Korean MMO Black Desert Might Just Have the Best Character Customization Ever

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

The team behind upcoming Korean MMO Black Desert have already offered a lot of material for fans and followers to drool over, but their latest tidbit will be like catnip for anyone with an eye on avatar customization.

Up until now, Black Desert's main selling point has undoubtedly been its graphics. Both the characters and the world look so polished and realistic that its screenshots could easily be mistaken for renders from 3D software like DAZ or Poser (seriously). But yesterday, in advance of their second closed beta test phase, the developers of Black Desert released a new video to flaunt the game's unique character customization system. Unlike preset or slider-based customization techniques that currently dominate modern MMOs, Black Desert divides the face and body up onto very precise elements that can be adjusted directly and intuitively. Click here to see it in action.

If you're as intrigued as I am, you'll probably have to wait a while before you can play for yourself. Black Desert's second closed beta period starts on April 22nd but will only be available to players in Korea. The game is expected to be localized for North America after its Korean release, but that often takes a year or more to come together. Until then, you can learn more about Black Desert here.

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Iris Ophelia (@bleatingheart, Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Times, and has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and with pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.

Comments

[Account Deleted]

The customising looks amazingly detailed and great quality avatars

Their site seems now down: " It seems like that the Character Creation Video attracted a lot of attention, especially in the west ... the hype is to much for our Website and we can't handle the heavy traffic at the moment"

Hoping this MMO will allow / be able to export the customised avatars in some way ?

[Paola Tauber]

Fantastic. It reminds me slightly of Eve Incarna character creation. Wishing SL 2.0 - if it will ever materialize - would go in that direction in regards to avatar creation and customization.