Guild Wars 2: The character creator

Does a character creator make or break an MMO?

No, of course not. But a good character creator adds to your enjoyment of the game. After all, everyone wants to feel special. No one wants to create a cool looking character and find out you look the same as a thousand other characters in an MMO (Can you say World of Warcraft?).

With Guild Wars 2, it’s even more important to be able to create unique characters. The game promises a personal story focused on the individual: “Guild Wars 2 is YOUR story. Your choices determine how your personal story evolves; with thousands of possible variations, no two players will have the exact same experience.”

If you ran across 3 or 4 other characters in Lion’s Arch who looked just like you, you might start thinking your personal story wasn’t so personal. But no worries, the Guild Wars 2 character creator helps you create a character that’s uniquely yours.

You start with the basics, picking your race and gender, and then you choose your class.

After you’ve chosen your class, you move on to the character customization screen. You can easily spend an hour or maybe more tweaking your character build. You can customize almost every aspect of your character, from height to body type to skin color to hair styles.

And if that’s not enough, you can open up the advanced options and tinker with your nose, your eyes, your lips and your chin. By the way, your eye color options are buried in here, if you’re looking to change them.

As an added bonus, there are options to creator your armor color scheme. You can always change your armor colors in-game, so don’t agonize over them too much.

Usually this is where most other character creators end and throw you and your new character out into the beginning area. GW2 still has some choices for you, though, and these choices affect your personal story.

For instance, will you resolve problems with charm, dignity or ferocity? These are dialogue options your encounter as you progress through your storyline and sometimes elsewhere in the game.

The other choices you make all appear to be specific to your race, but they also affect your story. When you’re making these choice think about what kind of story experience they might lead to. Looking at the choices for a norn ranger, below, it’s clear how they might directly affect your personal story.

Over the last couple of years, the movement in MMOs has been toward providing players with engaging, personal stories. By combining choices that affect your character’s personal journey directly in the character creator, ArenaNet has presented players with an brilliantly innovative character creator, one that’s likely to be copied by the rest of the industry. The Guild Wars 2 character creator is a great character creator, one of the best in gaming.