New Character Customization coming to EVE

In their next expansion, EVE Online: Incursion, CCP are changing the seven year old character customization for EVE. Though all other graphics have had a graphics overhaul since launch, the character customization has remained lacking. But that's going to change now. Here's an excerpt from CCP's blog post:

With our upcoming expansion, EVE Online: Incursion, we will be rolling out entirely new avatars for all of our characters and NPCs in EVE Online. The character art is one of the few remaining pieces from the game that has remained as it was when it launched back in 2003. We've updated the ship graphics, the celestials, gates and stations, and now it's time we modernize and update the characters. We've created unique models for each bloodline,race and gender, 24 in total, along with new hairstyles and clothes. We even have shoes and underwear that you can play around with, even if they won't show on your portrait. That doesn't matter, though, because you will know what color underwear your character is wearing, and that is important.

The portrait generated will still be a torso portrait, that will work exactly the same way it does in game today. It will show in chat, in your character sheet, on EVE Gate and on the forums. There will be more options with posing, lighting and placing the camera though. So even if your character is full body, you will need to wait until the first release of Incarna to enjoy their, ehm, full bodies.

As the blog post suggests this update is a precursor to Incarna (the "Walking in stations" expansion slated for summer 2011). And due to the Carbon Technology being used in both Incarna is in turn a precursor to World of Darkness. So it is not unreasonable to think that Incursion will offer a first look at what kind of visual character customization World of Darkness might offer. As the blog states it should be available on EVE's test server shortly.

Whether this is a glimpse at World of Darkness' future character customization or not, the screenshots of Incursion's new character models look really good (here's another one).

See after the break for a couple of updates with character creation videos in EVE from the test server.


[UPDATE]

Found a video online showing the new character customization. This video was taken by a player on the Singularity test server:



[UPDATE 2]

Thanks to Massively found two other video, showing a female character and a male one.




[link] to EVE Insider blog at EVE Online.
[link] to Carbon Technology article at CCP Games.
[link] to interview with CCP at Eurogamer.