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Games Entertainment

Character Development In Games 26

Posted by Zonk from the more-than-just-a-pretty-face dept.
Gamasutra has a piece up examining techniques for character development in games. The article describes these techniques using the movie standards of dialogue and relationships. From the article: "Character development in and of itself isn't going to make your gameplay any better, but it will create a more satisfying experience because you're furnishing a more well-developed context, a more immersive world for the player to explore. You can't read a review of an adventure game or shooter without seeing some kind of reference to the storytelling, the dialogue, the characters. Can you relate to the characters? Are they well-developed? Are they interesting? It's become an expectation, an industry norm. Cliches and stereotypes are unacceptable."
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Character Development In Games More

Character Development In Games

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  • Multiplayer games (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Wilson_6500 ( 896824 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @03:27AM (#13292465)
    One critical direction for games at this point is the multiplayer bent. You don't really _get to have_ any character development there. I shouldn't even have to get into multiplayer FPS-es, where your character development is limited to a two-sentence blurb in the game's manual that nobody reads.

    Co-op doesn't count, because I can't think of a game that's substantially different in the storyline when you have more than one player working towards the goal--I mean, basically where you play an entirely/substantially different story based on the number of people in your "party." Wait, there was that co-op themed Half-Life game, which I think was for a console. Unfortunately, I haven't played that one, and it's more of a tangentially-related plot than a real digression of the standard plot. Can you imagine what Half-Life would've been like if you could play through with one OR two scientists? What if one of the two was female? What if Gordon fell in love with her, even though she's played by your pasty white room mate? How would HL2 be differnent if Valve had to deal with two different scenarios: one where Gordon escapes alone, and one where he escapes with a lover?

    Let's discuss MMOs (and by that I mean I'm going to talk at you about it now). There's a delicate balance in multiplayer games--specifically MMOs--when it comes to the player. Since _everyone_ in an MMO usually gets a chance to complete a quest, you can't do much to tailor the enounter (usually between NPC and players) without leaving some groups of players out--you can't give seven dialog options for every encounter in the game if you want to complete it in a reasonable amount of time (what EA considers reasonable). If you force the PC to say anything at all, you're branding that character with that reaction, so unless it's totally generic you ruin any role-playing the player might happen to be trying to enact--it's not likely that the people playing characters such as Sefiroth and xXSePHIROthXx and SeFiR0f are trying to role play, but maybe once in a while you'll find someone who cares about that little-seen but important MMO aspect. It's important to them, at least. However, if you don't have any tailoring, then there's little to no real interaction in the encounter--and I don't mean between player and NPC, I mean between PC and NPC. The encounter is hollow, like listening to an answering machine message.

    In many MMOs, I think this point is moot anyhow. Most players play MMOs for the social environment, and so the NPCs are generic, and the PCs provide the interaction. But that comes at the cost of a substantial plot: unless your players are heavily into role-playing, it's hard to support a plot driven by the characters. If the plot is driven by the hollow NPCs, you come to the problems mentioned above, where the whole world rests on the shoulders of a king with as much in-game dialog as one of those "Welcome to Corneria!" guards.

    The industry is producing many games that are solely online (think Enemy Territory 2), and many that have interesting settings with very little story (you see very elaborate character designs and settings in some Korean MMOs and Multiplayer FPS-es with almost zero backstory in-game), so I suppose that these lessons, sadly, apply more to single-player games, your Metroids and your Halos. I would love to see a game with a mutable story based on the number of people playing. Imagine a game that offered one of the players the chance to backstab the others and take a completely different story line. Imagine the final battle of that game, where the Good guys have to fight their Evil Overlord room mate, who not only betrayed them but took the last Dr. Pepper. That would be one for the gaming history books.

    I've played FF games since the first one on the Nintendo, and I fondly remember many of those characters. Some I remember for having interesting stories (Freya Crescent, for one, underdeveloped as she was), some I remember for just being interesting for other reasons (the Psycho Cyan bug!)--
  • I'd vote that the best game for character development is Jade Empire right now. Everyone has their own story, and it branches based on your reactions. It makes the game so much more intereting and keeps you going forward so you can find out the guy's wife or why this guy left the order, etc. To me, that's proof that character development makes a huge difference.
    • I dont know JadeEmpire, but i think that the gta character set is actually really well done. Of course the characters dont have to do with the gameplay at all (which is the same with 99% computer games), but they really tie together the loosely quests. And the cutscenes are fun to watch.

      The plot itself is better than vice city too:
      - VC has a clear goal (get back the money and the drugs), so the story gets volitional
      - SA has a vague goal (your brother is in jail), that way every nonsensesical quest fits in n

  • Game - book - movie (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tsa ( 15680 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @04:20AM (#13292657) Homepage
    I think a good game should be like a good book or a good movie: good plot, interesting and life-like characters, no loose ends, etc. It's hard enough to achieve that in a book, where you have an in principle unlimited amount of pages, but in a game or a movie it's a mayor challange.

  • Fair shake. (Score:2, Funny)

    by Seumas ( 6865 ) *
    I'm less interested in "character development" than I am in making sure that every ethnicity, race, socio-economic, religious and political group is properly and fairly represented in each game. Nothing detracts from my enjoyment of Tetris more than seeing more blue blocks than red. It just seems like such a horrid injustice and rips me from the enthralling gameplay.
    • Your missing out on a whole story angle behind Tetris , The repressed blue blocks have for a long time been fighting for civil rights against the elite Red and their yellow cohorts . At the dawning of tetris the repressed masses had been fighting in a civil uprising to take back power and create equal rights.

      Its your job as the outsider to aid the blocks to come to a peaceful resolution , What the creation lines symbolises is the unity between the blocks and them forgetting their problems and linking arms a
      • Wow! Thanks for clearing that up. I never realized that Tetris was such a deeply veiled chronicle of the struggles of the typical Russian citizen. I mean, obviously the Red symbolizes Soviet oppression, while, as you say, the yellow cohorts are their Chinese counterparts. It all puts such an interesting historic spin on what I always thought were just a bunch of falling blocks...
      • I, T, O, L, J, S, Z...

        I is red
        T is gray
        O is light blue
        L is yellow
        J is purple
        S is deep blue
        Z is green...

        We know about the I and L opressing O and S...
        What about the other characters in this wonderful saga?

        I still think my @ can beat the crap out of all of them anytime. Especially after one of them ate my d.

        • Did you note I's are pack animals? They show up rarely but often 2-3 in a row or close one after another. S's and Z's are pack animals too, but they live in a single herd (males and females of the same species?)

  • Old Ultima Online memory (Score:4, Funny)

    by Sierpinski ( 266120 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @08:42AM (#13293606)
    This article made me think back to the days where I played Ultima Online, and had a rather hilarious (at least I thought it was) meeting with a NPC.

    There I was, riding my trusty steed through the wilderness, when I encountered a wandering healer by the name of Stella. (Her name was 'Stella the Wandering Healer') So naturally I dismounted, walked up to her, and I said:

    "Stella!!!"

    Her response:

    "Ooooh, Colors!"

    I played that game for over five years, and for some reason its one of the most prominent memories I have of the game. Offtopic or not, I wanted to share, because I still think its funny. :)

  • The Sands of Time (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 11, 2005 @09:23AM (#13293867)
    While perhaps not the best overall example, I thought that Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time had good current-day character development. Especially considering that they could have just made it a completely generic platformer, with a simple goal that you just try to attain.

    For those that didn't play it, the Prince himself did narrative for the story. Voice-over to start with, then the rest was pretty much dialogue interaction between himself and his companion. Without too much spoiler, you got to see the Prince's character change from a somewhat 2-dimensional "I am the son of a Sultan" to a character that I think many people cared about in the end.
  • I think that there are a few 'stand-out' games from over the years that relied heavily on this. Games such as Max Payne, Hitman 2, Command and Conquer, X-Wing and Tie Fighter, Diablo 2, StarWars NTOR, Im sure that there are more memorable ones that are out there. I know that there was a lot of 'what's behind the next corner', especially with HalfLife, and UNREAL.


    I only played Starwars galactic battlegrounds, as my one true fray into MMOPRG, and man did I jump out quick. There was no sense of sticking t
  • The characters weren't as cutesy as in the first Kotor, but unique and fascinating in their own right. Also without the family issues so you didn't have to play Dr. Phil in this game.
  • No wonder the game market is still predominately male!

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