 The Xbox One version of Black Desert Online featured in this video was provided to me by Pearl Abyss. All footage of the console version of the game was captured on an Xbox One and is based on a pre-release version of the game, which is not 100% representative of the final product. Keep an open mind, beta is beta. So this was a long time coming, for good reason. Black Desert Online, an MMO that no doubt you've heard of, one that many say has one of the, if not THE most in-depth and customizable character creators to date. As you can see here, Pearl Abyss was kind enough to allow me an early look at the upcoming Xbox One version of the game, which has some differences with the PC version. There aren't that many, but I will address them when necessary. To start off, you get to pick a class, the console version of which has 6 so far and the PC version having 17 at the time of recording. I'm willing to guess that the console version will receive the rest of the classes as time goes on, but don't quote me on that, I don't have insider knowledge and am just taking a shot in the dark. These classes not only determine your playstyle and role and whatever else MMORPG classes tend to entail, but they also serve as visual presets, as each one of them has a different set of face, body, and other options. Come to a heavier degree than others. From there, we can start customizing our character. In terms of appearance, we have hair, face, body, and voice. For the hair options, you get around 15 per class, some have more, some have less, and you can change certain things like the hair length and shape and curliness depending on which style of the hair. Certain hairstyles will actually allow you to adjust certain sections of the hair in case you wanted to flow in a certain direction or anything like that. You can also color individual parts of the hair, like the tips and the roots, as well as adjusting how shiny or curly it all is. Like hair, you have different face options depending on what class you picked. For example, this wizard has an old man preset in case you wanted to look like an old man. Then you have skin color complete with strange colors and a shine slider, facial hair of varying degrees, and the big one, face shape. This ain't your grandpappy's face shape adjustment either. Each one of those highlighted areas is an individual part of the face you can morph, either by its location, its size, or its rotation. You can either go in and fidget with it by hand, or for the more methodical of you, there is a set of sliders that you can use to make more precise adjustments. You can even enable or disable symmetry if you want to give your character a non-symmetrical face. And also some nice quality of life is that you can lift the hair or remove the highlights if they're in the way of your adjustments. From there, you have what you'd expect from an MMO, except with a little bit more customization. Some additional options for things like individual irises and pupils, makeup, tattoos, wrinkles, and even a standby expression for what face you want your character to make while they are idle. Nearly every one of those options has additional adjustment sliders. And now onto body. For shape, just like the face, you have individual control over the length, width, and depth of various different parts of the arms, legs, thigh, belly, chest, just about everything. Or you could also edit the body with these more general sliders if you don't feel like doing all the individual body morphing ordeal. You have some extra things like muscle tone and tattoos, and this is an interesting opposing feature for if you want to pose the character for whatever reason, maybe for screenshots or something. And you can change your character's voice and pitch and along with some previews via emotes and attacks and stuff. So far, the console version only seems to have one voice for each of the six classes, not sure if they plan on adding more or not. You can pick a horoscope for flavor and backstory reasons. Then you can preview the character and different poses, presumably poses that they can and will take as you play the game. And you can try on different sets of equipment that sort of gives you an idea of what the class wears, anything from practical to impractical to stylish to not so stylish. And lastly, there's the beauty album, which allows you to browse, upload and download created characters to and from the online gallery. So say you have made a character you are particularly proud of, you can post it online for the entire world to see and use if they so wish. Or if you don't feel like doing all these fine tuning adjustments or whatever, you can download a community made character for yourself. Quick detour, the PC version of the game has the option of applying the most popular settings of the class you picked. So if you're interested in seeing what everyone else is looking like, you can roll the dice and see what great and or questionable creations the community has made. There is the option to change your character's appearance after the initial creation via the appearance change coupon, which can be purchased with the game's premium currency, i.e. real world cash. You can either buy a single use coupon or a slightly more expensive 30 day coupon, which allows you unlimited appearance changes until the time is up. Alternatively, you can save up loyalty points to spend on one or snag one from the in game marketplace if you don't feel like forging over extra cash. Oh, all righty, let's tackle this behemoth with the bad first. Take a shot, everybody, because I'm going to complain about the UI. Both the console and PC versions suffer from some minor UI annoyances. For the console version, anytime you cancel out of a submenu, it always places the selector at the top of the list every time. So let's say I scroll down to make up and then I pick something, some lipstick, you know, some eyeliner, and then I exit out. It puts it back at the top on face type and it does this every time. So say you're trying to flip through these menus really quickly, you're going to have to scroll down through them over and over again instead of simply leaving it where you last were. Also, the sliders move a little bit too slow for my liking. They do accelerate as you continuously adjust, but it just takes a tad too long, in my opinion. What else is when adjusting the individual parts of the body? It gets a little bit finicky when you're trying to select things. I guess it's the nature of making selections with the joystick, but it's kind of hard to pick between different parts. Flicking the stick in a certain direction may not always select the portion in that direction. It's kind of inconsistent and takes way too much to get used to. And it's hard to tell where it's going to go. Perhaps giving the user a cursor instead would fix this problem, because luckily the PC version doesn't have either of those issues since you're using a mouse, but instead it has a different, slightly less annoying one. When using the mouse to move and adjust parts of the character, if you accidentally hover over a window while clicking the mouse button down and holding it down and adjusting, you will grab on to said window and start moving it around. This can get really frustrating when you're simply trying to move the different parts of the character around and you keep selecting these windows, which can obstruct your vision while adjusting. These might seem like minor issues, but considering this is such an in depth and heavy duty character creator, you're going to be spending a lot of time in it. So the minor things add up quickly the longer and more often you have to deal with them. But the biggest issue of all for me is that the classes are gender locked. Not only that, certain body types are class locked. I know it's just natural and expected for a lot of Korean MMOs to have gender locked classes, but I've never seen any benefit to it. Some may note that there are equivalent classes for both genders like how the wizard and the witch are male and female equivalents of each other in some sense, but that doesn't change the fact that they are still different classes with different skills and abilities. So say that there's a skill with the wizard that I really like that's not available to the witch, but I would much rather play as a woman. There's unfortunately nothing I can do in that regard. I'll just have to compromise in some way, but it doesn't stop there. The appearance options you're given for customizing the character are also dependent on what class you have on top of that. Say there's a hairstyle you really want or face shape you would prefer. Or heck, in the berserkers case, maybe you don't want this hunched over posture or you do, but you would like it on a different class. Too bad you're stuck with what you're given. Some classes have more hairstyles than others. The wizard has an old man preset, but the witch doesn't have an old lady preset. In fact, nobody else has an old person preset to speak of and take as much time combing over each and every option as much control as it gives you. You can only change the base shape so much without being able to perfectly recreate a face from another class whose appearance you would prefer. Try as you might, but the berserkers face will never ever look like the fighter's face. It's just a missed opportunity in my eyes and feels like it's a bit of unnecessary extra work on the developer as well, because they have to create new different presets every time they want to have a new class instead of just having one frame with all of the options available to all of the classes. But hey, I'm not a developer. I don't know what goes on behind the scenes. So there might very well be a very, very good design and technical reason why they do this. Just from a player perspective, this feels like it's so close to being the most in-depth and freely customizable character creator on the market. But it's just being held back a ton by the system. And it's a real shame because there is a lot to like about this character creator a lot. I mean, a lot, a lot like, holy shit. First, the characters look good, like really good, even on console. There's the odd pixel-y texture sometimes here and there, but the major parts of the character look incredible in terms of graphical fidelity, which is crazy to think because this is an MMO. MMOs aren't supposed to look this good. They're supposed to look low-poly with blurry textures and stylized graphics to make up for the fact that they can't reach modern AAA single-player games. Well, Black Desert Online laughs at MMO limitations and says, here's a game that looks amazing and you can make your character look like a monster. Have fun. Second, this character creator has selectable preview, not instant preview. So no hovering over an option causing it to instantly pop onto your character here. Comparisons between options is easy because you can switch between them as you please. Third, there are so many fine-tuning options. So many fine-tuning options, like everything has additional adjustment sliders. It's insane. The things like hair length and position, shininess, the wrinkles of your face, the placement and morphing of tattoos, iris and pupil adjustments. It's just all so much to work with that they'd be great on their own, but on top of that, you still have an incredibly in-depth shape control for the face and body combined with the pose maker. And this is a nice gateway into 3D modeling and animation. I'm recording this while I'm editing because I hadn't noticed while I was recording, but on the PC version, you can actually undo up to a certain amount of actions that you've taken on the character creator, as well as make temporary saves in case you want to go back to a previous version that you are working on. That's really, really cool. By the way, this system of messing with the individual parts of the face is incredible for how much control you have over the way your character looks. The asymmetry option, the ability to change size, position and rotation. This is Dark Souls' level control over the face where if you so wish, it can clip into itself and make monstrous creations. The difference being with this, it's much easier to understand and use and be in control in making those adjustments. I mean, how many games allow you to adjust the ear lobe and helix individually and make an oo-woo face and have your eyeball clip outside of your eyelid? And it was all on purpose, but it doesn't just stop there. No, no, no. They took this system and applied it to the body as well. You can change individual parts of the body to be skinny or chunky as you want. It's not exactly fat fat, but it's leagues ahead of what most character creators give you by a long shot. I don't know how Pearl Abyss managed to do it, but they made possibly the most adjustable and customizable body options in a video game. Certainly the most control over them at the very least. And yes, there is a butt slider. And finally, the flip side of the genderlocked classes is that though these all act as individual presets that are exclusive to that class and gender, they are still each one of them individual unique presets. So if you don't care about the classes being locked behind them, then you can see this as each one being their own canvas with unique options. And with that in mind, it does mean that you do have so, so much to mess with. Enough time and experimentation and you will find your perfect look in this game. And you know what? If you don't have the time or will to do so, this beauty album and online gallery feature is fantastic. There are so many talented players out there that can make so many good looking characters that if you give it the time, you can find one that suits your liking. Conclusion. The genderlocked classes and class locked body and face frames hold it back from being truly the most in-depth and customizable character creator. Guests will just have to settle for amazing face body and find detail adjustments with the ability to go into overwhelming amounts of player control. This has been character creator critique. Be sure to vote for which character creator you would like to see next. So and happy Valentine's Day.