Character Customization

[Zooch]

I'm beginning to look into different forms of character creation when playing games, and I was curious about your gaming preferences:

1. How important is it that you are able to customize your character?

2. Does the customization get less important when you get down to the gritty details (like how many eye lashes your character has) - if so, what's your tipping point?

3. Does the genre of game affect the importance of character customization?

[Thrik]

I prefer it when the customisation is relatively limited, but still lets you make your character look unique and like yourself (or whatever persona you wish). For example the kind of stuff you get in Oblivion is way OTT in my opinion and takes too much time to piss around with, whereas the Xbox LIVE character thing is pretty much perfect.

[Warby]

1) not at all important as long as the given character is totally awesome like lets say in god of war i just started a bonus play and you can choose all those fancy outfits in the beginning ... i am half way through hand i wished i had taken kratos default look

2)no the more power the better in fallout 3 for example i felt like i had no control at all over the look of my character ... no matter what sliders i pulled it all looked the same "soulcalibur4"s character creation is pretty powerful but NOT QUIT powerful enough i say

3) no but the TASTE of the developers does !

[-HP-]

Character Customization should stay in the RPG genre, imho!

[Taylor]

It depends completely on the genre; character customisation implies self-insertion, so I don’t want it in a narrative based game with a central character because I'm following them and have no desire to make them me. It's also not a massive focus in first person games because I can't see what I look like, so I'm not that fussed about the aesthetics.

It's more important in games where my character is a visible, empty slate and crafting him or her makes up a lot of my game-time, like a western RPG, MMORPG and, to a lesser extent, fighters and racing games. As far as options go I prefer a few controlled meaningful options rather than a wall of sliders that I have to ram rapidly to minimum and maximum values to find out what they actually change.

[Zooch]

Thanks for the responses guys! I asked a few different forums the same questions and got lots of good responses. The general concensus is that character customization (I'll call it CC from now on) is important to an extent, but most people are happy with simply swapping pre-made body parts and adjusting high-level properties like height and weight.

I've found that people feel the genre directly relates to the importance of CC. People say it's most important when your character can be viewed and identified by others (online games like MMOs). They say CC has no place in an FPS game; simply because the most important aspect of the game is killing others, not stopping to see what they look like.

A lot of people touched on the idea that if the game is an adventure game that has a central storyline, they'd rather play a non-customized character since it's not their storyline. They reported that if they can't control what their character does in the game there's really no point in deciding what it looks like. The sandbox style games seem to carry more weight in CC, so the more sandbox you make your game the more CC should play an actual role.

There really isn't anyone that wants to spend long amounts of time on CC. A number of people even cited oblivion for being too in-depth. The average amount of time people want to spend customizing their character is anywhere between 15 mins - 45 mins. Anything over 1 hour is really extreme. Also, using morphs to stretch maps such as jawlines and eyebrow length is generally considered a waste of time (had lots of negative responses). The majority of people that attempt to create characters using these slider scales end up with some ugly creations that look nothing like what was intended.

Some even say that you end up making the same character, no matter what sliders you use. It might look a bit different in the end, but it will still look very similar to anything else you might try to create.

[Jetsetlemming]

I love kitting out my character to start a new game, with different skills or starting equipment or whatever. Stuff like assigning skill points at the start of a new Deus Ex game, or building a whole avatar in Morrowind/Oblivion, or as simple as choosing one of three basic builds in Shadowrun. Gameplay stuff. Visual customization I'm ambivalent on. It can be neat if it's done right, and concise, but I don't want to spend 20 minutes fucking with sliders and options in Oblivion or Sims to get the guy looking "right". I've always liked Deus Ex's amazingly simple yet broad visual customization- you've got a bunch of racial skins to choose from, including the ultra rare for gaming "Mexican" and "Albino" skins.

[st0lve]

Depends.. In FPS games, singleplayer, it's not important at all. But, in say COD, you cannot really view yourself, but others can. Instead of 20 generic soldiers, you have 20 half generic soldiers with variations to them assigned at random. That gives the game imo more realism and variation. Being able to pick your outfit in COD would probably be popular to a lot of people. The R6: Vegas series you unlock more gear, some affects gameplay and some doesn't, IMO, it's a good system. If you play the game for months straight, it feels good to get some rewards.

In 3rd person games (isometrics, RPGs etc.), you NEED customization. Image WoW without customization, gazillions of generic people, hell, I bet even the pvp dudes care. In Anarchy Online you even have an "social" tab, where you can pick what gear to display, so that you can have a "look" instead of random patches of randomly colored gear.

Customization allows you to "connect" more to the character imo. Just like d3 puts on black all day since he is a goth, and the grin guys wear macdonalds hats.