I’ve recently been tweaking a bit with the freshly launched Dragon Age character creator, and i’ve made an interesting discovery. I can only create human specimens with faces that only their mothers would love.

I have a huge problem with games that use the “5 pages each with 10 slider-bars”  approach to character customization. You start out easy enough, sliding each bar and modifying what you think want modified. Then you reach other sliders that actually do what you wanted before, so you do that, then you go back and change the initial slider, but now it just looks weird. Fast forward half an hour later, and after fiddling with tens of sliders, you end up with a monster.

In Oblivion i managed to get away with it since most of the time my head was covered by a helmet. In Mass Effect i got lucky and hit a “hate it now, love it later” spartan look for my char. In Fallout 3, i tried not to look into any reflective surfaces for fear of shattering them.

Really, those sliders might be wonderful for people that do FACIAL RECONSTRUCTION from 3000 year old mummies or criminology, but it does nothing for the regular guy that just wants to get a regular look. You don’t turn the sliders all the way one side or another, but you still end up with an ugly character. God forbid you actually have control over how skinny/fat/muscular your character is.. i’m glad we haven’t reached the point where we have sliders for individual fat/muscle groups. What’s really bugging me is that developers still think this is a GOOD idea.

And.. It’s not. They have two ways to go here.

The first is the standard way of mixing presets. You have 5 faces, 5 hairstyles, 5 types of mustache and a ton of tattoos. Already you have a decent amount of variety you can make for a character so he’ll feel unique and “yours”. We don’t need millions of variables where you get overwhelmed. Like when someone asks you to say a random word with your eyes closed, and then you stutter for a bit since you can’t just pick one. When you have that much variety, it gets confusing and overwhelming. Give us a decent amount of variety and we’ll make that character “ours”. MMO’s use this way and it works just fine, and that’s in a context where you have a high chance of meeting a ‘clone’. When you’re playing a single-player game.. it cuts a lot of the slack out.

The second way is what you can call a ‘generated face’ based on a few attributes, made by moving a few elements. Similar to sliders, just that instead of having 50 of them, you get 5-6. I saw this method being used to great effect in Eve Online. You have two knobs and two X/Y coordinate charts. By just randomly wiggling them around, you can get different face-configurations. After that, it’s just a matter of choosing hair-styles and tattoos. This would be ideal as it allowed variety, while also the possibility of mixing the idea of multiple preset-faces and ‘generating through’ them. This can even be implemented with the idea of the multi-sliders, just that instead of sliding, make it so we can directly click on different attributes like the mouth/nose/ears and have 3Dmax-ish/Spore-ish ways of manipulating them.

All in all, the base idea is just this: Developers, don’t use tons’a’sliders you have a lot of alternatives that are a lot better and give the player a lot better chances of getting an actually LIKABLE character.