Have More Beautiful Characters Made Games Funnier?

Previously, Warhammer Online was complained by Korean players due to its ugly characters and was modified in accordance with eastern aesthetics. Another game Mirror’s Edge also fell into such an embarrassing situation when its main character Faith who embodied the ideal eastern beauty in westerners’ eyes was made over by a Japanese netizen. In the meantime, some debates on the differences between eastern and western aesthetics were brought about. Recently, Mgame’s newest MMO ARGO announced to change its character appearances and to make them look more pleasing based on the opinions and suggestions from players. Apparently, nowadays players have an increasingly higher demand in terms of character appearance. Here, we won’t focus on the comparison of East and West, let’s turn to talk about what influence characters have exerted on a game.

Actually, who doesn’t like beautiful things? Tons of players will try to experience a game at the first sight of its cute, cool or fetching characters, female players in particular. In pursuit of beautiful character looks, those players will strive to level up, earn in-game currency or even spend money in perfecting their character’s appearance. Consequently, more and more developers have dedicated themselves to designing various nice characters, costumes and gear etc. AION, C9 and Perfect World are just good examples with good-looking characters and a strong character customization function.

Nevertheless, in the early days, the technology was not advanced, so game characters could not be compared to present-day ones. Take Ultima Online and Lineage for example. The game characters that players saw were only some rough graphical images made up of pixels. At the mention of Second Life, although it was a 3D game, its character looked comparatively crude. How could it attract players? Thus, the game poster played an important role. More often than not, players were only allowed to customize their character’s hair and consume color, even the character’s eyes couldn’t be seen. What players had to do was to imagine the charming character in the poster while controlling their own one. In view of this, we can say that the game content was the true reason why players lingered on the game at that time.