Character design represents one of the most critical early decisions in game development, as it influences downstream design choices and can be extremely costly to change later. This experiment compares two distinct visual approaches for Seaborne, a conquest MMO, to determine which character style resonates more strongly with target players and why certain aesthetic choices drive preference.

One of the things I find most helpful is seeing not just what option was chosen, but why. They liked the polished look and broader appeal of the realistic design, whereas the blocky design was too reminiscent of Minecraft. If we ran this test with a younger audience we might see a completely different preference, highlighting how important it is to know what customers fit your ideal profile.

Rally correctly identified the realistic design's popularity, though Rally overestimated it (96% vs 86%). Rally's prediction captured the strong human preference despite overcompensating when I ran it using Google rather than OpenAI, in Smart mode (the larger Google Gemini 2.0 model). OpenAI in Fast mode (GPT-4o mini) slightly preferred the blocky design instead, highlighting the importance of calibration–checking the model and audience you chose gives results that match your past experiments.