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What type of MMORPG Character do you prefer more?
~The character of absolute freedom. Characters who have no previous background and can be customized to look as much like yourself as possible. Basically the ultimate self-insert character. In maples case, Explorers, Cygnus Knights, and Resistance come the closest to this description. In other games cases, think games that let you customize the appearance of the character completely at the start of the game. For offline games, think... The Elder Scrolls?
~The established hero. Characters who have established backgrounds and achievements within the lore of the game world (Aran, The Demon, Zero), or at least is established to be their own character (Evan, Chase the Beast Tamer, The Special Explorers to some extent). Think games that give you a character that has a set appearance when you first make the character. Offline, most games do this already, even if the "main character" is some faceless every-body whose choices are made by the player.
Thinking about it, there might be more types of characters than the two above, but at least as far as I can see, these two are the most common.
If you know of more types of characters, say so and I'll probably add it to the list.
Comments
I play a lot of RPGs and MMORPGs, and one common thing among a lot of them, is that you create your own character and play for a while, to discover a couple of hours in that you're descended from some legendary hero, have supernatural powers you never knew about or other such things that have been done a thousand times before. This is fine for a lot of games and I can understand that it gives the character some backstory and is there to give an explanation as to why you can conjure fireballs to throw at your enemies, but I prefer the "established hero" approach.
There aren't many games that really do this though, unless it's in a sequel and you're playing the same character from an earlier title in the series, or a character who you've heard about in previous games, which in my opinion is an even better way of doing this. I think the hero classes in maple strike a good balance between both types, because they're both well-known heroes from their own time with their historical battle with the black mage, and also the "unknown hero" when they awaken to find themselves severely weakened and a stranger to most because of how long ago the battle with the black mage was.
As for character physical appearance, it doesn't really bother me too much but I prefer having a lot of customisation options, especially if it's for a character that I'm going to be spending potentially hundreds of hours playing as. I can understand that a lot of developers would prefer that the character look a certain way, however they intended them to look, but I'd rather have the freedom to make my character look however I choose and define for myself what the character should look like, even if it doesn't fit in with how the developers wanted the character to be, but this is generally only the case with single-player RPGs. The Nova classes (Angelic Buster & Kaiser) seem to do this quite well, with both allowing you to customise how the "base" character looks to a good extent, but also having their true form show the character as the developer intended. I'd never actually considered this until now really, but this topic just made me think about it.
I'm not one for making my characters look like myself. I'd rather make a character that looks role-appropriate if I'm going to be doing a specific thing for that character in an RPG. So if I'm going to be playing some form of spellcaster it's likely to be an elf or whatever other "magical" type race is available, usually with some kind of markings or tattoos that seem to be common place. But there's also nothing wrong with customising a character just for fun, to look exactly how you want it to. Most MMORPGs do a pretty good job of this with allowing you to have your gear look like whatever piece of gear or clothing you want, and I'm pretty happy with how Maple does this too, with there being a decent variety of cosmetic options available in one form or another.
Overall, I like the freedom to really do what I want with a character, but there's nothing wrong with a game giving you a hero that the developers premade and gave a huge backstory and profile to. I often read a lot into the lore of RPGs and MMORPGs if there's a good amount available and it's well written, which I've found myself doing with Maple fairly often. We have the obvious underlying stories about the black mage, the black wings, and everything else going on. But even the little stories in the theme dungeons really add backstory to the world as a whole and to the characters, and it's fun to just get lost in the game world. That's what we're mostly here for anyway, right?
On the other hand, I like the established hero because it's like learning about a new character in a book versus writing my own character. With my own character, I already know everything there is to know about them already and no matter how much I try to distance myself from them, there'll always be a piece of myself in them. There's no surprises. But with the established hero, I get a chance of another perspective that isn't just me and it's interesting that way. Plus, I'm the kind of person who thinks it's self-conceited to insert myself into a hero role, which is why my characters of absolute freedom would never look like me nor would they ever straight-up be a self-insert, only what I think their personalities could be like based on the things and experiences I've managed to cobble together over time playing with them.
This is why with established heroes, I don't change their default appearances. It feels wrong to me to change their looks for anything else other than what they canonically look like. Established heroes are heroes of their own stories, stories which I'm only a viewer of and changing them in any way feels like self-insertion into a story I have no part in.
Interesting perspectives though...