People’s approach to character creators usually falls into one of four categories:

1. I’m going to put myself in the game

2. I’m going to spend hours making my perfect character for my RP

3. I’m going to make the most hilarious abomination I possibly can

4. 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.”

People’s approach to character creators usually falls into one of four categories:

1. I’m going to put myself in the game

2. I’m going to spend hours making my perfect character for my RP

3. I’m going to make the most hilarious abomination I possibly can

4. 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 your 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.”