Think about it, when have you ever played any kind of game or RPG where all the character creation does is change the player's appearance? I do get some people like that but I've noticed a very consistent pattern of more customisation options usually means the devs have spent too much time on that rather than the gameplay and story.
There's also the other factor of these little background tag stories they try to introduce like with religion or lifepaths. They gives you the impression this is suppose to be some kind of meaningful choice but in reality all it does is change a few dialogue responses and has very little effect on the main story itself. It feels like there are certain mechanics I see regularly getting shoehorned into genres that don't belong in it and they're meant for a certain type of person that isn't really that interested in gameplay and more interested in cosmetics and general customisation.
Character creation is the only way we’re getting straight white males at this point, so I’d classify it as essential to most games.
If you think it’s just meaningless superficial detail, then I guess you don’t mind playing as disabled transgender black lesbians.
Oh yes, I've explored that myself, what's been remarkable is learning how much of the customisation stuff is third party assets. You're right, it's all just marketing. When you realise though how naked it all is especially with these latest games them claiming they worked on the game for however many years and the games come out this bad seem even more implausible.
Yeah, while most elements of a character creation mechanic are just a re-skinned version of the developer tool, some features are clearly "we dumped a lot of excess dev cycles into this".
Like BG3's vitiligo slider. They spent time on that.
BG3 devs complained because they “put so much work into character creation” and people kept picking “bland builds”. The simple fact is people will either pick entirely off min-maxing or what they find most aesthetically pleasing. Character creation is also lazier than a static character as it wipes out most the need for a backstory (again see bg3) for the character which makes them feel empty.
except BG3 has very poor customization. You need to choose from a short list of predefined faces, for humans is worse since you have asian, african or european esthetics and you end up with just 2or3 choices.
MassEffect had much better customization.
One thing I found quite amusing is how when you pick human even though the white colour swatch is the first in the colour palette for skin colour it switches to black, meanwhile the elves default to the white skin colour. That's definitely not a coincidence lol. I didn't check the other races for that though because a bunch of them have default non-human skin tones.
Definitely not a coincidence, I think it was white in beta. They could have made it random skin color but they realy wanted black.
It's just a skin colour bro /s :P
They were getting input from Curtis Yarvin 👀
By 'bland builds' they meant 'Why do people keep making characters that are white and male?'
And being the bubble-drowning, coom-brained retards that they are, the obvious answer of 'Because people want to play as themselves, you stupid fuck' never occurred to them.
Or that, gee, the majority of their customer base are white men with alot of spare income on hand.
Having said all that, I don't mind character creation, as it atleast gives me the option of roleplay and self-imposed custom game modes.
Actually, this isn't even true, IMO. I don't think I'm that unique in not caring much about what I'm playing as as long as it's a game that I like. I've played countless games with main characters that are people, animals, aliens, gods, vehicles, objects, plants, robots, whatever. I don't care.
But if a game has a character creator, I'm just going to make myself. I'm not that interested in "being" someone/something else.
Pretty hypocritical of them, considering most of the companions in the final game ended up being some variation (or combination) of human or elf, which in D&D usually translates as "human with pointy ears." Didn't even include any other staples of high fantasy like halflings, dwarves, or (half-)orcs in the main cast.
Seems like they were very intent on playing up demons (tieflings) in the cast.
Based Human Male Fighter Gang
Been that way since 1998.
I think part of what that was as well in defence of gamers is the dipshits didn't seem to understand because they were in early access people were not going to commit to messing around with customisation when their saves were getting broken constantly and Larian breaking save files was still a thing even into release. I think they even made those complaints well into Act I before they were releasing new content.
People’s approach to character creators usually falls into one of four categories:
I’m going to put myself in the game
I’m going to spend hours making my perfect character for my RP
I’m going to make the most hilarious abomination I possibly can
I’m going to make some minimal changes to the default model, because I don’t care that much
I’m usually in group four, but that doesn’t mean I don’t acknowledge that the other groups exist. As u/GrundlePuncher said, if the devs were already making a lot of different NPCs, it’s not exactly too much effort to give the player those assets to mess around with, and it absolutely does enhance the game for lots of people.
As for the rest, I know what you mean with life paths, but I don’t think it’s a problem or indicative of wasted dev time if you give a few blurbs that help your player make choices about their RP, or their stats, or a few sentences of dialogue that reflect their character’s alleged competencies.
Maybe I’m just not playing the right games to understand your complaint. The closest I come to getting what you’re saying is with Solasta, which I was never able to get into because everyone seemed to have the same voice and accent, and also because the way the dialogue choices work feel less like you're playing a character and more like you’re choosing which of four mouths to say “the snarky line” or “the patient line”with… but I didn’t think “oh man, if they hadn’t let me choose life paths here, the writing would be so much better because they’d have had 20 extra minutes.” I thought “man, this writing has a bit of wittiness-disease, and it’s weird how they chose to give each possible dialogue choice to a different character.”
I really can’t believe I forgot that one.
Honestly I fucking get that because it is the argument of if I'm going to stare at a character the whole playthrough it may as well be a hot girl.
I consider it to be a feature because i like fucking around in that shit.
Back in the day I would somewhat enjoy that, but when you realise it's all completely cosmetic and there's zero impact on gameplay it feels like a waste of time for me as a gamer unless you actually care that much. I mean in Fallout 4 for example it was something of a meme to create the most fugly character imaginable. It's all in your head though, because the characters don't react at all and this is the case even with the story background tags RPG games sometimes have.
It's more about immersion and allowing players to add a little bit of extra veneer to the story they want to experience. And I wouldn't entirely discount the impact of this from the player's perspective.
That said, the extent to which customization needs to be offered to achieve an appropriate level of benefit can vary. In Pathfinder: Kingmaker for example custom character portraits and a basic level of customization for the 3D model was absolutely sufficient. In the Avernum series, pretty much the same deal (though that didn't have built-in support for custom portraits).
In something like Skyrim though, where the level of visual detail and interaction in the world is pretty high, I'd have the same level of expectation for what I can do with character visuals. And then of course there's games where I'm perfectly fine with playing a pre-set character or a "no-name" character in general, like in the STALKER series, Half-Life, Dishonored, etc.
It all depends on the kind of game experience you're aiming to create and what kind of story you're trying to tell.
Interesting thought experiment to make the customization actually affect the gameplay in various ways.
Would be funny to see NPCs start reacting to those "MAX every slider to make a hideous character" types in horror & revulsion. Although unlikely to happen since developers would rarely want to gate content or acknowledge that those essential "character creation" type features actually are deeply relevant to how you interact with the world.
Wrestling games come to mind; expansive character options in terms of both looks and stats which affect the game and even the story.
I also liked the Ogre Battle/Tactics Ogre system where, while not directly affecting your appearance, you were asked a series of morality questions which affected your alignment and starting units and actually had an effect on your story paths (although you could modify your alignment with in-game choices).
I was just about to mention wrestling games.
It's been twenty years since Knight of Lodis came out, and I'm still looking for another tactics game that scratches that itch half as well.
The only time character customisation affected a game I played was mass effect and that just gave you an additional mission based off it.
Most if not all of it is simply aesthetics of how you want your character to look to having their own backstory, which 4/10 makes you fantasy Batman.
The last time in terms of build it affected how I played was Fallout NV, there I actually made one build for early game to beat speech checks in the first mission then used the 'are you sure you want this build as you leave the starter town' to respec. Fallout 4 ruined that to where I just abuse the leveling glitch thanks to the autonotron dlc to get everything I want.
White male human knight with Hairstyle 1, Hair Color 1, Eye Color 1, maximum muscle slider, and a longsword please.
ahem
Elden Ring.
True, at least in Elden Ring's customisation your stats change with your appearance because you have to equip certain gear etc, I actually kind of like that. Some RPGs still sort of have that with classes but now they've more gone the more generalise route, as a result classes lose their uniqueness but they don't even do the generalising properly compared to a skill point based system so the games just behave meh.
The true purpose of character creators is to make you spend time in the game and get invested before you start playing it.
If they just put you in the game then you say "ugh y-axis control is backwards. delete." If you spent 15 minutes on your character then you say "fine I guess I'll dick around with ten pages of settings to fix it".
If this wasn't the case they'd say you can change your look at any time, or any time before endgame, or at least once. But instead they say you better spend lots of time on character creation or you'll regret it later.