 Hey you, finally awake, so Skyrim, oh Skyrim, Skyrim, Skyrim. So for standardization sake, just like Divinity, I'm only going to be going over the vanilla unmodded version of the game, because we're looking at the game itself and its creator, not the infinite potential of its modding community. This is the special edition of Skyrim, but I'm sure that not much has changed as far as the character creator is concerned. As with most fantasy RPGs, you begin with a handful of races, orcs, elves, humanoids and the like, and you get a little blurb of lore right over here, giving you some backstory and a little info on unique bonuses for each race, like how the Khaji get bonus damage to unarmed attack, or how Argonians can breathe underwater. And then if we go to body, we have sex, male or female, we have skin tone, weight, and a few presets, in case the amount of fine detail options is a little bit overwhelming for first timers, or if there's a look you would like to start out with, that you find in one of the presets that you like. Then for head, we have what are basically facial features, things like scars, wrinkles, face paint, etc, things like that. Next is face, which is not actually the entire face, but rather the nose, the cheeks, the jaw, and a few other options like cheeks, neck, and forehead colors. So if you want rosy cheeks or a dark forehead, you can find those options here. Next are eyes, which are what about you would expect, shape, color, size, orientation, all those things. Eye brows, again, what you would expect, mouth, similar deal, and hair, again, about what you would expect. And how the adjustments work is that you have these sliders for each different parts of the face, whether it be the mouth high, you know, the mouth depth, you move it forward and back using all these sliders. And that's how it works for pretty much every single option in the character creator, you have these sliders. And it is usable with mouse and keyboard, so yeah. Now, I apologize, if it seems like I went through that pretty quickly, there's just not a lot to go over as far as this menu is concerned. Skyrim's character creator is very basic and to the point. And it's also because, boy, there's a lot to unpack here. First of all, that intro. Before you actually reach the character creator, every time you have to sit through the game's intro, which can take up to about four or five minutes. Yes, you can save right before the character creator to solve that problem, but it's still a problem that the player has to solve instead of having a built-in skip function or something. Not the most annoying thing and you can mod it out. But as I said, vanilla game, it's a tad annoying. And it's not the worst thing, but say if you don't have the foresight to save right before the intro ends, in fact, I forgot to and I intended to for this video, then you have to sit through the expedition dump for another five minutes just to make a new character and finally start customizing. Second, though, there does seem to be a lot of options. It feels as though some are missing, like not in the sense that they were taken out of the game, but in the sense that you feel as though they should be there. Like here's an example, like you may have the ability to change the nose height according to the face. If you want to make it higher or lower, you can change nose length and you can look like the Wicked Witch of the West. But what about nose width, nose size, like I take a closer look at that snout? It's a weird problem that's hard to really describe. But the fact that you can only customize some parts of the face, but not others just kind of feels weird. There's also very little to differentiate your overall head shape in this game. You can adjust and adjust all the sliders. But aside from, I guess, like hair and some of the wrinkles and, you know, colors here and there, characters of the same race are going to feel very similar looking. And I understand that different species share similar features to one another, but again, if you look at us humans, we come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and colors and all sorts of things. I don't think it'd be too unrealistic to expect the same to be possible for other species as well. This is the case for some races more than others. Speaking of which, the same goes for the body. It's very limited. You do have a weight slider, but it's more like a muscle mass. And unless you compare the lowest setting with the highest, there's not going to be a lot of difference in body types. Everyone's going to be around the same height and same build for that race. I know some of the races are shorter or taller than others, but it's very, very unnoticeable and there's no way to adjust it either. Everyone in the game is going to be pretty much around the same height and build. Now, I understand both of these negatives are obviously because there's going to be a lot of equipment and a lot of different characters in the game, and said equipment has to be able to fit on everyone. So the developers decide to have every character just kind of look around the same so that they can spend resources on something probably more important. Still a downside though. Next is the presentation. The game's graphics, it hasn't aged well. And that's not really anyone's fault and nothing can really change it, but yeah, the models are a little bit dirty and not very expressive. There's not a lot of character to these characters. Admittedly, that is a little subjective as you could say that they purposefully made it a little bit grungy to fit this sort of aesthetic and we'll talk about that later, but in my personal preference, it's not great. And lastly, this is a big one and as much as it pains me to say, because I love Skyrim, but the user interface, good Lord. Ooh, there's a lot of work that needs to be done. It is rough, especially if you're purely using a mouse. Some may think it's easier to navigate on controller and you'd be right, but it's still not a great user interface. That's why I've been using keyboard for the majority of this. Now let's just take this one step at a time. Firstly, the categories are mislabeled and not very well organized, I feel. You would think that face would mean the whole face and cover everything involving facial features, but no, it's the nose, cheeks, and jaw and all other parts of the face are in their own category. You know, the things like the eyes and the eyebrows and the amount of sliders for each category doesn't make any sense either. Why do the eyebrows have their own category? When you only have like four sliders, couldn't you lump in the eyebrows with the eyes? I feel like that would make a lot of sense. And if not because you're worried about cluttering it with too many sliders, then why does the face category have so many then? Couldn't you break it up into nose, cheeks, and jaw and maybe put like makeup somewhere for the cheek and forehead colors? Everything's just sort of everywhere and it gets really confusing, especially head. Doesn't really have anything to do with the head. It's just sort of, you know, facial features, not really the whole head. Then there's actually viewing the character. You can't zoom in or out at all, aside from, I guess, seeing the upper torso when you go to the body category. But you can't really manipulate the camera at all. The only way to view your character at a different angle is to drag their head and look in a side direction and that's pretty much it. You can't really zoom in or out or to a comfortable distance. This face takes up like just a small portion of the screen. I would like to look a little bit closer, if possible. But I can't do that. Next, not only is there not a selectable preview, there is no preview for your options. None whatsoever. So if you want to see what's available for your character, you have to go through every single option to see what it does and see what you like. If I want to see all the different hairstyles or like compare to, I can't. I just have to keep on scrolling to look at the last one and then, oh, I want to compare the last one with the first one. Well, I gotta scroll all the way back to the first one. And sure, you could say it's a little easier on mouse and keyboard, but this is not intuitive whatsoever. And imagine on keyboard and controller, you have to scroll through every option to see what they are. And it makes comparing options really finicky, which brings me to probably the biggest user interface crime that Skyrim has committed against its people. The usability and navigation of this darn thing. You can't see all of the categories and you can't flip between the ones that you want at a moment's notice. You have to constantly be flipping through each and every single one individually. And the same goes for the options in each category. You have to scroll through them if you want to reach the one that you want. On mouse, it's even worse because the slider buttons are so precise that you have to take a few extra seconds trying to grab the darn thing and then sometimes you don't even grab it. There's a lot of wasted space where they could have shown all of the options as well. Maybe rearrange the sliders and text so that you can display more at once. Give us panels to select, numbers to gauge, what option we're on, anything. Come on, Skyrim, get it together. Obviously this doesn't ruin the character creator experience, but thinking about the lack of convenience that this character creator gives you, it leads to a lot of wasted time. You don't want the player to waste time trying to figure out your menus. So there's a lot of room for improvement, like a lot. But of course the game does have some good points, right? Well, of course it does. Let's get positive. The character options themselves are not that bad even for a near decade old game. Firstly, there's a lot of options here. Tons of races to choose from and most of them are very distinct. Though I did say it felt lacking. I can't deny there's still plenty of options for you to choose from as far as customizing your character. And similar to Final Fantasy XIV, some people just appreciate having these options even if it changes very, very little. Then there's the style of the game. You may think this is a typical fantasy with elves and orcs and though that's partly true to an extent they do look very distinct and unique. The elves in Skyrim, for example, are very different looking and sort of have their own identity from elves in other media. And though they're not necessarily my cup of tea, I can't deny that they do stand out. And the same goes for the other non-human based races as well. You can play as a furry or an orc that isn't monstrous or a lizard person. I think that's really cool and more games need lizard people. Divinity has lizard people. I rest my case. And though the graphics are a little dated, Skyrim has a very uniquely gritty and semi-grounded style that it pulls off pretty well. And I think some people can appreciate that. And I've been pretty negative so I'll say one nice thing about the UI. It's aesthetically pleasing. It's very clean. I think it looks very nice. The little ornaments on the borders and the edges feels like it fits the setting pretty well with the whole Norse feel of Skyrim. But again, that's going to be subjective. I know that simple minimalist UI is very popular right now and I know a lot of people are a bit tired of it, especially understandable considering Oblivion's UI is just oozing with visual style. But as far as nice looking UI goes, Skyrim's pretty all right. Conclusion. Time is a cruel, Mr. Sun has not done Skyrim many favors. There are a decent amount of options to mess with but the experience of actually messing with them is always so unpleasant. The UI holds a lot of it back. Now of course the character creator is very much lacking in a lot of ways but on the bright side, the wonderful and dedicated community of modders have worked long and hard and nowadays there are tons of mods for just about everything, including tons I'm sure can make the character creating experience much more pleasant. I mean, this is Skyrim after all and it has one of the if not the largest modding community out there for any game. I'm sure you can find a decent combo of mods to make this pretty much the best character creator in the world. I mean, just look at these. There's so many and sexy nude mods. Lots of sexy nude mods. Jesus, that's a lot of sexy nude mods. This has been character creator critique and be sure to vote for which character creator you'd like to see next and I'll see you then.