SJ Longthorne

Imagine if character creation allowed you to choose a personality blueprint, and from then on all your core dialogue was branched accordingly, both in writing and performance. Choices, too, would be tailored to your type — an opportunity to add complexity. Any games do this?

I still think it was my imagination, but Dragon Age 2, if you tended toward snarky it seemed even the non-snarky responses were flavored that way. But like i said, i still think i was imagining this.

That would be cool. Usually we do the whole ‘no personality unless it’s been picked in a choice’ thing and sometimes that makes for inconsistent protagonists who are just dull/silent AF except for that one quirky thing they said

That's basically what went wrong with AC Odyssey.

Now we're on that topic... A few weeks back there was an article on how Kassandra almost didn't make the cut because Ubi bigwigs thought female protagonists don't sell (wrong imo). People argued for having male and female options for the sake of inclusivity. >

But I argued I'd rather have a singular protagonist if that means the budget for writing, animations and va doesn't have to be split. In fact, you could argue that doing that would allow for their character to be fleshed out more and thus do it justice. >

Just trying to pick your brain here. Would you agree that the better move would have been to cut one of them to do the other justice? I think a game solely about Kassandra would have been better.

Both are good depending on what you’re aiming for. Generally though if you’re telling someone else’s story, working towards aspiration of an established character, I prefer to just invest in someone pre-formed. We just need to be more open-minded about who that is.