87 Hairstyles Are Not Enough: How Players Experience Character Creation in Baldur’s Gate 3

In digital roleplaying games character editors are commonly present. Here, not only visual but often also gameplay-related decisions are made. In this paper, we focus on the fantasy roleplaying game Baldur’s Gate 3 . Through an online questionnaire ( N = 171), we investigated how the character editor is perceived, which customization categories players find important and how they assess the number of options offered within categories. We derived design suggestions and our results show that the editor is perceived well overall, but can improve, mainly by offering more categories and more selection options in the existing categories, even in those, that already offer many options. In contrast, categories that already had many options (100+) did not overwhelm participants, indicating that it is not a general problem to offer many options. Complementary to this, we found relationships between individual differences (age, gender, personality and engagement with the game) and the category importance perception, opening up questions around tailoring character editors.