If you were planning to spend hours making sure your chin looks just right and ensuring your eyes aren’t too close together when you fire up Mass Effecty sci-fi RPG Exodus, I’ve got bad news. Rather than a slider-based character creator with ten million sliders controlling the likes of cheek yaw and ear curvitude, devs Archetype Entertainment have decided to set the majority of protagonist Jun Aslan’s face in stone to make him a more defined person, leaving only the likes of hair and tattoos for you to muck about with.
The Wizards of the Coast-backed studio revealed this info in their June community update post on Reddit. “As we continue to reveal more about our game, we want to be upfront and transparent with you about where character customization stands,” they wrote. “This has been a long journey, and along the way, we made a creative decision to build a more defined character.”
“Our customisation feature set is focused on curated options rather than a full slider-based character creator. This means Jun will have a more established look, with options including hairstyles, facial hair, hair color, eye color, makeup, and tattoos.”
The studio plan to show off some of this hair and makeup customisation in action over the coming months, in the hopes of demonstrating that despite not having control over the width of his nostrils, you’ll still be able to bring a splash of your own style to the spaceboy. Personally, unless I’m deliberately trying to make something hilariously hideous, I personally tend not to get too far into the nitty-gritty of character creators with hundreds of sliders, mainly out of fear I’ll do something then come to realise at the 50 hour mark it makes my person look tremendously wonky from one particular angle. There are also never any good noses, because for some reason picking the thing that sticks out of the middle of your face makes its presence seem really weird all of a sudden.
So, I can’t see being limited to slapping a funky hairdo and moustache on Jun being too much of a problem for me, but can certainly see why folks who’re more confident in their brow manipulation could well be disappointed.
In the end, how this decision ends up looking in hindsight will likely come down to how people take to the defined aspects of Jun’s personality. It might be an extreme example given how beloved he is, but to my knowledge folks rarely complain about not being able to move Geralt’s eyebrows around without mods whenever they fire up The Witcher 3.
