A new video from the official Final Fantasy XIV channel reveals the character creation process as seen in the beta. I must warn you, the video is kind of silly in conception. Two “spies”, one who speaks in Japanese and one who speak in English, sneak into Square-Enix’s headquarters to catch a glimpse of the beta.
The character creation process, video production aside, is interesting. I like the fly-out panels that allow you to easily see your options instead of the toggle based system that WoW uses. However, there are a lot of confusing options for a first time player, like the guardian thing, birthday type thing, and job type thing. I don’t know what any of that stuff is, but I’m excited to play.
If only they allowed male Miqo’te (or Mithra for you FFXI types), then they might have a leg up on WoW with the Twilight, werewolf, and furry communities. I, for one, would love to play a male Mi’quote. Not many games have such strict gender restrictions, and I don’t think a US-developed game would have similar restrictions on race and gender (feel free to correct me).
Do you think the character creation process tops other MMOs, or does it need work? It certainly seems like the 8 year old FFXI had a little bit more flavor with your character parading around while you customized them, but you couldn’t get as close a look at them. I think this sequence is forever burned into my mind:
I like the look of the character creation and totally agree that the drop down menu is a much better system than WoW’s toggle menu. I expect the Birthday/Guardian thing is explained somewhere in either the text box that comes up when you select one, or maybe in the game manual where people who care more about the lore of their character can look it up.
June 11th, 2010 at 6:51 amI found the way they did it kind of weird, because of the way that the guy was saying ‘Yeah, that looks good’. I also feel that it was kind of embarrassing to watch and I’m glad there was no one else around whilst I was watching this. I think a more traditional reveal with a better look at the screen and someone talking over it to explain would have been better in terms off efficiency and explaining the Birthday/Guardian and other stuff, but this did get the point across and it does make me think it looks like a pretty awesome game.
The FFXI set-up would just annoy me I think. I never played it, but I like to be able to easily see the character I’m creating, and all I can say to the bit where she leans over and then there’s a camera angle change, is wow… just wow.
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I’m a little disappointed at the fact that you can’t slider any of the features or colors. It would let you make your character even more of an individual that way. More hairstyles would also be nice as well as more customization on the body like limb sizes and such. FFXIV’s customization definitely beats most MMOs by a long shot, but it still doesn’t match up to Aion’s. Because of all the hype I heard about FFXIV’s customization, I thought it would beat Aion’s, but I guess I expected too much.
June 16th, 2010 at 6:11 amQuote
You cannot customize limb sizes, because then that would require replicating every wearable piece of clothing to match, which multiplies the amount of resources needed. I remember the Star Wars Galaxy editor, which was at the time one of the most customizable character creators. The problem is that people will abuse any system and having a bunch of deformed characters running around ruins the immersion and makes the game feel cheap and more like a sandbox than a serious story-driven environment. I heard that Aion suffers similar issues due to it’s generous editor. There’s no need for color gradients… 32 colors is plenty and is obviously intended to stay within reasonable bounds of what may be considered natural. It’s a way to keep people from going too extreme with their character and I’d rather have that limitation than the opposite. I actually enjoyed XI’s rather unique way of having characters run around the screen and show themselves off, so I hope they add a bit more environment to the XIV editor and give the characters something to stand on, and also get rid of or reduce that swirling effect around their feet.
July 2nd, 2010 at 11:23 amQuote
Aion has this character customization beat hands down. Played FFXI for years, as a true female, and I think greater character customization options, closer to that of Aion, would have made the game far more attractive to female players, which would have drawn, in turn, more male players. The Japanese mystify me with their strict gender role expectations. It’s as if they don’t care one way or the other about female players because game play is not an accepted role for a woman in that society. Between that and my guilty conscience about supporting a whale murdering culture in any way, however small, I think I’ll try to stick with Aion or other “Western” run games. I’m really not into “knowing my role as a woman.”
September 19th, 2010 at 12:42 amQuote