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Character Customization in Games
l337CrappyJack
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So Lost Planet 2 was announced, and having been left a bit cold by the first one, didn't have much interest in it. Now I read that you can change your character's appearance, from gender and clothes all the way down to the gestures they use ingame. Suddenly I have to have a copy.
This has been a running theme for me. RPG's aren't about grinding up to get the best possible weapons and getting my level up to snuff; it's about finding the right pair of gloves to go with my armor so I can walk around feeling like a champion. Any game with face sliders guarantees I'll spend at least a few hours fine tuning the bridge of my character's nose. Saint's Row, Def Jam....I even spent most of my time grinding in WoW not for levels or prepping for raids, but because with a few more pieces of leather, I could make a pair of boots and CHANGE THEIR COLOR.
So what about you? Is the ability to decide whether your character has a beard or not a draw for you? Do unlockable outfits ever make a bad game bearable? And what do you consider an example of this sort of thing done right or wrong?
This has been a running theme for me. RPG's aren't about grinding up to get the best possible weapons and getting my level up to snuff; it's about finding the right pair of gloves to go with my armor so I can walk around feeling like a champion. Any game with face sliders guarantees I'll spend at least a few hours fine tuning the bridge of my character's nose. Saint's Row, Def Jam....I even spent most of my time grinding in WoW not for levels or prepping for raids, but because with a few more pieces of leather, I could make a pair of boots and CHANGE THEIR COLOR.
So what about you? Is the ability to decide whether your character has a beard or not a draw for you? Do unlockable outfits ever make a bad game bearable? And what do you consider an example of this sort of thing done right or wrong?
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Mass Effect was probably one of the better examples of a character maker. Apart from the really naff hair (most of the time it just seemed as if it was a separate entity existing on the head, or maybe that was just me), it was actually possible to make decent-to-good looking characters. It made sense in a game like ME since you were always seeing your character's face in conversations and cutscenes, so it was seamlessly integrated. In Fallout 3 you almost never saw your character's face except for occasionally in VATS combat, and even there you usually had hat, helmet and glasses obscuring things and making you look just as generic as the rest of the guys.
Plus in ME they gave you the option to keep the helmet off for most of the game so you could see yourself. That was a good decision.
MMOs are the worst offenders. You tend to have an outfit that looks good... and one that has the stats you need. It seems to me that the outfit you lovingly customize should have better stats than something you found on a dead body.
WT looks so ugly compared to rock band.
Plus chainsaw guitars yeeeeaaaah.
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The worst part is, I have yet to find so much as a blog that caters to pointing out this kind of thing. Costume Get, maybe, but that guy updates maybe ten times a year.
I'm amazed there even is a blog dedicated to this. Then again, there's a blog for everything these days.
Precisely.
You are all familiar with Phantasy Star Online, yes? In the latest game of that style, Phantasy Star Portable, I quite possibly spend more time shopping for new clothes than I do shopping for new giant energy swords and laser cannons.
Hell, even in games that are first person, like Fallout 3 for example. You will rarely ever actually see what your guy looks like unless you go third person and turn on the "vanity" cam, but you can bet your bottom dollar I spent a long time making sure my guy/gal's face and hair were perfect. Plus I would often wear a combination of clothes to make my character look cool, even at the expense of armor.
Fable II was another game in which I searched the world over for new pieces of clothing, then mixing and matching them till I find a combo that I thought looked cool.
edit-
Even in Front Mission 3 I spent a ton of time painting my Wanzers and naming them.
I also always wish that in games like Castlevania you could get the armours and stuff to actually make your character look different (AXE doesn't count). Like, the last time i saw that sort of thing was probably SotN, where you could get that cape which could be changed.
Oh yeah, and i'm SO gonna grab a Phantasy Star Portable...
In a lot of games it doesn't really matter (PSO). But in RPGs and fighting games, the other characters (usually) reveal some glimmer of emotion and personality in their speech and actions. Yet I always feel as if the created characters look more like an actor playing a role.
Maybe it's just my imagination, or maybe it's just because I know that I created them and can't quite forget that. I'd love to see developers continue to work on it, though!
So you never played Mass Effect then? We're getting there, most devs are just too lazy to put that kind of effort in when 90% of the time you'll be looking at the back of your character's head rather than the front.
Fable 2 tried to tackle this with no stats on armour, but then they didn't offer much choice either.
Single Player dungeon crawlers tend to do this well as you don't need to min / max as much to be competetive as its solo, Titan Quest had good loot but you could not change the look of your guy much.
Guild Wars had a good system imho, dyes and the like.
My big hope for MW2 is that you can customise your soldiers gear and uniform for MP so I can dress like a mad Spetsnaz type all the time. Would make Team deathmatch odd if your all in different kit I guess...
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Unecessary showboating taunts and breakdance idle movements ... should be mandatory in every game.
I agree, but on the flip side, I've been turned off by plenty of games that force you to play as GENERIC PROTAGONIST, and then have him be silent the whole game anyway. The Ghostbusters game has me worried about this, since from what I hear, your character barely interacts with the cast and just runs around with them shooting stuff. Then from screenshots, he looks to be about the blandest motherfucker alive.
But only if they were female. I tried, and I couldn't make a male character that didn't look like a generic scarred action hero.
The character adapted really well to how you chose your skill points and your evil/good and corrupt/pure scales. Too bad there were only like two or three good looking clothing options per slot and the rest made you look way too fat. The monk outfit was the worse offender, there is no way anyone looked good in it. At least there were a lot of dyes.
I would argue that Guild Wars system was not a good system for customization. I agree that the dyes do help somewhat, but the armor choices for each class were extremely limited. There was always the set of armor that was the best you could get for that area of the game. There were a few different sets for each class that made for some customization based on your character's skill, but the reality was that at any point in time, any character of a given class was wearing one of two or three different sets of armor. It was one of the very few things I didn't like about this game.
Sold. So hard.
Edit: But make it damn well free, much less a subscription-based thing. What the hell, EA/Dice?
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Fallout 3 had the same problem - your character is supposed to be a teenager but ends up looking closer to 30.
Customizing my character's appearance is somewhat important, but given half the time peoples faces are hidden behind masks/helmets customizing starting appearance isn't critical to me.
I like having sets of gear. I have a Pvp set, 2 pve sets and some nostalgia stuff. I think it would be cool if you could wear anti-undead sets or resist sets. I am a little disappointed that it is not really worthwhile wear a frost resist set against a frost boss.
It's also one of the reasons I like Rock Band better than Guitar Hero. RB's characters are awesome, it's like a "Make your own Pixar character" generator. Love it!
I always spend a huge deal of time in games like Mass Effect, Fallout 3, Oblivion, perhaps an hour or so, just to make sure the character looks the best I can make him (or her) look.
In Guild Wars, even before it was useful for the Hall Of Monuments, I was collecting elite armors for my Mesmer and dying them around. I wanted to fight other players with the character that looked the best.
So yes, character customization is something VERY important to me in a game, and I wish more MMO devs took it more seriously, like some people said in here before me, by letting our cool custom armors be as good, if not better, than gear sets.
I don't know, I liked the guy I managed to make. Don't know whether you'd call him action movie material or anything, but then again, this is an action heavy game anyway.
Also, why is that so many people seem to view character creation as a tool to make other characters? Like in City of Heroes or Soul Calibur, so many people seem to gravitate towards creating other famous super heroes, or creating characters from other fighting games. I can see how it would be fun, but I wonder why it's the main thing people want to do.
In Oblivion, I generally clicked random until I got something close and then worked from there. There was a similar system in EQ2 that I used rather extensively because each subsection didn't have 1,000 more subsections. It was "Cheeks ... fat or thin? high or low?" and it got on with it.
So those dudes are unoriginal. Or maybe want to see if they can, or as practice. Or simply want to make an homage. Who cares what they do? Question is what can you achieve with it?
Saints Row 2 on the other hand...
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