Character Creation and Choice in RPGs
People love character creation in videogames. Often a person will spend up to about an hour creating their character in youtube videos, talking about hy thy’re putting points into this stat or that, but this character creation screen is usually a one time thing. Some players can also even rush through it. Because of this, there’s a lot of different approaches to it in gaming.
You would think by now here would be one type of character creation which is the best, most standardised way to do it; but the approaches can still be very different.
In The Elder Scrolls Oblivion for example, a character will be suggested to you by the way you conduct yourself during the opening dungeon, or in Fallout 3 there is the G.O.A.T test where you answer a multiple choice questionnaire . These are ways the developers have tried to make the character creation aspect of RPGs understandable to players.
JRPGs will often forgo it this entirely, giving you pre-set types of classes with personalities. Or they will offer a job system, where classes can be changed on the fly.
The Dark Souls games are interesting because they don't explain to you what each stat does or what the best items are to travel with on your journey, there can be a lot of trial and error, and this is part of the experience.
I think the reason why there is not perfect character creation system is because it can ruin a game if its not tailored up with the correct design. In Dark Souls, you may make three or four different characters in your first attempts to beat the game. Those first attempts are all about trying different strategies, until you find one that works, and even after you beat the entire game, you will try again and again with different builds and setups.
A player can redo their progress very fast in Dark Souls when they know what they are doing, and will often think they wish they had done things differently.
In a game like Fallout 3 though, it may take you over two hours before you realise you don’t like your character, due to the long opening and the way the tutorial quests work. To counteract this, Todd Howard tends to simplify character creation, as he did in Skyrim, and we get skills that are easily learneable accrosscharacter classes, or everyman type characters, jacks of all trades in other words. In Skyrim, there’s no reason why a barbarian can’t do magic, or a wizard can’t pick locks.
There is no real desireto punish the player for making bad choices in Bathesda games in their character creation.
This is a good approach, because character creation will otherwise define the entire gameplay experience, and players will just look up the correct guides on what is optimal.
In older RPGs like The Bards Tale or Wizardry, character creation is actually the most important aspect of the entire game. Sure players would have loved experimenting with different teams, but often in old RPGs, certain parts of the game were undoable if you chose unwisely.
These games would absolutely destroy you if your numbers weren’t correctly allocated.
To me this is the two sides of character creation, one where choice doesn’t really matter too much, and one where choice is integral to your progress.
Something I though t about while writing this, was how players seem to really appreciate the middle road.
Maybe it’s the case that in order to have character creation matter, and to have lots of choice in what kind of character you create, the game itself needs to be extremely non linier, and offer more replayability.
If you are going to lock certain characters out of quests, then there needs lot be lot more variety. I think this is why players love New Vegas and the original Fallout, and dislike Fallout 3.
That first Fallout title in particular is interesting, because it starts with a time limit, and leaves you to figure out almost everything on your own. You may restart the game a few times to tweak your character, but in general, because there’s no obvious correct path forward, you’ll find yourself creating your own story based on your talents. Every playthrough you get a little bit further.
It takes a lot more courage to create plotlines and situations the player may never even find themselves in if they don’t make a certain type of character, but it also makes their choices way more interesting.
The tension between these two designs, between open-ended freedom and a more focused journey, is still affecting RPG games and pretty much every genre of gaming today.
And it’s going to continue to affect character creation options.
