The Elder Scrolls Character Creation

[Millicent]

Thefirst step on your journey to greatness, Character Creation plays a huge part in your journey. Picking the right class and character will go a long way to ensuring you enjoy your Elder Scrolls Online experience. A true hero must not only be able to bear arms against their enemies, but to also look like someone out of legends.

The first two choices are your character's gender (male or female) and the sound of their voice. There are eight voice options for the varrying gender and race combinations, so be sure to find the one that sounds right to you.

While selecting a race, it's also important to consider the faction you wish to align yourself with. There are three currently in the game. Certain races will start out tied to specific factions, unless you have pruchased the Imperial Edition of Elder Scrolls Online, and the option to change won't come for quite some time. If you and a group of friends want to play together from the very beginning of the game, everyone should talk over which faction they want before hand.

As with any Elder Scrolls game, the first step is picking from the many Races available to you. If you are playing the standard version, there will be 9 available. Adventurers who purchased the Imperial Edition will be able to play a 10th race, the Imperial. A brief outline is below, but more detailed info on each race can be found here.

After figuring out the race you want, you can now choose a class. For some people, it might work best to think about which class they want prior to choosing a race. You can jump around the creation process at will, so if you're unsure of the race you want, pick the class first then it will help narrow down the best racial choice. A brief outline of each class is below, but for all the details head to their dedicated pages Here.

Elder Scrolls has never lacked customization, and ESO is no different. In fact, it's even more so than before. Players can sculpt the look of their character through many separate options. The first is body type, which gives you a sliders for the balance of musculature, largeness, and thiness.

The head gets the same treatment for detail as the body, allowing you to slide your facial structure between Heroic, Soft, and Angular features. Along with it, and in the next tab, comes things like age, adornment (facial hair and small trinkets), hair style, colour, forehead slope, and more.

Creating your character is the first decision that you must make when playing The Elder Scrolls Online. Although you are presented with a wide variety of options for altering your character's appearance, the only decisions that have an actual effect on gameplay is your class and faction. Your character's capabilities are more strongly affected by how you choose to play the game (and by choices made when you level up) than by your initial character creation.

Characters are server-bound. Characters can be deleted, although the number of deletions allowed in a given time period is limited. In general, deletion is irreversible. Up to eleven Additional Character Slots can be purchased from the Crown Store for a maximum of twenty.

The character creation screen is split into four menus: Race, Class, Body, and Face. The name text field appears at the top of each menu. Throughout this article, the following will be used to indicate which attributes you can change after character creation:

If any of these requirements are not fulfilled, they will show up red. Additionally, the text box takes a maximum of 25 characters and does not allow entry of symbols other than apostrophes and hyphens, so the no numbers and invalid characters requirements should not be possible to break. To get an idea of which names may suit your race and gender, see this page.

There are three available alliances: the Daggerfall Covenant, the Aldmeri Dominion, and the Ebonheart Pact. Your alliance will determine your starting location and more importantly the side you will fight for if you choose to take part in the Alliance War in Cyrodiil.

Alliance is usually determined by race with the exception of Imperials, available only with the Imperial Edition, who can join any alliance. Players with the Explorer's Pack or Adventurer Pack can choose to play any race with any alliance.

Your choice of race will determine the racial skill line you unlock at level 5. Personal preference plays an important role in deciding race, since it may limit your alliance choice and to some degree determines your character's appearance. If you are not concerned about alliance or appearance limitations, then the primary factor left is whether the racial bonuses pair well with your class and possibly the weapon and armor skills you plan to use.

There are seven different playable classes, although only four are available with the base game: the Dragonknight, the Nightblade, the Sorcerer, and the Templar. Three additional premium classes have also been added: the Warden (available with the Morrowind Chapter or separate Crown Store purchase), the Necromancer (available with the Elsweyr Chapter or separate Crown Store purchase), and the Arcanist (available with the Necrom Chapter).

Your class grants you three skill lines for use throughout the game. This decision will have a greater impact on gameplay than any other choice in character creation, and cannot be changed without deleting the character and starting over.

Many aspects of your character's appearance can be customized, although race will generally have the largest impact. You can rotate and zoom the view of your character using the buttons at the bottom of the screen. This can also be done by clicking and dragging left and right to rotate and scrolling the mouse wheel to zoom. The preview options on the left let you see your character in Novice Gear, Champion Gear, and No Gear (armor depending on class).

These all range from small on the left to large on the right. The triangular body type slider will also affect each body part, so these individual sliders allow the fine-tuning of body proportions within the selected body type.

It is possible to revisit certain aspects of character creation via the Crown Store. While the official name of this feature is the ESO Style Parlor, these options are also commonly termed the "Barber Shop" due to MMO parlance. Class cannot be changed.

A Race Change Token will allow you to change a character's race as well as appearance and gender, but not their name or alliance. It does not affect style knowledge, meaning the character will retain knowledge of their original racial style. These tokens cost 003000 .

I may still be skeptical of the existence of The Elder Scrolls Online, the MMO no one really asked for, but I'm glad to see they're putting a lot of effort into an aspect of the game I care a lot about: the character creator.

MMOs, generally speaking, have pretty bad character creation systems. The best I've seen has probably been that of EVE Online (a game where you almost never see your character) or APB (a game where the character creator was literally the only redeeming thing about it). The worst? I still can't get past how horrible GTA Online's has been, forcing you to mash up tiny pictures of your parents and grandparents to create a face for you character that has a 10% chance to just be plain old ugly, and a 90% chance to look like a swamp mutant. No wonder everyone in the game wears masks.

But in this two minute video demonstrating the various ins and out of the Elder Scrolls Online system, it seems they've come up with something on the good end of MMO creators, and certainly the best I've seen in any Elder Scrolls game to date, even Skyrim.

The key is in the range of options. Too many games have you stuck to a few face archetypes of a body somewhere in between "Olympian fit" and "superheroic." In The Elder Scrolls Online, you can be tall, short, ripped, chubby, and anything in between. Facial mixing seems to create a diverse set of options as well, and even individual body pieces like shoulders or hands are able to be altered.

And of course, Elder Scrolls has the task of doing all this with a collection of different races, rather than just humans. I like the new looks of the Argonians and the Khajit, especially compared to past games.

Watch the video led by TESO design director Jared Carr below. All this said, I'm still not convinced that TESO is a good idea, or will be a success, but at least the character creator means things will start off well.

In past The Elder Scrolls games, character creation was where the player decided their class, which would shape their character's strengths and weaknesses for the whole of the gaming experience ahead. With Skyrim, the class system has been removed, and character creation determines very little about the capabilities of a character. The only aspects which the player will choose are race, gender, appearance, and name.

The process is thus centered almost entirely on the aesthetic aspect of character creation, which has been greatly improved over past games. Players can now edit facial features in much greater detail, and add decorations like war paint, facial hair, battle scars, wrinkles, and dirt coverage.

Notably absent are birthsigns. Instead, Skyrim has added Standing Stones, which are monoliths found throughout Skyrim that functionally replace both birthsigns and Doomstones. They can be activated at any time once the player discovers them, and confer various bonuses, such as increasing experience gained for certain skill types, or buffing stats. Only one can be active at once (unless one uses the Aetherial Crown). The Warrior, Mage, and Thief Standing Stones, which boost experience gained for skills associated with each archetype, can be found on the way to the first objective after the game's intro mission.

Of note to many players is that the character creation screen is brighter than most areas of the game, which may result in some features looking darker in the actual game than intended. This can be (slightly) alleviated by pausing the game, before naming the Prisoner, and looking through the smokescreen of the start menu.

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