I'd like to take a moment to encourage customisation in games.

By tailoring your game to it's player you make for a more satisfying, personal experience. Here are a few examples of what I'm on about (most of which I'm actually going to be using somewhere at some point):

* Don't just let the player choose a name, let them choose their sex, stats and appearance. Make a few player CHRs and give them a choice from all of them. Make sure they know what they're going to look like before they start playing! Have NPCs respond differently depending on what and who they are.

* Let them name stuff! Do they have a space ship? Let them give it a name! With the (fairly) recent addition of VSP manipulation functions, you can even emblazon it on the side of the craft by blitting the name to the tileset!

* Make conversations multiple choice, with different outcomes depending on what the player says.

* Let your players edit the GUI! Let them choose their mouse pointers, let them pick which tiled background textboxes use.

* Let them import their own custom content, like their own portraits, gui backgrounds etc.

* Give them a base of operations and let them decorate it! Even simple stuff like picking what colour the wallpaper is in your Castle of Extreme Awesomeness makes all the difference.

...

Thoughts? Contributions? Examples?

I totally agree with er... about half of your points (branching plots, customizable GUI, base of operations customization, specifcally). I would also somewhat agree with your other points, with the following caveat:

It really depends on the kind of game you're going for. In a game where you can make all your own characters, the player can invest more of themself into the characters, having little background stories for them and so on. But what about in-party character interaction? How will the game know if you've decided that two characters are sisters, or there's a love triangle between the main character, the healer, and the thief? You basically restrict your story ideas to things that are devoid of personality interactions, because you either can't make the assumption because you don't know what the player has dreamed up, or you're forcing a personality (arguably the most important part) onto a character. Yes, you can sort of provide for this through branching plotlines and so on... but there's only so much a game designer can put into it.

On the other hand, with a set of specified characters, you can write a story where the player will become sympathetic to at least some of the characters, and can experience it vicariously through them. Movies and television shows are quite popular, despite the fact that you have absolutely no customization there. But, at first especially, the player may not feel as invested in the game and so may lose interest, and if the game designer hasn't thought up likable characters then the problem is even worse.

Really I think the best approach is to think about what sort of game you want (do you want an epic, heroic fantasy or an emotionally impacting, small-scale love story, etc) and then decide what fits best. I don't think you can really make a call on whether uber-customizable is better or worse in the general case.

Hopefully what I said made sense, and I'm sure I'll read this again in an hour or something and realize I sound like an idiot, but there you go.

Edit: Also, I'd like to say that either way will still be lots of work, and neither fully customizable nor fully pre-developed characters will save a bad game from bad design. ;)

I'm not in favour of customisation at the expense of never finishing...

Zip

{You'd have thought I'd have got bored of this by now}

So, basically: too little and you feel like you're watching the action rather than being a part of it.

Sometimes that's what you want. And the whole 'name the character' thing is retardedly trivial. It adds nothing except the ability to name someone 'penis' and snicker at dialogue or whatever.

I'm very happy that games like BG and KOTOR have allowed a decent plot in a game with character customization, but that does not change the fact that there are tradeoffs, and it will never be possible to integrate so customizable a character into a plot to the degree one can a prefab character. Now, that doesn't mean that games with prefab characters necessarily take advantage of the potential...

As for changing the GUI, eh. There are some games this just doesn't work for, and in many cases it's not worth the trouble. There's also the question of to what degree you should relinguish artistic control over your game to the player, and what kind of sacrifices you need to make to allow for really meaningful changes.

Actually, I'm currently creating a library in verge called HAIL (Huge Artificial Intelligence Library) that will allow infinite customization for your verge games. Litterally, in fact, because it will be based on the Heart of Gold Infinite Improbability Drive hardware, when those become standard in all PCs. I imagine it will be finished before 2523.

To be serious though, this kind of argument is really a 'western RPG vs. eastern RPG' argument. While there are plenty of games that break the stereotype on both ends of the spectrum, for the most part, it's a philosophical difference between the two. Western RPGs (Neverwinter Nights, Baldur's Gate, Morrowind) seem to favor a more 'immersion' approach of getting you to identify with your character by involving you in its actual creation. Eastern RPGs (final fantasy, clones ad nauseum, with Dragon Quest/Warrior being a notable exception) seek to get you to identify with a character by creating a more complex, though usually much more linear, story.

Both game types appeal to large numbers of people. Some people like both. Some people might argue that Cloud in Final Fantasy 7 has absolutely no personality whatsoever, rendering my point completely invalid. I guess it just depends on the tastes of the individual. Blame the person who create genres.

Yeah, I'm not against heavy customization, just the idea that every RPG would benefit from it.

Quote:Originally posted by Troupe

I thought cloud was quite a characterless shitsack, enhanced by the fact that all the characters in that game were pretty much the same becuase you just put the best materia possible on them and stuff. Yeah, I don't care much for FF7. Of course, the characters in FFIX and FFX had tons of personality, so it's really just execution.

Barrett was the best character in that game.

I also agree with Blue Z.'s assessment. I happen to like both kinds of games. I would say that I can spend more time on a game in the vein of Baldur's Gate, but I'm more likely to remember playing Xenogears or Chronotrigger 25 years from now.