In the wake of the Assassin's Creed Odyssey controversy - which you can read about here if you're interested although it is by no means essential reading, just the inspiration for this thread - I'd like to ask you: how important is player choice to you? Are you the kind of person who takes greater fulfilment in personalising your experience (be it through character customisation, dialogue trees, skill trees, etc) or are you content with playing a game where you have no influence over the design? What are some of the best and worst games you have played that have allowed you to make your own choices, and what series do you believe could benefit from letting players choose how they play?
First off gotta say loved Oddessy don't care what anybody says my favorite AC since 2 but anyhow I love customizable games character creation is by far my favorite feature in a game and the more I can personalize a game the better
If there is a girl character that still has access to the same classes as the boy, I would prefer to play a girl. It irks me that in some games, the girl is locked to the mage and the cleric (although every once in a while you may see girl rogues/assassins and rangers)
Unless the character themself is crucial to the story, I prefer character customization both to personalize it and also because character creation is fun to do. As far as skill trees go, that really depends on how well the game's progression system works. If it's too clunky or there's just too much of it, it just becomes more of a chore to try to keep track of everything. Player choice is a bit of a controversial thing, I think. If it somehow interrupts the narrative, I think it's better to go without. The original Mass Effect trilogy was one of my favorite game series because the choices made it feel more like my decisions mattered, even though they didn't have much of an impact. There were always those little moments where you can get a little bit of satisfaction from a choice you make as a split second decision. It was very much the journey being more important than the destination in that regard. The only issue is that with it being a multi-game series, it would become difficult, and sometimes impossible, to make those choices relevant from one game to the next. That was a complaint I saw a lot when the games were still sort of new, that the choices didn't influence the games that followed. Then someone would inevitably say, "Did you expect them to make a different sequel for every choice you could have made?" or something along those lines. I would say choice works better in single game stories, but taking Telltale as an example, I don't think that's really true since even if you look at their games individually, the choices don't really matter at all. At least in Mass Effect there was a risk that you could actually completely fail if you don't do all of the preparations you need or you could get your whole team killed if you make the wrong choices.
I always trust the game creators with this choice, for better or for worse. If they feel the story would be fine with a customizable character, I'm okay with that. However, if they feel that that the story needs a character of their own creation, that's fine with me too. I'm of the mindset that a linear game and a player choice game can both be nearly perfect. Take my two favorite games, for example: Fire Emblem: Awakening and Xenoblade Chronicles. Both are story-based, but have different main characters. In Fire Emblem, you create your own character, and the story revolves around that character. While the choices you make are minimal, it's a nice touch. Xenoblade, on the other hand, focuses on Shulk, a non-customizable character. That doesn't matter to me because Xenoblade already has such a great story. Both have their place and can be enjoyable when executed correctly. I have no preference between the two as long as the story is cohesive.
When you play a video game that tells a story, you are being told a story in first-person. Sometimes it fits nicely with yourself, sometimes it doesn't. I can't tell you how many times I've played a video game which makes me kill someone even though they did nothing wrong. I want to side with them even, but the game is telling me not to! Or maybe it's the opposite: my character will let someone get away for plot purposes when I think that person doesn't deserve to get away free. But that's the story that's being told. Being upset about being forced along a particular story event in a video game is only slightly more unreasonable than being upset about a movie or book taking a particular turn. You're being told a story, the only difference is that it's being told in first person and you're more logically invested in it. Even with the Reddit post above, I think the complainer is being unreasonable. I, a straight male who is psychologically incapable of visualizing a situation in which I am non-straight intimate in such a way, have voluntarily had my male player character be in gay relationships in some video games. Mass Effect comes to mind, I think I accidentally did in Dragon's Dogma, purposefully in Fallout NV, whatever. It's a story, it's a character, it's a plot. I can't kill 500 soldiers in the field of battle any more than real-me could slay a dragon or hurt an attack dog or be sexually intimate with a man. But it's a story and it's a character. If you don't like the book, stop reading it. Anyway: I love character customization and skill trees, but I also absolutely respect when a storyteller tells a story to me and I play it in first-person story experience. Whether I enjoy it or not is a different matter: but I respect that a story teller will tell me their story.
