Brooks wrote:

I think the character creation suites are the only good thing about current AAA titles. And Saints Row has the best of those.

Yeah, I thought my SRIV character was great, and it really helps that it had the voice to match.

I got into the habit of always creating female characters in games with customising features, and the tech's got to the point now where you can make a character as strong as most proper characters with back stories and shit. My silent avatar in GTAV online is infinitely cooler than any of the overscripted dopes in the main game. 

There's also an actual different feel to some games when you play as a male or female - Mass Effect is a good example. I played ME2 the second time as a badass lady Shep, and it immediately seemed fresher.

Blue Swirl wrote:

dynamiteReady wrote:

You get to see Master Chief in the game though, don't you? I don't think Freeman appears on anything but the box art.

It's true. Everything you learn about Freeman is via how the other characters react to you. Chief manages to display a range of emotions without ever taking his helmet off. The plot of the Halo games is bat shit insane at the best of times, but that's a massive achievement for Bungie.

FTFY.

There was a Dublin snake yeah.

IanHamlett wrote:

Freeman isn't strong and silent, he's mute and it's weird. I can see what they were trying but it didn't work. Master Chief just seems like they couldn't commit to a flat or a round character, leaving him as a gruff badass with no backstory or personality. I'm not making a case for Modern Warfare but Sgt Price is at least as badass, has some backstory, a hint of personality, and a fucking big moustache.

Gordon Freeman absolutely worked, in that you build his personality in your head via how other characters talk to you/him, with you filling in the blanks. He's you whilst at the same time being him - in typical Valve fashion you feel like you're making your own choices but you still end up playing like a selfless good guy because of how the other characters see you.

Regarding Chief, 'no back story' seems like a stretch when hints as to his origin are dropped throughout the series, especially in the flashbacks in Halo 4. 'Gruff' also seems to be off the mark, as he's perhaps the most polite mass alien-murderer in history. Despite being two foot taller than everyone and essentially a walking tank, he still respects the chain of command, and when he doesn't it's for strong moral convictions. He never curses or gets angry, even when being threatened with arrest by a frothing senior officer.

Sgt. Price is a stonking character, but a bolt of lightening as far as the Call of Duty series is concerned. The rest are indentikit all-American white dude action heroes, fresh off the cover of any straight-to-DVD action movie. They're rough and ready, and when the bullets start flying, they're rougher and readier.

dynamiteReady wrote:

Nintendo appeared to catch on very early with Samus Aran... To think that you'd blasted and rolled through the entire game as some kind of mindless space marine (tm). You'd have blatantly assumed the character to be male, because of the experience you had guided the avatar through.  Even the modern versions of the game subvert this very common preconception (of strong lead male roles), even though the mystery was dispelled almost 30 years ago.

This is one reason I've avoided Other M, the talk in the reviews of Samus essentially being totally subservient to her male commander and showing no initiative just ruined the character for me.

It's like those Star Wars prequels that they were planning a while ago but never actually got around to THANK GOD.

Freeman worked for me in HL1, same as the mute criminal worked in GTA3, but by the time HL2 came out it was just too strange. There were all these people including you in conversations and you didn't say a single thing. Before everything kicked off he was a jobbing scientist. A guy like that is going to walk into some of the rooms he walks into, and meet some of the people he meets, and say nothing?

The point about picking up who he is from the people around him is good but that didn't work for me last time I had a look. You're a famous hero to most by the time HL2 happens and Alex fancies you. I was blown away when I first saw their relationship, I had never picked anything up from body language in a game before. We just didn't have the fidelity a couple of years before that. But now that the wow factor is gone, she's a weak female character that only serves as an ego boost to a mute scientist that only uses his expertise to plug stuff in.


These clowns probably do more science that Freeman. I know for a fact Chris Redfield does.

Regarding Chief, 'no back story' seems like a stretch when hints as to his origin are dropped throughout the series, especially in the flashbacks in Halo 4.

Sorry, I never bothered with any of the fan fiction.

As far as Modern Warfare goes, most of the soldiers were disposable. Many of them were literally disposed of. The MW trilogy is Price's story so it's no coincidence he's the good character. Some of the other characters only exist as lower camera angles to view Price from.

Just because CoD 1,2,3, WaW, BlOps, BlOps2, Ghosts and AdWar are shit, it doesn't remove from MW. RoboCop will always be great even though the 2,3 the TV movies, the TV show, the kids cartoon, the comics, the toys and the reboot all suck balls.

It'd be nice if Price was a different race and gender to most action heroes instead of being the same as Freeman and Master Chief, but at least he's not from the same country as the people making the game.

HL2 didn't work for me. Not throwing a cactus in someone's face is one thing but maintaining the tenuous illusion of all these people talking to a guy, that never responds (because it's me right?), about event's that I wasn't there for (because.. wait, what?), needed too much effort from me. Just standing in the wrong place made a scene seem strange. I was put in the strange position of being a silent actor in a play where I was also the only member of the audience.

What the fuck even is that? I found myself pondering this strange relationship instead of going with the story.

IanHamlett wrote:

Just because CoD 1,2,3, WaW, BlOps, BlOps2, Ghosts and AdWar are shit, it doesn't remove from MW. RoboCop will always be great even though the 2,3 the TV movies, the TV show, the kids cartoon, the comics, the toys and the reboot all suck balls.

I fully agree. I just disagree with your analysis of Chief and Freeman as characters, and that Price is a better example. He's the best of a bad bunch, while Freeman and Chief are masterclasses in FPS characterisation.

IanHamlett wrote:

(...)  but maintaining the tenuous illusion of all these people talking to a guy, that never responds (because it's me right?), about event's that I wasn't there for (because.. wait, what?), needed too much effort from me. Just standing in the wrong place made a scene seem strange. I was put in the strange position of being a silent actor in a play where I was also the only member of the audience.

I still feel Freeman's lack of voice was better than giving him a voice - refer to my example of Tommy in Prey. Walking into a bizarre section of the sphere, Tommy comments something like "woh, this is weird!". I fucking know, mate, I'm looking it. Instant disconnect between me and the main character who I'm meant to be. By the end of Prey I hated Tommy, which puts you in the weird position of hating your own avatar in this universe. As a slightly weaker example, was Sonic a better character before or after he was given the voice of an American teenager? Would Link be improved by giving him a vocabulary beyond "hya!" and "argh!"?

IanHamlett wrote:

I remember posting about the problems with game stories in the old forum. One problem is not being able to create horror movie style tension because, unlike the girl checking the basement in Teen Slasher 5, the viewer is controlling the main character. That poor girl doesn't even know she's in Teen Slasher 5.

A good point, in video games you've voluntarily entered into a situation, while a character in a film is supposedly unknowing of what they're getting into. But I disagree that a game can't build horror movie style tension - REmake had me checking corners in the corridors of the dorms I was in at the time, as everyone else had buggered off home for reading week. (I was doing a proper subject and hence didn't get a reading week, I wasn't the only one around cos I was Billy No Mates or something. Cough.) Films build tension with "what's going to happen to them?", whiles games make you ask "what's going to happen to me?" which is arguably the scarier situation to be in.

The silent-protagonist/character-development-though-other's-reactions thing was done very well in Ace Combat 4. It might have aged a bit, I haven't played it for a decade. But that's a character that doesn't exist outside of the cockpit, he never stands in a room with three people talking to him, he never holds a cactus.

I definitely found the HL2 approach weird. It's like when I'm at home on my own and only have the cats to talk to. So for the most part Gordon would just stop listening and end up going to the other side of the room or jumping about to see how silly it was that whoeveritwas would just keep talking to him regardless. The cats do that too.

JonB wrote:

I definitely found the HL2 approach weird. It's like when I'm at home on my own and only have the cats to talk to. So for the most part Gordon would just stop listening and end up going to the other side of the room or jumping about to see how silly it was that whoeveritwas would just keep talking to him regardless. The cats do that too.

Yeah, but the Gordon I played had no time for small talk; 

A: "What? A pet head crab!!? Oh. That's nice..."

Someone else on the other hand may have thought; 

B: "The fuck! That's a head crab!"

A script would completely kill that, and would have imposed an idea on your psyche that would have latently affected your passage through the rest of the game. I can definitely imagine that a player who'd originally internalized response A, would play Gordon (well... HL2) at least slightly differently to a player found to have internalized response B...

Smang wrote:

silent protags usually leave the bigger impression on me. things like another world, limbo, transistor and some of the games mentioned earlier in this thread nail that - most of the characterisation is gleamed through NPCs reactions to you or communicated visually. good writing is actually very rare i think - Joel & Ellie immediately spring to mind, i'm sure there are a few others but im drawing blanks. that said, i also love cheeseball OTT mofos like Dante (real Dante) and the main dude from Vanquish, these guys know they're in a video game that bends to their rules.. Fighting games might also be the best example of 'silent characterisation', where everyone literally wears their heart on their sleeve. this has led to long time players of these games forming rather strong links with their mains, at least if their choices aren't determined by tiers. as mentioned by dynamite earlier, this led to sf3 being somewhat unpopular, as only 2 characters had returned, whereas in alpha only 2 of the characters were brand new.

Yeah... Fighting games are a strange one. I suspect that character selection, even in high level play, can be described by a continuum that accounts for the subjective visual appeal of the character to a given player, and the player's ability to use their chosen character...

That's why I specifically brought up the subject of Remy, a charge character, wodged into a game in which you're encouraged to tap forward most of the time... He appeared to be such a bland design too... Almost as if the artists were like "you want a charge character, eh? Et Voila."

Needless to say, when the various versions of SF4 were being planned, no one called for his reinstatement...

dynamiteReady wrote:

Yeah... Fighting games are a strange one.

somewhat on topic i recall an article a while back showing how players performed better when using thier preferred colour-way, and a little worse when not their favourite pallette.

dynamiteReady wrote:

Couldn't care less about characters in games. At the tittle tattle, button mashing and costume selection just gets in the way. But then I'm not one for narrative in games. Mario's grunts and hollers in M64 convey a character inasmuch as he comes across as a up for a scrap, but that's enough for me.

Come on... You're the dude that persuaded me to watch City Lights... Mario (and perhaps games as they stand right now) channels the spirit of the silent movie era, more so than any other form of entertainment.

Good point. And if the story and character dev can be moved on as elegantly then fair enough. Just I'd rather have my stories in films and books. I'm just an old arcade head really when it comes to games.