Customisation and Party Castle

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Customisation and Party Castle

By Aeskor
Aeskor is a games enthusiast with a strong opinion. He has previously worked as a freelance games journalist writing articles.

Character customisation varies a lot from MMO to MMO. Some customisation is truly terrible and limits your options so much that you’re bound to run into about five other characters identical to yours throughout your travels, per hour. This is a total immersion killer, and can really break the bond the player has with their character.

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On the other hand, there are a few games out there (Aion for instance) where the customisation is extremely detailed and allows for a very personal, in-depth portrayal of your character, which is fantastic, however; you’re still limited by the boundaries set in place by the sliders (the bars you slide from left to right to increase your arm/leg/eyebrow size) etc.

Some people like a lot of customisation (like myself), but there are a lot of people who would prefer to just jump into the game with a premade avatar and, that’s fine too. A friend of mine groans and carries on whenever I spend more than five minutes customising my avatar and getting ready to start a new life in an MMO, whereas he’s completely happy basically randomising everything and jumping in. That’s his cup of tea and that’s great. Although my cup of tea, as daunting and as hard to stomach as it can be sometimes, is customisation and more customisation, so I was pretty damn excited to hear apart Party Castle, Square Enix’s new online community.

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Ever wanted to be able to actually create your own face for your avatar, down the very last detail? Well, now you can. Party Castle lets players literally draw their own faces onto their characters. But don’t worry if you can’t draw or you’re just not interested in creating a custom face, there are a few premade eyes, noses, mouths and ears to choose from, so you can fiddle around with their location on the face and just jump straight into the action of Party Castle if you so choose.

For the rest of you out there that are like me, and are crazy about customisation, then you’ve basically got unlimited options. You can draw whatever face you like for your character and colour it any colour you like. Then, you can simply paste it onto the face of the character model of your avatar and you’re ready to go explore Party Castle.

Yes, there are still sliders but in this regard they are secondary and further the customisation.

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Not only that, you can customise the basic movements of your character too, which will hopefully bring an element of uniqueness to each character running around the world. It’s a huge step forward in games and hopefully the trend will continue. Hopefully the days of one-run-animation-per-race and “wait, you look exactly the same as me… screw this customisation system!” are over.