On MMORPG character creation
02 February 2016
Some of my friends are excited about an upcoming MMO called Black Desert Online. I’ve known about it for a long time, but I know better than to get excited about new MMO releases. That’s a good way to feel very disappointed.
The game is launching in March, but they’ve made the character creator public for people to toy with. If their marketing is anything to go by, they treat the character creator as their pride and joy and think it’s really something special. The (carefully edited) preview video sure tries its hardest to give this impression:
After trying the editor yourself it’s painfully obvious the video has been meticulously cut in addition to just being sped up. In practice the character creator is a humongous mess of sliders, which fortunately can slightly more intuitively be manipulated by dragging your mouse on various parts of your character’s face like in the video. Such freedom! It’d be easy to think that this is one of the best, if not the best, character creator in an MMORPG or any game so far.
Alas, that freedom is the greatest fault in the creator. Basically what it does is exposes every single parameter in the underlying face structure engine to the user, with little to no limits or moderation, in a somewhat intuitive manner. The implementation is admittedly quite slick, but as a concept it’s hardly new, with many singleplayer RPGs already having used the exact same trick before. Dark Souls 1 and 2, Oblivion and Skyrim (with mods), and Dragon’s Dogma to name a few off the top of my head.
Because there are no ‘sanity checks’ of any kind on the sliders, it’s a cinch to make your character abhorrently ugly, be that on purpose or not. A single click and drag can make your character’s eyes clip into their cheeks or pull their lips through their teeth. With some fiddling you can push the eyeballs out of their sockets, shape lips into some kind of pointy beak parts, and top the whole thing off with heart-shaped pupils and optic fiber afro:
Creating actually good- and most importantly unique-looking characters is much more difficult. Expect to spend several hours in the editor, and when you finally think you’re done and create your character, sooner or later while playing you’ll notice some little detail that’s off and will have to pay real money to re-edit your character to fix it. That’s how it usually goes for me, at least.
As I said earlier, it’s easy to fall into thinking that this is a good character editor. A lot of people would say it’s on a whole new level. I disagree. I think it’s lazy fanwanking.
My issues with it can be condensed into two or three points. First is the lack of limits on the sliders. This makes it easy to fuck up real bad, as well as for memelords to create abominations like the one I attached above. Some might claim the latter is a pro rather than a con, but I don’t think there’s any reason a character creator should allow horribly clipped and glitchy faces to be made.
Secondly, it’s needlessly complicated. There’s got to be at least two dozen areas that you can tweak on your character’s face. Eyes alone have around eight – per eye. Hair has 6-8 subregions for which you can tweak length, puffiness, curliness, alignment, etc. The length, width, musculature, and so on of each individual body part can be adjusted. The vast majority of this is completely pointless, only appealing to a tiny portion of the playerbase who enjoy obsessing over their characters. Good for them, but a chore for everyone else.
Three, a lot of the freedom it gives you is an illusion. Sure, on the surface it looks like you can control everything, but that’s only true to a degree. Each race has an underlying character model that you can only deviate from so much. You’ll be hard pressed to turn a petite and fair elf face into a strong, chiseled Amazonian, or an ogrish giant into something more man-like. This isn’t really a flaw; it’s more intentional design, and what’s more it’s design that I agree with. I’m mentioning it here to point it out, because many people forget this when praising the character editor for its ultimate freedom.
A good character creator should allow the player to create a reasonably unique-looking character with reasonable ease, and make it difficult to accidentally create ugly characters by enforcing some reasonable basic rules such as proportions and distances.
That is just the ideal, of course, and in practice no character creator can completely ensure that more… aesthetically impaired players won’t inadvertedly create horrible abominations, or keep less seriously minded users from breaking the system and spawning nightmare fuel. Black Desert Online’s character creator just feels like it doesn’t make any sort of effort in this direction, which is why I think it falls short of what it could’ve been.
Finally, I’ll reference a favourite article of mine on the topic of character creation. It’s an interview with Torfi Ólafsson, Eve Online’s creative director. On page 2 they discuss Eve’s character creator, which is in many ways similar to BDO’s:
One of the more abstract inspirations for the character creator was, it turns out, the ’90s raytracing program Bryce. Named after hacker Bryce Lynch from legendary TV show Max Headroom, users will remember it for its incredible ease-of-use when making evocative, natural, inevitably somewhat alien landscapes. Ólafsson remembers: “You’d show it to your mum – ‘Look what I have created!’ – and she’d finally be proud of you. But the thing is that it always looked kind of the same, just mountains with maybe a sphere and some clouds. Had Bryce been a general purpose 3D package, you wouldn’t have felt so empowered – because most people using it are not professional landscape artists, just as most people using the character creator are not professional character artists. We capitalised on the fact that we had world-class character artists here at CCP who were allowing players to feel as though they were world-class character artists through the tools.”
The final sentence is the crux of the issue with Black Desert Online’s character creator: whereas Eve lets the player feel as though they’re a world-class character artist through the tools, BDO puts the player in the shoes of a world-class character artist and waves them off.