As I mentioned in last week's post, I have a thing for character customization in games. It's what attracted me to a lot of my favorite game series and I'm willing to forgive almost any number of flaws in a game as long as the game does it well. Done right, it allows you to more deeply immerse yourself into the game's world and can add entirely new levels of replayability. Tactics Ogre remains one of my favorite games for just this reason, as I basically played it like a Lego set, making my own characters, giving them all backstories, and playing out battles between them in Training mode.
That said, don't think that character creation is a "get out of jail free" card for any game. In fact, it can easily become the one thing I hate about a game if it's done poorly. Following are the rules I would like for every game moving forward to follow with regards to character creation and/or customization.
8. Give me options.
Don't get me wrong. Being an artist myself, I totally get that making tons of alternate designs for a character is tough, and can take a lot of time and resources that could be better spent on other aspects of the game. That's the reason why this one is so low on the list.
That said, it is still important that you give me options. This is especially true if you're making the sequel to a game that had way more options than your current game does. You hear me, Soul Calibur 6?
7. If you're going to give me alternate outfits, make them look different.
I'd like to give special mention here to the first Dissidia, where most of the characters had terrible palette swap outfits that were 2 shades off from their default.
That's an extreme example, but this is a far more widespread affliction than that. Other offenders include The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age, or for that matter the far more recent The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of War, where most of the armors you can find look pretty much the same except with a line going in a different direction, or a spike here or there. Boring. If you're going to half-ass it this much, you'd might as well just make palette swaps. Speaking of...
6. If you're only giving palette swaps, then give me LOTS of them!
Palette swap costumes aren't ideal, but I can still work with them, and I have before. I spent almost all of Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce with Lu Xun palette swapped to white, role-playing him as a paladin with fire powers.
So my request is, if you're going to just do palette swaps, give me LOTS of them! Palette swapping is super easy so there's no excuse to only give me one color change that's just two steps off from the original, and no I'm not going to let it go, Dissidia.
Or hey, better yet, give me a color slider so I can make my own palette swaps.
5. Give me control.
Obviously, the point of character customization in a video game is to be able to put a part of yourself into whatever game you're playing, whether it be role-playing as an imaginary character, or creating an idealized fantasy version of yourself. So, even more obviously, I need to have control over who and what my character is.
This one is a fairly rare offense, but it does happen. Examples include Final Fantasy Tactics A2 not giving you the option to name your characters, or Fable forcibly covering you in scars because it's impossible to not take damage.
4. Don't make my created characters worse than the defaults.
Speaking of Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics RPGs - especially those made by Ivalice Alliance and the former Quest Corporation - are a major offender on this front. Apparently nobody told them that the point of character creation is supposed to be to allow me to make my own characters. Instead they seem to be under the impression that character creation is just about recruiting expendable idiots to fill out my party until I figure out how to recruit the special people.
I'm not playing Tactics Ogre because I think Denam and Catiua are cool. I'm never going to use your characters, and giving them bonus stat points and access to exclusive classes is just an insult.
Actually, this one happens a lot more often than you'd think, and affects more than just character creation. Other examples include Galactic Civilizations II's spaceship builder, where the preset ships all come with more stuff on them than their chassis' weight limits should actually allow, meaning ship building is pointless because the presets (which, incidentally, are also the only thing the AI uses) are always better.
3. Make me feel like I'm a part of things.
Here's a surefire way to make me hate your game with a passion: let me create my own character, send me through hours of missions, then at the end reward me with a team photo that includes every character in the game except for mine. Go screw yourself, Syphon Filter: Omega Strain.
And no, I get that it would have been difficult to somehow put your character into a prerendered image... so maybe just, you know, don't paint yourself into that corner to begin with? If you can't make it work then just don't do it.
2. If it's character creation, don't tell me who I am.
A lot of people use the terms "character creation" and "character customization" pretty much interchangeably, so I feel I should define what I mean first.
Character customization is more like what you see in a game like Mass Effect. The main character of Mass Effect is Commander Shepherd. Period. You can decide whether Shepherd is a male or female, some facial features, abilities, armor, which is his or her favorite store on the Citadel... but it's still Commander Shepherd.
This is opposed to character creation, which allows you to actually make your own character who you play however you want.
It is very important that, if you are going to give me actual, legit character creation, DO NOT TRY TO TELL ME WHO MY CHARACTER IS. This is why Fallout 3 was great, while Fallout 4 was - at least from a story perspective - hot, steaming garbage. Fallout 3 didn't give me absolute freedom, no. I was from a vault, dad ran away and left me, yada yada, but beyond that I could play my character as whoever and whatever I wanted. Fallout 4 on the other hand could not stop bashing me over the head with its own idea of who it wanted my character to be. You are middle-aged, you have a child, your spouse is Nate and/or Nora. DO NOT QUESTION THE GAME.
And no, I get that they need to give you at least some amount of backstory just to connect you to the game, but it should be as minimal as possible. "You're a new adventurer looking to explore the labyrinth." "You recently left the vault, have fun." That's fine. Not only is it all you need, it's all you should WANT. If you want a singular, deeply nuanced character, then stop playing games with character creation.
1. Let me make an attractive male character.
I can tolerate a game pretending that picking a name and a hair color is character creation. I can play a game for a hundred hours knowing that my created character will always have only 90% stats compared to whatever Cloud Strife wannabe the dev wants me to use. I can even get into a game that tells me the young prodigy inventor I wanted to make is instead a middle-aged retired soldier with a wife and kid.
However, if there is one thing I can not abide, one thing that will make me hate your game with all the burning fury of a neutron star... it is being offered my choices of character, and seeing that my options are "Roid Mutant", "Scar Face", "Toxic Avenger", and "Girl" aka the only character whose face you can look at without dry heaving.
This is an epidemic that plagues almost all of the gaming industry outside of Japan. Seriously, what's up, game devs? Are y'all scared of being called gay or something? KNOCK IT OFF.
No comments:
Post a Comment