Onyx Oblivion said:
Treblaine said:
Onyx Oblivion said:
I am sorry to hear this...
Oh well, Gordon himself is a TERRIBLE character. No personality or anything...He is the worst kind of protagonist. A silent one who everyone in-game likes for no reason as though he used to talk to them and they developed a close friendship.
Good games, horrible main character. When a headcrab named Lamarr has more personality then the hero, you've got a shitty hero.
Maybe he should talk Saint's Row 1 style. Like, a single line at the end of every major landmark in the story.
VIDEO GAMES ARE
NOT THE SAME AS MOVIES!!!!!
But why are you holding them to the same standards and expectations as movies? like that the protagonist MUST be well fleshed out and deep, what you are asking for is like more characterisation in a book told from the 2nd person perspective!
WHY oh F***ing why can so many people get the idea through their heads that Gordon Freeman is DELIBERATELY left an empty shell so that he is easier to inhabit.
How films and books do it: develop the character of protagonist to EMPATHISE with them
How games do it: Give the illusion that you ARE the protagonist so you can more deeply immerse in the world
The more voice acting you give your protagonist, the more automatic actions, the LESS CONTROL you give the player, the more if feels like they are just a director ordering an actor around. if you don't FEEL that you ARE the character in the story then the game has failed in doing the one things games can do and that movies/books cannot.
I DON'T WANT THEM TO BE LIKE FUCKING MOVIES!
Plenty of games let you FEEL like the character in the story, even with speaking protagonists, and also in a linear game series like Half Life, you can't really feel like you have any control, anyway.
No, I'm going to try to be polite but I feel the rage rising because I can sense the tide and I can tell people are just gravitating towards Hollywood style conventions of protagonists, that is all right for some shallow console game like Uncharted.. but NOT HERE.
And sorry, you may be able to control conversation trees of Shepard in Mass Effect but you don't inhabit the character, at best you feel just like a director of a film, you are just controlling someone else's performance. It ends up more like and Real-Time-Strategy, you just get disconnected.
I mean just consider the more "hard-core" Bioware titles like Dragon age, which although giving you conversation trees keep your character mute.
This is SO INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT for Role Playing Games where the entire purpose is feeling like you inhabit the character and the only way to achieve that is to have as much control if not absolute control over every DEFINITIVE thing they do.
See when characters speak, even with the control you have in Mass Effect, there is so much in precisely how and what you say which you cannot control, the more automatic thing your character does the less it becomes you being the character and more you just observing them. And talking from a 1st person perspective is just WEIRD! A voice coming out of our own head that isn't yours, saying things, not necessarily the way you want them said.
Dragon Age Origins has a good compromise, you can control what you said but it is mainly short, direct and objective questions purely for the purpose of getting the NPCs to say the things you are interested in and not to force any characteristics on your own playable avatar.
I'm not saying Mass Effect is a terrible game because it gave Commander Shepard a soul, it's there isn't room for two.
One thing I wished they'd do with the GTA series is since they have taken to giving the protagonist really interesting characteristics they should address how they say and do a lot of things to other NPCs yet when the cutscenes end they may do something completely contradictory once the player is given control again.
I'd love it if Nico Bellic admitted in cutscenes he didn't know why he did some things, like as if something else was controlling his compulsions. The story could hint that the old career criminal has gone quite insane, with a split personality partially taking over that did not care who dies, if Nico dies and sees death and destruction as a game with no consequences... and it would be implied that this psychotic alternate personality is YOU the player.
Of course to you the player it is all just a game, but imagine what the characters in the game would think, this guy ploughs through pedestrians as if they are just straw men, they talk compassionately on one hand then go on a killing spree just to see the blood splatter.
Well that's the way I see it, the GTA series is quite literally schizophrenic insanity, I'd just love it if the games plot could explore that.
