Ruin Explorer
Legend
I think that is part of what's going on, but I think there's also just a lot of people with boring-ass ideas in charge of these sort of operations - it's not even design by committee, it's one boring guy with boring ideas making the final decision on the character and preferring the blandest one there is.
I think when we look at successful games, particularly long-running series, non-bland > bland. Like, God of War - Kratos is an incredibly distinctive freak. They re-did him completely from a psycho asswipe in the originals to a gruff dad in the recent ones, but he's still very distinctive in style and voice (Christopher Judge baby, Teal'c himself!). You've mentioned The Witcher - no way those games would have picked up so hard with a bland, generic Witcher - they might have done as well with character creation - but not with equivalent of Cal Cestis or a similar MoR figure.
I mean, hell, I can go on - no way Uncharted works without Nathan Drake or similar, the Horizon games without that little weirdo Aloy, and one of the reasons the modern Tomb Raiders are weaker than they could be is that their vision of Lara Croft is a lot more of a bland generic scared-but-brave Final Girl than the bold-as-brass one of the earlier games. Like, do you need the ludicrous boobs or excessive glamour of the originals? No. But turning Croft into a generic Final Girl isn't really doing it. Hell, if the Star Wars Jedi games had a better lead than Cal Cestis, I'm pretty sure they'd sell even better than they have - the actor is good, and can be quite freaky (he played The Joker in the awful Gotham TV show with the OC guy as Jim Gordon), but they clearly directed him to be a totally bland Luke Skywalker expy.
I think if you're really going to go bland, just stop yourself and either change the game to be character-creation-based, or revise to non-bland. Pick a lane!
It's Ubisoft so that's near-certain, and you'll probably be able to get some in-game. Let's hope they're not equally bland and cosplay-y.
