I hate this too, even though I know the character wouldn’t actually know what would happen. The paths should have some description so that you can make an educated guess, even if it turns out to be wrong. Like “go through the forest path on the left or climb these rocks on the right?” You still don’t know where the forest path leads or what’s beyond the rocks, but you have a better idea of what to expect for the path itself. Hell, even if they look identical to the MC, say that in the description somewhere.
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This is something that bugs me a good deal. For first names, even, IIRC, the female love interest in A Mage Reborn is named Ilya… a male name.
I do disagree over the customization, though: I think it’s a good idea to allow people to get a better idea of their character, even if it doesn’t impact the game much.
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To me a sentence like the one in the made-up example (which you read all the time) always seems very unnatural. Like, you wouldn’t read it like that in a novel, at least not in the ones I’d read.
Instead of having multiple lines like this in a CG I’d personally rather have a single instance of, say a RO, commenting on the MCs hair color. For example, I always play a MC with very red hair (as red as it gets). They could say something like “you’re always drawing attention because of your hair” or, if you’re playing someone who’s blond, make them comment on how it looks like… I dunno, a bad example would be something ultra cheesy like “Your hair looks like the sun on a dewy morning in spring”. Awful, I know, but it was just to get the point across.
Something like that would make me feel seen instead of making me think “Oh, so this is where the hair color variable (or whatever it’s called in choice script) is placed in the code!”
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The immediate tell when you have an option to put in your own choice for it. Okay, so guess that entire option is at best a word replacement. Not that every author needs to put in tons of unique flavor text for all of the options, but fuck if I don’t love it every time it’s acknowledged beyond “[hair/eye/skin color]”. It’s not like I’d rather there be no options, but at least acknowledge it a bit.
Ugh, there’s no way to say that without sounding whiny and privileged or whatever. “Hey author do more work!!!”. At least to me, it’s super welcome, even if it’s literally just a single line immediately after choosing and then word replacement from then on, it’s still nice.
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This is usually the case, though there are definitely some instances in which the choice matters if it’s a specific choice, but there’s still the option to write your own. Like people may comment that you have the same eyes as X person if you chose the same eye color they have.
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Realistically, you could have both, no?
(For my game I was thinking of having some more specific flavour text changes for preset colour choices, and some more neutral responses when players choose to input their own colour outside of what I have prepared.)
Going against the grain of what a lot of people are saying here, I personally like customisation. It allows me to make the MC feel more alive and tangeable in my mind 
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I love customization, just not the way it’s always realized. I absolutely adore the character creator in your game, but it’s the opposite of what I meant, because I always had the feeling what I chose actually mattered going forward, beyond just some flavor text here and there.
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Yeah, absolutely you can, I just never see it. It theoretically would be the best option, letting people use unusual things while still properly acknowledging the other options, but more often than not I see that option in situations where it’s either outright never acknowledged or only used as word replacement.
And I love customization too, your’s being one of my favorites 
. I just wish more games acknowledged the choices instead of just having it there to say you have customization. I’ll still prefer useless customization to no customization, though.
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I’ve definitely played that game but don’t specifically remember the character creation process. I’ll go back and play it again.
How choice games deal with save games drives me up a wall. It’s also annoying that you can’t make saves whenever.
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Illya is a generic fantasy name too tho, not just a russian name.
What do you mean by this?
I mean that the name in the game isn’t supposed to be a russian name, it’s just supposed to be a made up fantasy name.
It’s definitely influenced by the actual name, though, just like most names selectable for the MC - Alexis, Hel, Innes, Leith, Rune, Sevan, and Yuval - are actual names borrowed from a variety of languages. It’s not a cardinal sin, but it is mildly annoying to me, as someone passionate about onomatology.
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I think that this attitude is a little unreasonable, to be honest. It’s perfectly possible for a name to be classified as belonging to a certain gender in one culture while being the opposite in others. Just look at ‘Andrea’—masculine in some places, feminine in others. Or ‘Yuri’—everyone knows the famous man Yuri Gagarin. Yet I know a Japanese girl named Yuri (or at least, I know she exists. Don’t really know her).
There are other examples, but I’m sure you understand what I mean. If a different culture in the real world can use names with a gender bias contrary to that of one I’m more familiar with, why not the inhabitants of a fictional land in a fictional world?
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Putting percentage chance of outcome in the game. I do not want to restart and waste 3 hours of reading just because I failed a 70% roll.
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I’m not sure if this is a mechanic, so much as author habit, but something that drives me up a wall is when the rest of the cast judges the hell out of you for succeeding or failing a skill check.
What I mean is, in some games, you play as a practiced expert in some field, and anybody who’s an expert at anything could tell you that they still have off days where they screw up. But because you’re supposed to be so good at your job, if you fail any skill checks ever, all bodies present will immediately start looking down their noses at you for being utterly incompetent and useless, whereas succeeding at skill checks makes jaws drop open in wonderment, because they totally didn’t expect you to be good at your job!
Made it really annoying when I was playing Silverworld and everybody was ooh’d and awe’d over my character having such pinpoint aim with a rifle - she was a damn sniper back in the army, what were you expecting?!
By contrast, doing… basically anything in Soul Stone War, and failing, earned me no end of mockery from my so-called “friends,” which only made me hate them that little bit more.
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I think it’s where the problem lie, you generally don’t have a ‘job’ to begin with in most choice games so all the actions are just ‘stuff you do’ instead of ‘a thief thieving’ so as far as the game know, you never knew how to do it even if you pulled it off 20 times before.
It’s complicated because it’s an issue but except a convoluted reputation system that probably wouldn’t actually work, I can’t think of a solution. At least not one that doesn’t involve a ridiculous amount of variables to write for a single author.
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True enough, and Silverworld certainly did have a bit of variety in character types:
You could either be a sniper, or an assault gunner, and you could either use a rifle or a pistol as a sniper, or a carbine (I think?) or an assault rifle as an assault gunner.
You could also either be really good in melee combat, or be really good in stealth.
I was a stealthy, rifle-wielding sniper, for reference. Probably just doing the variable calculations for that, alone, would’ve been a big ask.
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They act like that if you succeed too BTW. You’re very much treated as the weak link even if you succeed at literally everything possible. (I did a full playthrough with like 95 in all stats so I literally COULDN’T fail and it still happened)
I think it doesn’t stop until the troll fight and even then.
I get what the author was going for but they really did a bad job at establishing the MC started out as an absolute non-combattant. Especially since they just start out with magic anyway.
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