There are a lot of different ways that you’re able to approach a character creator. There are people who breeze through it in less than a minute, just a minor stop on their journey. There are people who are there to create an utter monstrosity. And then there are people who want to hand tailor a real person out of the pixels.
I’ve delved deep into the character creators of these eight games to do everything in my power to create a perfect recreation of myself to live and breathe before me, as a test of each game’s possibilities. I have emerged with an uncomfortable understanding of my own features.
Each entry will include the result of my tireless efforts to stare into my own soul, as well as a picture of myself for reference. They are in no particular order, apart from saving possibly the best for last.
Dune: Awakening is the most recent entry on this list, and it also comes with one of the best character creators. It’s not only detailed, but it’s also extremely easy to wield, with tools that clearly do what they say they’re going to do, and don’t mess up a lot of other features at the same time.
A running theme with these is going to be difficulty in getting the mouth and eyes right. The nose is easy enough; not every character creator gives me the option to make a crooked and repeatedly broken nose like the one I am personally stuck with, but apart from that, nose options abound. Eye and mouth options are a different story, and Dune: Awakening delivers in that department.
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I don’t remember Baldur’s Gate 3’s character creator being quite so barebones, but barebones it is. There are almost no options for facial sculpting at all, and there are only a handful of facial preset options.
Because of this, I was limited to just creating some guy. I’m not saying that I have a particularly hand-sculpted face; I definitely seem to come out of life’s character creator as a preset of my own. But my preset was, unfortunately, not present in BG3.
This one is going to keep me up at night. I don’t know quite where this got away from me. Is it the melting candle aesthetic? Is it the simultaneous ancient and yet boyish features? I’m not quite sure. What I am sure of is that this one isn’t just not me, this one is not anyone, living or dead.
Oblivion Remastered gives you an outrageous number of tools to tinker with nearly every possible feature. (Apart from hair options, which are laughably scarce.) The issue is that every single time you tinker with one thing on a face, the entire rest of the face seems to shift, making it akin to a game of facial feature whack-a-mole with a jumpscare at the end.
This was one of the happier character creations of this whole ordeal. The Sims 4 lends itself really well to something like this; it’s got a cartoonish style which easily forgives minor discrepancies with your own face, but has extremely easy-to-use tools that allow you to play in that cartoon playground with a lot of precision.
The result is, I think, possibly second-best on this list. Ironically, despite what I said earlier, I think the nose is what’s lacking the most in this one. I couldn’t quite manage to get things as wide as I wanted without throwing the rest of the nose off, along with being unable to make it as crooked as I’d like. Maybe my Sims counterpart has just been hit in the face less than me.
There are no kind eyes in Cyberpunk 2077, and things went downhill from there. There were plenty of hair options, though none that quite matched my own style. (Understandably, it is the future.) But I was also surprised at how few facial sculpting options were present here, too. There were more here than in BG3, but fewer than I thought I remembered.
The result is, to my tremendous disgrace, clearly a Corpo recreation of myself. Try as I might, I could not shake those Corpo vibes, and it has forced me to take a good long look in a very real mirror. Is there a Corpo somewhere in me, lurking?
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FromSoftware’s character creators are known for having a lot of potential, but much of that potential is in creating monsters that may, in fact, be worse than the monsters that you face in the game. But can those same tools be used for good?
They can, it turns out. While this is certainly not a perfect recreation, I do think it’s one of the most accurate proportionally, compared to the rest. The biggest issue with this one is the expression; there’s a hollow quality behind the eyes here that disturbs me.
Starfield might be my favorite Bethesda RPG, but it certainly has a very strange character creator. Rather than changing aspects of your face by moving sliders that shape specific features, you move sliders that make your face slightly more like other preset features. It’s a strange method, and ends up forcing you to spend a lot of time doing things that should be relatively simple.
The result is a face that’s undoubtedly very lifelike, but also appears to be the face of a small child. Is this child still trapped in me, somewhere? Is this an echo of my former self? I’m not quite sure. What I am sure of is that this is a face that gets a lot more sleep than I do.
Going into this whole experience, this is not the character creator that I expected to be one of the best. It does many of the things that I just blasted the Starfield character creator for doing. But somehow, I felt more in control of this method than I did the other.
And so, this is one of the results that I’m happiest with. There’s something wrong with the mouth; the expression on this character is a little bit like someone who’s trying not to smile with a mouth full of water. But as a whole, while this character creator might not have quite the range of possibilities of some of the others, it might only be behind The Sims in terms of ease-of-use, and the end result.
