The Secret World: My Beta Weekend #4 Experience (Part Two)

Character Creation

Each account has the ability to create three characters. It is at this point where you select your desired faction (Templar, Illuminati or Dragon) as well as which "dimension" (Server) your character will reside in. From what I saw during the beta weekend, character creation is pretty simple and limited in options. There is an option to choose your character's gender, an option for the head (and its corresponding features) and also an option to customize your character's outfit.

The customization for head basically involves only changes to the character's facial traits (like eyes, nose, lips and jaw) and hair & make-up (like hairstyle, hair colour, eyebrow shape and make-up colours). Within these customizations, the options are pretty much limited to a few designs (probably less than ten for each option). Therefore, with this character creation system, there is a pretty high chance (close to very high) of you to see a "clone" of yourself within "The Secret World". Up until this point, I am sure you would be asking this..."What about the rest of the body?". Sad to say, you cannot customize anything below your neck. There is no customization for your character's height, build and anything what-so-ever apart from changing outfits. The reason for this might be due to certain brave attempts by the creators in doing something out of the ordinary (but this is just my speculation of course).

Usually, whenever we are shown a cut-scene in a game (especially an online game where there's player customization for your character), we will never find our character within the cut-scenes. But for "The Secret World", in every cut-scene I've seen so far, we will definitely be shown our character (be it front or back).

This in my opinion is a very hard thing to do (worthy of a pat on the back). Surely everyone is gonna have a different character right? Therefore it would probably be quite taxing to incorporate our characters into the cut-scenes. However, in their attempt to do this, they had to sacrifice something else...our character customizability. I'm guessing they had to remove the ability to customize our avatar (everything below the neck) so as to make things easier for them to incorporate the characters into the cut-scenes. Albeit a praiseworthy attempt, I think that it might have been better that they improved on the customization options and just leave our characters out of the cut-scenes. Besides, our characters aren't even moving or talking in the cut-scenes anyway (Definitely asking too much over here...hahaha). They're merely standing there, so it would hardly matter at all if we had removed them.

As for our outfit, although there isn't much clothing to choose from during character creation, I am under the impression that there are plenty of them available in the game (probably at the faction HQs, New York, London and Seoul). The clothes can be bought using Pax Romana (the in-game currency). Guess this means that you will have to save up some money and go there for some "fashion shopping". But still, I think that those clothing are gonna cost a bomb and better looking ones will probably be available only in the "cash shop". Lastly, there has been talks in the forum stating that the character creation will improve during live and thereafter, but how much of an improvement it will be still remains to be seen.

Previous: The Secret World (Part One)

Next: The Secret World (Part Three)

Posted in: The Secret World