Palworld - Character Creation Chat
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Today we take a look at the pokemon rival that tries to do it all.
The "Pokemon with guns" tagline was pretty funny, but when some friends started playing and really enjoying it, I started to become interested. Now the game's reached 'Version 1.0' So lets see what the full release has to offer. First, before we create our character, we have an option to set up our new world, or we can join a friend or dedicated server. Much like minecraft, we can't carry any progress between servers, but unlike that game, our character's look also does not carry over. So every time you want to join friends, you'll have to recreate them from scratch. I do like that they have multiple difficulties including a custom option:
I'm not the biggest fan of survival games, so I turned off the death penalty. (No more dropping everything on death) But I left everything else standard. Next we get to create our character, We start out by giving them a name:
Then we have 12 starting presets:
(I started with type 6) Next up we have basic body editing, staring with body type, 1 for a more feminine style and 2 for a more masculine look. For skin tones, we have 14 presets, including fantasy tones.. But we also have an option to make our own custom skin tones!
Already a huge step-up from the four (fixed) skin options in even the latest Pokรฉmon games. (I really wish Pokรฉmon would at least give us a custom option)
we can also freely rotate and zoom our character, but no background/lighting preview to see how our character would look in-game.
Next up is body scaling and...
Only 3 points of adjustment, and WOW do they scale poorly. It seems like they each have their own seprate scale factor (how much they adjust based on the slider) So even if you try to keep all the slider's even, if you're not near the center point, your character can still end up looking unbalanced:
and with no 'undo' or 'reset to default' button these sliders are not only clumsy, but also kinda annoying to work with. Here's what I ended up settling on:
The white hair is 'Kida' vibes from Atlantis the lost empire, Especially with the wrapped top..
Ok, well now looking at both side by side, I guess not so much, Somehow I remember Kida being a bit more muscular, But sure why not, let's make a design inspired her look:
I really wish we had more adjustment points for the arms or shoulders at least. I pretty much had to average all Kida's dimensions out to get this close, with a better system I could probably do better... Next up is 'Face Type':
It's pretty much the full shape of the face, we have 26 options here. Mostly masculine, and we can't really edit the shaping any further, Outer shape, nose, lips, eye shape, brows, and ears all rolled into one!
Here are the options I'd argue has the most feminine traits:
That's only 9 out of 29, and there are not a lot of style/personalities on offer. Kida's a fairly complex character for the time, shown being smug, energetic, cute and strong, I'm not really sure any of these really capture that versatility. So this is what I ended up just sticking with the default:
The other's looked either too young, too flashy (mainly in the lashes) or just a little too intense/dramatic. Next up are the eye settings:
We have 5 patterns, and a sixth that's just 'blank white' If you're looking for something a bit more natural, only the first two actually fit, but we have some anime/manga designs. as well as 'cat eyes' We can adjust the eye and brow colors, using a similar slider that we had for skin, so you can pick any color you want, but they'll still be modified based on the pattern you use, For example, as shown above I went for a very pale blue, but it still came out fairly bright and vibrant. I had to adjust it to near white to get it to look more like Kida's eyes:
Next up is hair and...
Oh yeah, I forgot modern game HATE longer hairstyles, Shoulder length or bust! We have 37 choices, mostly modern styles, with a few ponytails and buns, not much in the way of traditional fantasy hairstyles.
And this is literally the brightest color we can set for the hair. The only hairstyle that kinda stood out for me, was this one:
It's fairly spunky, and has some ties in it, I could see a modern Kinda potentially wearing this:
The next section is Voice, so I guess we're done with our character!
So... Final Thoughts I guess? It started out pretty solid, offering custom skin tones, and more face presets, but the rest kinda felt 'phoned in'. ...Sure, we could adjust our body shape, but the adjustments were so lackluster and clumsy, And while there were a fair number of face presets, the fact that we Had ZERO options to change on them other than 'eye pattern'. This is a survival game, so I don't really find the lack of lipstick and makeup options that much of a problem. But I still feel the option to decouple eye shape, and eyebrows would have done wonder's for the diversity of character looks and styles we could create. Loads of other 3d indie games have done better, but it's clearly not a focus for this team.
Any ways, thanks for reading, see you in the next chat!
I definitely agree that the palworld character creation is very clunky and could use more work and options, but I am admittedly personally very grateful for the fact they did put in at least SOME effort to let you have a character who's a bit on the fatter side, as someone who has never once been skinny in my life it does make me happy whenever i glance over at my character and see them with their muffintop. The bar for being able to be a fat character is in hell and I truly cannot deny that I am simply glad they at least put the bar on the floor with a kinda janky slider unlike other much more in depth character creators that let you customize 2 million things but god forbid you arent thin as a rail
That's a good point, body size scaling (especially torso) is really something we don't see that often! Phantasy Star online is one of the few multiplayer games I can think of offhand that offers something similar, but I'm sure that game had a significantly higher budget. More Games need to offer better diversity options for skin tones and body types, (looking at you Pokรฉmon! XD )













