CO First Look: Character Creation

Huh.

Okay, while there are some nice features, bits and bobs, as well as some interface improvements, between CoX and CO, I’m not all that wildly impressed (though having seen other systems character creators, I can understand the “wow!” factor). I liked being able to point to spots on the body to get to the parts there, but while the selection of pieces in CO was better in some places than CoX, it wasn’t as good in others.

Clipping, not surprising, remains a problem, but less so than in CoX because, frankly, they’ve cheated by not having anything baggy. Skin, tights, decorator accents, and that’s it. But shirts? Sweatshirts? Pants? Didn’t see any way to do it. Will that come later? Better not be a MT charge, or I’ll be irked. 

(Yes, “skin and tights” is classic comic book wear. But I’ve tended to steer clear of that with my supers, for whatever reason. I can live with that, but I won’t be happy.)

Margie complained there was no way to do bare hands. I didn’t try that, but I probably will.

I do like the idea of a default “pose” for a character.

The power selections were — well, honestly, a crap shoot. A lot of info, but it’s not clear yet how it fits together. I went with a basic build for Fire, figuring I’ll learn more as time goes on, but an intro tutorial would be, well, handy.

I also had graphics problems — the game immediately told me that my card drivers were old. Eek! I went ahead and told it to use the default graphics anyway, and they were — pretty bad. Poor CoX quality. I’m tracking down the latest driers for the card (an NVIDEIA GeForce GTS 260M), and we’ll see if that makes a diffference.

Took me about 45 minutes for the first character, and I exited out as soon as I hit the first zone. More later …

5 thoughts on “CO First Look: Character Creation”

  1. Um … duh. When there’s a banner that says, “Tights and Skin,” you can pull that down and get other baggy stuff. Oops.

  2. Plus now there’s a “five fingers” for bare skin hands. Weird.

    I did get an “invalid costume” error which was auto-reported. So that felt good.

  3. And I’ve now tweaked the video to match the desktop (yay) and a few other settings, so that it does look the full awesome. And discovered where to change the Y axis to behave “normally.”

  4. It took me a minute to figure out that there was a dropdown list of groups of similar pieces and parts, too. Overall, I was underwhelmed with the character customization. I could never get the colors right for anything, and I still didn’t see any power effects customization (someone online says you hit “P” and can do it there, so hopefully I’ll get a chance to try it out in about an hour).

  5. Yeah, I didn’t see that, either. Hmmm.

    Having designed up three characters (two modeled after CoX ones), I really don’t think the options are much more elaborate than what you can do in CoX. A bit better organized, maybe, and with some unique items, but there’s a lot here that looks even more cartoony or poorly designed than in CoX.

    OTOH, I”m happy with the results I got.

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