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.
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.