Does a character need a Player Controller?

so i had a Character blueprint with my player and a camera on it, everything works fine.
but i was reading this link Setting Up a Character in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.1 Documentation

And saw that it tells you to create a PlayerController, which i never did.
so my question is, do i need it? what advantage does it have?

i receive the axis/action events inside my character BP and also perform the rotation in there(the player rotates towards the mouse like a topdown game)

i noticed that the ThirdPersonTemplate doesn’t have a player controller at all, but the top down template does

for you to be able to posses and control a character it needs a controller. depending on the situation you would either use a player controller or a ai controller. a player controller is basically the representation of the player within the game. if you look at the game mode of something like the third person template you will notice that there is a default controller set there so there actually is one being used. there are also some default player controllers that are built into the engine you dont always need to create your own.

to summarize if you want a character in game to make decisions and come to life it will probably need a controller.

i see, i tried creating a player controller and noticed it already comes with a camera inside, can i delete this camera or move its position? because the project i have needs a top down camera

so i been reading some posts about player controller,and found one that said that the player controller’s camera gets disabled if the character already haves one, does that mean i don’t have to worry about the camera inside the player controller?

yea you dont need to worry about the camera in the controller if you have one elseware.