Chell May Get a Makeover for Portal 2
- Thread starter Austin MacKenzie
- Start date
What`s the use of guessing ? It will take a hundred real years for the game to come out and by then everybody will forget how Chell looked.
Heh. Not what I meant, but I suppose that's my fault for not being clear. She gives the sense of succumbing to the tests, not of wanting to rise over them. One of the first things you do to take control of your surroundings is adjust yourself, and her unadjusted image just feels like all she's done to counter her situation is to get down and kowtow, saying "thank you sir, may I have another". The way the game feels is that your lab-rat-esque self has decided to beat the tests and leave, even if that means going through this perilous gauntlet of physics-bending puzzles. To escape, Chell must play Glados' game, and try to beat her at it, but her reflected character image is one who might just have assumed the party submission position instead of escaping into the behind-the-scenes. I feel that her design reflects more of a lost hope, not of still fighting for something else, that, upon drawing up to the flames at the end, she would find that to be all there ever was going to be at the end of the tests. The player of course continues on, portalling to safety, but design of the character and design the character could have portrayed are starkly different for moments like this.Chipperz said:
Yeah, I figured that was what you meant but, like I say, her whole image is of a woman going through the motions and nothing more - success, failure, life and death are all pretty much the same thing from her point of view, because she will either die or keep playing a homicidal machine's games forever and, as much as the promise that she will be set free once she completes them, she doesn't really believe it.BehattedWanderer said:
Of course, the parts of the game that really make you (as a player, at least) elated or terrified are the last parts where you would hit up two portals to see yourself, so she could have a manic grin on her face and we just don't know it
Fair point again, but I've done a bit of trickery for most of the levels, and her image has always remained the same. I just hope she'll have some emotion in the sequel, like anxiety at hearing Glados alive again, or merriment while meeting some fun little personality cores.Chipperz said:Yeah, I figured that was what you meant but, like I say, her whole image is of a woman going through the motions and nothing more - success, failure, life and death are all pretty much the same thing from her point of view, because she will either die or keep playing a homicidal machine's games forever and, as much as the promise that she will be set free once she completes them, she doesn't really believe it.BehattedWanderer said:
Of course, the parts of the game that really make you (as a player, at least) elated or terrified are the last parts where you would hit up two portals to see yourself, so she could have a manic grin on her face and we just don't know it
Trickery with a portal is still trickery, friend. It took some finagling, and some twitching, but I could manage to get chell to look at herself enough to know that her face never changes, which has been my point. Being silent doesn't have to mean unemotive.Dr. Paine said:
Didn't you ever put two portals at a corner or at parallel walls and chase yourself? Because I did that for hours. You could see Chell pretty well if you got the angles of the Portals right.Digikid said:
But yeah you don't see her enough or close enough to warrant this new design. Which is personally why I think they'll lightly redesign Chell for the same reason they redesigned the Left 4 Dead characters at the last moment; they just weren't clear enough and got lost in the environment.
With Left 4 Dead this meant more unintentional friendly fire instances but for Portal I think it's almost if not more important that Chell stands out. Portals are almost impossible to explain to someone who hasn't played it or understand at first glance. They require the player to think in a way that that they're not used to. I think one of the key elements to understanding Portal's main mechanic is seeing yourself though the Portal. With the current design I worry the player may not get this straight away.
Simply changing the main colour back to bright orange would make it a whole lot easier. Plus it would tie it in to the original game a little better.
Nope. I thought she was either Hispanic or Mediterranean. Meh. Not that I put too much thought into her ethnicity, or Chell in general...Xanadu84 said:
Did anyone else gather from the forest around the facility, the way you woke up from a cryogenic chamberish kind of thing, and GLaDOS's madness that many years had already passed between the time when the compound had been taken over and the events of the game?
Has anyone else noticed that Chell awoke from a Stasis chamber in the first game? Well, this may shock all you slower ones out there but maybe, just maybe, SHE WAS PUT BACK IN! :O Shocking isn't it? Oh look, now I've spoiled the whole 100 years thing. Really, its not hard to figure out. PLUS, SHES APPARENTLY A CLONE! SO THERES ANOTHER POSSIBILITY! Who the hell actually assumes they just put her in a closet for 100 years?
