After all the nonsense of yesterday and this morning, I’m happy to report that the Champions Online “open” beta was performing much better tonight, at least for me and for friends on Twitter.

I was hoping to try an experiment. One of the neat features that CO has is the ability to save a character ‘template’ and then use it again, or even share it with friends. Normally for open beta I’d just create a total throw-away character, but since I figured I could save it, I opted to spend some time and try to create a champion I might re-use in beta (ultimately I failed, but that’s beside the point for the purposes of this experiment).

My idea was originally for a basically human cowboy-type hero. He’d use pistols as his energy builder/ranged attack, but then Ego melee weapons for his close range.

The character creator wouldn’t really stretch far enough to accommodate my vision, so the character morphed as I made him. I stuck with drab colors, but his ears and eyes got very alien, and his hands grew claws. His proportions are off, with huge forearms and calves, but thinner biceps and upper thighs. His nose is flat-ish. I wanted to give him a slight muzzle but couldn’t manage it. I wanted to give him a cowboy hat, too, but couldn’t find one. There was no duster, but there was a trenchcoat.

His name is Drifter and he’s deliberately ugly and is meant to be creepy. He looked creepy in the character creator but (as others have noted) characters never look as good in-game, sadly.

Anyway, I saved his template and was delighted to find that they save as a jpg!! Here it is:

In theory, if someone downloads this and sticks it in their screenshots folder, they ought to be able to load it in the character creator and make a clone of Drifter. Actually note that character isn’t quite complete. My ‘finishing touch’ of Drifter was to give him the Bestial attitude. I ended up deleting that version because running on all fourss he just looked silly. But here’s the full version, ready to launch, version, complete with running on all fours like a beast:

I’d love for someone to try this out; see if you can really load a character template from a jpg. I assume the data is really in the file name: that 303963158 number. But who knows? If anyone tries it, can you leave a comment and let me know if it worked? If so, I can see a cottage industry springing up around people doing character design for others (not me, obviously…I’d be a customer!)

Back to poor fugly Drifter. Here’s a couple reference shots, from the launcher. I spent so much time messing about in the character creator that I didn’t even get out of the tutorial area!

And this one is gamma corrected like mad so you can see what few details there are on the costume: