civatrix said:
You don't need good visuals to covey emotion or to get players to identify with your characters. How many of you had tears welling up when Aeris died in FF7? You felt the loss that Cloud was experiencing because you identified with him.
Oh god, I balled my eyes out like a little kid (well I was I suppose) at that, everyone did, it was just so shocking, being only 8 or 9 at the time, it was my first big RPG, I'd never experienced /anything/ like that before. Hell FF6, Celes attempted suicide made me cry and the graphics are quite obviously shite these days. Even doing the scene agin with Nanaki realising his father actually stood his ground fighting the Gi Invaders, his whole life hating his fater, replaced with immense respect, his transition into an adult brought a tear to me eye, and that was only last week.
If you can build good characters, and a strong narrative, you don't need flashy graphics. Saying that, I find it really hard to ever feel that sad for characters in films, 2 hours is never long enough for me, after growing up on a diet of tens of hours of RPGs. It's such a unique medium for conveying attachment and emotion, far more powerful than films. But these days, none of the big studios ever seem to make use of it, though I've heard good things about Spec Ops the line, and I look forward to checking it out which I can afford it.
Even RPGs these days seem to have boring characters in them, especially the ones with blank slate characters. I can just never get attached, as my character never really interacts with anyone, he's just sort of /there/ to move the story along. At the moment, I think Bioware has the best way of representing a self built character with the Mass Effect series. You can choose how you want to act and stuff, but Shepard still has his own personality and thus actually exists in the world, you see him interacting with people and doing things, so you actually feel his presence. Until we have holodecks, or well as the technology to make a truley open D&D style world open world RPG, with AI that can actually comprehend, as opposed to a few preset dialogue options, were still really limited to what we can do.
Nenad said:
I take it that To The Moon [http://freebirdgames.com/to_the_moon/] is the living proof this guy is wrong.
...although not as wrong as some comments here what you to think. While what you say might be the most important, body language can add one more enhancing layer of connecting with characters in games.
I just wanted to say cheers for pointing that game out, looks pretty interesting, I shall get the demo forth with. And yes, fucking BODY LANGUAGE. The last game I saw that had decent body language was the Legacy of Kain series, in fact I'd go so far as to say that game has had /the/ best body language and facial expressions of all time, and nobody in that game is even human!
Suki_ said:
I think this guy both has a point and doesnt. Currently games are extremely bad at setting up things like facial expressions which are key. If they cant properly show emotions its really hard to create a serious game like he is talking about. A game kind of loses all emotional impact when you can see the protagonists blank emtionless face.
civatrix said:
You don't need good visuals to covey emotion or to get players to identify with your characters. How many of you had tears welling up when Aeris died in FF7? You felt the loss that Cloud was experiencing because you identified with him.
You mean the chick who got shanked after joining me a whole two hours ago? Yea I didnt really give a shit about her when she died since she was barely even a character. She was never focused on, her character was never expanded, she was just a throw in who had no reason to be there and whos only purpose was to get shanked.
Yeah, you really wern't paying attention to...anything, if you're gonna say that. Never mind the fact that the first disc of FF7 is about 12 hours long if you don't just mash X during the conversations and don't do /any/ exploring. I mean, she joins you at about the 2 hour mark, so that's about 8 ish hours she's with you (if we take into account the sections where she gets kidnapped and leaves you to go pray)
