Never has there been a better excuse for grown men to play dress up with dolls. The Black Desert Online character creator is out as a free standalone thing you can download. People with a lot of time on their hands, and the desire to manipulate a dozen facial muscles, are in heaven right now. Anything you make in the character creator can be imported to the final game—an MMO in a world that no longer sees many MMOs.
There's an official video from Black Desert, but Let's Make Friends goes further with the concept. So I'll post the one from Let's Make Friends. The stock characters you can make in there are beautiful. Just absolutely gorgeous men and women. But Korea (Black Desert is Korean) has always been able to do this. It's hard to top Korea if you want artistic renditions of good-looking people. You can get funky, too, though. Push a character creator with this many sliders too far, and you'll come up with some heinous-looking faces. Ugly is easy. Beauty is hard.
Around the three-minute mark, Let's Make Friends starts crafting characters to resemble Hollywood folks. Otherwise, you can even stiffen and pose character's hair in freakish ways. Like, full-can-of-Aquanet-in-the-1980s ways. Not to mention posing their bodies. I've never seen a character creator let you pose your character in such wacky ways before. And the smiling is creepy. Crafting a natural-looking smile must be the final hurdle of believable character animation. Well, come to think of it, I hate my own smile, so who knows. Maybe smiling is just a creepy thing in general.
Black Desert Online heads into Closed Beta Test #2 on PC in one month, February 18. We recently sent Travis Huinker into the first closed beta, and, if Gaming Nexus Slack chat is to be believed, we're attempting to send him in again. You can pre-order Black Desert on the official website. Packages start at $29.99 and go up to $99.99. It will be buy once, play forever, like Guild Wars, but there's obviously a structure in place to spend plenty of money in-game.
