It’s a no-brainer that a lot of your MMO audience is going to want to create good-looking, attractive, and physically fit characters. But if you’re a studio that’s attempting to represent a virtual world populated by a wide array of human races, you might also consider the odd and off-putting as possible options.
Simply put, Chronicles of Elyria has some ugly races. Maybe that will have its own counter-cultural appeal, especially among players looking for a different experience. The 12 races — or tribes — of the game span a range of skeletal structures and facial makeups, with options available to the player to customize each upon character creation.
In addition to showing some early prototypes of the character creation process, Soulbound Studio discussed how it’s trying out simple world interaction in its upcoming VoxElyria client, merging accounts in preparation for name reservations, and handling the different languages in the game.
“I’m so excited for this adventure to be completed since we’ll be able to make real characters on our real server with our real in-game tools,” the team said. “I’m a big fan of character creators, so I anticipate spending many of my upcoming hours just playing around with this experience. By the end of the adventure, we’ll be able to walk through the entire Ward of the State character creation process, so expect a video… or maybe we’ll do a live stream and you can tell us what characters you’d like to see us make!”
