I am a creature of habit. I order the same things at restaurants, I drink the same beer. I have television shows that I watch over and over, like comfort food. This becomes a problem in my game of The Sims 4, where all my new sims are using the exact same hair.
The Sims 4 Vampires came with four new female hairs, and they’re all a little gothy. But my favourite, by far, is this ornamented double bun straight off of Akasha from Queen of the Damned. When I saw it in the trailer I thought I’d never use it, but there’s something so luxurious and tacky about it. The jewels even change colour with different hair colours.
Of course, this means that there’s four sims in my game who use this hair in at least one outfit. And it keeps showing up on randomly generated “townie” sims. I’m approaching a sims hair singularity, and I don’t know how to stop it.
What about you, gentle readers? Are there character creator options that you keep returning to, game after game? Can’t live without your playable character having freckles? Modded in Beyonce’s hat from the Formation video into all your games? Let me know in the comments.
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31 responses to “What Are Your Character Creation Bad Habits?”
For some reason my characters always end up beautiful, Aryan people. Blonde hair, blue eyes… I swear I’m not racist :/
technically speaking you are…essentially everyone is.
We’ve all been culturally brought up on the idea of what an “ideal” look is by parents, family and community
Russian friend of mine was working in China at one point, and often heard locals commenting negatively about him, purely because he had a beard – they didnt know he was fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese. The mentality was that the hairiness that allowed for a full beard must mean he was evolutionally closer to apes than they were, hence they were genetically superior.
I have no doubt its not everyone in China that thought that, but its an example of how your upbringing can influence your view on whats ideal. Obviously whether you can grow a beard or not isnt a measure of genetics, but as a cultural measure its something thats quite common.
Its not just in looks either, its in a lot of areas. Think about a workplace. The team you work with is great. They do everything better than everyone else. The team down the hall, yeah, they’re pretty good, but they arent as good as you. The team in the next office arent so bad, but clearly worse than you and your office neighbours. The team in the next state? Dont get me started on them, they’re terrible.
That sort of mentality is repeated around the world – your immediate environment, which is what your experience is based on, is always the most natural way of thinking. Anything different to that makes you uncomfortable and starts sending off danger signals.
Doesnt mean its right (or wrong for that matter), but its still what you’re views and opinions are going to be based on.
Thats pretty strange, since one of the gods they worship has the most manly of beards – Guan Yu
It doesnt have to make sense, thats part of how standards work, cultural or otherwise. They just use whatever experience they have to make themselves superior.
Lets leave it at that. This is something that opens a massive can of worms (if I havent already) and never leads to friendly debates. It usually ends in heated arguments around politics or religion.
Look at the office example instead, its a less arguable example. Anything different is questioned, and measured against your personal experience. The point is, humans are hypocritical by nature, thats why its common to see cultural racism and similar discriminations.
Was not my intention to argue or share worms, just found it strange is all 🙂
It really boils down to some people never leaving kindergarten and carry on life with school rules where anyone slightly different is an excuse for discrimination 🙁 In this case, envy, for beards are king. I wish I had a beard as kingly as Guan Yu…
Nah its all good. I just found that when I was responding to you, various examples opened up all sorts of debates. Politics, religion, everything in between.
We’re a product of our experience, and through that can have biases that can be racist, whether we think they are or not. I know I’ve been guilty of it on occasion.
If you’re arguing that everyone believes blonde and blue eyes is the peak of attractiveness because of society, I can’t agree with you there.
If you’re arguing that what we find attractive is the culmination of many factors including environmental and societal influences, I can buy that.
If you’re arguing that everyone is racist, get the hell out of here.
No but a certain group of people do.
Not only what we find attractive, also what we consider weird or unattractive, and it is the negativity that we usually associate with racism, but positive bias is also, technically, racist.
99.9% of us are biased. racial bias resulting in changes in behavior towards said race is by definition racism. Racism isn’t necessarily some great evil to be sneered at, but it is a flaw that exists in most of us.
Racism’s and racial bias are almost impossible to track. You may think un-trackability that solely works in the favour of those who claim it doesn’t exist, but it also works in favour of those who claim “99.9%” of us are. Everyone makes assumptions about so many things, sure, and can be biased at certain times, but if 99.9% of us are biased and racist (and i’m assuming you mean everyone, not just the majority race in each country), then is anyone really?
I am not sure why you’d want to believe in a worldview like that, but I guess that’s your personal decision.
If everyone is biased, then everyone is still biased, just relatively less so. If everyone was slow, then relatively speaking no one is slow, but by definition, we are all slow… Also, I say we’re all biased, obviously I’m not elaborating on the fact there are degrees of bias (just like there are levels of slowness…), some are subtlely so without thinking, others are violently so and act it out.
Its a more of a philosophical view than anything, I guess, to compare against the concept of the ideal not the examples of the ideal. And no, it doesn’t mean I’m just miserable all the time ^_^
Depending on the game, a tall, muscular half-elf with black hair and blue eyes. Perhaps I’m projecting somehow.
Without fail my characters end up with dark skin, long grey or white hair with a matching beard. I dont know why.
All my characters in RPGs withe character creation tend to be later middle aged, weary looking men usually with grey hair with heavy stubble. And I’ve been doing this since my early 20s.
Male characters = white hair, Goatee and green or white eyes.
Female = Blonde, green eyes
Spend 30 minutes creating a semi decent character and then hit the randomize button and ruin everything.
i generally go for either youg adult dark hair light coloured eyes for men. or a older white haired badass looking dude. i think my favourite and most memorable character i can remember making was for saints row 2 – he was asian with white hair, older looking and had a cockney accent. man ive gotta play that game again. so much fun.
females vary lots, for jrpgs i usually pick non sensical hair colours, like teal, or violet and go for the slightly older character models, but still make them pretty.
immature, and young character models shit me off across the board, so i avoid them like the plague.
I find that when replaying a game or just starting a new character in the same game, my characters almost ALWAYS end up looking near identical to the ones I’ve already made. Because I guess that’s what I end up thinking looks cool with the options given in each game I guess.
Every time I create a new commander shephard he could be a twin brother of the one I made previously and it’s not intentional.
It totally depends on the game, but I generally tend towards female avatars and Green eyes.
In Mass Effect I always play as the palest possible woman with green eyes, black hair and black lipstick largely because I thought a goth take on Shepard worked really well with Jennifer Hale’s voice, in Saints Row 4 I played as a black woman with green eyes, short hair and a slightly militaristic outfit because I thought that fit best with the voice I preferred out of those on offer (I was tempted to go with the Nolan North option though) and in Fallout 3 I played as a tanned, freckled, brown haired and brown eyed woman because I would fit in a little better with the rest of the brown surroundings.
When creating characters for RPGs like Mass Effect or Fallout, I go with the general rule of “Me, but more attractive.” 🙁
Same, though the armour in the game and the voice options will decide if its “me but more what i think isattractive” or “me but female and what i find attractive” such as in Skyrim, my characters are alway male because the male models have better looking armour and animations while in fallout its female all the time because they look best in the armour and make more sense story wise to me ie Female Courier thats against the legion is just total bliss
My RPG characters are always blonde with green eyes. I am a brunette with blue eyes. I believe I am having something resembling an identity crisis.
I have two character designs I always use to save me many hours lost trying to design a character. In general I always use “Angrifter” who has short, wild red hair, amethyst eyes, a stern expression and dark tan skin. She sometimes ends up with glasses and most often has dragon or oni horns if they’re available. If there’s an 8 character name limit (Somehow these still exist) or an alt slot then I’ll use the “Fuerie” archetype with blue, medium length hair, pale skin, green eyes and a softer expression. She sometimes has an eye patch too, preferring the type that’s like a headband with the patch coming down off it.
I find it impossible to give my characters serious names. This is one of many big character flaws on my part, freely admitted. And the thing is I seem to be pretty good at carving a fairly decent looking mug, when the facial options extend to it. No man that looks that good deserves to be called Slapnuts or whatever.
It’ll depend on what options are available and whether there’s any that are objectively better, but I’ll usually go with a character that’s fundamentally unlike my scrawny, male white arse. My Shepard is as close an approximation as I could get to a bad-ass Polynesian woman.
I can’t wait for CMDR Creator to come out in Elite Dangerous. Another 3 hours wasted on creating the perfect character, saving it, then I decide to make a new one for fun, and I finish it within 10 mins and it’s better than my 3 hour one lol
I name everything Batman.
In a play-through of Pokémon White 2 I once named myself Batman, all of my Pokémon Batman, and my rival? Toast.
The two constants are that they usually look in their 40s or older an they have the same name. Skin tone, hair, height, eyes, facial features, and voice tend to vary dramatically.
My characters now end up looking like Jennifer Lawrence in Hunger Games.
Every game I play my avatar ends up looking similar to Autolycus from Xena/Hercules… I found a design that works for me and can’t snap out of it! 🙁
I always start with the shortest female I can make. Then, increase the weight sliders.
My Inquisitor was a buck toothed, ginger female dwarf with freckles and a buzzcut. Definitely wasn’t winning any beauty contests.
Fyi, tall male irl.
I always do the same thing, take some pics with my phone of four angles, then proceed to make the closest resemblance to myself.
Makes me feel more immersed in the game.