Elder Scrolls Morrowind and Oblivion, and (to some extent) Fallout 3 & New Vegas. They had a good amount of character customization compared to their later entries.
Cyberpunk 2077 had quite a bit as well, more than what I was expecting.
Stardew Valley has a lot of different shirts and accessories to choose from during character creation.
You could argue that, to some extent, Minecraft has the best character creation in the form of skins.
I know it’s not what you meant, but Paranoia (the TTRPG) has a great mechanic where each player’s choices pisses off other player, ah you picked weapons skill 2, cool, so the next player gets -2 on weapons, hope you didn’t expected a high skill there.
Oh! Amazing guilty pleasure of mine, but Code Vein! Anime vampire Dark Souls!
Everything about the game is a little rough and lackluster, but somehow it still comes together enough to be an entertaining play if you’re willing to give it enough grace to meet it where it’s actually at. I’d recommend getting it on sale for <$20USD or less if you can.
But also check out the amazing Monster Factory episode for it. If that doesn’t sell you on the character creator I don’t know what will.
Trash game, but I gotta give it to Fallout 4, mainly because I like some of the presets. It’s first-person so you don’t look at your character all that much, and just picking a preset I really like is an important feature. If all the presets are trash and I gotta work, that’s keeping me from the game.
We joke about Skyrim giving you too many choices and people spending hours in character creation. That’s not a good thing. I’m all for choices, but give me a few good presets to choose from and give me the option to change it later. Cyberpunk and Animal Crossing are two (vastly different!) games that let you remake your character at any point, short of changing your gender (and in AC, your name). So you don’t have to stress about it too much at first, you can get into the game, and then change it up later. (Cyberpunk lets you do it at any mirror. So does Animal Crossing, but you’ll have to buy one first — or move in a neighbor who has one in their default house, like I think Kidd does (and regarding his name, yes, he is a goat)).
With games like Cyberpunk with full character voice acting, I wish they’d tell you about the voice actor. Like, in Cyberpunk, “This is Cherami Leigh, she works out of Los Angeles, and she voices Asuna from Sword Art Online and (list a few other notable roles).” Or “This is Gavin Drea, he’s from Ireland, and list some of his credits (he hasn’t been anyone major in anything major).” Rather than just listen to the voices. Not specifically because I think voice actors should get more credit (I do, and they should, and you already know Keanu Reeves and Idris Elba are in it and who they are, so why the hell not) but because I think it’s more information about the voice than just listening to a sample they recorded that probably isn’t even in the main game.
I wish I could recommend the character creator for Phantasy Star Online 2, because in theory it’s great, with the ability to mix and match clothing layers, recolor clothing, fine tune your body proportions, select from various customizable faces, etc. Most importantly, you can attach accessories to your character however you like and adjust their scaling and rotation in ways that let you repurpose them. For example, for a while I was using a head ornament, scaled down, rotated, and clipped into my face, as a pair of fangs, and it looked pretty convincing!
I can’t actually recommend it though because the process of actually collecting outfits and accessories is FOMO gacha hell. (Gacha items purchased with “AC,” the real-money only currency, can also be bought secondhand from other players, but you’ll pay an arm and a leg for them, and you can’t trade items bought with “SG” which is the premium currency that can also be earned in game.)
I love PSO. PSO2 is so, so incredibly sad for me. It could be so, so much more.
Also, the PSO franchise has my number one favorite aesthetic, hands down, by a huge margin.
It’s a tied between Sims 3 and Sims 4. Prefer personality part of Sims 3 of being able to pick 5 traits instead of just 3 but I find Sims 4 great for customising Sims’ appearance and you can even make trans people.
Create-a-style was also awesome!
APB: Reloaded is by far the best one I’ve seen despite the game being pay to win. You can customize your character to no end from designing decals for clothes, tattoos, cars, even making your own theme song. Not to mention the basic stuff like face, hair, and body customization. But like I said, be wary of the game. It’s a sweat fest.
To be cliche, probably the Bethesda style character creation, just because you can tweak so much. That’s probably the best I’ve got because my current laptop is a potato and Skyrim is about the most intensive that it can (barely) handle.
A huge issue I have with it though, is that after all that tweaking and fine tuning of your character, you can’t save or load templates. So sometimes I’ll spend ages creating a character, start the same and play for a bit, then for whatever reason decide to start again an hour later (regrettable choice, a faulty mod etc.), and now I have to create a character all over again. At that point I just choose basics and hit play.
This is an annoyance to me in all games with character creation though. Even something simpler like Stardew Valley, especially if you’re trying to get the colours just right.
If you’re going to give us the ability to create and fine tune personalized characters, let us save and load them, god damnit.
Enhanced Character Edit SE let’s you save presets, and gives you even more options.
It’s admittedly been a while since I’ve played Skyrim (probably over a decade), but can’t you just make a save right after the character creation? Or does it not let you save during the escape sequence at the beginning?
It’s been a whole for me too, but I think some mods are better applied before a starting the game. Even if you save just after character creation the game has initialised a bunch of things and that might cause problems.
I do think being able to save preset faces would be great. Sometimes when making a character, I make a model I kinda like, and I have to decide if it’s worth the risk of trying something different and not being able to remake my original if the new one doesn’t work out. Some games (mass effect?) represent each model with a code, which works pretty well. But I don’t think skyrim does.
Yeah I was just coming to say as well, the biggest issue with this is mods.
And in games like Stardew Valley, the other issue is the game seed. If you keep using the same save, a lot of the same ‘random’ events will occur.
If you’re just after customizing appearances, the WWE games have a lot to offer. Aside from changing the physique and facial features they let you change the texture of your clothes. Clothing options are mostly modern, but I know there’s usually armor for different periods as well. You can also use custom textures for tattoos and the like, but I never really messed with that side of it. It’s also handy if you want to make a bunch of people since having a whole roster is a big part of the game.
I also remember Saints Row IV having a good character creator, but it’s been years since I’ve played it so I can’t give a lot of details.
Gotta second WWE as it is hands down the best I’ve seen. You have tons of items to use, AND they can be layered in most cases. Along with the decal, tattoo, and stitching systems with blank canvas items you can literally paint whatever design you want.
Not only that, but you can customize everything else about the characters beyond their own appearance. You have your move set, the intros and all that other stuff.
There are some hilarious user creations. My kids and I spent more time making dumb stuff than actually wrestling.
Monopoly.
From old worn-out shoe to indestructible battleship - everything is possible!
Still remembering all those epic battles among the siblings on who gets to play the racing car… Good stuff!
There used to be this game called Aion. It was an MMO from like 2007. I had, hands down, the best character on there. The character looked like a cartoonified version of a Muppet Mr Bean. Most people just made short and wide characters with tiny heads, but that’s all games. My character was like 10ft tall, super lanky with a beer belly, and made everybody else look ridiculous with how interesting he was. I honestly could have made a real life muppet version of him out of foam and sticks and felt and stuff.
Edit: apparently it’s still around. Which is wild. Maybe I’ll make a new account or see if my old character is still there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aion_(video_game) it’s Korean and from 2008. I don’t remember it being particularly good or unique other than you could glide places with wings, but that’s been done by every game under the sun now.
It also looks like there’s a sequel that either just came out recently or is about to very soon.
Not the best, but GaiaOnline has a soft spot in my memory.
I think the wii mii creation system is probably the best since there’s such an excessive amount of customization while being still very limited in scope that you can make some crazy stuff
If you’ll consider desktop (paper) RPGs, then Traveller.
I really enjoyed the character creator in Sunset Overdrive, it’s too bad the actual game was garbage.
I’m going to put one out there for the Star Citizen character customizer.
Players upload their creations to the website here: https://www.star-citizen-characters.com/ (I recommend sorting by most downloaded, but there can also be some good stuff under the default latest sort).
And they frequently hold competitions on who can make the best characters.
Tap for some examples
