Top games that let you create and play as yourself

Video games have become incredibly cinematic over the past few years and they often tell the story of a particular hero that did a particular deed, with plenty details along the way. It’s a nice feeling to evade from your reality at times and just pretend that you’re someone else completely, as a huge part of what makes video games fun is stepping into the hero’s shoes. If everyone was a hero capable of superhuman feats in real life, video games wouldn’t have been half as exciting. But we aren’t, so it feels awesome when we take on that role even if just for a couple of hours before we have to go do something else.

That being said, not all games call for a premade hero, a character given to us which we would emulate. Some games demand that we ourselves step into the universe created for us and fill the role of the hero. A lot of people are after this experience and game developers don’t shy away from giving players this opportunity any time there’s a place for it. Here, we are talking about character creators. Those menus that pop up right as you start the game and in which you spend more time than the tutorial and the first 5 missions combined. Earlier versions of technology only gave us access to rudimentary character creation tools that most times made us look like deeply troubled sea monsters despite us trying our best to make something in our own likeness.

Today’s character creation options are very intricate however and allow players to spend even hours if they so desire, tweaking away at their perfectly sculpted character. If you’re going to spend the next 100+ hours with this character, might as well make sure they look like you. Some games do this part so well that you can recreate yourself entirely. Patient players often spend chunks of their time recreating famous figures so accurately that they could even fool a lintechtt. That being said, let’s take a look at some of the best games that allow us to take on our own appearance, or create an entirely new one for ourselves rather than having us stick to a base model.

The Mass Effect series

Mass Effect is a highly acclaimed space opera which puts you in the shoes of Commander Sheppard. You can’t change their name, but you can change pretty much anything else, including their gender. This allows players to create themselves as Sheppard and take control of the Normandy airship as it prepares to jump into orbit searching for new adventures. This is a lengthy Action RPG series that will have you spend plenty hours with yourself, so it wouldn’t be that good of a feature if it would have forced you to look at something hideous (which often time is the case for players that have no patience or natural talent for sliders).

The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim

This game is set at the opposite end as Mass Effect. Here, players trade huge airships for fierce dragons. You play as the Dragonborn, a legendary warrior akin to dragons. As you learn more about your scaly lizard side of the family, you get to do it looking like yourself. The game puts you in a tough spot from the beginning as it makes you create your face in the middle of a sentencing to death, meaning that you’re forced to picture yourself judged and executed before the adventure even starts. Without any major spoiler we can say that you don’t end up dying in the first 5 minutes of the game, which is great. This means that your real life face gets plenty of one on one time with the world of Skyrim.

Fallout 4

Fallout 4 was one of the most anticipated games ever prior to its release. The now iconic scene in the beginning of the game where you look at yourself in the bathroom mirror is how you start your character creation. The game basically tells you to take a good look in the mirror. Who do you see?  Thanks to a well done character creation menu, the game can proudly ask you “what does the face of a nuclear survivor and ultimate badass look like?”.

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