The day they take home a new role-playing game, players will spend a long time creating their character - precious time that could be better spent playing the game. To allow you to hit the ground running on launch day, BioWare will be releasing a standalone character creator.

The character creator will be available for download on October 13th. After experimenting with different character classes, race, and appearances, you can save these characters to your hard drive. It sounds like you'll be able to directly load these files with the PC version of the game. It should prove useful/fun to those of you looking to pick up the console versions, too.

The character creator will be 320 MB in size. The app has the same system requirements as the game, so this will also be an opportunity to check if your PC can run the game.