Dragon Age Origins Character Creation

So, on October 13 the folks over at BioWare released a download of their character creation utility for Dragon Age: Origins. I finally got around to downloading it and spent some time last night and this morning tinkering around with the tool.

The default video options leave you with a pretty dark screen, making it tough to see things clearly. You can change this up by modifying the gamma settings. Race and class options are basic. I thought this was the case with Age of Conan, but Dragon Age takes the cake. Three races with three classes doesn’t offer much. The addition of the “background” element seems interesting, but the character creator gives you little more than a few sentences on what the background means and it doesn’t provide any information on the actual in-game impact of your selection.

Once you’ve got the basics down, including your character’s first name (last name is prepopulated), you can proceed to the facial characteristics screen. This offers you a fair amount of customization. If you spend a little time with it, you’ve got enough flexibility to create a reasonable facsimile of your own face, assuming that interests you to begin with. Then again, people have always said I have one of those “recognizable faces”, so maybe I’m generic enough to have fit neatly into the options BioWare makes available. After completing the creation process, you have the option to upload your character to your online profile. This, of course, requires that you create an online profile in the new BioWare Social Network. Clearly a smart move by BioWare, developing a basic social networking application to bring the community together in anticipation of the game and to support it beyond release. It will be interesting to see how deeply players engage here. With many popular games the forums and message boards supporting them see plenty of activity. The question is, will players here adopt the other “social” features of the network. I guess we’ll find out in time.

I’m a big RPG fan and have been since my D&D days, which started more than 25 years ago. The Gold Box games from SSI were killer in the late 80’s early 90’s, even on a Commodore64. And, I have a ton of respect and admiration for BioWare for their Baldur’s Gate work, starting in 1998. Those games were amazing. Deep, rich…and most of all, fun. So, I will remain hopeful that DAO gets the job done. It’s really tough to say with this character creation utility.