So what was this game about again?
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Another game that would have been fine with a neutral character creator. It's amazing how they insist on forcing you to play the equivalent of the female druid in D4 in every game now when the solution is just to give everybody what they want and focus on gameplay, story and mechanics instead of identity politics.
You want to be a bald headed black lesbian? Fine just use the sliders and have at it. You want to look like yourself or your favorite waifu? Go for it. I guess "owning the chuds" is far more important than selling games these days.
Having character creator is extremely limiting on story writing because you have to pretend that tabula rasa is real or ignore the choices altogether (for example female Shepard). Imagine for example Yakuza Kiwami if they made Kiryu male or female, it would completely change the storyline and make a good portion of it extremely bland. The problem is that the western RPG story writing is so shit anymore that no one cares about a dedicated character anymore unless it’s a JRPG. I can’t think of a single decently written AAA western rpg since what, Witcher 3? Meanwhile in JRPGS there’s been Persona 5, Dragon Quest XI, Nier Automata, Like a Dragon, etc that are all standouts for dedicated characters.
Saints Row 3/4 handled it perfectly, by simply letting you make a funny character and writing the story around it no matter what you picked.
That’s again the tabula rasa impact, you remove all uniqueness of a character and make them referenceless. For example, grandias biggest charm was the personality and uniqueness of the characters, they had personality and a lot of that was dependent on their age, appearance, etc. you can say this about many many dedicated character rpgs.
You mean Saints Row 1 and 2. Saints Row 3 and 4 had horrible nonsensical stories that were just meme-tier, especially Saints Row 4. But Saints Row 1 and 2 were pretty well written for a self-insert character, but it was obviously written to be a self-insert male character given how masculine the stories were for the first two games.
4 was a real shame because the driving was actually better than 3, but you had absolutely no reason to touch a car outside of mandatory sequences after about 10% of the game.
I reject this premise entirely. Several very well-written RPGs have character creators, and most of the worst stories in gaming have fixed protagonists. Certainly, it can be more challenging and more work to write a story with custom protagonists in mind, but it’s absolutely possible. It also forces a degree of (near) universality onto your themes and narrative choices, which helps with stuff like “broad appeal”.
“Well written” because they have to jump through hoops to make the side characters relatable because there’s nothing unique about your character. Garrus and Wrex stand out because they are unique characters with an actual story behind them.
Shepard worked because the high restrictions of the Paragon/Renegade system usually led to a consistently written character being made by forcing you to commit, most of the time, to being one or the other to not lose out on points you'd need in it to make bigger decisions.
At least in ME1, its been so long they all blend together and I can't remember if that stayed in 2/3.
Shepard worked because they wrote the story entirely for a guy static character and then made some minor dialogue changes for the female option. The illusion of choice dialogue options has been overdone as is, they never actually make massive impacts or punishments to the story.
I find the gender difference far less egregious in a universe basically dominated by the Asari, who seem to be the ones corralling all other races together. Its still generic "sci-fi egalitarianism" but it at least is inoffensive.
The true failing of the character creator is the background choices, which should lead to considerable differences in both your treatment and your choices but instead if just a handful of "we referenced it 2-3 times randomly with no effect" moments.
'Cept that made Mass Effect a shitty RPG all around. There's no point in deciding what action you think is best on a case by case basis because you get punished for not committing to one side or the other on the morality meter. So you just choose whatever aligns with your current playthrough without needing to think or even read the already truncated dialogue options. Seriously, Mass Effect might as well have started by asking if you wanted to be a Paragon or Renegade and just decided everything from there.
Well his point was that the lack of a canon singular character makes the writing worse. In which case those limitations contribute to making a more dedicated character, instead of a murderhobo that can min/max around quests arbitrarily to pick the best rewards.
If you think JRPGs have better written stories, then a "shitty rpg" is the one that offers you a bunch of choices to begin with. If you prefer having a bunch of options, then JRPGs are the shitty RPGs because you can't really "roleplay" in the slightest.