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Chubby chars: Elder Scrolls Online character creation system unveiled

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The Elder Scrolls Online is out now; here’s our Elder Scrolls Online review.

It makes sense to put the work into building your MMO’s character creation system: statistically speaking, more players are going to see that than any other part of the game. Especially if you’re GTA Online, and frequent server explosions force your players to make yet another rubber-faced Splicer to embody.

Enough thoughts spared for the gangbanging woes of other platforms, though: let’s take a look at Zenimax Online’s ear-wiggling machine, which we’ll all need to navigate to discover whether or not we like The Elder Scrolls Online.

As a moderately overweight man, I’m always pleased to be able to create moderately overweight avatars. That only seems to apply to ESO’s males, however – the ladies retain their impossible hourglass figure no matter how many apples they’ve munched from unsuspecting Nords’ tables.

Saints Row remains the series least in thrall to high fantasy or Hollywood in its people-building tools, then.

Body types in ESO are defined by triangulating a point between three extremes: large, thin and muscular. Faces, meanwhile, can be soft, angular, heroic, or somewhere in the middle.

Zenimax evidently have a couple of serious bugs to iron out – every now and again, one of their characters will have the noggin of a cat or a lizard, which clearly isn’t right. Not to worry, though: your visage will be everybody else’s problem if you employ the first-person camera for Elder Scrolls Online shown at QuakeCon.

But beyond that, the system will be familiar to anybody who’s played Skyrim. We’ll pick from a wide variety of preset hairstyles, and spend half an hour working out which cheekbones best match the purple yolk of our eyes. Won’t we? Guys?