The Daily Grind: How important are character models to you?
by Rubi Bayer 
Nov 13th 2009 at 8:00AM
Filed under: Culture, Game mechanics, Opinion, The Daily Grind
But in spite of the options at hand, the avatar is just a tool to get the job done, right? Your Paladin's hairstyle won't give him any sort of tactical advantage in battle, so those players who zoom right past the character creator and accept the randomly-generated avatar can get straight to killing. They're having just as much fun."
With so many options at your disposal, do you spend the required time getting your character's hair the perfect shade of red and experimenting with that facial scar to get it just so? Or do you skip the vanity part and get to the killing already?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Bri said on 8:04AM 11-13-2009
I've deleted characters after playing them for levels because I still wasn't really happy with how they looked LOL.
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Suspiro said on 11:36AM 11-13-2009
Hate to admit it but I've done the same soo many times and take forever at character creation.
RiHahn said on 1:13PM 11-13-2009
Same here.
Though, any more I find I'm looking at race selection and armor variation more than the number of sliders available for the avatar's nose... After all, even if you spend *hours* in the character creater getting the perfect look, once you're in the same armor as everyone else, the only thing really differentiating you is maybe height.
I like the games with interesting races, which allow for a lot more variation in backstory or even in-game origin story. After all, I play some random variarion of 'human' for all of my wakign hours every day, so I want my escapist reality simulator to offer something else.
For example, Aion has probably the most detailed character creator out there right now, with maybe the exception of CoX/Champions, but it essentially boils down to an infinite variation of two things; male and female human.
Sure, the Asmodians have claws and glowy eyes, but - yeah, basic human.
AoC was even worse; 6 shades of literal human... I realize one can only do so much with the source material, but...
There is a reason for this by the way; ease of armor modeling. If everything in the game fits the same basic form factor, all you have to do is tweak a few pollys between races and you're done. (Shadowbane had centaurs - talk about an armor-model nightmare I'm sure)
Anyways, this thinking is probably the big reason I was so pro-horde in vanilla WoW - a good choice of races. Once BC hit I switched sides and rolled Draenei (hey, I thought the spacegoat thing was pretty cool) - and now, thanks to this decision, I get access to werewolves *and* heirloom items for them. :)
And to be even further away from short, tall, pointy eared, funny colored - human...
DrowVampyre said on 8:07AM 11-13-2009
Absolutely vital. I've deleted characters after 20+ levels because I decided I didn't like some option as well as another, and if I can't make the character look like I want I usually won't play that race or class period.
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Solude said on 8:11AM 11-13-2009
Aye, I have written off entire, sexes, races and some cases games because the character just didn't do it for me. Not unusual for me to have mirrors of myself running around for alts because only 1-2 looks work.
Add to that, options that allow saving character look speed the process once the "me" is found.
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Itoao said on 8:26AM 11-13-2009
Like the other posters, I feel the avatar is pretty important. I happen to be one of the players that likes to attempt to make some representation of myself in a game. I absolutely cannot stand when the character models fail to offer a wide range of customization.
I won't swear off an entire game because of it but its annoying as hell. In this day and age you would figure the ability to make a character look for example like they are African does not just mean you have to make darker skin tones available.
I think what guild wars did with the series is a great example of increased customization as the series changed.
In the first expansion and original game most of the avatars looked Asian or Caucasian in my opinion but when they got to nightfall and the theme was African characters they really looked African and so on.
I have not played Aion but I hear the customization for your avatar in that game is amazing.
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Joshua Przygocki said on 8:47AM 11-13-2009
It is Itoao, very detailed, and I agree with the above few, I like to have a character look the way I want it to.
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mediumsizedrob said on 9:00AM 11-13-2009
It represents you to everyone else in a game you'll supposedly be spending hours and hours on, so to me it's very important. I agree with an above poster, most of my alts end up looking very similar because only a few of the faces/hairstyles end up being appealing to me.
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Micah Patterson said on 9:01AM 11-13-2009
@Itoao
Aion customization is to the point that I would think it's impossible to run across an exact double. Sure the hair styles are numbered but there are a LOT of options and because it doesn't just use Brown, Blue, Green, etc as colors you can do hundreds of shades of just one color. Throw in the facial and body sliders and you're almost always guaranteed to be creating an original. Only times you can see similar characters are if you make famous people like I did. Ned Flanders and Billy Mays.
How the avatar looks is most certainly an important aspect to a game because we have to like how a character looks like if we're going to spend hundreds upon hundreds of hours looking at it. We may not always see the face but the thousands others who play will. When i take screen shots, I always take them from the front so you see my character then. When i'm flying i'll move the camera around to get good views and such.
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UltimateQ said on 9:02AM 11-13-2009
Agreed, I must have a good looking character model. That doesn't mean they have to be a super model, they just have to have some amount of detail.
I'd play a fat guy any day, if he looked good.
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Bam! said on 9:03AM 11-13-2009
I play Asheron's Call soo.... I sacrifice a lot for prefered gameplay :)
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Bryan said on 9:05AM 11-13-2009
I agree with everyone else above me. One of the things that makes me come back to a game after a break is thinking about what my character will look like with some of that awesome gear. Warhammer Online does this very well I think, I really like the look of the character models in that game.
Although I can play a game that has bad character models, i.e. LOTRO because the rest of the game is very good, but it definitely alters how MUCH I play.
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Arkanaloth said on 10:08AM 11-13-2009
character models are *extremely* important to me... like many I have also deleted a character because I wasn't happy with how it looked.
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Blacknimbus said on 9:28AM 11-13-2009
If I can't find an avatar I really like, or the animations don't look right, I'll cancel and uninstall.
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Lemmo said on 9:28AM 11-13-2009
I'll buck the trend just a little and say I think the avatar is very important, unless I'm playing from a first person perspective. I never really cared what my character in EQ looked like (I played an Iksar, accepted I was an ugly lizard and moved on). In Borderlands which is a sorta-but-not MMO style game, you have to pick one of the four guys, but I never care because I never see myself. I wouldn't mind the return of the first-person style MMO, simply because of the immersion factor, but that's another discussion.
Otherwise yeah. Avatars are vital. Especially in CoH and Aion. Plenty of style points to be had.
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JP said on 10:24AM 11-13-2009
I know I appreciate and admire when I see a well done character. I will even send tells complimenting them. I hope others that put in the effort do the same.
When I see something that's obviously a joke or intentionally ridiculous, I'm less likely to assist that person or even acknowledge them in game.
I just feel like someone that can't muster the tiniest bit of creativity that fits w/in the lore is below me.
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Vulturion said on 9:44AM 11-13-2009
Absolutely vital for me also - if I cannot make a visually appealing character (be that good looking, scary, monstrous, etc.) than I just won't play.
Modern videogaming is a visual medium, and I just don't have any sympathy for MMO developers who'll lovingly craft timesinks & balance formulas then mistakenly believe players will take to them when the only visual feedback is a re-colored smock for the mis-shapen wall-eyed avatar they cobbled together.
I'm much more a fan of character model quality over character model choice though; not many dozens-o'sliders creation systems produce output that actually impresses me, and (grudgingly excepting the superhero genre) I heartily disapprove of creators that allow character to be 9' tall and 2" wide or vice versa.
For my money (which they ain't getting), Aion might as well have written quests in text message talk and saved a few bucks dreaming up lore - once they decided to allow avatars modelled on a carnival Hall Of Mirrors any semblence of immersion and atmosphere was discarded. *pout*
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PaasHaas said on 9:53AM 11-13-2009
If a game doesn't have a random function, I immediately start disliking it.
Found a nice fix for that tho: my gf loves putting that stuff together, so she'll fix my chars :-)
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royale said on 10:01AM 11-13-2009
If Fallen Earth didn't have such ugly (imo) avatars I probably would have bought it by now.
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kasapina said on 10:01AM 11-13-2009
When I see my character almost all the time ( the above poster made a good point ), customization is quite important. For example, in wow, I'd never play a gnome or a dwarf, simply because they are short. And while I do take my time with creating a character ( more complex character creators have me spending more than an hour ), some games just go overboard. I mean, who cares about the nose's bridge, or the cheekbones?
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