Fallout 3, Dragon Age: Origins, Skyrim, Mass Effect

Games, early on and throughout the experience, can allow players a sense of individuality when it comes to their main character, namely through Character Creation, Skill Allocation, or both, all in varying degrees.  These decisions have the potential to influence entire sections of a narrative or impact a player’s style of play, thus affecting the individual narrative that each player forms in their own play.

Character Creation is a rudimentary, but often-employed, method of customization used to immerse the player in the narrative.  Within these sections, often very early in the game, or before the game actually begins, players are given the open option to “create” a character: this is done by picking and choosing from a variety of different features, like eyes, nose, mouth, hair, et cetera, and other defining qualities, like gender and species, all in order to sculpt an avatar, whether in the player’s likeness or otherwise.  Fallout 3 (Bethesda Game Studios, 2008) illustrates this initial customization: upon their character’s birth and meeting the father character, players are asked what they will look like in the future.  Dad busts out the Gene Projector to see what you’ll look like in nineteen years (the player-character’s age once the game starts rolling), at which point players can choose their avatar’s gender, race, facial features, and hair styles.  It’s nothing extravagant, and this physical customization impacts little to none of the narrative.  Still, it’s a personal touch that is allowed to players off the bat.  In this case, and all others to follow, the game also provides default character models for player use if they do not care for this type of customization, or such.

The Dragon Age games (2009-2012), The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2012), and the Mass Effect trilogy (2007-2012) all allow for similar customizations, but with different choices and different impacts across the narrative.

Dragon Age: Origins (2009) begins the customization section after a backstory cutscene; players then have the opportunity to choose their gender, their race (human, elf, or dwarf), and their background story before choosing their physical appearance.  Each of the six background stories stands as both a tutorial and a unique plot point for the character before converging into the main game path.  Further, the race and origin chosen impacts the interactions and reactions of different non-player characters in-game, and what kind of interactions the player can have with them.  Individualized touches like those help to immerse the player in a story of their crafting, whether or not developers and writers preordained those dialogue choices.  As a brief example: I chose to be an elf that lived in a quartered-off slum area of a larger city, living under the rule of a ruthless, spoiled human.  The human leader proceeded to disrupt my character’s wedding and rape my character’s cousin.  After resolving that issue, those I met throughout the game referenced my time in the alienage, as the slum was called, and my actions against the human leader.  That became an experience that five out of six other players wouldn’t have and helped make the experience unique for me.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (shortened herein to Skyrim) allows for a similar level of customization, first deciding the Dragonborn’s race (Dragonborn being the main character) from any number of fantastic races and subraces: humans of varying kind, elves likewise, beast-humans, and orc.  From there, players may customize physical features.  The race chosen has the greatest difference in narrative, dictating which unique active or passive abilities a player possesses, but also impacting how a player wants to walk around the world, whether the world acknowledges it or not.  Consider the difference between meeting a human and an orc and you can get the basic idea.  This idea, while not recognized well through dialogue or reactions in-game, can be pivotal to the shaping of one’s personal narrative.

Mass Effect (2007) starts the entire saga with players creating the human (no species-options here) Commander Shepard: first, very basically, deigning Shepard a male or female to customize, or a quick-start character of either gender to jump right into the game, for the same reasoning illustrated in Fallout 3.  Players who choose to customize first decide Shepard’s pre-service history: whether Shepard was a “Spacer,” living aboard space stations until enlistment; “Earthborn,” wherein Shepard was orphaned amid Earth’s sprawling criminal and gang-driven underworld; or “Colonist,” where Shepard was born and raised on a small colony before slavers destroyed the settlement.  Each of these options impacts dialogue throughout the saga and, in the first game, dictates a specific pre-service mission players will go through.  In order to experience all of them, players would have to create three different Shepards with each individual history.

Following that, players pick Shepard’s psychological profile: that they were the sole survivor of a horrific mission, a war hero that fought against insurmountable odds, or a ruthless soldier who sacrificed their own unit and murdered surrendering enemies.  This decision dictates what kind of bonus character points Shepard will have: bonus Paragon, Renegade, or a combination, which factors into the dialogic impact Shepard can have in conversations.  The Morality section of this exploration discusses the impact of Paragon and Renegade as a whole.  Natalie Ward notes the impact that this sort of customization has in Mass Effect; I would argue in games as a whole, when done well, that these decisions, as much as others made in-game, “cause story to change, making players as much an author of the game as they are the player.” (Ward, 2008)