Need Humanity: Deeper look into Dark Souls 2’s character creation

I’ve spent many hours of my life trudging through Lordran in my quest to rekindle the flame or become the new dark lord. Through several different characters and different builds, the end goal has always been the same. What’s also consistent is how fast I usually blow through the character creation process. Why? Well, it’s never been all that innovative, there were never that many options, and let’s face it – there's a good chance you'll spend the vast majority of the game hollow or in armor, which means you’ll never even see that pretty face you spent a half hour on.

What if that wasn’t the case though? What if the sequel offers a ton of new options and will question why they exist in the first place? The new slew of screenshots posted on Dark Souls’ Facebook page has evoked these exact feelings in me. While "excited" doesn’t begin to explain my feelings towards this game, certain new options… wha?

Let’s start with the good! In Dark Souls II they brought back the “Homeland” descriptor, which determined head shape and skin color, hair, hair color, eyebrow, eyebrow color, eye color, beard, beard color, tattoo, tattoo color, and opacity. The interesting flags that went off here are beards and tattoos. As someone with the undead curse, you better be rocking a powerful beard and have a sweet tattoo! If you don’t put a Pegasus on your cheek, I don’t know if we can still be friends.

In nearly every situation, I’ll praise more options over less. Sure, I may not put a Pegasus tattoo anywhere near my face, but I dig having the option to do so. With more options comes more room to troll. I’m sure we’ll see pink haired characters with green beards and red tattoos on their faces on release day. What else says fear like full on freaks invading you in force? Like I just said though, I love that those options exist.

For those looking to doll their character up, prepare to be bombarded with makeup options. While the available screenshot only features the female option, I wouldn’t be surprised if these options carried over to male characters as well – then again, I can’t see FromSoftware giving beard options to women. The shown makeup options include eyeliner and eyeshadow.

Now let’s talk about some of the stranger options present under the “Advanced Settings” tab while creating your character. The choices I’m most interested in are hormones, form emphasis, eye socket color 1, eye socket color 2, and eyelid brightness. The “hormones” option is shown in the female character creator, and I’m thinking this could be a way to adjust femininity and masculinity. Eye socket color creeps me out a bit, especially since both can be different. I would have to guess that form emphasis deals more with proportions; note it is different than physique. Lastly, just what and why on eyelid brightness? Dafuq.

Well there you have it! We’ve already talked about classes and gifts, so feel free to catch up. It makes me so incredibly happy that there are all these options now, since character creation before was a basically a joke. Perhaps the text on these sliders will change, or maybe what they mean will become more clear. We've got a month left, my soul is sooooo ready.

Historian, teacher, writer, gamer, cheat master, and tech guru: follow on Twitter @AndrewC_GZ