“Character creation” is the watchword of the week at Chronicles of Elyria. In addition to a developer livestream that showed off the first iteration of the character creation system, Soulbound Studios pumped out a blog post to explain some of the finer points of making an avatar in this game.
“Although Chronicles of Elyria is a fantasy game, we want the ranges of character creation to be realistic,” the studio said. “This means that we need to create constraints for each of the tribes when it comes to customization sliders — so no, you can’t create big-head mode. We’re creating an immersive experience, and that means each character created in game needs to look and feel like they belong to the tribe to which they are born.”
Backers for the game will soon have a way to check out their character outside of the alpha, thanks to a standalone program called My Akashic Records that’s in the works.
Immersion breaking? You buy RNG Soulpacks in order to unlock characters to play. Each will have random skills and some will be more powerful than others. Nothing screams immersion quite like opening your Soulpack!
That’s all well and good, but from this player’s perspective they also need to look like individuals. If rigid tribal characteristics determine that my character has wide-spaced, deep-set blue eyes, high cheekbones, a square jaw, cropped brown hair, a pallid complexion and a broad, stocky frame then that leaves a lot less room to create a distinctive looking avatar. Doubly so if those characteristics extend to armour styles, decorative patterns and even weapon proficiencies.
I like the point, but still agree with the whole “20 varieties of human is boring” thing. There’s a place for levity and fun, and where I like immersion I also believe that fantasy should vastly exceed what we have been offered from publishers and developers over the years.
Agreed, but if Aion and BnS have taught us anything, players will abuse sliders to make the most monstrous characters they can.
I still love sliders though…
Thank goodness for developers that embrace immersion! Definitely going to be keeping an eye on this game.
Fuck immersion.
While I agree that immersion can be a sensual enjoyment, sometimes it’s much more entertaining to have a total lack of such immersion even though, and especially when, such immersion is expected.
On the last point I disagree. I can enjoy silly… but when it comes in on something that should be serious it had best be an appropriate point and style. Random stuff when expecting immersion is not entertaining, but distracting, and often so overdone as to be a detractor overall.
There’s a difference between Gintama as it is, and throwing Gintama style stuff into LOTR, for example.
If these are your creations, kudos. They look fantastic, even if they are a bit frightening.
However, most of these these are still within the realm of realistic, if just barely and very improbable. Constraints tend to affect much more extreme proportions, like the little people behind the 3 dancing dudes, or the lady in the second pic being 10ft tall.
I did not create any of those characters in the screenshots. They are the search result of “Blade and Soul ugly character creation” ;)