Character Customization in Guild Wars

Character creation can be a fun, painstaking part of the MMO experience. Players expect options for their character’s appearance if they plan to spend an extended period in a virtual world. Guild Wars’ creation process allows players to select their character’s appearance from premade faces and hairstyles. While selecting from a pool of skins formed by the developers’ imagination may keep characters within the aesthetic confines of the game world, the limits may come into conflict with the visual individuality of a character, the personal preferences of the player, and the depiction of the sexes.

One may run through the vast MMO world with a hundred different players on the screen at one time. One may also find their character’s twin, or even triplet, in that crowd. Guild Wars does not offer a great range of initial character customization. Players can only play as the human race, despite other races existing within the Guild Wars world. A player’s decision to select certain avatar options may be swayed by the options available or not available in avatar customization. Developers gave female characters a larger pool of faces and hairstyles compared to male characters. However, female characters do not have a choice to be old or horribly disfigured, but male characters have old, haggard, and scarred options. Thus, male characters have less choices to be attractive—and less choices in general—while female characters have many choices in meshes but no choice to be unattractive. Because many people would rather play a unique, attractive character, the higher possibilities for attractive features and more options in faces and hairstyles may support the inclination to play a female character.

Character customization, of course, does not end at the initial creation of the character. The character’s profession determines what kind of armor or clothing that character can wear. Professions follow a theme in their equipment. For example, while there are several variations to armor sets, warriors can only wear heavy armor, mesmers can only wear fancy outfits, and dervishes can only wear long robes. Armor sets, however, can be mixed within each profession, allowing players to find creative armor combinations. In an effort to further customization, Guild Wars implemented a system in the third chapter where players could buy armor of any appearance with the highest armor rating and customize the armor’s statistics.

The system, conversely, has little use if the armor sets are not particularly to one’s taste. By setting each profession in a rigid image, some armor sets fall short in creativeness. Nearly all female characters’ armor sets are close-fitting or show skin in unpractical places while their male counterparts are covered from head to toe in bulky gear. Female characters’ armor, on the other hand, has finer, more intricate details, and higher quality than male armor. Again, these are reasons why some people may choose a female character over a male character.

Creativity waned in the coming of the last chapter. Old armor meshes were retextured and marketed as new armor. While armor had been retextured and noted as different armor sets before, the community became enraged at the lower texture quality produced in the final chapter of the series where they expected entirely new armor sets. Players, too, had been asking for variation in armor within their profession. Female elementalists wanted options for more modest dress. Assassins did not want spikes jutting out of their shoulders and limbs and pleaded not to have anymore spikes. Many times, players only received half of their requests, even as early as the beta.

In the beta, female warriors were as thin as spell casters with necks just as long. Players complained about giraffe necks and that they preferred the warrior to at least appear capable of wielding a two-handed hammer without her arms snapping off, and the developers partially responded. Female warriors were given faintly more muscle in their arms. In contrast, the male warriors have always been thick, muscular gladiators. Their necks and thighs appear as solid as the tree trunks in the environment. Many people reported on forum polls that they had chosen female warriors because they found the male warriors too thickset, not the least bit attractive, and even loutish. This posed a problem for players who wanted to play male warriors as intelligent, elegant, righteous leaders, since many other players would only see them as twelve-year-old brutes. The developers did not see the need to change the male warrior’s appearance nor the female characters’ necks.

The developers hold a set vision for the professions, as well as what defines male or female. A player is given appearances to choose from by the developers, and what those aesthetic decisions are affect, to some degree, the character a player will select. If a player finds a duplicate of his or her character, the twins may be amused, take screenshots, and forget about the encounter. They may not wonder why they look alike, or they may subconsciously guess why they look alike—there were no better faces, or it was the best looking armor. In games where character customization is limited to selecting from premade appearances, many players may not find designs to their liking and will have to settle.