Unlike the Borderlands games before it, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands includes a full-on character creator, not just swappable head and body skins. And true to Bunkers and Badasses’ real-world Dungeons and Dragons inspiration, what seems like an impressive appearance generator turns into a fun D&D-lite character sheet by the end.
With that in mind, let’s jump into the basics of Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands’ Character Creator and how it works, if you’re wondering just how creative, or weird, you can get.
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands features six character classes: Stabbomancer, Clawbringer, Spellshot, Graveborn, Spore Warden, and Brr-Zerker. And before getting into how to customize their look, it’s worth noting each has its own passive ability, or “Class Feat”, and two action abilities you can choose from. For instance, the Spellshot can either turn enemies into sheep– wait a minute, skeep, my apologies. Or equip two spells at once. The Brr-Zerker can do either a spin attack, or a leap attack. Every class has an option like that, and once you reach level 7 you can swap these out at will from the skills menu. A further fork in this road is that you can actually multiclass after reaching a certain point and have two different passive abilities. For instance, a Spellshot/Graveborn multiclass means you get twice the hellish blast occurrences when casting spells. You can also respec your attributes at any time by visiting a machine in Brighthoof, and can even change your secondary class after completing the story.
After choosing your initial class, it’s time to choose your appearance. You’re not beholden to any particular look or race for each class– the look of your class’s armor is the only difference, and there are a lot of options in Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands including body type, voice quality and pitch, and even an option to turn off symmetry. The really fun part is Wonderlands’ slider overdrive, which removes the limiters on both body and facial feature options. When you engage this, you can make some truly horrific-slash-wonderful monstrosities, ignoring human anatomy or even the laws of physics completely. Look at that beauty! I recommend engaging the slider overdrive and just hitting randomize to see some true avant-garde works of art. Rapture’s own Dr. Steinman would kill for a face like that.
Moving on from your character’s appearance, you choose a Character Background. Similar to D&D 5e, backgrounds help you choose which attributes to excel in. Want higher strength and lower intelligence, choose Village Idiot. Want low Strength and Dex, but higher Intelligence and Wisdom? Choose Failed Monk. These backgrounds, in combination with the type of voice you chose, will also change some of your character’s dialogue if you enjoy a bit more role play in your looter-shooter RPGs.
After choosing your background, you can allocate your actual attributes, and they all give small boosts to certain stats, such as crit damage, crit chance, and even your skill cooldown speed. The six attributes mirror the six in D&D 5e exactly, except that Attunement replaces Charisma, as there aren’t any role-playing elements in Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands when it comes to dialogue choice or persuasion. You just use guns for that.
I would recommend checking the panel on the right of the character sheet to see which attributes are recommended for each class, as those are the ones you’re most likely to use. But no one’s stopping you from making a Stabbomancer with an absurdly high constitution.
There are some carry-overs when it comes to character customization from previous Borderlands games as well. You’ll find items in the world that unlock new options for armor and headgear, and those are added to your profile’s initial character creation menu in case you want to make a new character. You can also fully change your character’s appearance, including using these new options, by visiting this machine at Izzie’s Fizzie’s in Brighthoof.
And that’s our quick breakdown on the character creator in Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. For more on the newly released Borderlands spinoff, check out IGN’s Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands review, and dig into the origins of Tiny Tina if you’re new to the franchise.