The Weirdest Character Creation Screen

Even if you don’t play a lot of games, it’s quite common for you to  be able to change how you look. As someone starts up a new game, one of the first things they do is create a character, an avatar to represent oneself. However, there’s no standard way to make a character creation screen. Depending on the game, character creation screens can be incredibly basic or incredibly complicated, with a whole plethora of methods in order to make a character a player wants.

Because there are no standards though, character creation is a minefield.

No sliders, no buttons

In many games with a character creation screen, there’s always some somewhat standard ways to make a character. Sometimes you can only pick between some pre-made characters, with very minimal options. Other times, you can create almost anything, from a perfect doll face to a horrendous abomination. Most character creators give you a bunch of options to choose from (like skin and eye colour), while others give you all the options, all neatly placed on sliders, to the point that you can actually make realistic-looking people.

On the flip side, you get very few options at all. In Pokemon GO for example, you can change gender, eye, hair and skin colours, but that’s about it. So every character is pretty much the same, regardless of gender. However, some games may only allow you to pick male or female and that’s it. Still, this is not as weird as the character creation in Sea of Thieves.

My character is all random

This is my character in Sea of Thieves. She’s a tall, chunky character who stumbled into a neat clothing combination and hasn’t changed her clothes in like three years. However, clothing aside, I didn’t directly create Phovos. (Yes, her name is Phovos…) In fact, what I did was click RANDOM a bunch of times, looking at groups of pirates and ‘holding’ ones you like the look of. So I spent a good fifteen minutes trying to find a bulkier female body that didn’t look too old and grumpy. I hit that random button so many times, because there were no other customization icons. I kept on pressing random until I stumbled on this look. Which I’m somewhat happy with.

However, once you’ve selected a character, you definitely can’t create another one. You end up stuck with whatever you chose. Which is why my pirate looks a little bit like a pig. The only way to change a character is to create a new one and start from scratch again, or buy something from the in-game shop for real money. But even that just takes you back to the random pirate clicking screen.

I suppose, at least everyone fits the art style.

There is one upside to the random character creation. No matter what, no matter how many times you randomize, it’s still impossible to come up with a true abomination. Every single randomly generated character may be different, but they match the rest of the world pretty much perfectly. Which does seem like a bit of backwards thinking, but I can see why you’d want both NPCs and player characters to all have the same style. No matter how many times you randomize, you won’t ever get a hideous person with stretched or folded features, you’ll always follow the Sea of Thieves art style.

The reason for this is mostly so your character fits the art style, but at the same time, there are theories that the random generator was used so that Sea of Thieves didn’t have any issues with copyright. After all, Pirates of the Caribbean is owned by Disney, and Rare probably didn’t want to end up in a legal battle with them. But despite the fact that there’s an official PotC game mode, the  random pirate generator still exists.

However, that being said, most of Sea of Thieves’ customization is actually in all the unique clothing for your character. And clothing isn’t as connected to the art style as the random characters are. Clothes can range from being half naked, to camo and trying to fit in, all the way to the brightest and gaudiest clothes around.

So, at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter. Because while I may look ugly, at least I’m not as ugly as all those people in neon green and pink…