 We all like creating characters, whether it be molding your idealized self to fit into a fictional universe, trying to recreate the perfect replica of someone you know, or bringing in a character from another property entirely. This is Character Creator Critique. With World of Warcraft's classic servers just over the horizon, I thought it'd be interesting to take a look at WoW's character creator as it is today. MMOs are arguably a genre where the character creators are the most important. With hundreds upon thousands of other players running around, you want to make sure each person can feel unique. WoW is, of course, the big daddy of MMOs, the largest MMO around, both subscription-based and in general, and it's been around for a long time, so its character creator has obviously gone through quite a few changes. And I'm here to see if it can hold up in today's standards of Black Desert Online and WWE. I'm not kidding about that second one. So, let's create a character. So, there are a variety of races and classes, and neither of them are gender locked, thank goodness. And they have changed through the years on which race and class combination you can pick. You can see, as I select different races, different classes are available to me. For example, if I wanted to be a Torren shaman, I could. However, if I wanted to be a gnome, I would be unable to pick the shaman class. They are locked for flavor reasons and lore reasons, things like that. They have changed throughout the years, as new races and classes have been added as time has gone on and expansions have been released, so there may be new ones in the future, I don't know. And speaking of, if you are a lore nerd like Ian, there is a more info button if you wanted to get more info. It gives you a little bit of lore and information about the bonuses and traits you get from each race and class, all these tiny things, kind of the gist of what you're selecting. And when you select a class, it gives you a little preview of some basic gear that you could potentially get for that class, which is pretty nice. Some look better than others. And when you select a class, you have the ability to change basic things like skin color, faces, hairstyles, hair color, and depending on the race or gender, different accessories like piercings or facial hair. So we're going to go over the bad first, because I like to end on a high note. Firstly, this scrolling menu is pretty clunky. I can't zoom in to the character at all, aside from the initial going into the face, but I can't go any further than that. And I also can't look at the character from different angles. I mean, I can change their horizontal viewing, but I can't kind of look at the top of their head or maybe below them if I wanted to see underneath their chin. I can't do that. And with this scrolling menu, I can't really see more than a handful of options at a time. And if there's an option that I want to try out at the bottom of the menu, I have to scroll through them. It also means that if there are two options I want to compare by swapping them instantly, I can't. I have to make sure that it's within the frame to kind of click to go between them. If there's something at the top of the list that I want to compare with something at the bottom of the list, I can't do that. I have to either be lucky enough that they are within two spaces of each other because you're limited to five, you know, at a time. Or I could try to compare them in some sort of external image previewing program like paint or something. It'd be much nicer if I could either see all of the options at once, or most of them, or that I could scroll through them and click them as separate actions as opposed to it selecting whenever, whatever option as I scroll through them, you see, like I scroll through it and it instantly changes to that face. That would matter more though if the options were that significant for as many options as you have for race and class when you settle on one, your selection on how to make it unique are fairly limited. Sure, you have different hairstyles, different hair colors, different skin colors and things like that, but they're all very, very subtle changes. The faces are fairly similar, you know, you won't get crazy different faces. Some hairstyles look the same and a lot of the faces are indistinguishable. In fact, you cannot change the face shape whatsoever, only the face texture. Some faces have slightly different proportions, but for the most part, as you can see with the human male, every face will have a high ridge nose. And maybe I don't want that, but too bad, that's the only nose I get. Even the eye colors are tied to what face you select, instead of being part of a different menu or slider, which brings me to the next negative in that there are no finer adjustments sliders or options for your character. Not only can you not customize the size and shape of your character's face, you cannot customize the size or shape of anything on the character, not the hair length, not the buffness. If you are a human male, you will always be a burly human male, not a skinny one, not a fat one, just always big and buff. If you are a night elf female, you will always be a tall and lanky night elf female. Although the male orcs do get the option to change their posture, which is pretty nice, but you're still going to be an absolute unit. This actually makes me wish more games would allow you to customize your character's posture, because that's a really cool distinction and adds quite a bit of personality. Now I understand that this is to differentiate the races anatomy, but if you look at humans in the real world, we come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, so why can't other races, you know? You can still have an average orc be larger and muscleier than the average human, but it would be nice if you could make some kind of adjustment. Me personally, I'm a pretty skinny guy, so if I wanted to hypothetically self-insert myself as a human, I'd just have to accept that I'm going to have massive beefy arms. Now I know someone is going to point out that there is a human allied race coming that will allow you to play as essentially a fat human, and that's great, but it's still limiting, and the problem still applies to the other races. Basically, your character is going to be looking very similar to a lot of other characters of their race. And one final downside that I'm sure a lot of people are going to disagree with me on is this, the sexual dimorphism. For those of you who don't know what that means, that's when there is a large difference in a species between the males and females. An easy example is how peacocks have bright and beautiful feathers whose tails can spur out to create a bright display of colors, whereas peahens are very dull in color and have much less prominent tail feathers. This is the most subjective negative, but I more often than not consider it a negative when it's done to an extreme degree. Now some of the races do it alright. The dwarves are pretty good, the undead are pretty good, surprisingly. The night elves, the night elves are pretty good, I guess. They suffer from massive arm syndrome, the males, but they're still pretty tall and lanky compared to the other races, and their proportions for the most part make sense. The gnomes are pretty good, even the goblins are pretty good, aside from their faces. I think the girls are a little bit too pretty compared to the guys, like the guys just all kind of have gross disgusting faces, whereas the girls, they're you know, fairly pretty, pretty dumb. There are some ugly faces in there, but for the most part, they look kind of too nice, in my opinion. Hell, even the tauren are pretty good, instead of making them just female humans with a little bit of body hair, they're mostly the same size. Stature is a little bit different, but they do feel like, you know, the males are bulls and the females are cows, which makes a lot of sense for them. This is not the case, however, for a lot of the other races. With the draenei male, you have this hulking massive beast of a man, but then for the female, you have this scrawny, wayfish cosplayer. I mean, it looks so similar to the female night elf, like, it's not even funny. Same with the orcs. The males, you have this stalky, wide figure, but for the females, you get what's no larger than the human males. The trolls are probably the biggest offenders. The males are tall, hunched over with massive tusks, and you actually get a lot of tusk variety too. You can, you know, if you don't like big tusks, you can get small tusks or medium tusks that point up, you know, that's very nice. They're very cool, they get these massive tusks, but then you look at the females and there's just another tall blue girl. Even their tusk sizes are not nearly as varied. Look at that, that's pathetic. And they look so similar at a glance to the draenei and the night elves. If you silhouetted them, I wouldn't be surprised if you had trouble telling them apart. They're just so similar in body type, especially considering how distinct the males are. I mean, look, this troll looks nothing like this draenei, and this draenei looks nothing like this night elf. Now that's not to say I have a problem with tall blue girls, I think they're very pretty, but it very much undermines one of the strengths of WoW's character creator, which I will go over the good now. Even though the options and finer details are limiting, out of the gate you have a lot of general options. There are a lot of races to pick from. There are a lot of classes to pick from. And though the distinction between two different characters of the same race may be minor, the distinction between different races is major for the most part. For the women, like I said, sexual dimorphism is abound. But for the most part, it means no two races look exactly the same. And you could argue that the Horde side has a wider variety of options compared to the Alliance, but without a doubt they are very distinct. But what is quantity if there's no quality? And I think this is another thing this character creator achieves. Every character is appealing in its own way. I don't think there's a single dumb race idea. No, not even the goblins or the gnomes. No, not even the pandar. And sure, you've got your basic fantasy tropes like orcs and elves and dwarves, but you can also play a sun-praising menatar. You can play as a goblin, you can play as a zombie, you can play as a freaking panda for crying out loud. When comparing to other games, you'd be surprised at how many potentially cool races you could pick from that universe only to be limited to boring like a human, but different. But this is a very healthy variety. What makes it better is that the races look nice too. The models look good, the art style looks good for what it is, I guess. I know certain people won't be too fond of the cartoonish aesthetic, but for the most part it is pretty polished. Ever since Legion Blizzard has updated the models and textures as they have been around for a long time and started to show their age. And they look pretty good despite their fairly low poly count, while still fitting in with the classic style of the original game. So as to not upset long-term fans, they basically look as good as you remember them looking. Overall, your character customization is going to be more based off of the gear you wear and transmogrify rather than what's available from the character creator. So conclusion. It never really excels in any way, but there is some nice basic variety, and it gets the job done. If you enjoyed this video and would like to see more, be sure to mention what other character creators you would like to see critiqued. Or if you hated the video, then feel free to write an angry comment about how worthless this idea is for a series, and that I should jump off the nearest balcony for not making a crap guide to monsters. I hope you all have a wonderful day.