Sometimes, nothing paralyzes me more than a wealth of options. Sure, having to choose between one or two extremely difficult questions can tie me up the same as any other man, but the thing that really makes me stop dead in my tracks is when I have more options than I even know what to do with. Rather than being happy about all the tantalizing options that are available to me, I stare at all of them in some kind of mute trance.
This is usually the problem I run into whenever I get put face-to-face with a character creation tool (pun entirely intended). A tool that is now more prominent than ever due to the rise of customizable RPGs, the character creation tool allows you to design an avatar in any way, form and – quite literally – shape. My problem with this kind of robust feature set is that I often have no clue what to do with it.
For the most part, I tend to stick with the default character, which is what I did for the Mass Effect series. In fact, I’m so used to the generic Shepard that when I see other Shepards in clips on YouTube talking with my Commander Shepard’s voice, I get kind of weirded out. In other games, I tend to make my characters look like Cortez Cardinale, from Leet World. This is a bit silly, yes, but it helps me make the character my own without having to go too crazy. I very rarely break from this trend, although I recently designed my Saint’s Row 3 character to look like Walter White from Breaking Bad.
All of this thinking about character creation got me wondering how other people make their own characters? Do you design them to look like you? Do you make them look like somebody famous? Do you stick with the vanilla presets? Share your heroes!