Custom Character or Traditional Character

[Sarkin]

which is your preference when it comes to game characters?

i'm not sure which of these X4 will have but in X3 we were Juliann Brennan, and the only thing we got to really effect, was what ship he flew and where he built factories. (atleast as far as the main story(ies) are concerned.

but personally i've kinda always preferred the ability to make , and name my character. since the X series seems to use a voice to text program to read the text, i always wandered why we couldn't make a character an give it the name we want. this of course has an obvious answer in some of the lines that are voice acted be it by friends of the main character, or side characters who are scripted to say the main characters name.

which of course is easiest if the main character has a set name, that the writer, and voice actor can read and pronounce. which of course they can't do with every concievable name people might come up with. but with text to voice programs this could potentially be changed. and allow for lines to include the names of custom made characters.

I thought i'd ask everyone elses preference, and while at it also ask if we are going to have custom made characters, or if the story of X4 will have its own character that might prevent us from making one our selves.

i mean being able to make a Split/Paranid/Teladi character as opposed to being a Terran, or Argon would be cool. primarily in that it always bugs me when i cant choose to be an 'alien' in space games.

I know that in the X games if you picked 'custom game' you could pick a different starting role, such as assassin, merchant, what have you..which were technically supposed to be of another race but they didn't really 'play' differently.

[RandomDude]

I do like making my own custom characters - I'm sure most people would. I always prefer the X games that give me a choice of characters to choose from with different starts.

As far as I know, X4 won't let us "Create" our own character, but there will be multiple starts to choose from which is good enough for me.

Being able to make your own character and then start with an amount of "points" to get a ship and equip it how you like would be cool. You could start with more points based on the difficulty or just designating how many points you want would mean you can start with next to nothing or with a huge empire.

One of my favourite starts to play was the XTM pirate start that gave you Capital ships plus some unique ships (TS?) that could use Khaak weaponry.

Sometimes I'd just pick a vanilla start on Xtreme difficulty and go from there too.

[IceBlood]

Aye. Simple character creation tool would be a nice feature indeed. Actually few selectable faces per race would add some variation. At least in previous X-games there was a possibility to rename your pilot. We shall see.

[requiemfang]

As much as I like to agree with this in a sense, I have to disagree with the concept. Reason why, custom characters require a bit of resources in order to put in the game. You have to have a lot of modification for a avatar creator and that requires time and resources that I think would be better spent allocating those resources towards other aspects of the game. It's not like this game is Skyrim or something.

[Sarkin]

Originally posted by requiemfang:

As much as I like to agree with this in a sense, I have to disagree with the concept. Reason why, custom characters require a bit of resources in order to put in the game. You have to have a lot of modification for a avatar creator and that requires time and resources that I think would be better spent allocating those resources towards other aspects of the game. It's not like this game is Skyrim or something.

That doesn't really tell me your personal preference when it comes to characters.

however i don't think that it would take that many resources to make a custom character in the X series. given that for the most part we never see our characters. ( unless this is planned to change ) .

mostly i guess as far as the X games go the main thing i think it would overly effect would be starting relations based on race(potentially difficulty in upping your relation.) starting ship, these are things generally available in the 'alternate starts' in the custom game portion.

but it would be nice to still have even if its not a huge thing , just to feel more like its 'your' character.

something that would make the character more 'yours' .

[requiemfang]

The amount of varations and changing of shapes for characters isn't something that "won't take a whole lot of resources to do.) It requires more than that. Besides the point at this point in the game development process, since the devs plan on releasing this game sometime this year I think it's a bit too far into development to even think about adding custom character moulding to the engine it's like trying to add a custom character creator into a game that's already been coded without the function in the first place. Having to divert resources to do this I think is not something the developers want to do. I think this might be something that the developers would have to start coding directly at the beginning stages of the development process.

As for the personal preferences sure it'd be nice but overall I think at this point the devs are focused more on giving us a working game with as many bugs removed from the game. They're focused on trying to do better than how well XR did. I'd rather be able to enjoy and play the game than have a customized character or be able to know what my character looks like.

[Sarkin]

Originally posted by requiemfang:

The amount of varations and changing of shapes for characters isn't something that "won't take a whole lot of resources to do.) It requires more than that. Besides the point at this point in the game development process, since the devs plan on releasing this game sometime this year I think it's a bit too far into development to even think about adding custom character moulding to the engine it's like trying to add a custom character creator into a game that's already been coded without the function in the first place. Having to divert resources to do this I think is not something the developers want to do. I think this might be something that the developers would have to start coding directly at the beginning stages of the development process.

As for the personal preferences sure it'd be nice but overall I think at this point the devs are focused more on giving us a working game with as many bugs removed from the game. They're focused on trying to do better than how well XR did. I'd rather be able to enjoy and play the game than have a customized character or be able to know what my character looks like.

just to clarify again..i'm not really asking for it to be added. as the opening post says i'm inquiring into which people prefer. with a question toward which one X4 is going to have.

[Axeface]

I always play the games main character for the story, and once thats done I start again with one of the other starts (usually Boron).
X4 is going to have different starts like X3 does, and each will have a little storyline to go along with it. We'll have argon, paranid and teladi starts afaik. Im sure we'll be able to rename our chars like in x3.

[Signals]

Prefer custom character. A locked in character makes it seem like I'm playing with another persons game. Any references to the player and I have to sort of look the other way. When I played X Rebirth, I would always think "who the hell is Otoni? I'm not japanese."

[nobrien]

in an X-game i would far prefer a working game, feature complete at release, than a char generator, also like a few above have mentioned modding will be a big factor if they manage to pull it off,

But im not holding my breath.

[Afro Luigi]

In X:Btf to X3:R you played a member of the Brennan family. TC and AP you played the generic faceless/nameless "pilot". X4 will fall into either camp. But hopefully X4 will be the second camp.

[CTHOMP]

I'd rather keep it a vague create your own type. The voice acting in rebirth is rough and forcing you to listen to that along with the bad copilot wasn't a positive experience. I'd prefer they keep it like x3tc. I'm sure they've learned and will be returning to x3 type interaction.

[Obiwan Kenobiwan]

I never actually cared about my Character Name in this Game, rather more in the Starting Cirumstances concerning Faction Standings and Opposition Level.

[Dirty Jack]

It would be nice to have some sort of Character creator .

[BalaGi]

In X3 even if you had Paranid start and play as Paranid, the sector police will call you a two-eye

[Elenoe]

Originally posted by Obiwan Kenobiwan:

I never actually cared about my Character Name in this Game, rather more in the Starting Cirumstances concerning Faction Standings and Opposition Level.

because you've never had a body. Then it doesn't matter that much. But if they also force a look to you things are kinda different. Not sure why not choose neutral one like Elite before it got character creator but they hadn't.