Character Creators

The hype train for the newest "Dragon Age" game is roaring down the
tracks. The latest is an article on GameInformer on how the game has
an incredibly robust character creation system, heads and shoulders
above anything they've done before. But I'm not here to talk about
"Dragon Age".

Rather, I'm here to question the importance (and wisdom of pouring so
many resources into developing) these character creation tools. I
mean, sure they're neat. There's a certain segment of the population
who likes nothing better than to use these tools to create convincing
duplicates of real people. ("Look, I created Keanu Reeves in
Skyrim!"). But creating these character creation tools isn't cheap in
manpower or time, and I have to wonder: does it really matter? Is that
segment of player so large as to balance out the expenditure used in
creating the tool? Because I suspect the vast bulk of players spend
ten or fifteen minutes tops with it -creating a character that looks
just vaguely close enough to their vision- before moving on the actual
meat of the game.

Sure, the character creation tool is usually just a front-end to the
same editor the developers (or a procedural generation algorithm) use
to manipulate faces for NPCs. So its not like they're making it from
scratch. Still, the question remains: is all that effort to create
such varied face technology really worth it? Do players /really/ care?

It just seems that with actual video-game technology stagnating
--games of today, tech-wise, are pretty much the same as games from
five years ago-- publishers are instead trying to differentiate their
games with the /appearance/ of new sophistication rather than actual
advances. But this fiddlyness comes with a cost, and with AAA games
/already/ costing over $100 million to make... maybe trim down on the
unimportant stuff? Or at least focus those limited resources on the
stuff that actually matters, like solid gameplay, good writing, and
clever level design?

Because no matter how good your character creation tool is, it's not
going to save your game if the rest of it sucks.