It's pretty common in game development to up against the wall in terms of texture memory or frame rate performance or way past your limits and needing to cut th

It's pretty common in game development to up against the wall in terms of texture memory or frame rate performance or way past your limits and needing to cut things before release. It's very believable they didn't have the spare memory for in depth customizable characters. It's much more efficient for the computer to have more characters to render that look the same. Maybe they had the exact same geometry for all players and the exact same textures and just a different label over their heads, or had only a color swap texture difference, etc.. If adding customization meant each player had to have separate data and that data didn't fit in fast caches, it could have broken the frame rate requirements. Writing games, I've spent months on optimizations to do things like draw as many objects with as few data/state/rendering changes as possible to reach frame rate requirements for a smooth game.