Even the most staunch Crimson Desert defenders might have a slightly harder time arguing that main character Kliff is bursting with personality. The drone-like player avatar is such a nobody that it’s bizarre we’re all forced to play as an identical version of him, and indeed only a male him, despite the single-player RPG coming from the same studio that created Black Desert Online with its amazing character creator tools. So, as IGN noticed, modders have of course stepped in. Character Creator – Female lets you visit the game’s barber to design your very own female protagonist, and a male version is coming very soon.
Poor ol’ Kliff. Not only does he have such a silly spelling of such a bland name (hey, I’m a “John,” I know of what I speak), but he has the lack of personality to match. Much like a cliff, he’s about as interesting as a pile of rocks. Given this, it’s so very odd that developers Pearl Abyss opted to make him the primary focus of so much of the game (alongside side characters Damiane and Oongka), rather than letting players roll their own hero or heroine to explore Crimson Desert‘s vast world.
The somewhat makeshift solution is Character Creator – Female by Khione95, which allows you to remake Kliff as a female character, with any of 98 faces and 159 hairstyles. So while it’s not a literal character creator with all those meters and toggles, there’s still a lot of variety on offer. Right now, you find the face choices at the in-game barber by selecting the “BEARDS” tab, although this is apparently due to change. The modder has even gone through “most” armor options to adjust them for boobs.
Khione95 has plans for a more complicated setup, with customization options for faces, an option to play Orc or Goblin, switching in more “female” animations, and tomorrow (April 9) they intend to release a male version of the mod. It’s still early days, and many are reporting glitches and issues, but many more are celebrating the new option.
The one big downside, however, is that you need to have unlocked the game’s barber to use it, and that’s a fairly arduous process. You need to complete a whole line of dreary quests from Grounds of the Sunrise, which will eventually add a barber to your camp, but requires building an entire farm and ranch first, then waiting to grow a bloody tree. One kind soul has dropped a save file with it all unlocked, with as little of the main quest played as possible.
Another option that bypasses this is the much more limited Playing Kliff as Damiane SFW mod by Chris Rubino, which switches in Damiane’s skin and animations for Kliff’s immediately, but offers no customization.
Of course, if you just do a body-swap, your character will still have Kliff’s original voice. There is a fix for that too, as IGN points out, but it’s far from ideal. It’s called Kliff Female Voice, but it’s an AI model reprocessing all the dialogue, and so sounds as poor as you’d expect from that. But short of someone else voluntarily re-recording countless hours of dialogue, there’s no neat solution to this issue.
