I am the embodiment of the jokes about RPG players clocking two hours in a game without leaving the character creator. Here I am 120 minutes in, still meticulously tweaking "cheekbone depth" and "outer iris color" and the exact position of all my battle scars. At this point, I've accepted and leaned into my status as a character creation tryhard. I know there are thousands of other PC gamers out there like me—which is why the most soul crushing, pride annihilating thing in an RPG is pressing play, getting to the first cutscene, and realizing "oh no, I'm ugly."
It was Dragon Age: Inquisition that broke my spirit for the first time. My first feeling in Inquisition's character creator was glee. Though players would later have plenty of opinions on BioWare's switch to Electronic Arts' proprietary Frostbite Engine, we were all feeling pretty giddy looking at the glossy skin and glistening lips of our custom Inquisitor faces on launch night.
