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:

The Dragon Age: Origins Character Creator allows players to create and customize a player character on the PC which they can save and use when the PC game launches November 3rd.
The Character Creator will allow you to:


- Create your Dragon Age: Origins Character before the game comes out
- The Dragon Age: Origins Character Creatorprovides the tools to create a character with a nearly endless amount of options.
- The Character you create can then be used as your avatar in the BioWare Community Forums


You can download the Character Creator in the following languages:


English


http://files.bioware.com/dragonage_cc_dl/DragonAgeOriginsCharacterCreator_en.exe

French

http://files.bioware.com/dragonage_cc_dl/DragonAgeOriginsCharacterCreator_fr.exe

Polish

http://files.bioware.com/dragonage_cc_dl/DragonAgeOriginsCharacterCreator_pl.exe

Russian

http://files.bioware.com/dragonage_cc_dl/DragonAgeOriginsCharacterCreator_ru.exe

Spanish, Italian, Czech, and Hungarian

http://files.bioware.com/dragonage_cc_dl/DragonAgeOriginsCharacterCreator_EsItCzHu.exe

German

http://files.bioware.com/dragonage_cc_dl/DragonAgeOriginsCharacterCreator_de.exe

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.

Originally Posted by Majnun
What's the range on stats for this game?

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.

Originally Posted by wolfing
lots of facial options, no body options. You can spread 5 points on stats, but can't choose any spells/skills.

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

Originally Posted by Majnun
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.

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.

Originally Posted by txa1265
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?

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.

Originally Posted by Dhruin
Last name is tied to your Origin, I believe.

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).

Originally Posted by Melvil
I made a black Dwarf

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.