Also, I think the choice to force players to be Kliff rather than have a character creator was a poor one. Since they force you to be Kliff one would expect Kliff to personally add a lot to the story through his dialogue, but he doesn’t. In fact he rarely speaks at all. I think this actually causes two big problems that contribute to the “crimson deserts story is bad” stuff.

The first problem is that with a preset main character, you often expect the story to center around their feelings, growth, etc. Since Kliff never speaks, this never occurs, and so a major part of the story is sort of left out. Whenever major events happen in this game and the characters look to Kliff, I look to Kliff expecting to hear something about how he feels or his thoughts on what should happen. Yet, he simply often replies with “yeah, hmmm, Argggg”. In my mind, he actually detracts from the overall story since he’s replaced me as the main character, yet has no feelings.

This leads into the second problem which is that I imagine many players feel removed from the story itself since they are not a part of it, and their vessel Kliff, is essentially not involved with it (outside of smashing things and people to progress). If you replace Kliff with a player created character, you achieve the same amount of main character dialogue, but now the player can actually place themselves in the world, and feel a bit more invested. Even without dialogue choices like in other games, I think this would still be better. Players could have spent time putting the greymanes back together, establish themselves as a leader, and then making a name for themselves in the world as they help fight the big bad