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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9675460" data-attributes="member: 18">All PCs are more written than they pretend to be, zero exceptions.Even if we look at games lauded by people for having PCs who are supposedly blank slates, we find that the dialogue offered tends to be pretty narrow and specific, often not offering as many choices or as much nuance as supposedly heavily-written PCs. Again the Oblivion Remaster helps bring this into focus, as does Starfield. Neither has a PC who is really a blank slate, they're just limited and inconsistent in a way that's every bit as "unimmersive" as most heavily-written PCs. Often you can easily see the hand of the specific quest writer because in one quest you'll have a bunch of gentle/empathetic and curious question options, and the next you'll have only a couple of options, both of which are rude and snarky and where you can't ask "why?" or the like at all. More heavily-written RPGs tend to avoid that specific pitfall at least.The most successful RPGs, immersion-wise, I would argue are ones where the PC is at least somewhat established, but not locked down. Also where the personality of the PC and their role in the story align - Commander Shepard is a good example here - they're a badass as you say but that fits perfectly with the story and setting, and still leaves a lot of room for manuever. I would argue Hawke was by far the most effective the DA protagonists for similar reasons (and some more complex ones). Grey Warden suffered from a bad case of quest-based-personality syndrome, Inquisitor had some of the blandest and most contrived dialogue in RPG history, and Veilguard has a specific personality but one that isn't well aligned with the story in quite a complicated way (it also suffers from a failure to kill your darlings, writing-wise, but again there's more to say there).BG3's PC choices are pretty good in Act 1 but increasingly devolve into quest-based-personality syndrome as the game goes into Act 2 and especially Act 3, which illustrates the sheer difficulty of managing that approach. The specific backgrounds vary wildly in quality (showing they were learning as they went), and have some really bizarre holes in them (again especially in Act 2/3).</blockquote>

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