Does anyone else love promo websites for games which have character bios (usually playable rosters)? I feel like this is something that sort of became prominent with the death of manuals. I recall game manuals used to list every playable character in say fighting games but if you can just host all this on a website then why not?
Bonus for completely silly bio information like likes/dislikes, favourite food,
I guess they’ve been taken down but the websites for the Borderlands games had interactive tools you could use to explore each playable character’s entire skill trees. I found it very satisfying to mess around with.
They still do have basic little character bios for all the Vault Hunters up
That sounds awesome! I think I enjoy these the same way I enjoy constructing characters for TTRPGs. It’s like fiction/gameplay expressed purely through character info rather than a cinematic or prose narrative.
Web-based character builders / talent calculators have been a feature of mmo fandom forever. Wowhead (and Allakazam before it) are institutions at this point, and maintain a commented database of the entire game (which reveals the game’s inherent database-like nature)
There’s also Tim Cain who made a modular Gurps character-building program just for fun that ended up being the kernel of Fallout…