launched properly yesterday, which means that the first thing I did when I woke up on release morning was turn my Xbox on, plug 🉐in my headphones so as to not disturb my sleeping partner, and start playing. I ran through the intro – so far, so good – and got to the character creation screen.
For me, this is where the fun always begins. I love trying to create myself in character creators, although the exception is in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Baldur’s Gate 3, in which I’d made a half-Orc that looked nothing like me and, therefore, just kind of wಌinged it. When I play , though, I have reference photos from multiple angles set up next to my monitor to recreate myself and my friends to maximum accuracy. Don’t ask me why. I’m probably just indulging a deeply-rooted narcissistic streak. It’s just fun to see my face in a game.
It took me over an hour to get just my face right, and even then, it didn’t look quite like me. I painstakingly tweaked every possible option to get my nose right, looking at myself in my iPhone camera as I adjusted the width of my nose bridge, the e🅺xact slant of my nostrils, and the distance between my nose and my lips. When my partner eventually came to, I said, “Does this look like me?” and he suggested I make my cheeks rounder. Back to the drawing board I went, tweaking the base options and mixing different aspects of every 🐠facial feature with ‘shape blends’, whatever the hell that means. I had no idea what I was doing with these granular tweaks, some of which seemed to have no effect at all.
I screenshotted my process, too, and took videos of my TV screen to send to several different group chats. All my friends were at work, so of course they replied to me almost instantaneously. The recommendation was to make my face rounder, so I did, and then replied with another video alongside the message, “she looks Korean to me, HOW DID I BOTCH MY OWN FACE”. After more tweaks, I sent out a revised version, and in another group chat, a friend said, “you just look angrier in✨ real life”. Another chimed in to agree, saying, “you look very at peace here, it’s very unnerving”. Eventually, they said that there was a definite similarity, and I said, “they look like me but hotter”. I got the reply, “I wouldn’t say hotter, maybe more mentally stable”.
Fair play to them, but it just didn’t look right to me. With every tweak suggested to me, my ꦇcharacter’s face seemed to look less and less like me. Every feature looked close, but it was only a passing resemblance. I was over an hour into the game, and most of it had been spent staring intensely at myself in my front-facing camera and then being frustrated with the tools I was given. I had work to do, I wanted to eat lunch, I should be playing the game! But instead, I was tweaking the exact angle and depth of my eyes, the width of my nose, the height of my cheekbones, the poutiness of my lips – and none of this with direct sliders, min🌊d you, I was just smashing different presets together with ‘shape blend’ and hoping I’d get something that kind of looked like me, from a distance, maybe.
Eventually, paralysed with options and no idea how to use them together, I gave in, picked my background and traits, and went into the game to actually do things. I’ve realised that not only could I not make my character truly look like me, but that I have no idea what my face looks like anymore. I look in the mirror and see someone who looks almost like my Starfield character, a distant cousin of a future spacefarer. Maybe I even look like a doppelganger of me, living somewhere in the world with a face kind of like my own. Maybe this morning, they booted up Starfield and created a version of themselves thಌat looked almost like them, but not quite. Maybe we will both keep going to Enhance! shops whenever we see them, nudging sliders around until we see something more true to life. Maybe neither of us will ever get there.