I have heard many complaints about the character design. Some people don't like the rugged faces of the preset characters. Personnally, some ugliness doesn't bother me : not all people are beauty paragons. Especially in a harsh place like Skyrim. They did an amazing job. However, I don't especially want my character to look like a cruel assassin who broke his nose seven times, drank twice as much as is too much, suffered from chilblains, lost an eye, spent 12 years in dirt and got some smallpox.

My question is the following : is the character creation tool flexible enough to allow for cute characters? Will I be able, in case I want it, to craft a youthful beardless cute Breton, for exemple, almost androgynous, with a pale soft clean skin and a naive look and pointy ears which reveals an Elven legacy? Or an strangely beautiful Altmer, with noble facial features which could justify by little the disdain which seems to be engraved in her eyes? Or a Bosmer with a cruel face, but thin to the point one would say that any squall would sweep him away?

Are all these possibilities allowed by the character creation tool?

Hard to say what you will be able to do with the character creation tool (unless someone has played it for themselves at one of the expos), but even if you can't do it with the vanilla game, you can be sure a beauty mod will probably be one of the first mods out.

Have you played Oblivion? there are sliders that pretty much allow you to make your toon look like what ever you want. So yeah if you prefer Fabio Lanzoni over Conan the Barbarian then you can probally make it with enough time

Who needs cute when you have a battleaxe? ;D

If you want man to look like a little girl just play JRPG instead.

:biggrin: haha, my Nord battleaxe bearer won't be cute at all, nor will be my Orcish smith. But I would like my Breton naive spellcaster and my cruel Altmer hedonist to be cute...

i think one of the developers said we can create attractive characters if we want in the character creator... cant remember which developer it was, though... vsions, i think?

the preset faces are just what they think fit with the rugged atmosphere of skyrim, but they arent stopping us from creating attractive characters.

This is reassuring, and indeed, I was pretty sure that it would be possible, though I missed it when a dev mentioning it.

Indeed, the preset faces fit Skyrim very well, but for at least one of my play-throughs, I planned to make a character who doesn't fit Skyrim at all. A complete stranger, who doesn't belong to this harsh place and will have to learn how to survive in it... I think it will be a Breton, though I am not sure so far...

Well if it's going to be your second or third play-through, chances are some beauty mods will be added by then as well. The only thing I am curious about concerning the presets is, if it's possible to make a "pretty" character with the in-game face generator, I wonder why they didn't preview at least one "pretty" face in the screen shots of each race. You'd think they'd want to demonstrate the full spectrum.

Indeed it's strange. It puzzled me, that's why I posted, even if I thought it would be possible to create beautiful characters.

I don't especially want to be able to create them using mods. Well, it's perhaps a blasphemy for some people here, and I don't intent to be unrespectful -- I mean the modder really do great job -- but the mods lack some legitimacy imo. I am all for the mods which give higher resolution for the in-game textures while remaining faithful to the original ones, but I dislike the ones who modify deeply the appearance of in-game stuff. If I have to craft an attractive character, it will be with the official, lore-friendly tools at my disposal.

But well, it's only my opinion, though...

One thing I really hope is that the character creator is improved on from Oblivion with its godawful sliders. I absolutely loathed that system because when I made a change to some feature such as the forehead, for some inexplicable reason another unrelated facial characteristic that I already worked on would change too, destroying all my plans. Every character I tried to make ended up weirdly androgynous looking and in the end I gave up and downloaded a few male/female custom race mods to get a character who didn't look like a freak.

We have a 'dirt' slider, which I am pretty sure wasn't at minimum for any of the presets. Turn that down, turn the age down, those should give you a preset to start working on. Just pick a preset you like, imagine him or her ten years younger after a bath and a good meal.