Innocuous Video About How Fromsoft Protagonists Are 5 Feet 7 Inches...

2025 was a year of highs and lows for me. Not for personal or professional reasons, but rather because I got weirdly obsessed with the height of videogame characters. It started with the surprising revelation that every FromSoftware protagonist outside of Elden Ring Nightreign is exactly 5'7", a fact I learned from a YouTube investigation by FromSoft savant Zullie the Witch.

I'd always assumed FromSoftware protagonists were taller than this. I'm not sure why, but it's probably due to how Anglo-American entertainment media has programmed my brain to perceive heroic archetypes as tall, dark and handsome. So finding out that all FromSoft's dodge-rolling warriors are the same height as me was surprising, leading me to think more deeply about how we represent height in games.

Some of this manifested in bizarre tangents, like when I bugged Arkane Studios level designer and The Black Parade director Romain Barrilliot to help me figure out the height of Garrett from Thief. Interestingly, it turns out that Garrett's height varies across the games. He's exactly six feet tall in Thief: The Dark Project, slightly taller in Thief 2: The Metal Age (though this extra couple of inches may be purely cosmetic) and a significantly shorter 5'5" in 2014's Thief reboot.

This is entirely beside the point, but it should be noted that Garrett is also a giant poo-coloured cuboid in the original Thief. Since we never see Garrett during play, Looking Glass never bothered to give him a proper character model. Little wonder the guards are so shocked when they discover him skulking around.

I guess we don't think about videogame character height much because the world is typically built relative to that height, even when the two are deliberately out of whack. For example, Quake's avatar Ranger is a puny 3'5" inches tall, which makes its levels seem huge and foreboding as you rattle through them.

Height is much more of a concern in VR gaming, to the point where it's something of an accessibility issue. Since VR accurately translates your physical presence into the game-space, you will see that space as perceived from your actual height unless the developers compensate for it. Consequently, most modern VR games will have bespoke settings that adjust the world accordingly, ensuring that particularly tall players aren't clipping through the ceiling and people like me don't get neckache when interacting with NPCs.

But I'd be interested to see non-VR games fold player-character height in

Source: PC Gamer