

Thanks to its pawn system, whereby you create and recruit party members throughout the world, you can experiment with some extreme builds and have them tag along with you too. It’s a subtle addition, but one that makes you really think about the kind of hero you want to embody from the start. Small, spry characters gain increased movement speed, but they’re easily knocked back or brushed aside by massive enemies. Here it’s all the same thing – make a really tall, heavy warrior, and they’ll move slowly but climb larger enemies more easily. In most RPGs, your appearance and character attributes are separate things, one a bunch of sliders, the other some numerical values on the next menu. Dragon’s Dogmaĭragon’s Dogma had many great innovations and tricks up its sleeves, but its approach to character creation might be its best of all. It’s the best kind of character creator then – powerful enough to make a really detailed build you can feel invested in, and to mess around in until you’ve made something that makes you a bit scared of yourself. We’ve seen some pretty accurate Kratoses, Solid Snakes, Bart Simpsons and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles walking the Lands Between, and frankly the latter are even more disturbing than the Eldritch horrors FromSoftware’s design team have spent years crafting.

With those sumptuous visuals comes the chance to build some really detailed characters… and then, obviously, uncover the hidden sliders, break the game completely and make a bunch of abominations.

Elden Ringīleeding-edge visuals were never a component of Souls games until Demon’s Souls turned up on PS5, and now the even more gorgeous Elden Ring. Now you commit to a role, and spend hundreds of hours perfecting it with platinum badges. Only a few games ago you could basically specialize in everything, the seven-footer with a Curry-like soft touch from the line and crossovers responsible for more ACL injuries than a greased floor. There’s a lot of debate about the MyPlayer build system and how much it restricts you to a particular position or role. When it doesn’t – prepare your eyes for Guillermo Del Toro’s vision of the NBA. When it likes your uploaded face scan, good times, get ready to see yourself in the NBA dunking on KD and posting Jokic-like numbers every game.

#Screen cyberpunk 2077 character creation upgrade#
NBA 2K22Īt one and the same time, a fearsomely powerful and genuinely stunning creation tool capable of capturing your look and then allowing you to build a player archetype with subtlety, specialization and a long tail of upgrade badges to work at over the seasons and pure, pure nightmare fodder, NBA 2K’s creation tool is the stuff of myth at this point. Presented in no particular order, these are they. It lets you invest all the deeper in the fantasy that this is you, achieving these impossible feats, becoming the NBA’s all-time great, chokeslamming random pedestrians… yep, Saints Row IV again.Įlden Ring’s wonderful player character creation tool got us thinking about the other titles with similar granular customization and awesome player-made works of art. Having some agency over your in-game avatar, then, is crucial to the experience. These are virtual spaces where we get to be the god-king, the center of the universe, or in the case of Saints Row IV, just a swole dude in a purple three-piece suit who can somehow fly. Beaten Elden Ring, have you? Well, that’s all very well and good, but what did your character look like while you did it? Just scored a goal in FIFA? Time to bust out the salmon celebration while the other player furiously stabs X trying to skip the cutscene. Repelled the alien invasion on an arcade cabinet? Tell the world about it in three initials on the high score screen. Embarking on any video game mission is an endeavor in the name of vanity, really.
