Yeah, CCP's "carbon" character creator is pretty awesome.

I'm really mostly interested in the body portion of it. I'd love to have a fat character. Or a skinny, yet tall one.

Too often, character creators give such a limited set of body types.

How can I get this?

Download the trial version of Eve Online?

I'd love to see a bunch of variation of body types and a bunch of additional non-character NPCs to show it all off (plus that gives me generic characters to kill) but I wouldn't want any of this at the expense of quantity of fleshed out characters.

If his name's gonna be Newhiem the portly he should be a short fat George Costanza of a man.

Even three different body types per gender of race and a little height slider would make things quite varied.

don't go with the modders they are just perverted

Guys, they have a brand new Engine this time around. It should be MUCH better. Just wait for the Game Informer article, I'm sure we'll see a lot there.

I would say that the faces were much better in Fallout 3 than Oblivion, but what really bothered me most was that the undergarments of characters somehow covered more skin than a lot of armor and clothing. Seriously, I can understand not wanting to show topless women in your game, but no one is going to say it should be banned or get an AO rating for showing shirtless men! So you can get rid of those pointless undershirts, that, and the feet... those hideous feet! Those things looked like bricks! The only thing comforting about them was that most outfits included shoes or boots, so usually, I didn't have to look at them, unless I looted the armor from my enemies, anyway...



Well, obviously not every model made by modders is going to be professionally designed, because modders aren't professionals, they're people who do it for a hobby, and there will be a lot of variation in terms of how talented they are, so you'll get everything from hedious models that look like they belong in the original Half-Life to things that are so absurdly detailed that even if you insect them from a couple centimeters away you'll still barely be able to tell that they're polygonal models. When you have professional developers working on things, though, in theory, you can expect a consistent standard in terms of the quality of in-game graphics. I say in theory because it doesn't always work like that, and Bethesda seems to be a company that's particularly prone to failing to deliver a consistent standard in the quality of in-game assets. So hopefully in Skyrim, Bethesda can do a better job on quality control and ensuring consistency.

And i would say that character models is one area that has often been of lower standards than the rest of the graphics. Morrowind was a perfect example, the environments were pretty nicely done for its time, and the water effects for the game were particularly impressive, but then we got those hideous segmented bodies... while Oblivion did away with the segmented bodies, I'd still say the character models seemed underwhelming compared to the rest of the graphics. Especially when compared to some of the other things we had been seeing in games at the time. But Fallout 3 once again improved on this, aside from the unnecessary male undershirts and the hideous feet, the latter of which is probably because since characters would rarely be seen with bare feet anyway, Bethesda thought it was not necessary to spend effort on making the feet look decent, and the former might just be Bethesda overreacting to the brief controversy spawned by that topless model on the Oblivion disc. But all things considered, I think it's safe to say that character models will look better than not just Oblivion, but Fallout 3 and New Vegas as well, it's just a question of how much better. I just hope it will be consistent with the rest of the graphics.

And I can agree with the desire to see variety in body shape as well, both in NPCs, and as a customization feature for player characters, because I might go as far as to say that everyone, whether beggars, adventurers, or nobles looking identicle below the neck hurts "immersion" more than sub-par character models can. I could understand it in Oblivion as the result of an engine limitation, but with modern technology, it should be possible to avoid this, especially since Bethesda is using a new engine now, that would be the perfect oportunity to do some things that were never possible in Oblivion.



I don't doubt that it will be better, my main concern is whether it will be consistent with the rest of the in-game assets.

Body types were not so much an engine limitation, even in Oblivion.
It's probably more to do with a hardware restrictions which had them have to make optimization decisions, and expense in terms of development time.