User Control in games?

IEatApples

Im just doing research at the moment about giving users control over the characters in games. A good example of this would be character editors at the start of some games and I'm getting very different feedback from users and from character artists so I'd love to see some opinions here.

Characters are an important part to story in games and surely users are more engaged with your creative ideas than their own? And I know its important when designing a character for it to have a good history before pen touches paper. But then again if a user gets to create their own character then this could add to the immersive experience.

I get the feeling here everyone would love to have the freedom to make any character they wanted for a game (like mods...) but would you let the public make their own character for your game?

Hmm maybe that makes no sense at all... lol, anyway just a thought and any feedback would be a great help.

Ninjas

Hmm, not sure what you are getting at. Some games let you make your own character. Mass Effect lets you even select from a few different back-stories.

I am pretty sure your average person could make a character with more depth than most "professionally written" game characters.

Ged

really it depends on the game and wether it is driven by how linear the narrative is. If the narrative is fairly open then theres room for interpretation then players may be allowed to make a character of thier choice, if the story is very linear and character driven then I dont see how giving freedom to players to create thier own character would help in any way and may actually just lead to a more generic less identifiable character with very little emotional connection with the player.

So to me really its not a question of "which is better" but rather "which would work best in our game".

IEatApples

But say you have a game like APB and your taking it seriously creating a real style cop or robber but someone else makes say a homer simpson, doesn't this ruin game play for others? Even though the customization of characters adds to the gameplay.

So as you said I'm not really looking at "which is better" but more along the lines of "Is there a line which you shouldn't cross" while giving users control. And if your going to far down this line doesn't it just turn into a simulator rather than a game?

You mentioned Mass Effect and while I played this game and did enjoy it the characters do feel very soulless in my opinion and even thought I created them I'm not feeling any emotional connection to them like I would to say Marcus from GoW.

danshewan

IEatApples wrote: »

But say you have a game like APB and your taking it seriously creating a real style cop or robber but someone else makes say a homer simpson, doesn't this ruin game play for others? Even though the customization of characters adds to the gameplay.

This was my first thought. It's like this in World of Warcraft - I wouldn't want to take it so seriously that I'd have to play on a role-playing server (even though I haven't played for over two years), but I always thought that running a raid with characters called Chesty McTitties or Gangsta Dwarf or something kind of take me out of the lore and story of the game.

JohnnySix

I remember back in the days of skinning/modelling for the original UT - there were some great quality skins of there from the likes of Godflesh, Moose, Mirage, Lawgiver (man, those were the days, circa 2000/2001)

Some people would make awesome stuff in keeping with the game, others would go make homer or whatever, I guess there was room for both, depends how seriously you or the game takes itself. Personally (aside for the 10 minutes downloading the custom skins in the days of 56k just to join a server ) I used to get a kick from the crazier models and skins people came up with.

The only downside was that skins/models that could be considered cheating (or the reverse, making an easier target ) as the collision models (which in the case of UT was a simple vertical cylinder) didn't change, so if you were shooting at a bigger model , you may be aiming at where his head is, but actually missing the cylinder all together. This was always bitched about by people who were playing against the war-cow - as the head of the model was somewhere close to the floor, but the actual head colission was the same place of every other model, meaning you needed to shoot at the weapon mount instead.