Crimson Desert Female Character Creator Mod Addresses One of the Biggest Criticisms With the Game
One of the major criticisms of Crimson Desert I’ve seen since launch is that it does not let you create your own character. Instead, you’re locked into playing as Kliff, who himself has been criticized for a lack of personality, and two other even less fleshed out playable characters. Well, now, like so many other things with Pearl Abyss’ open world action adventure, there’s a mod for that.
The simply titled Character Creator – Female mod, from Khione95, lets you build your own character by using the barber function in the game. It includes 98 face presets and 159 hair styles. A male version of the mod should be out soon.
With this mod installed, you’re able to play Crimson Desert as a custom female character using the female human preset. Most armors have been adjusted to fit the female body, and planned features include more customization options, more customizable races (orc and goblin are in the works), and a full suite of female animations.
This can be used in combination with Ev3n5taR’s Kliff Female Voice mod to create about as close to a custom female character Crimson Desert can have right now. The female voice mod uses as AI model to process all of Kliff’s original dialogue and convert it into a female voice, which, based on the videos I’ve seen of it in action, is pretty rough around the edges, so this isn’t ideal. But modders being what they are, it will surely improve.
Reaction to the female character creator mod has been positive, with some fans wondering still why Pearl Abyss didn’t use the well-received character creator from its MMO, Black Desert Online.
“The story just wasn’t strong enough to justify not using BDOs unbelievable character creator,” one Crimson Desert fan said. “I just don’t get it. Kudos to the modding community coming through.”
“I’m still beyond confused why they didn’t go the Cyberpunk route. Keep the same story, but allow us to edit the character. What’s so hard about it?” another commented. One fan added: “They really dropped the ball with this one. It would have been so easy to be a 10/10 game.” “The part that confuses me the most isn’t that most of the interactions you have with NPCs that aren’t Greymanes, just call you ‘the Greymane,’ as if you were already a customizable character,” another pointed out. “The part that disappoints me the most is that most of us assumed the reason for a premade character was due to story and plot reasons,” another said. “The trade-off for that absolutely didn’t pan out.”
Added another fan: “There was no reason they shouldn’t have launched this game with a character creator. Especially when we get a protagonist with the personality of a plank of wood.”
A lot of this disappointment taps into criticisms of Crimson Desert’s story. While some players are perfectly happy treating Crimson Desert as more of a sandbox game than a story-driven adventure, most agree that the actual plot, storyline, and characters leave a lot to be desired.
Even Pearl Abyss CEO Heo Jin-young has admitted that Crimson Desert’s story could have been better, telling shareholders: “I sympathize to some extent with the disappointment users feel regarding the story. I think it would have been nice if we could have done a better job with it. The production team tried to make up for the shortcomings in the remaining time, but ultimately, we focused on strengthening the gameplay, which is what we do best.”
Last month, Alec Newman, the actor who plays Crimson Desert protagonist Kliff, revealed how the story and characters changed significantly during development. In an interview with Skill Up’s Friends Per Second Podcast, Newman said he worked on Crimson Desert for five years, “recording various iterations of this character at various stages of development for ages.”
For the first year-and-a-half of development, Crimson Desert was just a demo, as far as he knew. It wasn’t until nearly two years into recording that he was told that the work would begin in earnest. “I went, ‘What the hell do you mean? We’ve been doing this for ages!’ So it was, in terms of recording, the gift that really did keep on giving,” he said.
This is in keeping with what we know of the development of Crimson Desert, which began life as an MMORPG prequel to Black Desert Online. It eventually became a single-player open world action role-playing game, with the narrative coming into focus along the way.
“With this project it was interesting because they kind of… I don’t want to say they kept changing the goalpost, but we started off recording with cards of the different parts of Pywel,” Newman continued. “You know, various characters and, he’s from this faction and he’s from that faction. And I kept just saying, ‘Yes, but what is happening?’”
Newman revealed that Kliff was called Macduff for quite a large chunk of his time spent recording for the game. And when Pearl Abyss settled on Kliff, Newman started banging the story drum.
“When Kliff stopped being Macduff, which was a considerable amount of time into the recording of this, once they settled on Kliff, I just kept pushing and pushing and pushing about story and character as much as I could,” he said.
“I have to be honest, I felt the pressure of a certain type of developer with a certain type of game. I’m glad I fought for that stuff because, you can tell when you read the reviews for the game that’s come out. You can tell when you speak to people. I spoke to some people today actually who are playing it and loving it. And whilst they love some of the voice acting and the characterization, the boon of this game is clearly the size of the open world. And the fact that you can pick up a cat.
“That is to do with, I feel, the preferences of the developers and the people who wrote the scripts for these games, which kept changing. So at various stages it felt very much like making a TV series where they kept moving the focus. And in fact it’s not a secret. If you look at the way that Crimson Desert came into being, they did move things around.”
Newman continued by talking about what he called a “bridge point” in development. “After a while, you know, there’s only so far you can go with him [Kliff] kind of being… not flat, but kind of stoic. Now, I know that as a Scotsman myself, I know what that means. But it’s very very hard to play 150 hours with somebody who doesn’t give anything away ever. So what’s been rewarding is that as people have played through over a 100 hours, they’ve found bits of Kliff that do speak of something more emotional sometimes.
“The whole Greymanes thing, after about two and a half years, they decided they really wanted that to resonate. This idea of family and trying to bring something back together. I think that’s the main story strand of the game, or the only story strand of the game when you begin it.
“And so that was the bridge point. I don’t want to say they started panicking, but they were like, ‘Oh yeah, we really want this. We really want Kliff to care about his comrades.’ And I said, ‘Well, he does, but you haven’t written that monologue.’ So we brought it in gradually and wherever we could, we attended to it. Wherever we were given something that could be slightly humorous, we tried to bring that out.
“But I’ll be honest, those moments were fewer than they could have been.”
The big question now is, could Pearl Abyss actually add a character creator to Crimson Desert? It seems unlikely, given how the game is set up and even marketed. But it feels like nothing is off the table for the developers at Pearl Abyss, who have released game-changing updates at a remarkable pace since Crimson Desert’s launch last month. Maybe DLC could give fans the chance to create a character of their own?
We’ve got plenty more on Crimson Desert, including a story on how the NPCs are the stars of the show, and a hidden food consequence system that a modder has restored. We recommend you take a look at our guide to Things to Do First in Crimson Desert, plus Things Crimson Desert Doesn’t Tell You (we’ve got 28 and counting!). We’ve also got a guide to the Best Early Weapons we recommend picking up, the Best Skills to Get First (including a handy explainer of the skills system), and 34 Essential Tips and Tricks to help you succeed in Pywel.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
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