In one of the more curious instances of WTF? that I’ve come across in MMO design decisions, I’m currently playing a game where the character creator is absolutely spot on: a pause button to stop your character flailing all over the place while you’re trying to focus on them; an in-depth and varied set of options that actually let you create attractive characters, rather than something like EQ2’s fifty seven sliders to change the size of your ear lobes, but none to correct for the fact that you look like a boss-eyed waxwork from Madame Tussauds™ that has been accidentally left out in the sun; and further customisations once you’re in the game that allow you to create characters with a level of uniqueness that makes City of Heroes’ characters look like they were dressed by the Cub Scouts.

And then, when you get into the game proper, your character looks absolutely nothing like what you created because the game engine couldn’t possibly render such detail, but the translation from one to the other is not just a slightly blurred replication, as though it had been run through an ageing photocopier twenty or so times, no, it looks like someone took a mold of your perfect character and then used the mold itself to form them. The outside part.

It’s like looking at your character reflected in a puddle of jelly.

So what you’re left with is a character creator that is amazing, but has nothing to do with the character you will play in-game, which means that you have no real way of controlling how your character will look for ninety nine percent of the time that you’re interacting with them. It’s like buying a Rolls-Royce only to find out when you get it home that it’s actually a number of Rolls-Royce-shaped boxes, glued together and suspended across the back of an asthmatic cow.

It seems like MMO developers create their games themselves as though they were making a character in an MMO, as if they feel that there is a fixed set of points that one can spend on creating an MMO, and after that one has to stop. “Ah, now, we’ve spent lots of points in Good Ideas For Character Creation so we haven’t got any points left to spend on Making Sensible In-game Avatars, which is a shame”. Perhaps it is the ultimate point system – cold hard cash – which controls such things, but really, when we said we wanted an amazing character creation tool, we didn’t really mean ‘just an amazing character creation tool’, there was a sort of implied requirement that the output of said character creation was translated faithfully into the game world.

But what’s the point in having a fabulous character creator that doesn’t control how your character looks within the actual game?