10 Character Designs That RUINED Video Games

5. Several Re-Used Models - The Witcher

Granted, all kinds of titles in a range of genres are guilty of this, but The Witcher offered one of the higher-profile (and so most egregious) examples. The fact is, huge, bustling RPGs and open-world titles have many, many NPCs to populate their worlds with. They can’t all be entirely distinct. However, there are ways of downplaying this and there are ways of making it super obvious.

In The Witcher, it wasn’t just that the same body types were reused in a subtle way. The same faces cropped up time and again, and not just in the background either. Some more important characters were ‘recycled’ in this way, which was a real shame.

Things have improved and intrepid modders have provided work-arounds for this issue, but there’s no denying that this really hurt the first game’s sense of immersion. The Witcher franchise is renowned for its atmosphere and worldbuilding, quite rightly, which makes issues like these all the more troublesome.