This week saw the usual up in arms response from the gaming community to a patch of one of their most beloved titles. Rust, the game that showed us what we're really interested in doing – murdering each other for chicken breasts and running naked pacifist groups – had an update that randomised what your character looked like, but more than that, it tied it to your Steam account.
So if your character was super-tan-orange, with bright green hair and an ugly face, that was what you were stuck with and will be for the foreseeable future. The rationale was that this way, players will have a unique identity within the game and that people will be remembered for how their character looks and could even be identified by it.
This is pretty different from what most games of its type are like, with character customisation almost always being built around giving players more options and more ways to customise themselves.
Unerringly though, with the majority of hardcore gamers being white males, that's the dominant character you'll see in such games. Forcing everyone to play a pre-chosen character then seems like an interesting exercise in making the game's inhabitants seem a bit more lifelike and varied, but some people really seem to be bent out of shape over being forced to play a black character, or one with a face they don't like.
So with that in mind, today I want to talk about character customisation in games and whether it really matters to you what you look like – especially once you've slapped a big helmet and pauldrons on it and are staring at it from behind or in first person anyway.
For me at least, a character customiser gives me the chance to make a character that looks like me. I make it short, stocky, give it a little beard and try and make my chin just a little bit more pronounced than it is in real life. Other than that, I will admit I don't really care and if I'm playing a game that involves frequent restarts and character creations, I'm likely to just randomise the features after a few run throughs as it's not something that's massively important to me.
However I'm aware that's not the case with everyone. The fact that people pay real money for skins to make their characters look different – even in first person games – suggests that how they look to other people is an important consideration for a good number of gamers. For some it's likely about showing off and looking cooler than your average player and for others it might be fantasy wish fulfilment, but it is something select gamers will go to some lengths to achieve.
But if it was that important, games which don't let you customise your character would flop. Tomb Raider would never have become a major franchise if people weren't perfectly happy playing as a female character. There certainly is a suspension of disbelief which has to take place with games and I think you only really need to get into accurate character customisation when you're talking about VR games, as immersion is quite easily shattered – or at least toyed with – when you have a body that looks drastically different than the one you know you have outside the virtual world.
I think ultimately, it boils down to personal preference. I know a lot of people that prefer to play games as female characters when they get the chance, some because they themselves are female and others simply because they like looking at a female character while they run around and kill things. Others just want a character that sort of looks like them, so they can role play within the world and some people love playing with otherworldy creations with derpy faces just because it's funny.
And then there's a big group of people that just don't care. Whether they're a man, woman, goat or alien, it doesn't matter. They're there to play the game and experience its adventures, not pretend to be someone.
But this is just my take on the whole thing. How do you guys feel about the way Rust has randomised everyone's characters and locked them to their account? It's not something that would affect my enjoyment of the game and I think it will be an interesting social experiment – much like the game has been from the get go – to see how people react to it and if it changes the way the game is played.
Is character customisation that important to you guys? Or would you just as happily play a game as Blob, the blob of goo?