preset.

Options that each CC has that the other does not:

Trilogy (looking at ME2): neck thickness, face size, cheek bone depth, ear size, ear orientation, eyebrow shape, eyebrow color

Andromeda: cheek bone height, nose width, nose size

The only place Andromeda is hands-down better than the OT in tweakable features is colors (except brows for some reason) and makeup/tattoos.

I won't argue DA:I's hair situation, it was awful. The bears looked like a kid attacked their face with a marker, the eyebrows looked like caterpillars, and the hair was, ya know. But in terms of structural options, it was vastly superior. Not how you come away with just "more colors!" Just take the nose, for example, because the full list is kinda long.

Andromeda gives you height, width, size, and depth.

Inquisition give you shape, height, depth, two dimensions for nose size instead of one, upper bridge size, lower bridge size, upper bridge depth, lower bridge depth, nose tip width, nose tip prominence, nose tip height, nose tip rotation, nostril width, nostril height, and nose break (size and direction).

Andromeda is a huge step back. I felt like a kid in a sandbox in DA:I's CC. I spent probably 2+ hours on each of the two characters I made, tweaking the tiniest details. And before you try to turn that around as a counterargument, they looked good long before that, they just weren't perfection. It wasn't hard to get a good looking character in that CC, despite the number of options.

I'm not arguing that we won't be able to make good looking Ryders with this stripped-down, bare-bones CC, because I'm sure we will. Even the OT CC could produce good faces (well, women's at least). That's not really the point for all of us though. For me and others, character creation in itself is an enjoyable part of the game. I love tweaking every feature, making the character truly mine. So stepping back from the fine control of DA:I to... this... is disappointing. Given the limited range of CC options, combined with the fact that Sara and Scott apparently have distinct personalities, I intend to approach this game more like TW3 than a Bioware game. Predefined characters with a little wiggle room. Maybe next game...

Apart from the unfortunate hair situation, I thought the Inquisition CC was the best Bioware had ever done. I won't lie, it was hard to figure out at first, but once you got used to it, you could make some great characters that actually look like real people.








The last one is my attempt at making Eva Green.
In ME:A, you get to look like Caucasian #2 with different hair and clown make-up.