What would be the usual vertices count for a character for a game? I’m using instant meshes for retopology but it seems like to get a decent mesh it has to have alot of vertices and i’m worried it might affect gameplay, Thanks in advance for the help 
It would be in tens of thousands of verts probably, for a good looking character. You can go with 50k, no problem. As long as you don’t have hundreds of these things wandering around the level.
Wow really? The base model I have looks good around 10k but it sounded like alot and while I don’t plan to have a large amount on screen at once I was worried as blender itself seemed to stop working at around 30k
Certain graphics APIs, drivers, and versions, may stop working at either 32767 or 65535 vertices, for various technical reasons. And those typically are the “split” vertices, where any UV or smoothing/normal seam causes multiple “split” vertices where the editor only shows one “model” vertex.
In general, 20,000 modeling-vertices for a character in a modern game on modern hardware (PC plug-in card, or modern game console) is totally reasonable. If you want to push to 100 characters on screen, or to 100,000 vertices per character, you will have to do a bunch of tuning, benchmarking, and careful management, though. Also, if you want to target the previous generation of Intel Integrated graphics (which is > 50% of the game buying public!) then you will have to make some hard trade-offs.
LODs can help. Arrange to not load the best LOD (or even the top N LODs, depending on how far you go on each level) when on slower hardware is a reasonable choice along this spectrum.
A detailed zbrush sculpt is around 16 billion. Perhaps more.
A good base lod is probably around 17k with room to improve - meaning you can reduce that further, since this is probably the LOD0 visible when closest to it.
In reality the vert count doesn’t really matter.
The limits on characters are due to number of weighted bones allowed to deform each vertex.
As well as to how effectively you remove overlapping geometry to prevent clipping.
There’s also limits on how many morphs And bones modify the same verts. This is potentially important for joint linked morph targets such as elbow correction.
Some of the best pre-made are probably the genesis 8 models.
I don’t like them, but others do.