This.If I'm playing a game for the first time (or, hell,
any time, really), the last thing I want to have to do is solve calculus equations just to determine if I should be putting that extra point into INT or WIS or whatever.
More than that, I despise playing games that have "optimal builds," such that you had better hope you picked the one, exactly correct, "viable" class and distributed your skills in exactly the right way at the very beginning of the game, without knowing a single goddamn thing else about the game going into it, or else you "did it wrong" and are going to have a bad time. Basically, I don't like being forced to lock into something at the start of a game, only to find out a few hours in that I made "bad" or "wrong" choices that screwed up my playthrough. Lots of people don't have the time or interest in replaying a game forty-seven times to determine what's the best character to pick based on trial and error, especially if the game is three hundred hours long or whatever. That said, I also don't enjoy feeling like I'm forced to look up character build guides prior to playing a game, either. It's like, if only one or two specific classes or playstyles are actually worth using, why even bother offering the others in the first place? Or, rather, why didn't they balance all the other choices in order to make those fun to play as well (or able to be played at all, in too many cases)? I would mock the "modern video game industry" yet again, here, except that this has been a problem from the very start, ever since character creation was first introduced into video games.
And yeah, I mostly like systems such as in
The Elder Scrolls games where you don't really pick anything at the start, other than usually your appearance and race, which might have a mild effect on starting stats and abilities, but for the most part, you're creating your characters as you go. The way they did it in
Dragon's Dogma, where the class you picked in the first town could be switched once you got to the bigger city and you could switch out skills and abilities almost whenever you wanted, was nice, too.
Honestly, if you
must pick a character and stats at the start, I liked the way some of the older games did it, where instead of (or, preferably, in addition to) just assigning points to stat numbers, you had the option of picking responses to little "what if" scenarios at the start in order to determine your class and stats, like "You come upon an old man asking for help. What do you do? A) Ignore him B) Rob him C) Help him D) Kill him" type of things. Granted, those aren't the best if the responses don't necessarily make sense or don't correspond to the skills you think they should or whatever. That said, in most games that had more abstract character creation like that, if they did also still give the option to more directly pick stuff, rather than solely going by the answers to those questions, I usually opted to directly pick stuff, or at least to tweak whatever results I got from the questionnaire thing.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
