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 into the experience. Not in a dramatic way like Grounded, or even the way Warhammer 40,000: Darktide has a much higher view perspective for its Ogyrn characters. But in a subtler everyday way.
As Zullie notes in her video, Elden Ring: Nightreign kinda does this. The height of its various playable characters does make a slight mechanical difference to the player’s experiences. Taller characters like the Guardian have better reach, while smaller characters like Revenant have a marginally higher chance to avoid being hit by certain attacks.
I think it would be an interesting variable to play with in other FromSoft games, or in RPGs and action games more broadly. I’m sure there are some that do it to a certain extent, but it’s certainly not a general feature. At the very least, I’ll be able to live out my fantasy of being able to pull things off a high shelf without risking snapping a tendon.
Elden Ring Ranni quest: Follow the witch
Elden Ring Blaidd quest: Wolf man watch
Elden Ring Nepheli quest: Warrior woman
Elden Ring Fia quest: Cold comfort
Elden Ring volcano manor quest: Get Mt. Gelmir
