So what was this game about again?
(media.scored.co)
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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.
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.