With the newest expansion coming to ESO and the fact that I'm trying to look for a new MMO to obsess over, I might as well cover this one now, huh? To start out, when you make your character, you have the choice between male or female, which of the three in-game factions you would like to be in, and which of the ten races of Tamriel you would like to be. Note that the tenth race, the Imperial, is paywalled and will require its own purchase from the in-game store. Each of the races have different attributes and bonuses that help them excel at different skills, but from my understanding, these are fairly small bonuses, not all restrictive, that is unless you like to min-max, I guess. On the next page, we have the classes of which the vanilla game gives you four, and the other two can be purchased from the in-game store. These classes give you different unique abilities and play styles, however, just like the races they are not restrictive, and each one can use any weapon or any kind of gear. So if you want to be a sorcerer that uses a two-handed sword and heavy armor, you can. Next we have some body options. Going up, there are some body shapes and height, and various markings like scars, skin and perfection tattoos, or patterns if you're playing a kijid or Argonian. Then further down, we have some more detailed body options that allow you to manipulate individual parts of the body, ranging from their chest to their arms, their hands, their hips, and all that good stuff. That's slider, and lastly we have face options, including general face shape, just like the body. You've got a list of different voices here. Hair, hair color, facial hair, or whatever unique racial feature that they have depending on which race you pick. And just like the body, as we scroll down further, we can see additional sliders to make further adjustments to the face. But you're unsure as to what sort of character you'd like and just prefer to gamble your aesthetics away. There is a randomized appearance button down in the bottom right that will do just that. And if you have a certain portion of options that you'd prefer not to be randomized, each and every single option has a little lock that you can toggle to make sure that that thing cannot be messed with accidentally when you're clicking it like I am now, or by when clicking the randomized button. Once you have major character, you can further change them. Back here in the main menu, we can see here there are four different options to redo your character. There's name, race, appearance, and alliance. Each one can be purchased with premium currency in the game store. So let us go over the bad. Some UI gripes. Take a shot everybody. Firstly, when you select to preview gear, different, like the different types of gear or no gear, it knocks you back out to the race select. A bit more annoying is the Skyrim problem of having no visual previews for certain options, i.e. the hair, markings, facial hair, etc. In order to see what your options are, you have to scroll through the entire slider, one option at a time, or just skip all of them whenever you just want to get to one. I think having a panel with some thumbnails of all the options is infinitely better because you can see all your options first and not have to spend the time scrolling through them all as that takes time and makes comparing options pretty difficult. The next problem I have is the lack of information of a lot of these options. For the races, there's a little tool tip down at the bottom here telling a brief summary of what bonuses you receive for each race. But if I'm a new player, I don't know what these bonuses mean or by how much they contribute. Perhaps some numerical values could be useful or some additional info about what each of these skills does in the game. And the same goes for the factions, there's no info on them whatsoever in the game. I don't know what sets apart the dagger fall covenant from the ebb and heart pact. If there is one at all, maybe there isn't the game doesn't tell me. And obviously I could always look these up at the wiki to get information, but then we wouldn't be looking at just the character creator anymore now would we. And again, same with the classes, there's a brief summary, but not much more. Some skill examples or more in-depth info about them would be really nice so players can make more informed choices. And that goes for the pay-walled classes in races too. It'd be nice if I could at least preview them and get a description of what they are so I can make an informed purchase if I wanted to from the character creator. And speaking of classes, there feels to be a little bit of a lack of them. I mean, for, I know they can use any sort of equipment they want and maybe they're just really in-depth enough to only need this many, but I guess that goes back to the previous problem of not knowing enough about them from the lack of information. And I think that's all the problems I have with this creator. That's not as bad as I was anticipating to be honest. I was expecting there to be a lot more restrictions and problems with this creator considering it takes a lot from Skyrim, but it does a lot of things surprisingly well. Let's go over those. Firstly, let's just quickly comment. The character looks good. Some of the gear is a little low res, but it's mostly the starter stuff. The higher level gear, they look pretty nice if maybe some parts still a little bit low res, but the face, I mean, that's a nice face. Look at that. Yeah, the general art style is very detailed, cool design, and keep in mind this is an MMO, so having a nice looking character model is an achievement in and of itself worth applauding. One of this is Lended 2 by its art style, which I also like, it's a nice stylization of the Elder Scrolls look, obviously a lot of it, inspired by Skyrim, but still a good look or nonetheless. On the subject of looks, prop 2 ESO for having good sexual dimorphism in the sense that the races look pretty much identical for either gender. Now sexual dimorphism is not an inherently bad thing. It's okay to have genders of a species have different unique traits from one another, so long as it's done in a way that is equal for each gender. Although the women in ESO are on average a little bit scrawny, the game lets you make them bulky if you so choose and vice versa with the males. And let's praise the variety we have on display here. Sure you have like four different flavors of human and three different types of elves, but there's also lizard people and cat people and cool, unique looking elves I'll admit. I said this in the Skyrim critique, these elves look pretty unique from your typical fantasy elves, so they stand out in their own right. And you know, praise to the Kajit and Argonian races because they are designed to be fully anthropomorphic, not just humans with animal features, not that there's anything wrong with that, but it really does help set them apart and make them feel very distinct from the more human looking races. One thing I forgot to mention is the fact that every class can use basically every piece of equipment and weapon. I think that's really nice and I appreciate the freedom that that gives the player. There's nothing inherently wrong with restricting classes, I mean that's what sets them apart, but having that option to be able to just wear whatever you want is pretty nice. Next I want to go over the UI, because although there are some parts of it that are tat frustrating like the hair and tattoo options being assigned to sliders, the actual usability of these menus is pretty seamless, not a single thing gets in your way and it's easy to navigate if you're on keyboard and mouse at least. You can just click and click and click, click where you want the options to go. It's great. While we're talking about options, let's talk about those options themselves starting with some very, very nice body options, which deserve its own section of praise because boy, do not enough games give you body options, let alone to this extent. Look how many things you can adjust. You can change individual parts of the torso and legs and arms, it's really nice. And that extends to pretty much everything else as well. There are so many things that you can manipulate and morph. But slider, conclusion. There are a few minor problems, but it does its job very well. ESO's character creator doesn't really do anything stand out or special, but it's a very solid character creator all around anyway with how many options and how much control it gives you. This has been Character Creator Critique. Thank you for watching and I'll see you next time.