The short king revelation: Why I spent 2025 obsessing over video game height

I don’t mean that in a professional or emotional sense, but quite literally: I spent the entire year weirdly fixated on the verticality of video game characters. This obsession began with an innocuous but startling revelation from a YouTube investigation by the FromSoftware savant Zullie the Witch. The finding? Apart from the cast of Elden Ring: Nightreign, every single FromSoftware protagonist stands exactly 5 feet 7 inches tall.

I had always subconsciously assumed these dodge-rolling warriors were towering figures. Perhaps it is simply how Anglo-American entertainment media has conditioned my brain, programming me to perceive heroic archetypes as strictly tall, dark, and handsome. Discovering that the slayers of gods and demons are actually the same height as me was a genuine surprise, and it sparked a deeper contemplation on how we represent physical stature in the digital realm.

This newfound curiosity led me down some bizarre rabbit holes. At one point, I found myself pestering Romain Barrilliot, the level designer at Arkane Studios and director of The Black Parade, to help me calculate the height of Garrett from the Thief series. The results were fascinatingly inconsistent. In Thief: The Dark Project, the master thief is exactly six feet tall. By Thief 2: The Metal Age, he has grown slightly—though perhaps purely for cosmetic framing—before shrinking significantly to a modest 5'5" in the 2014 reboot.

As an amusing aside, it is worth noting that in the original Thief, Garrett is technically just a giant, excrement-colored cuboid. Because the game is strictly first-person, Looking Glass Studios never bothered rendering a proper character model for him—which perhaps explains why the guards are always so shocked to discover him skulking about.

We rarely think about character height because game worlds are typically built relative to the protagonist, even when the scale is deliberately skewed. Take Quake, for instance. The avatar, Ranger, is a puny 3 feet 5 inches tall. This diminished stature is a design trick to make the levels feel cavernous and foreboding as you rattle through them, a subtle manipulation of perspective that emphasizes the hostility of the environment.

However, in the realm of Virtual Reality, height transitions from a design trick to a genuine accessibility issue. Because VR translates your physical presence directly into the game space, the world is perceived from your actual standing height unless the developers intervene. Consequently, modern VR titles often include bespoke calibration settings to ensure tall players aren't clipping their heads through virtual ceilings and that those of shorter stature, like myself, don't develop neck strain from constantly looking up at NPCs.

It is this tangible connection to height that I would love to see folded into non-VR experiences—not necessarily in the dramatic "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" style of Grounded, nor the towering perspective of the Ogryn in Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, but in subtler, everyday ways.

As Zullie noted in her original video, Elden Ring: Nightreign is already experimenting with this. The height of the various playable classes offers slight mechanical distinctiveness: taller characters like the Guardian enjoy better reach, while smaller ones like the Revenant have a marginally better chance of avoiding high-hitbox attacks.

It feels like a variable ripe for exploration in future RPGs and action games. While I am sure some titles already dabble in this, it is far from a standard feature. If nothing else, I simply want to live out the specific fantasy of reaching something on a high shelf without the risk of snapping a tendon.

Credit: Gamelade