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""They killed my... father...""

Games are crap. Really, really crap. And I talk from experience.

Think, if you will, of some games characters. Ok. Now think of some you could become emotionally attached to, or at least believe were real characters [Best not use the word "people".]. Getting harder. No, Sonic does not count. Clicking your fingers and pointing foward makes a good character not.

In fact, I can't really think of any. Games characters are shallow pathetic creatures. The bad guys are characatures of evil, the good eyes? Well, look at Snake.

Cool = smoking + not giving a crap about anyone. It's all simple stuff, and it's lazy.

The best games characters you will ever find. What genre would the be in?

Platformers? Hell no. Mario's got the charisma of a sandwich, Sonic's stylised to the point of being corny, even Lara Croft is just another "I don't need anything but this gun and a pack of one-liners that someone thought of on their lunch break". Nobody's real.

Same with FPS's. Duke Nukem is a great character, stolen straight from Ash from the Evil Dead, though. Gordon Freeman? Err... right. The Marine from Doom?

Ok, RPG's? Hense my title.

Characters in an RPG have to be:

The "leader". Cool headed, "Hey guys, this isn't the time to shout at each other! They're getting further away!"

The "hot-head". "Let's not wait till the morning! Let's go thrash them now!"

The "avenger". "They killed my... hamster."

The "female". "I'm going to shout at the leader and have a go at him although I secretly love him."

So no. Nobody in RPG's have good characters. Bar Skies of Arcadia, but anyone who dare's call themselves a gamer knows that. :0)

In fact, the best genre for characters? Point and Click adventures.

May I say "Sam and Max?", "Guybrush Threepwood", "The people from Day of the Tentacle"? :0)

All Lucasarts stuff, I know. But you can't fault the characters. Schizophrenic blond girls that carry scalpels around in case they need to operate, pirates that fight through the art of repartee, swearing old men that live in tourist traps that bend spoons using the power of their mind. Come on, why are you going to go shoot Nazis when you've got that sort of power?

Point and click games were some of the most original and inspiring games ever made, but they were abandoned because nobody could think of a way to properly update the graphics. 2D is for morons, obviously.

And they still haven't. Monkey 4 was, alright... but pointless in a 3D form. Grim Fandango worked better, for some reason. And this new Broken Sword looks awful.

But, perhaps, just perhaps, there is another way. A way to bring back the excellent characters of the point and click, that have been laid aside so we can have character after character of machine gunning "death means nothing to me" men who haven't shaved in a good while. I know there's a way, and I will prove there's a way.

Let's hope someone wakes up one day, and realises that there hasn't been one original character in a long time. They're all just carbon copies of the same damn one.

Characters are definitely what's lacking in todays games. It's a shame the designers just see characters as what they look like... but it goes further than that. Character design isn't about putting buttons on a shirt, it's about creating someone that someone else could fall in love with.

Nah, it's an RPG, but because of the characterization, it's very much like a point and click. You don't have to "combine object A with object B to pass", but it's the style of telling a story. And a great story it is too.

It's basically like Star Wars for the gaming world, in my opinion. Steals a lot from it, but it's great, because it works so well, and really don't care when you play it.

The worst characters you can just about sum up in a sentance or two, using very short statements.

For example: Take just about any character from Episode One. The worst example of a "beginning"... because it sets characters worse than anything I've ever seen.

Qui-Gon: "He's wise because he speaks softly, and his hobbies involve collecting 'useless creatures'. He dies after fighting Darth Maul, and Obi-Wan avenges him."

The best character in the whole of Episode one, also happens to be the cleverest. Why? Because of the original trilogy of course.

Anakin: "He's a slave, still young, and has powers he doesn't understand. He built C3-PO. He leaves his mother on his home planet, after winning a pod race, to become a jedi. He saves everyone accidently by blowing up a small space station. He tells a queen he's going to marry her."

Jar jar: "Clumsy alien life form who has trouble speaking properly. Becomes a general near the end, and has obviously been put in to entertain the brain dead."

Now, compare this to the characters set in A New Hope:

Luke Skywalker: "Dreams of leaving the planet he lives on, to help fight in the rebellion against the empire. After his only family was murdered, he flees on a secret mission with Obi-Wan, Han, Chewy and the droids, falls in love with a Princess, finds out he has special powers known as the force, and destroys a gigantic space station that's been terrorising the galaxy."

See what I mean? :0)

Han Solo: "He's hired by Luke and Obi-Wan to fly them to Alderann, and is obviously a very cocky person. His best friend is a hairy monster called a Wookiee, and also his co-pilot in his ship, the Millenium Falcon, which, according to him, is the fastest ship in the galaxy. After helping to save a princess and then abandoning everyone after he receives his reward, he returns at the peak of battle and saves Luke's life."

Even the damn ships have character.

And this is all from the one film, not the entire trilogy. Where the hell did it go wrong?

This is why I can't understand why people prefer Episode one to the original trilogy. Characters from the Phantom Menace you could get a paper cut from if you touched them... characters in the original trilogy develop heavily over a short period of time, simply because they're incredibly strong.

post reminded me to re-install Broken Sword 2, wiped my saved games *sigh* not that i'd got very far.
Great games, Skys of Arcadia's point and click? shame I havn't got a DC...

Hopefully a little less buggy this time. The man's a God though. You can tell from the games he makes.

Characters score big on the sequel list too. You make a game with great characters that people get attached to, they'll petition for a sequel, and then pay through the nose for it.

(Pay through the nose. Odd saying, isn't it?)

It might have had something to do with blood loss in the middle ages. Perhaps.

Project Ego is one such game in which you get to mould your character over a number of years, to the extent that if he's out in the sun a lot, he gets a suntan. Whether or not this is just a physical change I'm not sure, but it's a Peter Molyneux game so it's bound to be great. On Xbox, by the way.

Right now, game-making companies are gonna concentrate on making the games playable, look good and fun, and not worry about whether the characters have personality. The fact is, that generally people don't mind characters not being realistic so long as the game is good. And if the game is bad, then the unrealistic characters can just add on to that.

Unless technology in video games suddenly stops improving, or video games companies dramatically expand, then characters in games won't ever really become realistic.

Good post Grix.

Some good points raised here.

Do you really need to believe you're the player in a game, to be completely lost in it?

Hell no. Look at Skies of Arcadia! :0D

Vyse's character is very strong. Cleverly, your personality is put onto it, by giving you questions to answer, like "shall we leave now, or in the morning?" Being of course, one correct answer. If you answer it wrong, your "status" goes down, if right, it goes up. You can't control which path you take, but it does add a lot more to the game.

However, what I really dispise is the really awful non-player characters. You're supposed to be friends with these people, and they're as boring as most of the members on chat combined.

I think it's a good cross between the two, for the character you play, though.

Perhaps giving him/her their own character... but allowing the player to become so utterly absorbed in them, they feel as if they're making the decisions on their own. There's one scene I have in my mind that can explain this easily, but heck, I can't talk about it.

Just imagine this though. What if the character you play has a great fear of something... if somehow you could then put that fear onto the player too, wouldn't that be amazing?

Garrett from Thief isn't a character for kids. His dry and cynical wittisicms (I think that was spelt wrong) make the game more atmospheric and subsequently more fun to play.

Many games have shallow characters, yes, but that is because it is not required to have real people in games. If games are a form of escapism, surely many people would want to instill their own personality in a character, rather than having to be someone else.

Ant wrote:
>
Am I not allowed to
> take a game too seriously??

--

No :-)


Maybe you take films too seriously.

--

Damn straight I do. Sorry about that.

Really though, I want my character to start a game as a blank piece of paper, and I want to be the one that writes on it as we progress through the game.

Your actions should form your character, you shouldn't play through to the next scene, then discover that the guy your playing with is loving and caring after all, do you?

You want the ability to turn him into a nasty sod that cares for no one, but gets the job done, or maybe he will be a caring sous, and there will lie his weakness.

Let me dwell on this for just a moment, say you take your character, and during the game, you kill everything in site, and don't respond much to other non-playable characters. Once you reach the final confrontation with the boss, it's just a fight to the death - but that's the way you've played the game all along, that's what you'd want.

Now imagine that as you'd played the game you'd made sure that innocent civilians were kept safe throughout, and you always helped out one particular character. Now once tyou reach the end, that character has a knife at his or her throat. You will care, as you've interacted with this character during the game. It's not like having these situations thrust upon you as you do in so many games.

In Goldeneye I didn't want Natalya to tag along, she was annoying, and got in the way. As I didn't care about her, I should have been able to continue the mission once she was shot down, and try to go it alone. but no, I'd failed for not doing something I didn't much want to do. Hardly letting you develop things for yourself, is it?

Anyway, back to existing characters. There aren't really any that are great, it's true, but there are many that we've grown to like, and as such, Nintendo like to use them in their games. How much of the fun of Mario Kart is being Wario, because he laughs when he knocks other players from the tracks?

For this same reason, I'm looking forward to Luigi's Mansion, as I know it will make me smile when Luigi cowers in fear (like a cowardly coward no doubt Ant!) when he sees ghosts. I know I'll keep on pressing the button that makes him shout "Mario" even though it doesn't move the plot forward at all, as it's part of the appeal.

This isn't so much character though, more charactures, things taken to an extreme to make them funny. These characters don't much develop, and they are as they are.

To make this more clear, just look at the guy from Pikmin. Hardly oozing character, is he? After a couple of top Pikmin games, and maybe featuring in some spin off titles though, we'll grow fond of the character, and he'll develop little traits more and more into the games. But the character isn't developing, as such.

Now I believe I mentioned Too Human in another thread recently. A game in development by Silicon Knights, in which you will be able to upgrade your character with certain traits, and depending upon what you choose to change, the game will take path that depends on that skill you've developed. Not much detail has been released on the game yet, so don't take this as an in game example, just a possibility I've come up with, but imagine you upgrade your stealth skills. The game will change so that you use these skills more, and sneak around the game. Maybe if you'd have boosted your strength instead, you'd be a more visible character, meeting enemies face on?

Still, this is development of the character in terms of skills, not so much in terms of emotions, and who he is, and what he will become. But it is a start. If the game delivers what it promises, it could start the ball rolling when it comes to character development within the game. No longer will we feel sad when we find out shocking from our characters past, as it won't be relevant. We'll make the character who we want by acting the way we do in our games. I guess part of it will come down to a bit of genre cross over, as games like Black or White allowed you to change the way your creature acted by your actions, but that was what the game was about, we need to see something similar brought into other genres. Not like pressing a button to make a giant hand come out of nowhere to give our man a good slapping - though it may be quite amusing to slap Mario silly, just to give him a nasty streak...

Grix Thraves wrote:
> Level 3? What sort of point and click were you playing? :D

Yeah, I think I probably meant chapters, but I haven't played a Point 'n Click in years.

And no Stryke, I don't take it too seriously and I know it has flaws, it's just a game I'm passionate about. Am I not allowed to take a game too seriously?? Maybe you take films too seriously.