Why (and how much) does character customization in video games matter to you?

In the original Diablo, you could just barely make out your character. Warriors were in armor, Sorcerers kinda had robes on if you squinted, and the Rogue was a girl — oh, and she used a bow. That was about it, and dadgum it, I disliked it that way. Now, I’m probably in the minority here, but when Diablo 2 came out and still had fairly stripped down and mono-gendered classes — so that all Barbarians were grumpy bald dudes, all Assassins were lithe, kill-from-the-shadows ladies, and so on — I was fairly unimpressed.

So I heralded Diablo 3 at the time it came out as a high water mark because, while you couldn’t really customize your character, at least you could pick a body type that suggested something else and let you play every class that way. As you might expect, I was also very much in favor of the way armor dyes and transmog in general worked in that game — still one of my favorite versions of transmog, in fact.

Of course, I’ve been playing a fair amount of Diablo 4 since it came out and I unsurprisingly enjoy it, and while I love quite a bit — the combat loop, the game’s storyline, the varied endgame, and upcoming Seasons with new content to play — I would be a horrible liar if I even attempted to pretend that I don’t love the changes and updates to the character creator — all of it works for me and I’m super happy about it. It’s an upgraded version of what we saw in Diablo Immortal in many ways, and it lets me really differentiate my characters from one another. This is, as it turns out, very important to me.

So what about you? Why do you care about character customization? (Do you, in fact, care about it?) Does it depend on what kind of game you’re playing, are you indifferent no matter what, or do you just always love being able to put your own touches on a character?