Someone Should Make A Game That’s All Character Creator

Since she finished Baldur’s Gate 3, my wife has been searching for a new game to get into, and she eventually landed on The Sims 4. She downloaded the game on PS5, worked on making a character that looked like her for about an hour, loaded into her first neighborhood, then said, “I think I just wanted to make a character” and quit out.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. At this point, she has started multiple games, spent ages tweaking every last detail of her character, then quit quickly after starting. That’s mostly because she’s been looking for something she clicks with as much as Baldur’s Gate 3, which has led her to cRPGs like Pillars of Eternity 2 and Divinity: Original Sin 2, both games with extensive character creation tools. You can’t tell if you’re going to like the game until you get to the other side of that character creator.

The Fun Of The Character Creator Transcends The Game It’s Attached To

The thing is, even when a game isn’t for her, she does enjoy making her character. It’s made me wonder why there hasn’t been a game (as far as I know) that is exclusively centered on character creation. If my wife is any indication, this is the part of the game that many players are most locked-in for. It has me thinking that a game that focused on building specific kinds of characters, and where character creation was the main, repeated mechanic, could be a big hit.

Think about how much effort goes into making a good character creator. It’s essentially another game within a game, with mechanics and UI that you’ll likely never see again throughout the campaign. If you want players to be able to design their own characters, that separate interface is the simplest solution. But it’s a lot of work for something that some players will skip through in a minute.

Imagining Character Creation As A Core, Repeating Mechanic

It has me thinking about how you could build a whole game around character creation (and how some games, like Dragon’s Dogma 2, release the character creator before the actual game). There’s a very literal take on that, where you just never leave the character creator UI and that’s all the game is about. Maybe you begin with a limited set of variables and then the longer you play, the more you unlock. So, as you start, you can only pick from a few presets and that’s it. You would eventually unlock the ability to adjust those presets, and then as you continued to play, you would gain more and more sliders, more items of clothing, more accessories, more tattoos. The whole game would literally be inside the character creator.

But what would be more interesting to me is a game where character creation is a central and repeating mechanic. Back in 2020, Watch Dogs Legion let you play as anyone in its dystopian London, and the new recruits you unlocked could interact with the world in different ways. So, you might need a hacker for one task, a brawler for another. This was cool, but fairly underutilized. Taking it further, you could build a puzzle game where, in order to succeed, you have to create specific kinds of characters.

A woman is going on a date, and you have to build a character who matches her date’s Tinder profile. An Ethan Hunt-style secret agent has to impersonate an important person, but must first recreate their face in their mask printer. A greedy megacorporation wants to include a dead actor in their franchise movie and you are the CGI artist who must engage in digital necromancy. Many potential problems could be solved with the right face.

But, for that to happen, we need to start recognizing the character creator as a gameplay mechanic in its own right, not just a means to an end.