How Important is Character Creation to you?

 

I never really thought about it, but it’s incredibly important to me.  I only play female characters and the choices have always been diverse enough during creation that I haven’t noticed shortcomings during the process.  Recently however I have been extremely irritated with the limited choices being presented by developers at character creation.

So here it is my list of pet peeves:

• Hair:  As a woman, it is incredibly important to me in real life and in video games.  Why is it that all the hairstyles lately are short, shorter, and punk?  Long hair is not some rare, obscure phenomenon so why on earth can’t developers put it in game?  And if you are going to make hairstyles that are updos (buns, pony and pig tails) developers, for the love of all that is holy we do NOT want to see the skull peaking through or have ponytails that are so wimpy as to be pointless.  Dear god, please hire actually woman to design hair!
• Character Size: ranks right up there with hair. I don’t always want to play, ok rarely, a tall, thin, teenage character. I want to be able to age my character, to have her be short, rotund, and old or any combination of attributes. I don’t want to look perfect or like I just stepped from the pages for a fashion magazine. Life is full of wonderful variety, why aren’t video game?
• Makeup: another biggie for me.  There are more choices than none, harlot pink, and whore red.   The whole color spectrum is available, please learn to use it.
• Text: most developers get this mostly right.  If you are going to have loading screen tooltips, menus, etc. please don’t make them in the smallest, lightest font known to mankind.  And do not use white text on light gray background.  No player should be forced to go blind trying to read your text, this is especially true when the problem continues to exist even when you put on your reading glasses.
• Character movement: not running but things like hair, cloaks, coats, etc. moving with your character.  If I’m running at full speed how is it possible that my cloak and hair are still plastered against my back?

As E3 2012 officially opens in a couple of hours, I still vaguely hold out hope that a developer will actually design a game that solves my pet peeves.  What are some of your pet peeves?

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