It is possible to mix up combinations of sub-characters. If you have 6 different weapons and 6 different faces and 6 different body plans, that's 6 cubed
(216) different characters. To the imperceptive gamer in the heat of battle, the similarities will be unnoticeable.

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(Anyone remember the original Atari "Pole Position" game?)

Yep.

[edit: If you only want different faces, control points could be used to randomly manipulate the texture to make it look just perceivably different.]

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Pawns are meant to be identical

My point exactly, pawns are nothing more then an abstract representation of a game mechanic.

Makeing each Goomba look and act differently takes away from what they represent. Especialy makeing them each act differently disturbs (if not outright destroys) the effect they have on the game balance.

Some games are just ment to be games, let them be such.

Thanks to everyone for the excellent replies so far. I'm intending to reply to more of them but currently have limited time, but I'll start here:

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Original post by Tom The biggest problem I see with the clone philosophy is a lack of emotional investment. It is impossible to identify with a creature that looks like every other creature of its type.

Ok, so if we're able to uniquely identify a given character we're more likely to be able to form some sort of emotional investment whether that be as a hated/respected/despised/whatever opponent or as a sort of friendship or wanting to protect them. Taking your example of a wolf though, where's the value in allowing someone the potential of developing an emotional attachment to a character they're going to kill on the first encounter; outside of boss characters how often have you seen a creature in a game escape to fight you again another day, or cunningly hinder your progress without neccesarily engaging you till a later stage?

As I see it the visual aspect -- while still technically limitated in some cases -- is solvable but may introduce additional problems (or at least not produce a worthwhile benefit) if further changes aren't also made. The large, particularly cunning wolf with the scar on it's face is just another wolf you've killed unless you encounter it more than once. Why go to the trouble of allowing me to uniquely identify a character if I'm unable to develop any emotional investment anyway?

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Original post by stimarco That's an AI issue rather than a visual one. Nothing wrong with that, but I don't think Kazgoroth was complaining about this.

Not specifically, although I did make mention of behavior once in the OP. I do think it's a related issue though that if we're trying to vary the appearance of characters in an attempt to increase immersion it may be somewhat jarring that they all behave identically.

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Original post by Kest Large similarities between enemies is often a positive and realistic thing. When you hunt, don't expect to be able to identify specific instances of the animal (well, unless you're skilled enough to do so). If you storm an FBI security center, expect all suits.

I agree entirely, as with everything this isn't something that applies to all situations equally.

MSW gives the excellent example of the fact that Chess is an iconic game where the units are representative rather than actual characters. Strategy games like Civilazation fall into the same category, as do most RTS games; that GI you see represents a small group of infantry rather than a specific character and you need to be able to identify it as a group of infantry at a glance rather than having to think about it.

As Sean observes, our brains and visual systems are designed around recognising patterns, similar shapes/movements/colours/etc. and this is something we can take advantage of in a lot of cases. We're normally easily able to apply this to identify another human without that person being identical to other humans however, and can further apply it (as with the military example) to differentiate between different groups of humans.

- Jason.

It seems that many here seem to think visual appereance = textures/mesh. I would say that in most cases games would benefit much more from different animations.

In shooters you usually don't get to see your opponents faces but you see them run and walk and cover. Now all the enemies look just like robots - they run and shoot and walk exactly the same way. And I'm not talking about behaviour, just the animations used. Sometimes the enemies even run in sync, that's just wrong.

One easy solution is to add some random variety to the length of animation loops. Allthough, I would like to see different postures, someone leaning forward while walking, someone leaning back, someone keeping hands to his sides, someone swinging hands etc.

That said, I usually play more "classic games" where symbols or symbol like creatures are far better than "realistic" ones.