Category: Video Games

We’re continuing this month’s IGN First on Dragon’s Dogma 2 with a detailed look at its new, robust character creator. The original Dragon’s Dogma had a pretty intense character creator, but Dragon’s Dogma 2 has upped the ante for just how detailed you can get for your character and ideal Pawn.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 director Hideaki Itsuno explained during IGN’s visit to Capcom in Japan that the character creator was something they put a lot of work into for the first game, but with better hardware performance this time around, they could add as much freedom to the system as they wanted.

Itsuno-san said, “The problem is that this means that the act of creating a cool character, or the character that you want to see, becomes no different from doing so with clay… You could have your ideal character in mind, but you’d basically need to be an artist to form that character with your own hands, so that’s where we had to begin when deciding how character creation would work,”

He thought maybe they should make the character creator simpler, but because the game’s artists wanted something that detailed, they worked hard to create a system that gives players access to every available setting if they want it while also offering a simpler creation method.

They accomplished this by having two body types for each race, nine base bodies per type, and an uncountable number of base head variations created from nearly a hundred real human face scans. From there, you can make the final adjustments yourself, giving Dragon’s Dogma 2 a system where anyone can create attractive, realistic-looking faces without needing to be an artist.

The options are indeed vast, and you can get incredibly granular while editing a character if you so choose–there are 40 types of “muscle styles” and 12 sliders just for a human’s nose, for example.

“I imagine some people getting themselves stuck in the creator and having trouble starting the game,” art director Daigo Ikeno admitted. “That said, I think it’s a creator that will be able to meet the needs of most people.”

I’m one of those people who consider a character creator as deep as the one in Dragon’s Dogma 2 as the “first boss,” as I can easily spend more than an hour (happily) tweaking a character – which I was tempted to do at Capcom Japan despite my limited time hands-on.

Of course, the most obvious new addition to the character creator is a brand new race: the Beastren – anthropomorphic big-cats Itsuno-san wanted to add since the first game, but couldn’t due to hardware limitations. Specifically, rendering their fur on many subjects on the screen at once.

To make sure the Beastren had enough diversity compared to humans, Ikeno-san explained that the team “looked at the kinds of patterns and colors found in felines and made sure that the kind of variety that players would surely want were included.”

Ikeno-san concluded: “I hope that players will try changing both beastren and human faces to see what they can make.”

Casey DeFreitas is the deputy editor of guides at IGN. Catch her on Twitter @ShinyCaseyD.

Blizzard has revealed the next chapter in its live-service ARPG, Diablo 4, and it revolves around a really handy mechanical spider.

Dubbed the Season of the Construct, the upcoming update will send players into the perilous and trap-riddled vaults of the legendary Zoltun Kulle in search of treasure, battling demonically possessed mechanical constructs in the process.

The main power grind will center on your new robotic companion, a spider-like friend called the Seneschal who comes with its own management UI and can be customized with magical stones of different rarities and power levels to alter its behaviors and abilities to your liking. With nearly 40 different stones to collect, there will be a wide variety of options for how your multi-legged buddy can complement your playstyle.

“You can make a build on the utility side that’s there to suppot and healing you. You can also build out one that does a little more defense and get a combination of stones that intercept any incoming projectiles and further modify that to pull all enemies in for a big hit,” lead designer on Diablo 4 season 3 Dan Tanguay told IGN. “We’ve tried to bake in a lot of possibilities there for players to discover.”

Season 3 also brings some hotly anticipated quality of life changes, the most noticable of which is WASD key control support for more direct control over your heroes on PC — seemingly a necessity in a season that will feature so many deadly traps that you would really be best off avoiding.

There will also be a plethora of competitive leaderboards driven by ladder-based trials called The Gauntlet, where players compete for a high score, the mightest of which will be greanted “a permanent home in the Hall of the Ancients,” and medals to show off on their profiles.

Other notable additions include an extra stash tab to store your ever-increasing pile of loot, and a reworking of Helltide events so that you don’t have to wait for short windows to engage in one of the Diablo 4 endgame’s most profitable events.

Diablo 4: Season of the Construct will launch on January 23rd.

Travis Northup is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @TieGuyTravis and read his games coverage here.