A correction first
Earlier on 2026-10-06 the seven starting classes were switched to new textured character models, each one a single skinned body in place of the procedural body, head, hair and armour pieces. That direction was wrong, and it has been undone.
The reason is design, not technical. Those models are fully clothed. The player has to start from a bare body, with armour and clothing as interchangeable pickups on top of it. A model with the clothes built in cannot do that.
So the player keeps the bare procedural body, and each class's starting armour is a normal equipment item that can be swapped. The model pipeline stays: seven models are built, about 40k triangles each, skinned to the game's skeleton so every existing animation drives them. They are reserved for clothed NPCs and enemies. Nothing uses them yet.
Character creation
After picking a class you now get a "Create your character" screen with a live 3D preview of that class in its starting gear. The options:
| Option | Choices |
|---|---|
| Skin tone | 6 |
| Build | 3 |
| Hair style | 6 |
| Hair colour | 8 |
| Facial hair | 5 |
| Eye colour | 8 |
| Face sliders | 8: brow, jaw, nose length, cheeks, chin, eye spacing, mouth, age |
The preview zooms to the face on the face rows, the character can be turned, and the look is saved with the character.
The player's eyes now have a white sclera, a coloured iris and a pupil. They used to be near-black balls, which made the face look hollow.
Two bugs worth the detail
Sliders that rendered black. The face sliders are morph targets generated from the head shape. Wherever a slider moved the surface, it rendered black. The cause was the integrated-GPU profile, which turns the GPU skin cache off, and morph targets need it. The cache is now opt-in: only the head uses it while a slider is active, and every other mesh keeps the cheaper path, which was measured 3 to 5 ms faster.
A preview that broke the frame rate. The first version of the preview made the game take 4 to 8 seconds per frame and crashed the GPU. The preview model is now hidden from the main view and the shadow passes, and captured on demand. With that, the Low-tier review runs in about a minute with no slow frames. The preview target and capture rate scale with the quality tier.
A rule for quality tiers
Quality scales up and is never capped. Low is the default for now, but features are built at full detail and Low is derived from them, so the higher tiers stay open.
One cost of Low is already visible: it uses a 25 percent mesh level that makes faces look faceted, which still needs a decision. The base head also still looks procedural.