Game Rant #5: Create a Character

I love it when a game includes a create a character feature, especially when I can invest myself into the franchise. I often find the best sort of create a character systems come from fighting games, and the earliest game I can remember making a character was a WWE game, and once I did it I used to use that character to win belts and enjoy myself.

Lately though I seem to fail to see the point in create a character. WWE games still use this feature, and they have the incentive of obtaining achievements, but every year it's the same goals with the same items. Variety seems to have been completely eliminated and all we are given is a bog standard option to appease ourselves with a variety of silly items and nods to other franchises.

What seems to baffle me more is when the feature is given to us, and we are given items from playing through the game, but there isn't any actual purpose to do so. There's no achievements to aim for, there's no exclusive create a character mode to play through and there's no apparent point when I can use the same moves on something a professional designer has created for me to look at.

The only reason I can think of is to give us the illusion that we are getting something useful, or perhaps it's simply an option to be able to use the moves we love on a female character who has the 'Chest' slider cranked all the way up to full so we can admire the jiggle physics in whatever game we're playing.

Even if this were the case I don't think I'd mind it as much if the clothes weren't either incredibly hard to unlock, or if they didn't look so generic and identical to the previous installment. I know I've mentioned this earlier, but why do developer's merely update the skins for the main characters each game and not the custom clothing? If they the developers wanted us to believe that the main casts style had changed from the last game to this one, why are all the create a character clothes the same? Similarly if the main cast look roughly the same since the last game, why am i forced to use an entirely new selection of clothes on my custom characters.

Ultimately I see that character creation has been a great feature, but either the current generation of gamers are not that interested in this feature as I am, or perhaps developers aren't as interested in letting us hash out our own little characters to wreak havoc with. Either way I feel that a lot of games could perhaps benefit from more character customization - if you're going to be playing a game for a while you might as well add your own personal touch to it!