Why I'm interested in "composite characters"
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| A composite male beastren based on seven different characters. You can read more on how he was created here. |
I haven't taken the time to actually calculate the number of possible character combinations it can produce. But with around 1000 colors, over 100 face and body sliders (each with hundreds of positions), two races, two genders, and dozens of base heads, I'm guessing it must be very, very, very, very big.
That's what I like about the Dragon's Dogma games: they allow variety, and you'll encounter a lot of that variety as you travel throughout the game world and encounter other players' pawns.
Some of them look really weird. Some of them look ordinary. Some of them are breathtakingly attractive. Some are scary. Some are imposing. Some are cool. Some are interesting. Some are confusing. Some are creepy, or just utterly hideous. It often depends on whom you ask.
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| Base head #23 is a popular choice on female humans. |
You'll see commonalities (many of the people who play this game are men, so many of the characters are female) but in my experience, there's enough variation when I go to the Rift to keep the pawn rental game interesting.
A while ago, I read about a study in which researchers took photos of different people's faces and blended them together. The finding was that these "composite faces" were generally perceived as attractive. This is because, as you blend faces together, blemishes, asymmetries, and deviations tend to vanish, which results in a highly attractive face. In other words, when you average out facial features, the results, ironically, are above average in attractiveness.
Recently I started thinking about what would happen if we tried something similar with people's DD2 characters.
The cool thing is that the character creator actually makes this possible! Character slider data can be collected, aggregated, and then represented using varying methods, which can then be recreated using the character creator. The result? A composite character, like this Male Beastren who was generated from seven sources.
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| Some people like making characters that look truly strange. Photo and character credit: madg0dspawn |
This raises a lot of neat questions. For example, what will the results look like if we synthesize enough people's creations into a single character? Will mixing strange and conventionally attractive characters produce an interesting result? What do they say about players' preferences and choices with the character creator? Do facial sliders across different base heads look coherent when applied to the most common base head? What does a composite human look like across males and females? What does a composite male look like across humans and beastrens?
Also, what is the best way to synthesize and represent character creation data? Do we use averages? Medians? Modes? Some combination of all three?
And lots of other questions.
That's why I've created the Dragon's Dogma 2 Community Character Creation Project, a collaborative art project + experiment that anyone can participate in! You can enter your character creator settings using a form, and the data can then be synthesized using different spreadsheet formulas. All character creation data is anonymous unless disclosed by the owner, and I do not share slider data or recreate your individual characters; I only create and share composites. Below, you can find the forms for:
Players can submit any character they want, be they Arisen or Pawn, and you can submit as many as you want. No character is too weird, too beautiful, or too plain to participate, and I'll be using this blog to update people and discuss the results.
Stay tuned for more!
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