More Customisation options (Patreon)

So way back when I first started working on Gilded Shadows, I floated the idea of the player being able to make some choices regarding Morgan's back story. Specifically, the things I considered at the time were in regards to what Morgan is studying in school as well as how close she is to her family.

I eventually got rid of the idea because I felt it might be difficult to make work in the story. But recently, I played an otome that does, in fact, do this. And they integrated it pretty seamlessly. It doesn't always impact the story in major ways but it does have some impact and it was interesting to see how different things played out based on what background the main character had.

I would probably still consider some of the same sorts of things.

What Morgan was studying (Previously, in addition to interplanetary archaeology, I was thinking of having her study medicine and…something else I can't remember. It was another science career I think…I'm not sure if I still have any notes from back then or if I'll have to potentially come up with something else. Or maybe just stick with two options.)

I could also let the player choose things like whether or not she has brothers or is an only child. And maybe how close she is to her family.

In some cases these changes would have only minor impact in the story while in others there may be a more significant impact - for instance, Morgan's experience in the field of archaeology and Altair's history comes into play particularly in Caleb's route (well, this is the plan anyway) so there would probably be a lot of alternate scenes through that route if she isn't well versed in that topic.

The question is - why would we want to do this? Isn't it a lot more work?

And, well, yeah. It is. It would involve a lot more branching to account for these variations. The general idea, I guess, is to make the experience more engaging by offering more variation as to what the player controls. We're already stepping outside the norm (a little) by allowing physical customisation and some personality customisation. This is essentially just an expansion of that - trying to create an otome experience that doesn't feel like every other otome experience.

Of course, the question with this kind of thing is always 'does it add enough value to warrant its inclusion.'

And I think it's difficult to answer that question because different players see 'value' differently. For some people just the fact that the player needs to go through the game with different personalities and back stories is value enough. That replayability adds a lot for them. For other people, it would need to have heavy impact on the story - for instance if Morgan is a med student, does that open or close opportunities to take specific actions? That is what they would need to consider this valuable.

For other people, they might considering it punishing if certain opportunities and options are closed to you unless you have one background or the other. 

So it's always difficult to know whether or not something like this is worth doing - it's a game element that would be tricky (but not impossible to implement.) But if people hate it, it would be a HUGE pain in the butt to remove.

So I guess that's my question to you guys:

• How much do you value customisation in general?
• How much do you value *this kind* of customisation? 
• How much impact on the story and events would need to stem from these kinds of choices for you to consider it an interesting and valuable part of the game?
• What do you see as the possible pit falls and disappointments that might come from this type of customisation?

We'd really like to hear from everyone on this!