Playing Dress Up in Games

Bards are arguably one of the most stylish jobs in
Final Fantasy XIV.

Customization has become increasingly popular in games over the decades. Whether it's something on the technical end like tweaking graphic settings or an RPG where players have points to allocate to various stats on their characters, this sort of thing has been quite useful and people really eat it up. While customization has been a big thing on the practical side of the spectrum, it's also become all the rage from a stylistic standpoint. It could be something like having multiple costumes for fighting game characters, or graphically reflecting equipment upgrades in an RPG, or it could be like in MMORPGs where many games have gone so far as to allow vanity gear that players can acquire simply to make their character as stylish as they like while still retaining stats from other gear that actually is useful in battle.

I remember it being a very simple thing, back when my friends and I played Street Fighter II in the arcades during the early 90s. Get into a mirror match with someone and inevitably one of you would be stuck with a color scheme on your character that you probably didn't like. This used to happen to me with Ryu all the time. I was a traditionalist with him and many of the other SFII characters at the time, and much preferred their original colors, as opposed to the alternatives, and couldn't help but cringe when I didn't get them.

Granted, this mentality has softened considerably over the years and there are many alternate costumes in fighting games that I quite like the looks of. Street Fighter IV, for example has some very nice alternate looks for characters, and I'm quite fond of some of the other costumes that C. Viper and Ibuki have. I think a lot of other people must like having this level of customization as well, because, cry as some may about DLC, on-disc or not, people seem to be snapping the stuff up fairly regularly (or are at least waiting for stuff like Steam sales to get everything in one big, cheap bundle).

What really caught my attention was when games started to visually reflect changes in a character's gear in-game.  We saw it on a very basic level in games like Capcom's Knights of the Round as Arthur and the gang got better armor and weapons as they went up in levels. Eventually this poured into RPGs, my favorite genre, and I was thoroughly impressed to see that upon buying a new shield in town and equipping it, I could see my character actually walking around with it. This continued further with games like Morrowind where players could find all sorts of armor and whatnot, slap it on, and be in awe of their more fabulous selves.

Glass armor turned some heads
when it appeared in Morrowind.

This has continued over the last 15 years, with all sorts of games building upon the trend, especially as graphical horsepower increased with each new bit of hardware to come along. Games like Dark Souls, The Witcher, Kingdom of Amalur, and a small army of others all had snazzy armor sets that players could collect and use to doll up their on-screen alter egos.

The one problem that this could sometimes pose was that specific gear had specific stats attached to it, where, if one wanted to make their character as powerful as possible, they had to equip something that they may not have liked the aesthetic of. It was a sacrifice that had to be made in order to perform one's best.

However, that has slowly been getting addressed, particularly in MMORPGs thanks to the ability to have both stat-based gear as well as vanity gear on the same character. It's something that we started to see as players responded to various gear sets that games would have. While progressing to tougher dungeons, getting equipment with good stats is important if you want to be effective. However, as nice as these stat boosts may be, there's no guarantee that the armor will be aesthetically appealing to everyone. To address this, developers gradually began giving players the option to get that armor with the amazing stats and put it on, while at the same time having additional slots to put equipment that would augment their characters' appearances. So, now we could have the best of both worlds.

Personally, I'm surprised by how much such a feature has been able to draw me in. In a game like World of Warcraft when this feature was added, suddenly I found myself storming dungeons that I'd not visited in years just to get specific pieces of armor. Then on top of this, there wasn't a 100% guarantee that the stuff I wanted would drop, and I was more than happy to go through the dungeon as many times as it took to get a specific piece of gear that I wanted. My characters' aesthetics just meant that much to me, and the ability to dress them up just right was very appealing.

Now here I am a few years later, playing Final Fantasy XIV and finding myself thinking the same way since the game has similar functionality. I could very easily see myself running around, bending over backwards to get specific pieces of armor just to tailor my character to look exactly how I want. It's very addicting.

Custom character models have been a mainstay of fighting games for
years, but they sure can be appealing.

In the end, I'm surprised by the extent to which I've warmed up to such simple game features that we've seen slowly get implemented over the last decade. Once upon a time, I was happy just to have a well-designed protagonist and be done with it, but now to be able to completely customize his or her appearance, sometimes pouring in dozens of hours in the process has made the whole thing so much more fun. I'm certainly not alone in this either, as there are plenty of others really pouring themselves into this sort of thing, getting costume packs, dressing up their Dark Soul characters, or getting making their Blood Elf paladin looking just so.  Sure, doing this sort of thing is often more of a slog or a matter of grabbing DLC, but color me casual because I really do like it.