Character Height. When it's an option, how tall or short do you make your character? And any other character height related thoughts...

[Zed Clampet]

So it's character creation time. You've already jumped ahead and moved the dong slider all the way to the right, and now you are on to less important things, like your overall character size, tall or short, fat or thin. What are your preferences for these? Does it vary depending on the game/type of game? Other thoughts on size related appearances in games?

For me, if it's a shooter, I always make my character as small as possible. I'm sure it probably doesn't help, but any time I think I can make my hitbox smaller, I try to do it.

For games like BG3 where it doesn't matter, I usually just create the western ideal, tall and thin.

Topic inspired by:

An innocuous video about how FromSoft protagonists are 5 feet 7 inches tall led to me becoming weirdly fixated about videogame character height this year

That's the long and short of it.

www.pcgamer.com

 

[Zloth]

Dragon's Dogma 1 was supposed to vary the game experience a bit according to height. Smaller characters could fit into smaller tunnels and taller could reach up higher. I don't remember if it really came out different more than once or twice over the whole game, though.

I normally make my characters 6' tall. I'm 6'... well, I *was* 6' for decades, now I'm half an inch under that. It's the one thing about myself that I put into my characters. {And I always make the eyes green, which my own eyes are not, so that's one thing that never matches myself.}

 

[Colif]

A race in Wow used to be so short that they would be auto dismounted from their mounts if they ran through a puddle/river crossing. Blizzard eventually fixed that problem.

Generally the games I play don't go into that much detail, or if they do, I haven't noticed

 

[Pifanjr]

Like Zloth, I make most of my characters about 6' because I'm 6'1 (which means I typically make them slightly bigger than default), but every once in a while I set the height to its lowest value just to see how ridiculous the game gets.

 

[Frindis]

Dragon's Dogma 1 was supposed to vary the game experience a bit according to height. Smaller characters could fit into smaller tunnels and taller could reach up higher. I don't remember if it really came out different more than once or twice over the whole game, though.

Same here, the only thing I really noticed was weight limit/stamina.

For games like BG3 where it doesn't matter, I usually just create the western ideal, tall and thin.

It depends on the spells you have though (or where you explore for that sake), because if you don't have something like the gaseous form/shrink, then a smaller character would be at least better in Act 1 where you have several places you can squeeze into. Preorder people were a bit lucky in that regard with the Mask of the Shapeshifter making you shape into different race/size.

I make mostly normal sized characters in most games, if I don't want to have some fun and make ridiculous looking characters with short arms, long legs and tiny head or something like that. I also like my character to look a bit like myself in age and build, but I try to make some premade characters before Christmas.