Dragon Age - Character Creator Now Available
 

BioWare has released the Dragon Age Character Creator, opened their Social Site and are offering a nifty in-game ring for using these tools:
No doubt the usual mirrors will also have it - the BioBlog offers these two for starters: Atomic Gamer and File Planet.
In addition, the social network has been launched:
[quote]
The BioWare soci…More information.

I confess I'm a little bit underwhelmed with this character generator.

It gets the job done, but nothing special. This does however seem to be working as a promotional tool.

I downloaded this. Character creation is just very basic, the only choices you have are in gender/race/class/background (background is only a choice for a few of the combinations), base ability scores, and appearance. Appearance is where there is a huge amount of customization.

I would be underwhelmed by this (I don't care much about appearance) except that you can see all of the skills and spells available to your character later in the game. Customization of all of that does not apparently occur on character creation but during the game which is fine with me.

I also don't care about 350 levels of facial customization … but was I wrong that I was unable to change the last name of my character?

What's the range on stats for this game?

If it's 1-25 then that ring is pretty nice and I'll have to download this and deal with their social network upload thingy. If it's 1-100 then that means I don't have to bother really.

Oh, and from what I'm reading this is just a tool to create the physical appearance of your character? That's utterly useless to me. I was hoping it was a character planner that let you plan out what skills/stats you were going to improve along the way.

I'm guessing about 40 or so is the most you could get, since the highest talent requirement is 36. You start with a minimum of 10 in everything, and then the racial bonuses.

lots of facial options, no body options. You can spread 5 points on stats, but can't choose any spells/skills.
Underwhelmed though I sort-of expected it since this is will also be a console game, can't give too many options to console players or they might go into catatonic collapse.

You get to choose starting skills and spells/talents in the game, just not this.

Me too. It's really just the creation tool. You can see what skills are available overall, but nothing more. It doesn't let you plan much. There's also no info on further development options like class specialization or the role of those skills in a greater context.

Last name is tied to your Origin, I believe.

So you do get to choose starting skills and talent in the real game? I don't see why not in this, that's just misleading. It wouldn't make any difference to the generator, since you can mouse-over and read how all the spells and skills work anyway.

You can effectively plan out a character with this tool, you just need to look up one of the wikis to see how many stats/skills/talents you get to distribute per level. You can't plan out specialisations though.

I'm enjoying just reading all the abilities. It seems like a cross between WoW and DnD, with all the useless crap and duplicates taken out. They took the good bits of each, but took out all the legacy problems and convolutions from DnD, and the very limited customisation of WoW but kept the good bits of each system. I'm looking forward to playing it a lot. I want to make a Dual Weapon Rogue and a Mage as my first chars, then maybe a 2Her Warrior.

Thinking my party will be made of 2 Mages, a Rouge and a Warrior for most of the time. It seems Rogues can fight nearly as well as Warriors, but don't have as many fighting options, and can't use sword and board or 2Handers, where as Warriors have more fighting options, but don't get the Rogue talents for disarming things and sneaking etc.

They have gone with the DnD 3.0 approach to disarming tricks and traps, in that they allow all characters access to lockpicking and trap disarming, but Rogues get talents to make them even better at it (but because they are talents, if you take them, you're compromising your combat ability).

Which reminds me, I much prefer the distinction between skills and talents. I hate it when the opportunity cost of taking talking skills, or herbalism and so on is combat ability. They've set it up well though, if you want to be extra awesome at some of those things in exchange for combat ability, you have that option.

I'm really, really digging the character system. This 'demo' might not give you much to do, but it gives you a lot to read, and the opportunity to figure out how to combine certain abilities and try to plan out some builds.

This is true. This seems to be Bio's new standard approach, so that NPCs can refer to you by your name. I MUCH prefer this to having people refer to you as 'they', ala Sand when you meet him in Act I of NWN2 - "they have the smell of a harbourman about them" - ugh, so jarring.

Also, with the origin stories, if you could change your own last name, it would change the names of a bunch of early NPCs. Consider it the cost of having full VO.

Doesnt sound too exciting.

I'll let you guys be the test rabbits, let me know how it pans out!

No black people in this magical land, apparently.

I made a black Dwarf

I checked out the wizards skills first, then the warriors, so when I got to the thief, and saw that 2/3 of his skills were copy/paste from the warrior, I was a bit disapointed (shrug).

There are some presets that seemed close, but when rotating the character in the light it really just looked like a white person with a dirty face.

Personally, it's not a big deal, just something I noticed. And maybe it's not the "final final" character creator. I just wonder if it's going to create any unnecessary drama.

yeah, it'd really break my heart, that's for sure

I'm sort of confused why they all share the same skills, even though several skills seem tied to stealth/thievery and why the Rogue has little more than half the talents warriors have. Why so few and where's the compensation?

I guess there's an explanation somewhere.

318 megs? A little bigger than I thought it'd be, but the download speed is good. I'm hitting 1 meg/sec.

I'm a little curious to try out the origins part of the creator for myself.

Edit: Well if your a mage you get one and only one origin whether you are an elf or human. That sucks. Not the end of the world though. I guess if I really like the game I could try out a Dalish elf fighter on the second run through. I really liked those elves from the book. Reminded me of the Darksun Elves.

Do you get to choose your party-members' classes? I was under the impression that you would just pick up companions along the way, with no say in the matter (a la Dungeon Siege). If you can actually "hand-craft" your entire party … well that's another tick in DA's favor for me!

Edit: Okay, I guess in fairness to DS, you *could* control the development of all chars in your party, but they came on board clearly favoring a particular class.

PS - Do I get in trouble for referencing Dungeon Siege on this forum? I know it's blasphemy to some people.

That's necessary because the different races have a different perspective on the story. As a dwarf you are the king's 2nd son. So you carry the king's last name, are a royal treated with respect and obedience by everybody except the king himself and your older brother, the heir to the throne.
Other races are probably much lower in the food chain.

The warrior has more talents because all of the weapon talents are unlocked for him at the beginning of the game. The rogue can put skillpoints into Combat Training to unlock the remaining weapon talents.

From what I've seen in the character creator, this system totally lacks any sings of multi-classing or any kind of hybrid character. While it it's not a huge block, I'd like my rogue to be able to throw a fireball or two or even my warrior to cast a couple of spells, thank you very much. Hope there is something to remedy this ordeal in the game.

The more customisation the merrier but you have other party-members to sling spells, so I don't see it as important in most party-based games.

Having a magic wielding warrior would also clash with the lore of the game where magic is something you're born with and where all magic users are kept in the Circles or practice magic in secret, hoping that a Templar doesn't find them.

Uggh … I can tweak my nose hair but not my last name so that teenager console buys can get ego-stroking from hearing their character by name?

I have to say that what I consider the almost entirely wrong-headed approach in this character creator … or should I call it 'Dark & Gritty Fantasy Sims' … has taken my enthusiasm back down a notch. The thing is 99% about tweaking appearance.

No problem with referencing DS here, we're BIG supporters of both Lazarus and the soon to be released U6 Project which are both based on the DS engine. There really wasn't a 'game' released with the engine was there? :)

I see a new kind of marketing approach dawning upon us : Release a creating program first, as a kind of "teaser" with which the characters and creatures generated by it can be used in the full game … In some people, it might even work that they develop some kind of "emotional bonding" to what they've created so that they might want to try to test/play it in the real game …

To me, it's quite an interesting marketing approach. I'm impressed.

Even better - the approach is simply listening to fans.

Some people requested a character generator on the forums. They said they'd look into it, and lo and behold this pops out after a while.

In principle it's been before that : The character generator of the REalms Of Arcania series is in fact a standalone EXE file, don't know what files it additionally needs, though.

Plus, don't you remember the creating program for Spore ?

Also by EA.

Yeah right. :facepalm:

You really believe they haven't decided about this "demo" long before anyone on the forum mentioned it? It was just a nice coincidence so they could praise themselves how they listen to their fans..

I do actually believe them, I know, cynicism is the fashion around here.

There's not a lot of point doing a character creator for a limited RPG game like this one. It's not like Spore where the game is essentially about the creature you've designed. Character generation for DA:O only takes moments and doesn't have a great effect on the game, outside of choosing which origin, which is hardly something you need an external creation tool for.

So you're basically saying the character creator is something pointless biowhore has put out instead of a real demo? I agree.

Yes, exactly. Bioware don't do demos, for good reason. They can only put people off a game like an RPG, not convert them to buying when they weren't going to in the first place. But fans asked for a character generator and got one. Win win.

:rolleyes:

Only if it's a bad rpg. If it's a good game it can only attract new players. I understand they're afraid to let people test gameplay before *buying* the game.. and for good reason.

Is Risen a bad RPG?

How do I know? I've never played it.