#but sadly the industry is moving away from character creation nowadays it's really sad

[raynydaystorytime]

There was a game on switch a while ago, Daemon X Machina. Basically it was a not amazing (but not horrible) mecha game along the lines of Armored Core it was all and all a very bland game with both performance and gameplay issues but one thing about that game stood out to me. It was that you could upgrade your pilot, but upgrades were in the form of cybernetic enchantments.

First couple of upgrades barely noticable, eye colour changes, a handful of seam lines on your face. Around the middle you replace your legs with robotic replacements, hands and arms become mechanized limbs. And depending on the upgrade you either got bulky industrial style parts, blade thin aeronatic frames, or a middle ground with synthetic muscle fibers to give the limb some semblance of humanity.

And then you replace your torso. Your character is now a head on a mechanized body. An organic cockpit piloting a metal body, not unlike the robot you yourself pilot. The last upgrade is a full head replacement. Assumedly the only thing remaining of your body is the brain that's now floating in your head part.

The story was ass but Daemon X Machina did one thing very well though this system. It asked the player "how far are you willing to go". Because the thing is that none of these upgrades were mandatory, there were benefits yes but none of them were absolutely vital to success. The whole system walked a very finely tuned line. What are you willing to give up for better performance? Your legs? Your arms? Your chest and heart? Everything? Or will you stay human and handicap yourself? It was fascinating to see where people drew the line. How far they were willing to disassemble the characters they had themselves created. some people gave up everything, others rejected everything. Sometimes upgrades were chosen not based on stats but based on the look of the enhancement.

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I have lots of ideas but sadly never enough energy/expertise to realize them. Which just results in daydreaming so sometimes I daydream of a game.

In it the world is pushed to the brink of survival by monsters. And the player characters who are tasked with fighting against those monsters are given a choice.

They can augment themselves with monster parts, doing the same thing as Daemon X Machina. Your hands become talons, your legs become claws. You can jump higher, run faster. Wings and tails, horns and internal organs. Bulky augments let you wield larger weapons, tote a minigun or a rocket pod around easily. Lithe augments let you move quicker, run faster, jump higher. Push the limits until the only weapons you need are your own savage limbs. till you can spew hellish fire from your maw, till you can generate a million volts with your internal organs, till you can rip out monsters throats with your teeth and taste their cobalt blue blood dripping down your face, the same kind of blood that now runs though your veins.

Or you could not. Hunt down what monsters you can with what you have. Turn in parts to the research team. Use your enemies strengths not as implants but as technology. You kill a mantis monster and the research team hands you a sword forged from it's scythes, an invisible monster becomes a stealth field generator. You break your opponents down and turn them into weapons, armor, tools, all built for human hands to handle.

And then you watch people draw their lines. Who augments their body and who remains a steadfast human. And who tries to walk their own path somewhere down the middle. What augments do people pick? Do they choose function or appearance? Give players multiplayer, how do they react when faced with the choices of others? Maybe they split apart into humans and augmented, maybe the lines that they draw separate them from each other. Or maybe they find out that hunting monsters tends to go better when humans and augmented work together, the precision and versatility of humans synergizing with the raw versatility of augmented.

But that's just a daydream