The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine for instance has received far more plaudits for offering dye to recolour Geralt's armour than people clucking that it only applies to actual Witcher armour, not any old cloth.Įlsewhere, MMOs still offer plenty of choice, but the growth of personal stories, limited skill-sets and very few armour options mean that realistically there's rarely much separating your vision of a wizard from the next player, and most of that is cosmetic.
The more nailed down a character is, the easier it is to tell stories about them, to create recognisable characters to make toys and ghastly Funko Poop figures of, and there's been no real suggestion of late that most players actually mind having this creative weight lifted. The obvious example of it not being a bad thing is The Witcher 3, which just wouldn't be the same if you weren't Geralt specifically, sorting out problems like Geralt does.Īnd all of this makes sense. Fallout 4? Obsessed with creating its story and your place in the world, which wouldn't be so bad if it didn't do it so poorly. Skyrim - bar a little prophetic nonsense and a few unique tricks, it left you alone. Or just look at Bethesda's last couple of games. Bioware for instance pushed their vision of both Commander Shepard and Hawke on players by not only presenting their canonical version first, but making them look notably better than generated faces (at least until making a canonical female Shepard, after two games of 'eh, whatever'). More and more games began defining their protagonists either by force or in subtle ways. Not necessarily for better or worse, but definitely in a specific direction. You couldn't even dress them up properly, since clothing in these games was typically per-character and treated as a premium offering (with Vindictus sticking in my mind mostly for combining destructible clothing with the wonderful phrase, ahem, 'inner armor' - which is to say the ability to buy sexy underwear for your characters to reveal with bad play. Why would you want to give up the chance to create your own character from scratch in favour of taking what a developer thought was cool. I remember really, really hating this concept. There's quite a few characters now and those two might not have been the first to show up, but you get the basic idea. You wanted to be a buff warrior? You were a guy called Lann. Instead of classes, it offered characters. I remember being somewhat scornful of this a few years ago, particularly when games like Vindictus started showing up. Have you ever watched a new character reveal for a game you know you're never going to play? Then the sickness might have spread. That's what happens when the likes of Blizzard and Riot spend literally tens of dollars creating gorgeous videos to promote their worlds, yes, but it goes somewhat deeper than that. As far as I can tell, our membership is roughly a billion people and counting. This week, I'm writing not just as an RPG columnist, but as president of the newly formed League Of Folks Who Don't Really Play MOBAs But Are Bizarrely Hooked On All The Trappings.
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