From Hellgatewiki.com

Moved and expanded from the section originally on the Character page.

Unlike the identical basic character types in Diablo II, your Hellgate: London character will have a unique look. You'll be able to play with all the traditional options; skin tone, hair color and style, facial hair, height, body thickness, and so forth. Here's an example shot compiled from five screenies we took at E3 2006, and if you're wondering what all you can tweak when creating a character, here are the options.

• Class
• Gender
• Face type
• Skin tone
• Height
• Weight
• Hair style
• Hair color
• Eye color

Every playable build of Hellgate: London since early 2006 has had a wide variety of options for all of these options, with the most obvious changes those to skin tone, height, width, and hair color and style. Facial features and eye color were impossible to notice while playing the game, but are visible in the profile view, and are what your playing partners will see of your character in their party interface, which is why Flagship's working so hard to make the faces interesting.

Lee Dotson sits at a makeshift desk in what's supposed to be the office lounge. From here, forever tempted by an Xbox 360 and a huge, working Taiko: Drum Master arcade machine, Dotson designs the player models. Why does this 3D modeler have a stalker's gallery worth of pictures of actor Ken Watanabe on his desktop? He's trying to capture the essence of an Asian profile for one of the 12 body types you can choose from in the game. I'm assured that if the in-game character looks anything like Watanabe, it's strictly coincidental. "I looked at what City of Heroes did with character creation. We won't have that level of customizability, but we'll definitely offer more then World of Warcraft," he says. The plan is to let players adjust body types in proportion, alter the skin tone, and have different body modifications depending on sex (sorry, you can't make ladies grow beards). If you change the character's class, slightly different physical attributes will be available.
--CGW Magazine Preview, May 2006

In addition to forging a unique character look, you'll be able to customize your equipment with dyes and possibly even logos.

"The character creation system is still being designed and built, but right now it's possible to alter height, thickness (weight without numbers), hairstyle, eye color, faces, gender, and skin color. That could be expanded upon, of course. In development, everything changes all the time.

"We do have multiple colors in the game. How they're going to be implemented has not yet been determined, however. For instance, maybe a dye kit could be found as part of some loot, or maybe it could be purchased, or maybe you could accumulate a whole range of dye kits stored in a palette. Maybe each specific type of armor would have a specific color that could apply to your suit... We're still debating which implementation will be best. In any event, there will be different color schemes and we do also have plans to support some form of Guild logo. In what way, we are not yet decided."
--Ivan Sulic, March 2006

Colors and facial hair aren't the real fun though. The true prize for "I wanna look special" players will come from finding some crazy-cool equipment. Items that help you kill real good while also looking special.

"The player really customizes their character throughout the game. While you pick your basic look at the beginning, the real cool stuff comes in what you find when you're out adventuring. These are the flashy things, like magic helms, crazy new weapons, and those things that really make you stand out as an individual. Anyone can make a brown-haired, dark-skinned Female Templar, but not everyone can have a "Legendary Obsidian Battle Helm". You have to earn that!"
--Max Schaefer, Game Banshee Interview, October 14, 2005

While there are a lot of character appearance options, you'll have to be human.

Making Your Own

Flux got to create a number of characters during his testing time on Community Day 2007, and wrote about the experience:

Judging by the characters I saw on other machines, the best way to stand out in HGL might be to make your dude or dudette look like a newscaster. I didn't see many characters who weren't Asians sporting a neon green Mohawk, or albino with pink dreadlocks and blue eyes, or an African with a golden crewcut, and while you can't pick any inhuman skin colors, it's not hard to find hair color and eye color that contrasts enough to be quite unusual.

You can also select a random mixture if you're in a hurry, or just go with the randomly generated character you see when the display opens up. They're capable of giving you some interesting design ideas; I saw one look that had very dark reddish skin, a low brow, and silver-white eyes that literally glowed out of the face. You can also click and drag to spin your character around while you're testing, to see how they look from every angle.

Another nice touch is that your experimental model is not a t-shirt and jeans wearing noobie (as you'll look once you actually start the game). Your model is instead attired in quality armor and equipment, so when you change their look you can see how it matches with equipment of the type you'll actually be wearing. (Eventually.) It's silly, but just seeing your new character in shiny armor and wielding a big gun or sword is exciting; you want to get in there and start playing and leveling up to make that gear your own.

During my play testing time on Community Day I created several characters on two different machines, and noticed that the gear on the sample characters was always the same. When I asked about that I was told that yes, it was the same now, but that it might vary each time you created a new character in the final game. It's a minor little cookie, but I think it would be fun if they could randomize it, so we'd see something different on the character templates every time we made a new character.
--Flux, Mega Community Day Report, May 2007.

As soon as you create your new character and start a game with them, you will appear in a small dungeon where you must complete a brief opening mission that functions as a tutorial for Hellgate: London. See the Quests page for more details.

Classes and Subclasses

The concept of subclasses emerged in mid-2006.

Jonric: What kind of character system are you implementing? Will we be able to play as different races and classes?

Bill Roper: "In Hellgate: London, the characters represent the survivors of humanity, so the only "race" is mankind. There is definitely be a wide variety of looks that can be chosen as different cultures (or races in the real-world sense) are represented. As for classes, we've announced two so far, and there are more on the way. Also, our classes are very broad in scope, and to make this a bit easier for players to navigate, we've started looking at suggested sub-classes.

"For example, while a character may be a Templar, he could also specialize in certain ways and be an Exemplar, or a Defender, and so forth. Basically, it is like saying someone is a writer, and their sub-class is a journalist or a script-writer. These sub-classes may have other specific skills, abilities or statistical upgrades to help distinguish them - it's something we've just starting playing with so I'm afraid I can't give you much in the way of detail." --RPG Vault, June 2006

The concept of subclasses was initially thought to be just nomenclature -- like calling a Paladin who mostly used Zeal a "Zealot" in Diablo II. As more information has been released though, it's become clear that it's a much bigger deal than that. As of the GDC build in March 2007, the Templar classes were revealed: the Blademaster and Guardian. These are actually classes, not subclasses, in Hellgate's evolving nomenclature, since the Templar is a Faction, not a Class. Since then the Cabalist Evoker and Summoner, and Hunter Engineer and Marksman have been announced.