 Well then, here's something that I'm surprised I haven't covered sooner. D&D Online, the Dungeons & Dragons MMO based on the 3.5 edition rules set, and has such, has basically all similar elements pertaining to it, including its classes, races, spells, feats, and all that stuff. So this should be pretty interesting to see how D&D translates to an MMO character creator. First thing that I want to acknowledge is that although this is a free-to-play game, there are a fair bit of content that is locked behind subscription. So if there's a race, or class, or anything else that has this little button that says Unlock next to it, it usually means that that option is locked behind the subscription fee. So starting out, like most character creators, you can pick your gender, and then we actually have these sort of categories in what the game calls styles, which are sort of a way to organize the large amount of classes that are found in D&D Online into sort of their own little niches, aside from Iconic, which seems to be this game's version of a hero class of sorts, being more unique and maybe has a few more gimmicks than the more traditional ones, as well as being race locked and having a little bit of a backstory tied to it. They start out at a higher level with better starting equipment and abilities on top of that. Next are the actual classes, which are different depending on which style you pick. Again, just a way to sort of organize them. If you pick melee, then you'll have Fighter, Barbarian, Paladin, Monk available to you. If you pick Spell, then you'll have all the casting classes. If you pick Specialist, you'll have the more utility stuff, you know, all that. Over on the right here, we can see that there is more in-depth info about what the class is capable of, including numerical stats and what those stats actually do in the game via tooltips whenever you hover over them, which is pretty nice. And that goes for all the other stuff that's highlighted blue that you can see in any sort of more info tab as well. All you gotta do if you're curious as to what a thing is, you can hover over it and the game will tell you. That is the path from what I understand. This is a subclass of sorts or class archetype that you'd like to be. And just like before, over on the right, there's like a little bit of info on all the different types of subclasses and their differences, including all the different stat changes. Alternatively, if you would like further control and customization of your subclass, you can select customize and be able to make a more in-depth adjustment of the class, which we will come to later. Otherwise, afterwards, we have a massive list of races to choose from, albeit a lot of them are behind the subscription fee. And then looks, which is the visual customization of your character with a few varying options depending on the race you pick. This includes hair and hair color, eye shapes, nose, which is actually more of like the face shape option, mouth, facial hair, skin color and individual unique race specific options, horns and tails for tieflings, facial markings and different plating for warforged tusks for half orcs. You get the idea. There's also a randomized button and locks for every option in case you want a certain one to not be changed while clicking the randomized button. Now, I mentioned a moment ago that you can go more in-depth with your custom subclass. And that actually happens right after you pick your race. If you choose to go with the custom class path, this will bring up an entirely different set of menus, first of which is assigning your ability points to your six different stats up to a maximum of base 18, not including, of course, any sort of additional bonuses you'll get from your race, like for example, right here, I'm playing a half orc. So I get plus two to my strength automatically, where otherwise this would be 18. Now, how this works is that you can put in ability points into each skill and the points will increase to their cost as they go up higher and higher. For example, you can see here at 14, each increase will now cost two points from your little pool here. And then at 16, it will start to cost three points, et cetera. Each ability score has a brief little description on what it does. If you hover over and see the little tooltip and you can hover over various different other parts of the menu for more in-depth tooltips on how each of these mechanics work. Then you have skill points to spend on various different types of skills, each one pertaining to its own sort of thing that you can do in dungeons or combat or role play. It is D&D after all. So you've got all the basic D&D things like bluffing and doing stealth and perceiving secret passages and traps, things like that. And just like before, there's a little description over here on the right and tooltips when hovering over each skill to tell you what they do. How many points you have to spend will depend on your class. For example, a fighter will have a measly eight points to spend, whereas a bard gets a whopping 20. Your ability scores from the previous page will also determine the effectiveness of each of these stats. So you can either min max and capitalize on a skill that you're good at from your ability scores, or you could use your skill points to maybe bolster up a skill that you might not be great at. The choice is really up to you. Then after that, we have feats. I personally have two feats, but here you can choose a various assortment of situational skills and abilities that will be different depending on your race and class as to which ones are available to pick. There are both active and passive feats that you can take from having more defense against debuffs to enlarging your AOE spells to having a stun. There's a lot of them. This page also lists the feats you automatically receive from your chosen race and class as well. Next, if you are a spellcasting class, you will be able to pick some spells from a list. How many will depend again on which spellcasting class you have? As a bard, I am allowed to pick one, for example. But if I'm a wizard or sorcerer, I think I'm given like four or five. Then I'll show you a little summary page, just in case you want to go over all of your little special abilities and features and all that stuff. And then when you're done with all that, you can name your character and finally start playing the game. Boy, there's a lot of stuff. So let's take it step by step with what could use some improving? Firstly, right off the bat, the game is kind of ugly. Obviously, it's an MMO that came out in 2006. So it's working with a lot of limitations. But hey, I'm just calling a spade a spade, but not just the characters. The UI is kind of ugly as well. Visually, the buttons and text is large and compressed and look stretched out rather than fitting the proper native resolution of the screen, which brings me to the next thing about the UI that I don't like. And that's the layout. And in the custom subclass menu, especially there are way too many fonts, let's just count how many are on the ability score screen alone. That's way too many fonts, not to mention the lack of spacing between text and other UI elements makes everything feel way too cramped and tight. Like, give me some extra room to breathe, man. Overwhelming is really the best way I can describe this menu, but not just in layout, but in content too. When you're making your own subclass, there is way too much crap here. Too many feats, too many spells, too much info for each one. And I'm someone who knows a lot of this stuff. I play D&D, so I'm used to reading loads and loads of text. And I'm still intimidated by all this text and choices that just I just don't even want to bother with. Think about a new player who has no idea what any of this stuff means. They're going to have choice paralysis with just how many things there are. The counterpoint is that if all of this is too overwhelming for you, then you could just pick a pre-made subclass and not have to worry about it. But I think that ignores the problem instead of solving it. It's in the game, so I feel it necessary to critique. And yeah, I can ignore the bad parts, but you can technically ignore the bad parts of any game. I'm sure Sonic 06 is great if you just ignore the bugs. Yes, this is good for people who really like to go in-depth and meticulously craft every little part of their gameplay experience. But I think the process could have been streamlined a little bit more. Sure, it's like D&D, but that doesn't mean it couldn't use some improvements. Hell, I have my own issues with actual D&D character creation that I may talk about one day, but this is a video game, which means a lot of these systems can be improved upon in ways that you can't do with pen and paper. One suggestion is to maybe cut down on how many feats or abilities that you have to worry about until later on in the game. Slowly drip feed all the different choices that players have and let them pick later on when they're more informed about all this stuff. Right now, this is just way too much for starting your character. Most of the time, the player is going to go picking a bunch of random stuff and then go, sure, another issue I have with the UI is the functionality. You cannot switch between each category at will. You have to go one by one. For example, if I wanted to go from race to looks, even just clicking on the tabs, I have to go through each one one at a time instead of just being able to flip through whichever one I want to edit at the moment. This is especially annoying if you have a custom class that you want to have. So if you want to go straight to your looks, you have to distribute all your stats, pick all your skills, pick your feats again, finish looking through the summary and then you'll get to looks. And then if you want to go back to your race and you decide, oh, I don't want to be a half work. I want to be a tiefling. You've got to go back through all of these menus back again and then confirm so that you can go back to the race menu. And if you have a custom class, once you pick your race, you're going to have to do all that again. And it is really, really frustrating to deal with. Now, there are about a dozen other smaller things with the UI I could whine about. But what I listed are just the most immediate and major things. And yeah, you get the idea by now. It's not great. Let's move on. Here we have the visual part of the character creator, which I am also not a big fan of overall. The most obvious negative being that every option is on this little number system that I have to click through every single option, which I do not like. This means you have to select through each and every single option individually in order to see them all. And it makes comparing options very difficult because I can't compare option five with option two without having to scroll through every single other one. Not to mention that depending on the race, there may not be a lot of options for each item either. There are about seven faces for human male and six for female, which I would show you if it weren't for the fact that you have to go back a menu in order to select your gender, which is kind of weird, but I've already talked about the bad UI stuff anyway. But yeah, it's inconsistent. Sometimes there's a lot of options for one thing and then maybe like three or four options for something else. And I guess the final thing I'm a bit disappointed by is the absence of any sort of body options. Sure, the different biology of these different races means that their bodies will favor a specific size and shape and build over another, but I don't think it'd be out of the question if I were able to make my elf a little bit chubbier or my orc a little bit skinnier if I wanted to look at humans in the real world and even athletic ones that come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Now, all this may seem like a lot of bad things, the UI, especially. And that tends to be a result of having so many different things in a character creator. It means that more things can go wrong or be done poorly. Surely the inverse should be true, right? Let's look at the things that got right. Firstly, I want to praise the amount of variety you have in what you want to play. You have a total of nine whole classes to pick from if you're playing free, 20 if you pay the subscription. And although they're for free to play races, a whopping 13 for paying players. There are a load of combinations you can make with all the mixing and matching, even if you just play for free with just how many classes are available to you. And variety is nice. But what about the quality of that variety? Well, this game's got you covered there, too. You've got all your usual suspect classes, just about every fantasy class is available, plus a few extras. You're going to be hard pressed to find a typical class that's missing in here, unless it's something super obscure. If you want to be a healer, you can be a healer. If you want to be a tank, you can be a tank. It's based off the grandfather of RPGs, so it's to be expected that it covers all the bases as far as playstyle goes. You can play as a bard, so that's pretty awesome and something not enough games do, at least for me anyway. And this extends to the races as well. There are so many cool ones that go beyond the slightly different kind of human. And if you play D&D, some of these might look familiar to you. You've got the Asimar, which are celestial angel people. You've got Dragonborn, which are a Scaly's dream, even if they do look kind of like derpy frogs. You've got all the usual various flavors of elf, of course. And you've also got Tiefling, which do not make enough appearances in D&D games despite their popularity. And the ever awesome Warforge. As a D&D fan, it's nice to see all of these races represented after playing so many games with elf, dwarf, human, elf, dwarf, human, elf, dwarf, human, and then the odd orc. And even if I wasn't into D&D, all these unique races are nice to see, nonetheless, to change things up a little in my fantasy setting. Next, I want to appreciate that it does a decent job of informing the player of what all these special abilities and bonuses mean. Anything with a highlighted text or specific things in the custom class menu allows you to hover over the options and give you a brief little summary of what it does. And that is an incredible quality of life feature that I'd love to see in more games that have unique systems because this really, really helps inform the players like myself who have never played D&D 3.5 and may not entirely understand this game's mechanics. My biggest pet peeve is when information is hidden. Like, you know, in Call of Duty, when you want to know the stats of a gun and they just give you these little bars with flat numbers, with no relation to anything, like, what does that even mean? And then you've got to go onto a wiki page and find out, whereas all the info in this game is just right here. That is so refreshing. Lastly, I want to praise just how much control this game gives you as far as making a custom subclass. Just how much it lets you fine tune your gameplay style. Sure, I complained about the actual layout and overwhelming amount of choice and information just sprayed all over your face whenever you first open this up. But after taking a while to really look over my options, I found myself thinking about all the different types of starting builds for a character just by messing around with all these options. It's the same praise I gave Divinity and how customizable the game allowed you to tailor your play style. I feel the same thing here that looking past the overwhelming amounts of information and really kind of sucky layout that if I was better informed and understood more of these icons and skills at a glance, it'd be something I could really, really appreciate and already kind of do to some extent. I love creating custom play styles. Actually, there is one more thing that I would like to praise this game for, and that is letting you choose and preview all of these subscription races, even if you are free to play. I can pick Alchemist, I can pick Tiefling and then go through all this class customization, even though I don't have a subscription. It lets me preview and play with and mess with all the different choices that are available for that class and race. In case I'm curious as to what it entails, and I think that's great. It allows me to see what this class might be like before I make my purchase. And that's perfect. Conclusion, hidden underneath the ugly graphical and UI exterior and the overwhelming amount of information you need to digest to know what you're doing is a very in-depth character creator that gives you a load of options to mix and match and a ton more ways to decide on how you want to play. The hard part is getting past the ugliness and necessary homework. This has been character creator critique. Thank you for watching and I will see you next time.