Squilookle said:
I guess that must be why Saint's Row 2 and Mount & Blade still get the best balance for it.
But Saints Row 2 has an incredible amount of depth in character creation. You can even completely change your avatar down to gender, race and voice, mid-game with no consequence. In 3 qnd 4, I even used the same character to get the cheevos for playing as a man and a woman. Those games have less freedom, but still far more freedom than many character creators, and still the ability to go from being a Crow wannabe voiced by Laura Bailey to a rapper voiced by Nolan North asnd lierally nobody notices.
Which brings me to the real problem....
Saelune said:
Having character customization doesn't mean you need to be a mute puppet. Look at Mass Effect, Fallout 4, and even the Godfather 2 game of all things.
The ME series and Fallout 4 are good examples of why the "mute" part of the equation isn't really the important part here. These characters are voice, but they're animatronic puppets with all the depth of cardboard (least, far as I bothered in FO) and a sort of limited impact on the environment. Even that limited level of choice necessitates the characters have all the personality of cardboard to accommodate the play style of Saints Shepherd and Asshole Shepherd, or...whatever the PC was called in THIS version of Fallout. I forget. They made Boston boring.
This is why the problem isn't the character generator. Saints Row 2 was an example used, and it works because you're always playing a sociopath amoral killer. The boss has a pretty awesome level of customisation, to the point you can play someone who isn't strictly on the male/female binary, but my playthroughs feature the same basic character and personality. They're always going to be a dick to Pierce, they're always going top mutilate people over a slight in their cut, they're always going to go after Dane Vogel. Even where the individual dialogue for a specific voice is slightly different, the responses are always the same.
A static character can be fleshed out or flat, but without far more work than a Bioware game, Space Jesus will always be flat, save maybe in those few moments when you choose Saint or Ass. But they're still robots, and the impact of the choices you get in the tradeoff tend to be trivial. I mean, unless you're really into that decision about which character you have a stilted softcore sex scene with, I dunno.
People associate character creation with "play your way" style games, which, with VOs have become more limited than they've been in generations. For contrast, AC Odyssey doesn't have a character creator, limiting you to being the interesting one or Alexios, and you still run into the same sort of "choice" issues of ME. The Kassandra who commits a major act of murder in the story is otherwise, the same as a Kassandra who leaves said person alive. Arguably, there's slightly more consequences because several choices impact the ending, but this is something that used to be common in VGs, and doesn't change the "vanilla hero" problem. A similar problem existed when InFamous came out, and while you could choose to be good Cole or Evil Cole, they were basically the same guy with different flavoured lightning.
All moral choice systems usually do is force the protag to be more generic than Genericy McGenericFace. And that's not inherently bad: most of us have been playing games since the default was generic hero beating generic bad guy because reasons. It is, however, a bad case for defending created characters, because the moral choice/freedom systemm is what causes the problem the topic is complaining about.
