I'll miss Oblivion's facegen, I could create decent faces with it well enough, and when I did, the results felt a lot better than anything that can be accomplished with preset faces, because I actually feel like my character is my own unique creation, I never get that feeling in games like Morrowind that don't let you create you're own original face. And if you ask me, people complaining that they can't create good looking faces in Oblivion either aren't very good at it, or are just too lazy to try. Now, the original faces were kind of bad, but that's not facegen's fault, that's the fault of whoever created those faces. It seems to me that in Skyrim, Bethesda has decided to cater to the lazy people and put allowing players to make good looking faces with little work (And by "make", I mean choose from a set of options created by someone else.) over granting players a lot of room for customization. The end result might make creating good looking characters easier, but it comes at the sacrifice of allowing players to create characters truly all their own. I just hope that there's a lot of options with these preset features, and that players still have a degree of customization with them like changing their size and positioning, otherwise, Skyrim is going to bea HUGE step back from Oblivion in this regard. But no matter how many options are, I doubt we'll have as much customization as Oblivion.
On the plus side, it seems we have the option to customize body shape and add features like scars, which is nice, but there's no reason why a face customization system that gives player a good range of customization should be sacrificed for that.
I'd much prefer presets over the sliders in Oblivion. The ideal would be less extreme slider options, but in this case, presets is the lesser of two evils. It took me over half an hour to get a human-looking face down every time I started a character in Oblivion, and then it was always for naught, because my characters universally came out looking like Keanu Reeves no matter how hard I tried to do something different. Though I've come to believe that this isn't a fault with the game, but my subconscious.
Going back to presets alone would be the worst thing Bethesda could do to character creation, when I play Morrowind, I never feel like I'm playing a character all my own, every time I look at my character. I just feel like I'm looking at someone else's creation, and you know why? Because I am. The face was created purely by a modeler, you might as well just remove character creation entirely if you do that, because the appearance of my current Morrowind character is not much more my own creation than the character in a game where the player is limited to a premade character. In fact, in such games, my character feels more unique than most ones I've made in Morrowind, because at least usually if the character is a pre-defined one, the character probably looks unique. In Morrowind, no matter what face you choose. you can expect to find hundreds of NPCs with a completely identicle face.
Besides, you know, you CAN have both. Fallout 3 and New Vegas did that, you could choose from a list of presets, and just go with them if you want, or if you actually like having a unique character of your own creation, you're free to create one from scratch or modify the presets, now all you need is to make sure all the presets look good, and you're set, players too lazy to make they're own faces can just choose presets, and be done with i.
» Tue Dec 28, 2010 7:42 pm 
but sounds like that's fixed for Skyrim, YAY! 
