10 Most Useless Character Customisations Found In A Video Game
No facial hair? No sale.
Nothing makes a video game more immediately immersive than the ability to see yourself in it, usually by way of customisation options whereby players can alter the appearance of their protagonist.
If popularised by the RPG, character creation and customisation are basically expected features across practically every genre these days, a staple of the medium which, when done right, can massively enhance player enjoyment and engagement.
But sadly, there are many more examples of games that clearly just couldn't be bothered.
These 10 games all featured character customisation tools which didn't nearly cut the mustard, instead offering players a pathetically limited number of options to create the supposed character of their dreams.
Despite the overwhelming majority of these games being AAA tentpole titles, each nevertheless served up character creators which were so aggressively underwhelming as to be near-pointless, leaving players wondering why they even bothered at all.
At the end of the day these customisation suites - and we're being generous with that term - prove just how much time and effort goes into making the better ones...
10. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
Metal Gear Solid V kicks off in typically baffling fashion - being a Hideo Kojima game and all - with protagonist Venom Snake waking up in a hospital, where he's greeted by a doctor asking him to create a new appearance. At this point, the player is taken to a character customisation screen.
Fans were largely baffled that a game which saw them clearly playing as one specific character was asking them to customise their own face, a first for the mainline series in fact.
Hilariously, moments after you pick your new face - which is briefly shown flashed in a mirror by the doctor - you're once again seen rocking the familiar mug of "Big Boss" anyway.
And so, for almost the entire rest of the game your created face is nowhere to be seen, except for in window reflections if you're looking really closely, and in the game's "true" ending, where it's revealed you weren't even Big Boss after all (but a medic turned into a Big Boss doppelganger through plastic surgery).
To be fair, this created face does also appear in the game's multiplayer component, Metal Gear Online, but given that the dense campaign was the selling point for everyone, customising your character and then barely seeing the face throughout the game was...a very Kojima move.