 Apologies in advance, some of the audio might sound a little bit weird, there's a baseball game happening right outside my apartment. So Guild Wars 2 is an MMORPG well known for its featured personal story, action combat, dynamic events, and yes, declaredly fairly decent character creator. Customization in MMOs is very important as there are thousands of players running around in the world and the last thing you want those thousands of players to endure is having the character look exactly like every other chosen one trying to save the world. From the beginning we have five races to choose from, the char large furry beasts, the earthly human persons, large earthly human persons, the azura which are little furry gnome goblin little things which are kind of weirdly cute slash ugly, and my personal favorite the silvari walking talking plant people. None of the races are genderlocked and neither are the classes of which there are nine after you select your race and they're even nicely organized into tanky dexie and castie groups. Interesting notice that these classes are not tied down to a single weapon unlike most MMOs, there are weapons that they can't use but depending on the class you will have a pool to choose from so let's say you wanted to be a mesmer who uses a two-handed sword then you can do that. After selecting your class you can then go into further detail starting with the body as you do have a height slider and also some physical builds to choose from and each race will have its own set of exclusive features like the char's horns or the silvari skin patterns and night time glow color. Ooh look at that. As for the face you have a selection of presets to choose from as well as additional adjustment sliders for the eyes the nose the mouth and sometimes different features depending on the race as well and lastly in terms of appearance you also have this which is interesting armor dies. Just about every piece of armor in the game can be dyed with usually multiple colors up to four different colors at a time each one taking on a different piece or material of the armor. You start with a certain selection to choose from these bunch right here and can unlock additional colors through progressing through the game and purchasing them with in-game currency. There is also a selection of exclusive colors that can be obtained through this game's version of a cash shop with real-world money. Once that's all done we then have the personal story portion where you get to pick and choose different parts of your character's backstory and personality depending on their race and chosen class and these choices will actually be reflected in the game's dialogue and dialogue choices occasionally which is pretty neat. There is a transmog system in the game that allows you to change a set of equipment's looks while retaining its stats as well as a way to redo your character's appearance completely if you aren't happy with it via the total makeover kit which can be obtained in a ton of different ways in-game or purchased with real-world cash. However it does not allow you to change your race or class but just about everything else. So what's bad? Firstly and this is sort of a nitpick but the UI has some potential that it's not filling and it's kind of annoying. Firstly there is a ton of unused space to the right over here which I feel like could have been used to show the rest of some of the options you're given like this hair where you only get like one and a half pages like I feel as though they could have fit this extra half page of options in the rest of the space that they have over here instead of having to select through these arrows just to see a handful of options. Like especially the beard options on human male you get six displayed at the time so you have to keep scrolling through these arrows instead of just displaying them all at once which I feel like they could fit. Viewing your character is also a little bit clunky you can't tilt them at all only rotate horizontally and in order to zoom in and out instead of holding a right mouse button or scrolling you have to click this little button and you only have two levels of zoom. It would be nice to have a bit more control over how you can view your character because I might not like how they look at a specific angle or would like to see what I'm customizing like it's really awkward to look at the feet down there you see how I can only kind of barely see it it would be nice if I could maybe adjust them up and have a better look at their shoes. Using this creator is pretty painless but these little things make it not quite as easy as it could be and sometimes that adds up whenever you're spending a lot of time customizing your character. And here's another thing instead of having a separate option for facial features like scars or freckles etc it's tied to your head option which I'm not really a fan of. Perhaps a player might like a certain face but won't like the makeup that it has or vice versa they find a face that they like but would like the makeup of another face onto it they aren't really able to apply it to the face they want. The game does try to alleviate this by having multiple variations of faces some with the features and some without but I think that that's a flimsy band aid because firstly you still don't get to pick and choose which extra features on the face you would like you're still limited to what faces do have them and secondly you have to look for that variation because they might not be right next to each other for example this face and this face I have to keep scrolling back and forth to compare them and lastly another minor thing that this is just sort of the nature of having multiple races but I think it's still kind of disappointing is some of the races get a bit shafted in how many options they have compared to the others like humans get a huge amount of hairstyles like look look how many that's like four pages four or five pages but then you look at the azura and then you have nine that's it nine that's all you get so yeah there is some room for improvement here and there but notice that there were no major issues I had with this creator well that's because it is really nice overall so let's go over the good and I gotta tell you there's a lot first of all the presentation of this character creator is fantastic and I'm not just talking about the quality and style of the character itself though we'll get to that but this UI is not only nice and functional but it's nice to look at too this is incredibly stylish I love this whole messy painted style it's got going on which persists through the whole game by the way and it is a super unique way to present your menus I love it I mentioned before that there are some minor things that make the UI a little bit tedious to use but I say it's got unfilled potential that sticks out because it is so incredible to use to begin with a good UI takes absolutely no time getting used to and is completely out of the way and while writing this critique I hadn't even had a single thought about the UI once aside from it looks nice which it does which is a good sign the navigation is super simple and quick and natural nothing aside from having to hit the scroll buttons while selecting your options feels like a chore to use even the amount of sliders you get which is a lot they're organized well and nice and right there just ready for you to use and scroll up and down you know what's especially nice selectable preview instead of insta preview which is always appreciated next the non-human races are among the most distinct I've seen in a fantasy setting sure we often see fantasy races like these but they're more often than not NPCs and you're not able to play as them because I guess the developers worry that they'd be too weird or too out there or unbelievable to play as not these no these are wacky and weird and different and cool and the silvari skin can glow in the dark and can you see why they are my favorite what's even better is that I got to say this is one of the best examples of good sexual dimorphism the char are hunched over big and bulky and barely a hint of humanoid not just for the men but the women and the children too and the same kind of equality goes for every race except for the Norn the female Norn cannot be nearly as bulky as the males but hey four out of five ain't bad as for how they look the art style and fidelity of these characters is pretty good as well the former more so than the latter but we'll give it a free pass since it's not that bad and it is an MMO after all but yeah there's some nice detail in there the characters are stylized enough that you don't run into the uncanny valley I especially like how the equipment looks they do a lot with what they're given considering the limitations of being an MMO released in 2012 like look at that that looks snazzy I'd wear that speaking of doing a lot there are quite a few fine detail options in here you not only get several body options for different proportions of upper and lower body you get a height slider these face sliders a bunch of colors to work with there's not a lot to complain about when it comes to how much you can fine-tune your character from its base model I especially appreciate the armor die options that are super cool occasionally in games I may like how a piece of equipment looks but not necessarily like its stats which is why I love transmog system but this takes it a step further and lets you customize said armor's color scheme on top of that and it even allows you to do it from the very beginning which is very appreciated better yet it's not just limited to one color well I mean for some pieces of equipment it is but for a lot of the armor's it's multiple up to four colors which I gotta say that's pretty awesome and lastly this whole personal story thing is very neat I love role-playing and video games and I love it when games allow you to implement them into the gameplay which Guild Wars 2 does CCC is not a game critiquing show so I will not talk about how well it uses this feature but from what I play to the game it does appear frequently enough that this feels definitely important and plays well into making this character truly custom tailored to you I feel like I'm just going through the list of all of this character creators features and praising each and every one but that's because it's just that good which brings me to the conclusion it's the jack of all trades character creator although it falls short in some areas it does just about everything you want in a creator at least decently well and several things other character creators don't even have the presentation usability and bonus features are all great and it is a personal favorite character creator of mine this has been character creator critique be sure to vote for which character creator do you'd like to see next and I'll see you then