Character Creation - Order of the tabs. Other thoughts

[Forkedman]

So... character creation.

There are a couple of things that really stand out to me.

 

1) Lack of option to view your character as they would be actually seen in the game. Why isn't there a button tab that will show me what my character will actually look like when I start playing? To be frank I don't really care what my character looks like up close as I'm not playing a third person action RPG. I'd rather have a good sense of what the character will look like when the action gets rolling. 

 

This should at the very least be an option. Also the size of the character at creation isn't doing your models any favours. They look a lot better either at the scale that they appear in the inventory screen or as isometric characters. Being blow up to full size for close inspection just makes weaknesses that otherwise wouldn't be apparent very obvious. For example the strange clipping/shape/design of the 3rd male death head.

 

2) Order of some of the menus.

Currently class selection works like this

 

Class > Order/deity/spells > Attributes > Culture

 

This order is doesn't 'feel' right. It doesn't make sense to choose your culture which has an impact on your stats, after you've already allocated the rest of your points. It's means that you don't get the full picture of your builds stat layout until after you've made the decision on how to allocate the majority of your points. It also feels thematically wrong because culture has a lot more in common with 'order/deity' than it does with attributes. It makes the jump from roleplaying to technical attribution and then back to roleplaying.

 

A better order in my opinion would go

 

Class > Order/deity > Culture > Attributes > Spells/talents (if they end up on character creation).

 

To me that feels a lot more sensible. It's a transition from the roleplaying (class) to roleplaying with attribute impact to straight up attributes and technical make up of your character. 

 

3) Summery of class skills during character creation. It doesn't have to be anything more than a page outlining your starting skills and icons the same way that your spells are described. At the moment they show up as tiny boxes below your class selection. It would be a lot more readable and clear if they were either added to the class selection  description box when you have a class selected or presented on a page like the spells page. It would give people a much clearer sense of what they're starting out with and possibly also assist on the attribution of stats. 

 

3.1) Same deal for leveling up your character. At the moment it's like "Oh, I got a new little icon, cool.' 

There is no sense of impact or advancement to this. A description of the skills within the level up menu that is more than a tiny icon with some minor description of the skill is needed. Also your icons are so inconsistent. They need to all share a border style or something. At the moment spells and weapon skills feel like they belong to different games.  

 

 

4) Stats. Not nearly enough information on how they affect different skills and the impact that they have on your character. Not nearly enough.

If you think it's intimidating for new players to have large amounts of information thrown at them from the start, make the information optional through a tick box for advanced information. 

 

And that's it for now. 

 

[feanna]

I agree that the order of the tabs should be rearranged. Your suggestions sounds quite good, as well.

 

And as for the character's looks, yes, it would be great to see the final look early on - either through the whole character creation process or at latest after selecting your character's race (+subrace). In the old IE games it was ok to have the appearance tab last, because you could only change clothing/skin colors. But with more customization options, like head and hair this needs to come much earlier.

 

When in the character creation menu I noticed myself always jumping from race-selection to appearance and back, which was quite irritating because everything in between was simply randomized in the process (including sub-race selection, which you don't get when not using the next-button).

 

But knowing your character's looks is (at least for me) very important to choose a fitting background (class, culture) and both (looks plus background) are a basis for choosing stats and abilities, so you get a rounded character in the end.

Edited August 21, 2014 by feanna

[Fearabbit]

Quoting myself:

 

I'm not in the beta, but looking at the videos I noticed the following things. If this will change anyway, then ignore this post, but otherwise...

 

Order of menus:

It's confusing. It seems that when you select a race and click "Next", you can select the subrace. However, you don't have to click "Next" - it's possible to click on the next menu point in the bar at the top. It is not obvious that this way you're actually skipping the subrace menu. If you do the latter, the subrace menu does not come up until after you've selected your attributes - at least that's what it looked like in the videos, it was one of the submenus somewhere in "Culture" or "Appearance".

Problem 1: This is confusing as hell and simply bad UI design. You want it to be clear where certain menus appear and clicking "next" should lead to the next menu in the top bar, not to a hidden menu.

Problem 2: Don't have us select stat-changing stuff after selecting the attributes! That's such a bad design decision! It's confusing and makes me go back and forth, especially since the attribute screen does not show us the base numbers, but shows us the sum of the base and all modifiers (you only see the base once you select the attribute and look in the description - not intuitive and a bad place for an important number).

Gender -> Race -> Subrace -> Appearance -> Class -> Subclass -> Culture -> Attributes -> Portrait -> Voice. It needs to be clear when you select a certain feature, and all stat-changing features need to come before the attributes. Yes, that messes with your nice little UI where the attributes are at the center. But it's also the intuitive way to do this. (Note that I put Appearance before Class because then you have ALL the menus that make up your overall appearance in direct order. You could put Portrait and Voice there as well, I guess, but personally I like to decide these two things last, so I don't know. What's important is that attributes need to come last.

 

[...]

 

In essence, I agree with you, and I think this needs to be changed.

[Hormalakh]

Concur. Well said too. Especially the bit about the models.