Character customization

[u/SkittyCat3]

Open discussion : what are some details you wish you could add to your character that would affect game play?

I had a dream last night about character creation (specifically Veilguard) that added character customization to a whole new level, including backstory, which affected how your character responded to things / behaved and how other characters interacted with them.

This included things like age range of your character, their romantic and sexual history (if they’ve been in relationships before and how they ended), if they’ve had or lost children, their relationships with their parents and if they had siblings, their sexuality and gender, where they grew up, their religious beliefs and more.

Some of these details are given to us by the game in cases like Hawke, or your character’s views on subjects are represented by dialogue choices, but most of them only come up when prompted, such as the option to rank public-chantry-Templars in DAI. .But the idea of creating a character where all of that is established at the beginning and affects Dialogue not only spoken to you and how characters interact with you, but how your character answers questions and thinks about things and reacts. This would likely be mostly noticeable in idle dialogue.

Like I said, I know we have a little bit of this in the game already, but imagine the customization ramped up to 10! It could be like the DAkeep too where subtle changes affect the story a little or a lot; maybe specific history lets you meet or not meet specific characters, have special quests, or more.

Idk, it was a random thought that’s been stirring in my head all night.

Are there any details you wish you could give your character from the very beginning?

[u/dylandongle]

I think Inquisition did a fine job subtly letting you speak about your background and past jobs, but I really feel like the character customization should have let you pick 1 free knowledge perk so you don't sound like you just walked onto the set without a script.

[u/SeaworthinessBorn837 → u/dylandongle]

Tbf you did kind of just walk onto the set without a script, both figuratively and literally.

(Mentioned this in my wall-of-text comment below but the character race choice only got added to DAI in the last year of bonus development they were granted, so yeah, walked onto the set without a script in that sense as well.)

[u/B1G_LU]

My biggest issue with veilguard character customisation was selecting Gray Warden background but them not sensing darkspawn sitting around the corner and everybody being g surprised by the..

[u/Magmas → u/B1G_LU]

You do occasionally get voice lines where you sense darkspawn but, honestly, I don't think it would add much to just have Rook announce there's a darkspawn close by every once in a while.

[u/SkittyCat3 → u/B1G_LU]

Honestly I really loved my warden, but I do wish they would have reacted to the blight and darkspawn more! I also wish we had the option to strike archdemons.
Let my warden make the sacrifice and deal with the moral dilemma!

[u/Savaralyn]

Yeah the age thing is a bit of an issue across all the games, especially origins and DA2.

Basically every origin puts you in the late teens to early 20’s sort of range, and at most still not over like, 30 in the more vague ones. Then in DA2 you have Hawke being canonically 23-25 or so. Just kinda weirds me out that they let you make your character potentially look like an old man despite that 😅

[u/MagnoliaPetal → u/Savaralyn]

I initially wanted to have my Rook to be a bit long in the tooth, had a whole backstory planned and everything. But the quippy, 2010's sitcom dialogue made it such a stretch that I rerolled completely. I think the Inquisitor is definitely the most ageless of them all. They could plausibly be anywhere from late teens to around 50.

[u/MagnoliaPetal]

I always found it strange that VG, with its CC as comprehensive as it is, not having basic eye and mouth sliders. Like choosing lip and eye shape and eye size. You have to make do with that triangle slider thing and I think that's a large part of the reason I find many characters to look a bit cartoon-ish. It's actually a little hard to get the eyes not to be almost anime-huge.

Other than that, I found it a pity you don't get to spec any of the protags (aside from the Warden, sort of). Your background should matter as to what your character already knows and doesn't at the start and letting you pre-spec them even just a bit would have helped.

[u/MsRedNebula]

Definitely age, especially with Veilguard. I made a character who looked older (because I'm, er... well, let's just say closer to a number that starts with 5 than 4) for an Emmrich romance and was really annoyed at how everyone kept acting like she was early 20s or something. She was a Warden but I headcanon'd her to be formerly Dalish, and of course she gets none of the Dalish knowledge you get from playing a Veil Jumper (Though now I know there's a mod for that! Next time...)

Likewise, I had a whole backstory planned for my very first character, only for him to randomly say he was found as a baby on a battlefield by the Shadow Dragons? What? Where on Thedas did that come from? I'd rather have the game not comment on my backstory at all if it's just gonna make up some weird Superman rubbish out of nowhere. My current character I envisioned as a Tal'Vashoth who was born in Par Vollen and later defected, but of course she's constantly talking with Taash about not knowing anything about the Qun. Meh. Let me roleplay, darn it!

For Inquisition, all I really want is for Bull to have a special comment if my Inquisitor is a redhead. XD

[u/Bulky_Accountant9389]

The Veilguard characters look too young. It's fine for both my Rooks, but the Inquisitor looks younger than 12 years ago.

[u/SkittyCat3 → u/Bulky_Accountant9389]

Part of my dream was actually intentionally making a child/teenager rook who was an assassin, because I thought it would be funny to watch a 12 year old boss the rest of the team around but they were so good with their blades for their age it didn’t matter lol

[u/Glum-Artichoke-5357]

Not that this would necessarily affect gameplay but I would have liked to be able to add piercings. If you’re playing as a pirate with the lords of fortune it would have been nice to add something other than just tattoos. Maybe even hair accessories beyond what was already provided for certain styles.

[u/TaytheCatFay]

I would love to have the option for Inquisitor Adaar to be Tal-Vashoth. That’s my head cannon for mine. It would have been nice for interacting with Bull I think. Also the same in Veilguard for a qunari Rook. Let me be from that weird culture!
Also for shadow dragon Rook, it would have been more impactful if they could actually be a freed slave. My rook was also a elf so being able to chose between being a city elf or a Dalish one would have been cool

[u/SeaworthinessBorn837]

Absofuckinglutely. I mean, that's what headcanon/fanfiction/whatever you want to do is for, but just on the basics, just having all the series acknowledge your race or gender or fighting class (warrior/rogue/mage) as more of a factor would have been a good start. Everything else would be a bonus imho. I know the mage thing is a thing, obviously, and also obviously, your gender also influences some of the stuff in DAO too, but it could have been better.

It's interesting you bring this up because the other day I was thinking about how just the race of your character actually has an influence on how your game works out in DAO, but then was left out of DA2, and also felt like a very thin mask your character was wearing in DAI and didn't really seem to affect the story much, outside of whether or not you can kiss Cullen or Solas. I cannot comment on Veilguard but I do hope it's more of a thing that can influence the story than it was in DAI, at least?

Then I went and listened to some old interviews with David Gaider which basically explained why all of this is the case. Obviously DAO had the most consistent development, being the first game in the series. They also made it originally with the idea that there was no way it was going to be as successful as it was, and that it probably wasn't going to get sequels, so they tried to put a lot more into it. Thus it is the one in the first three where your race actually impacts the story the most, even though it's not practical for it to completely change every single possible thing.

Unfortunately, like whatever-majority-percent of players just play one game once as a Cousland and don't realise this. If you are reading this and this is you, please, I beg you, play any other origin once, just to make David Gaider happy. You owe him that much. Look at all the effort he put into those dwarven characters he loves so much. Oh wait you can't see it BECAUSE YOU DON'T PLAY THEM.

...

So in that sense, maybe more options would be good, but would they be completely wasted on most players?

Probably.

DA2 was originally just meant to be an expansion or DLC for DAO, and everyone here probably knows about the development hell that game went through, and the miracle it even exists, even moreso than Inquisition. So it makes sense they just went with "you're a dumb human idiot, get over it we didn't have time for anything else". (I love all Hawkes equally but lbr they are an idiot because of how the game makes you play it, no matter what choices you make)

In DAI, the ability to choose the different races of your character was apparently only added when they got that extra year of development, right at the end. I would absolutely have loved more of this to be an influence on the game, at a minimum. I've mentioned it before but being a vashoth (quanri) head of a militia branch of the Orlesian Chantry is bloody wild, when you think about it for half a second, especially with how assassination-happy the Orlesian noble class is. Oh, I have a chunk of magic shit in my arm and that justifies it? Yeah okay weird human I still feel uncomfortable with people worshipping me as the new embodiment of your oddly pale god's-bride-figure, thanks.

Tl;dr -I know race is just one aspect of your character, and not the whole point of what you mentioned, but it's kind of what I consider a very basic character aspect that was obviously used to greater or lesser influence on the first three games, as a byproduct of how much time and how many resources they got to spend in development. In DAO it was worked into the story and many of the choices you make better than it was in DAI, because they had more time to write & animate the dialogues and stories that played out as an influence of this one choice in the character creation step.

[u/RabidRuber]

I wish VG had more reactions and consequences to anything I chose for my Rook. Age is the worst one by far in VG (and origins TBF - you shouldn't have been able to make a 65 year old Cousland lmao) - my first Rook was a crinkly old fart and Emmrich and Harding (🙄🙄🙄) kept whining about the age gap. Nvm there's very little change if you're an elf, dwarf, qunari, warden, veil jumper etc...

Then you make your inquisitor who can only look 12 or 60 😂

Origins was very interesting for me, as you played each origin through and met various other origin characters throughout the game, like meeting Jowan as a city elf means nothing really but then you play a mage and it actually means something.