Since finishing Baldur’s Gate 3, my wife has been looking for a new game and finally landed on The Sims 4. She downloaded the game on PS5, spent about an hour working on a character that looked like her, loaded up her first neighborhood, and then said, “I think I just wanted to create a character” and stopped.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. She’s started several games now, spent ages tweaking every little detail of her character, and then quit right after she started. This is mainly because she was looking for something she liked as much as Baldur’s Gate 3, which led her to cRPGs like Pillars of Eternity 2 and Divinity: Original Sin 2, both games with extensive character creation tools. You can’t tell if you’re going to like the game until you get to the other side of that character editor.

The fun of the character editor goes beyond the game it is connected to

The thing is, even if a game isn’t for her, she still enjoys creating her character. I wonder why (as far as I know) there isn’t yet a game that is all about character creation. If my wife is any indication, this is the part of the game that many players focus on the most. I think a game that is all about creating certain types of characters, and where character creation is the main, recurring gameplay mechanic, could be a huge success.

Consider how much effort goes into developing a good character editor. It’s essentially another game within a game, with mechanics and UI you’ll probably never see again throughout the campaign. If you want players to be able to design their own characters, this separate UI is the easiest solution. But it’s a lot of work for something some players will skip in a minute.

Think of character creation as a central, repetitive mechanic

I’ve been thinking about how you could build an entire game around character creation (and how some games, like Dragon’s Dogma 2, release the character editor before the actual game). There’s a very literal version of this where you just never leave the character editor interface and that’s all the game is about. Maybe you start with a limited number of variables and the longer you play, the more you unlock. So at the beginning you can only choose from a few presets and that’s it. Eventually you’d unlock the ability to customize those presets and as the game progressed you’d get more and more sliders, more clothing items, more accessories, more tattoos. The whole game would literally be contained within the character editor.

More interesting to me, however, would be a game where character creation is a central and recurring mechanism. In 2020, Watch Dogs Legion let you play as any player in its dystopian London, and the new recruits you unlocked could interact with the world in different ways. So you might need a hacker for one task, a thug for another. That was cool, but it was pretty underused. If you expanded on it further, you could create a puzzle game where you had to create certain types of characters to be successful.

A woman is on a date and you need to create a character to match her date’s Tinder profile. An Ethan Hunt-style secret agent needs to impersonate an important person, but must first recreate their face in his mask printer. A greedy megacorporation wants to put a dead actor in its franchise film and you are the CGI artist who must deal with digital necromancy. With the right face, many potential problems could be solved.

But for that to happen, we need to start seeing character creation as a game mechanic in its own right and not just a means to an end.

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Thanks EA, The Sims 4 definitely needed a Battle Pass

I can’t stress enough how sarcastic I am.