I Found Zero Company's Customization to Be Unnecessary | Semi-Ramblomatic

Always a pleasure to watch Yahtzee’s (and SW’s) video essays! These stand out all the more as fewer places are taking the time and effort to edit and organize their thoughts

One thing I've not seen in a game that allows you to adjust your character look is the ability to feed in a photo or use a webcam to have it approximate your appearance.

Funny your brought up Cyberpunk 2077, I actually feel exactly the same even though I did spend the time to customize my V. My problem was the specific sound of the voice that ultimately killed my interest in playing before even getting Keanu Reeves in her head. My V was a obscurely non-white trans woman who grew up in a neighborhood filled with characters with Latino accents, yet had a voice of a white lady trying to sound gruff. Meanwhile I could never see any part of my physical appearance I spent a lot of time on past the immediate opening, even when I deliberately tried to when taking a shower.

Funnily enough, Baldur's Gate 3 didn't have a face mangler per se. You had like 7 faces or something. That said, I generally enjoy with playing with the char-gen and picking out the outfit. But I'm a silly roleplayer who likes to change outfit in CP2077 when I enter a club

My worn-down Devonian Hawkes and his big sideburns are canon.

My hawks was a green twinged twilek. I would have had exactly the same amount of fun with it if he had been generic box art man 1. It's utterly irrelevant, I made him a twilek because I could not because i needed to

Gonna have to big disagree on this one. Zero Company's customisation is a big reason on why I picked it up. I actually played female Hawks (twi'lek) and genuinely had no issues with Hawks as a character. Character customisation is a point in favour of a game for me personally, it's rare I stick with the default option even in games with a clear character (V,Femshep, etc) as it feels like a bit more personalisation. It feels like the pure idea of interactive narrative, the creators character coupled with a few personal touches. Also if you cba to customise it's pretty easy to just mash the confirm button a couple times and get the default character started in less time that it takes to have a sip of tea

Surprised he didn’t mention the most realistic reason for the addition of the face mangler in zero company, which is that some executive producer put it on a list of “things modern games need” and no developer underneath them could get it off the list without fear of getting laid off, and so it just stayed on by committee.

Right there with you. I actually *just* started Cyberpunk 2077 the other day and aside from picking the female avatar and a couple changes to hair and eye color, that was it. Most of the time I don't even bother that much, especially in games where it seems like the avatar's appearance doesn't really matter. If an evil genie forced me to choose between "all games have a face mangler" and "no games have a face mangler," I'd pick the latter in a heartbeat.