Your opinion of the Character creator.

The real disappointment is that most other Ryders look like my Ryder. It's impossible to make a unique face that you get attached to. That's what is so limiting about it, my character looks like most youtube walkthrus and I spent 40 minutes tweaking and working. Annoying and I sure hope they can patch in something like Inquisitions. You can make so many different looking people, from comedy/hideous to outrageously beautiful.

And none of them look like 80 percent of everyone else's character. Goes against the whole concept, really. Why have it at all when it's like the choice is really only 8 presents? That feels insulting, and I'm guessing why so many are mad. Like they wanted to troll us or something.

"Here, you got a choice . . .!"

Yeah right.

I found that the options the character creator provides are not bad. I was displeased with the way hair was rendered.

My biggest issue with it was that the features of the characters seem distorted by the camera perspective to the point at which I gave up on creating my own faces and just went with the premade faces - the all looked ugly in the creator, but were... acceptable in the game. It was a bit like the camera had an extremely wide angle in the creator and showing the face from an extremely close distance, like looking through a fish-eye camera objective. Under these conditions it was really hard to create anything meaningful, I have to create a carricature of the character I want to actually get it with those distortions.

It needs a lot of work. I eventually made a Sara I'm happy with but it required more effort than I think it should, and a little help from you tube.

Eh, I wouldn't go so far as to call in an afterthought.  It was a new idea, having actual face scans, and on paper that sounds like a great idea.  It didn't work, as we all know.  You can create decent looking Ryders with this CC, but it's DEFINITELY very weak in overall customization.

I think they tried something, and we're seeing that the new idea, while great on paper, just failed in practice, but I don't think it was an after thought.

There's no denying it was a bad idea.  But coming up with ideas in a relative vacuum can quite often lead to ideas that sound good on paper (using real faces!  more realistic looking characters!) but failing quite drastically in implementation.  I don't know if the limited options we have in the CC are directly tied to some inability to switch due to the face scans themselves, but that would be my guess.  If ME:A wanted to do "easy" with a CC, they'd simply have copy/pasted DA:I's CC, with perhaps a few tweaks because of different character models, or whatnot.  That would have been the safe, easier route.

Looking at what we wound up getting, it would have been the better option between the two.  But as much as I dislike the current CC, I don't think it was due to laziness or incompetence.  Innovation consists of massive numbers of failures before a success, and I think Bioware was trying to innovate with the CC.  Should they have realized earlier that it wasn't working as intended, and tried simply modifying DA:I's CC?  I think so, yes, but there's also a level of stubbornness in people, and sometimes trying to fix the thing or get it right in the first place, takes so long that you're left without enough time to scrap it and do something else.  

That's what I think happened here.  They tried something new, and either didn't realize it wasn't working as well as hoped (kinda unlikely, in my opinion.  No matter what people may think, these people ARE professionals, but even professionals make mistakes) or they realized it and tried to fix it, but got so locked into fixing it they didn't have time to scrap it and start over.

Again, just my opinion, YMMV.

It's not the implementation of the face scan, though. It's the fact that you can't choose lips from face scan 4 and skin from face scan 9, and eyebrows from face scan 2 to come up with a character you like.

I've worked in 3D, though not in gaming. It wouldn't have been THAT difficult to do that in most programs.

As long as you make sure the skin around the mouth, nose and eyes is in the right place so there's no cut off or overlap, it should be just as possible to swap mouths, eyes, eyebrows, and noses, as it is to swap hair.

From what I know for working for a 3D company for 7 years, it would have been easy enough early-ish on. Now, I'm not sure.

It all comes down to how much time and money BW/EA want to put into fixing it.  From a technical standpoint they can do whatever they want, chop the face scans up, add systems to the CC to let you swap them, whatever.  I would guess that is well beyond the money/resources they are going to be able to devote to it though.   There isn't any really payoff for them to do so though unless they make it a CC DLC. 

Maybe they will add some new presets along with more skin and hair colors, maybe a few new makeup options.  That is kinda my pie in the sky hopes at the moment anyway.

So they can't just swap out Inquisition's? I can make a awesome character in that . . .

I guess, even though it's their bad, so to speak, I would buy a reasonably priced DLC to fix this mess. Not happy but just to have the options I need.