Here I am in my comfort zone, the characters. Whenever it is a book, movie or a game, character is part of the product you should really focus on. Nobody likes soulless, boring character, in games, especially not the ones with terrible voice acting and pretending to be heartless killing machines. Unless, of course that is the focus of the game. There are different aspects of character design that should be considered, fitting clothing, we are really tired of bikini babes with swords and guns. It's not that is completely out of place and very not practical. It has been done so many time it is just tiring. Give us something new. Give us dirt on face, like Skyrim did, heavy armour, let us be a true bad ass chick.
Or you know what, throw a guy in ridiculously revealing shiny costume, over-sexualize men, covering only his precious male parts. And a Christmas tree looking weapon, and a cape. Oh, and in case you are trying to image how that would work, there:
Back to the main point, characters. Again, just like in art direction and environment, things need to stick together. You won't put a guy in Hawaii shirt into a zombie game. Oh wait. Right. Dead rising. Well this one can be exception to the rule. I like to experience consistency between assets in games. Visually and characteristically. Games should create attachment to the protagonist, and other characters in games. Create a concept of a game where as you are your character, maybe you feel bad for killing others. Give us emotional bound. This is what games should do. Characters should have stories of their own. One of the most successful games in terms of story and characters, one of my favourites for sure was Syberia. Game entirely focused on story telling and characters, from old guy chasing his own adventure, to a woman chasing after the old man and making it adventure of her own and the arrogant robot that manages to bring you to tears, both the happy and the sad ones.
It is probably worth mentioning Tomb Raider series. Where our main character - Lara Croft has been portrayed with her background, and rather than being a killing machine, she was and explorer that craves for adventure, and just how much emotions were put into her, when she had to kill someone for the first time (In the first game). There are however examples where game strangely comes out of it's path to focus on the main character, in Bioshock series we are more of an additional character and help to tell a story for people around us, which is an interesting thing to do, but the last game felt so off in that case. You felt like you were just helping the main character Elisabeth rather, that leading your own. Or we could look at the failure of the Duke Nukem Forever and cry of how bad the game was, and what used to be funny in the first game could not be repeated and was pathetic in the sequel.
Games should focus on matching well their characters into the games as in most cases people will stop focusing on how amazing the graphics are and you will find yourself lacking important content of the game which is the character design. Eventually we all get bored of mindless kllling in super realistic world and we want to go on the adventure with a badass character.
No comments:
Post a Comment