When you play a game, do you prefer to make your own player or do you prefer to choose from a roster of already designed characters?
What do you like/dislike about these?
What you you tweak?
Or does it not matter to you?
I usually love it when a game has a pre-set avatar that you can customize, but it depends on how it's done. If it's not executed well then I'd prefer to play an already designed character as the MC.
I always prefer to make my own player! Character customization is one of my favourite parts of playing a game, I like to make the character I play as look like me, or as close to looking like me as I can get. Or at the very least, I just like to be able to design and customize my character.
Choosing from already-designed characters is fun as well, but I find that I don’t feel as connected and attached to those characters as I do the ones I get to put my own personal touches on. If that makes sense lol
Ooh, character customisation is pretty important to me when playing a human/humanoid character! There are always exceptions, though!
The ideal level of customisation varies per game. With some games, it's nice to have sliders to adjust every minute detail, whereas with other games, having some preset options to choose from is fine (e.g. preset faces).
If I had to rank the options from most to least preferred, it would probably be: good quality preset options to scroll through (e.g., face shape, eye shapes, hair styles, hair colours, etc.) > highly detailed customisation (e.g. sliders for adjusting things like eye size, etc.) > a single preset main character > a roster of preset main characters to choose from. Hopefully that makes sense!
I don't tend to want to play games where the player character doesn't appeal to me, so for that reason, customisation is helpful!
I have sports games that I spend hours upon hours designing specific original characters. Then I neglect to actually care about the actual gameplay and it becomes my personal character building sim game. (There was a 2019 sports game that I managed to fill up all 100 slots in the character creator aha :x)
When it comes to RPG's that want me to make a character, I get kinda lazy and would rather rush into the actual game. My characters end up being a slightly tweaked version of a default template.
I generally prefer having preset characters. I feel like it's more jarring to have a character creator in a game that doesn't need it, as opposed to a game missing one when it could've been implemented well (Pikmin 4 being a recent example). But the few games that manage to pull off character creators well and have it work properly are definitely great :D
