10 Coolest Video Game Features (That Are Utterly Pointless)

6. Character Customization In 1st Person Games

Max Payne npcs
CD Projekt RED

To paraphrase Shylock from Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice - “If you let us design our own character, will we not spend a whole hour adjusting sliders and toggles?”

Whether it was giving Shepherd purple eye shadow and black lipstick in Mass Effect, spreading and contracting the eyes on your Sturgian warrior for an hour in Mount & Blade, or bumping the pitch bar higher and lower on your pawn in Dragon's Dogma. We all do it.

But all that time spent spent working on the character makes sense – they are the analog you'll be living vicariously through for dozens of hours. Even in games like the aforementioned Mass Effect and Mount & Blade, where you go through all that facial adjustment just to slap a helmet over it, or Dark Souls, where you make a great looking character, only to start off as an emaciated corpse.

But the worst offender of useless character creation are games like Fallout and Cyberpunk 2077. So much you can with your character and then...you play in a first person camera where you don't even get to see your own creation. Doubly so if the cutscenes are still in first person, too.

I mean, we all know we're not gonna stop doing it. How else will we be sure our eyebrows are just right?

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Author of Escort (Eternal Press, 2015), co-founder of Nic3Ntertainment, and developer behind The Sickle Upon Sekigahara (2020). Currently freelancing as a game developer and history consultant. Also tends to travel the eastern U.S. doing courses on History, Writing, and Japanese Poetry. You can find his portfolio at www.richardcshaffer.com.