I can see what Rare are wanting to achieve by utilizing a random character generator to make no two pirates the same and I can also clearly see how it would appeal to others who might want to skip their character creations due to the time it takes to make one. On the other hand, I love spending time fine tuning or even just slightly editing my character so that I can feel good while playing, as I know that the character that I created is MY character. However, I feel that having an exclusively random character is not the best way to achieve the bigger premise of the game that Rare is trying to show: "Being the pirate that YOU want to be" - rather than the pirate that the game RANDOMLY generates for you.
To make the creation reflect Rare's vision, you could make everyone start off with a random pirate to which you can edit with sliders to some degree, so as to not allow people to make their characters have extremely disproportionate body parts. This would allow for everyone to have a different pirate, hence fulfilling Rare's 'No two pirates the same' vision, while also making everyone look like they fit in with the environment.
By making the generated pirates not too disproportionate, this form of creation would appeal to the people who don't want to spend too long creating a character while not having them look too strange and deformed.
It would also allow for the people who enjoy the customization as part of the game experience to change the pirate to actually be the pirate that THEY WANT to be, further fulfilling Rare's vision and allowing for players to feel comfortable knowing that the pirate they're playing as is THEIR pirate.
However, I can understand that we're getting close to launch and Rare probably does not have a full creation tool ready to be used by players. Yet, I would not be that disappointed with the randomized characters so long as you could 'Store' some of the random pirates. You could do this so that when you find a character that you would like to play as, but still want to keep randomizing to get a new and better one, you could keep the pirate and not feel disheartened when the next loads of characters are not better than the previous. This would allow for the whole process to feel less mundane and risky when repeatedly pressing the randomize button to get the pirate that you would want to play as.
I understand that Rare are really going ambitious with this whole game but while I'm really looking forward to pretty much everything else Rare has said they're going to be offering, the character creation tool is the only thing that I feel like Rare should (have) left alone to be its traditional slider tool so that everyone can become the pirate that they truly want to be.
