This is very much a symptom of modern gaming, but I actually think that "creating your own character" is getting stale.
I'm certainly not suggesting it is inherently bad or anything.
However, I *do* think it winds up getting lumped in with some incredibly lazy practices and storytelling.
First off, "your character" doesn't exist. The developer explicitly cannot know your character or their motivations. "Choices" are given to hopefully give you an outlet to *broadly* apply to certain character themes, however you're simply never going to get the same level of detailed storytelling with a player-created character. Your character is never going to convey interesting quirks or personality flaws, because again, almost by definition, custom characters have to be built on broad-strokes.
It's also a super common trope, or even a crutch, to make NPC's effectively worship the ground your character walks on. After all, custom characters are an extension of the player, and you want the player to feel *cool*, right? But things can never get too personal, so again, it always winds up feeling a bit disingenuous.
And then visually, a lot of times you get into situations where to play as an interesting-looking character, you're asking the *player* to effectively serve as an artist.
Like, bro; I didn't go to school to be an artist. I literally don't give a shit to become an artist. That's *your* job. How many people remember running around in Oblivious, or any one of the Souls games, with some alien-looking motherfucker?
In my view, custom characters are sort of like loot systems:
In games that fully commit to them, they can be great!
But not every game *needs* to have a loot system, or custom characters.
In fact, a lot of games do themselves a huge disservice by trying to shoehorn those elements in, rather than evaluating the experience they want the player to have earnestly and catering to that.
But in any case, I think it just winds up making games worse a lot of the time.
End rant.
I'm certainly not suggesting it is inherently bad or anything.
However, I *do* think it winds up getting lumped in with some incredibly lazy practices and storytelling.
First off, "your character" doesn't exist. The developer explicitly cannot know your character or their motivations. "Choices" are given to hopefully give you an outlet to *broadly* apply to certain character themes, however you're simply never going to get the same level of detailed storytelling with a player-created character. Your character is never going to convey interesting quirks or personality flaws, because again, almost by definition, custom characters have to be built on broad-strokes.
It's also a super common trope, or even a crutch, to make NPC's effectively worship the ground your character walks on. After all, custom characters are an extension of the player, and you want the player to feel *cool*, right? But things can never get too personal, so again, it always winds up feeling a bit disingenuous.
And then visually, a lot of times you get into situations where to play as an interesting-looking character, you're asking the *player* to effectively serve as an artist.
Like, bro; I didn't go to school to be an artist. I literally don't give a shit to become an artist. That's *your* job. How many people remember running around in Oblivious, or any one of the Souls games, with some alien-looking motherfucker?
In my view, custom characters are sort of like loot systems:
In games that fully commit to them, they can be great!
But not every game *needs* to have a loot system, or custom characters.
In fact, a lot of games do themselves a huge disservice by trying to shoehorn those elements in, rather than evaluating the experience they want the player to have earnestly and catering to that.
But in any case, I think it just winds up making games worse a lot of the time.
End rant.
