The Dragon Age: Origins Forums announce Character Creator from Dragon Age: Origins will be released on October 13, giving players three weeks to experiment with character creation before the action/RPG goes live (thanks IGN). As the following states, this will be accompanied by beta testing of their new community website:

The Dragon Age: Origins Character Creator will allow you to create numerous different characters before launch and experiment with the different classes, races, and create multiple faces for the 6 Origin stories and save them to your hard drive for safe keeping until the game is released.

As you may be aware we are extending the BioWare community with a new social community site for Dragon Age: Origins. The great news is when we launch the Dragon Age: Origins Character Creator we will also be launching an open beta of the new social community site. You will be able to log into the new Social community site with your existing BioWare forums account name and password, and update it to the new social site account. Characters created with the Dragon Age: Origins Character Creator can also be uploaded to your account from within the Character creator. Once logged in to the social site, one of the first things you will be able to do is use one of your uploaded characters as your social website avatar for your profile on the new social website forums (yes we got that in!!), exciting stuff! Stay tuned for more information on the social website from now through launch.