Silent Protagonists

Why are game developers so loath to assigning personalities to the player character? Duke Nukem had one of the strongest personalities in a game, and the series was a big success (mostly). It seems that a paradigm has infiltrated the industry, teaching story writers that the player should be able to asset his own personality through the character’s actions. I can’t see why this has become such a popular concept, since in my opinion silent protagonists take away some of the game’s and story’s magic.

For instance, Halo CE was pure magic for me. The whole plot enchanted me. Halflife 2 had a story at least as good, but I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much. The game was linear, so your character was going to do the same thing no matter what. They tried to let the player express themselves in a meaningless way. The game would have been improved ten fold if Gordon Freeman had a voice. Most of the cool story I learned after I played the game, while reading about auxiliary documents and developer commentary on wikis. I learned about the Combine and the different concepts behind them. The same logic powers Freeman’s Mind, a playthrough of Halflife 1 voiced over with what thoughts are going through Gordon’s head at the time. Its hilarious and adds way more depth to the game.

Gordon Freeman
What is this guy like? Nobody knows.

Crysis was such a cool game. The graphics were great, the plot was nice and solid, and you could relate to the characters. Crysis was way less linear than HL2, and THEY managed to create a versatile character. Crysis 2, on the other hand, had a weak main character who was just a pawn of the voices in his helmet. It was way less fun, although that probably also had to do with the worse gameplay and unexplained story. Speaking of which, I don’t understand the connection between the first game and the sequel. The aliens in the first game were aliens that possessed and lived in anti-gravity, with wiggly, blue bodies and tentacles. They also needed a cold environment to live in. They sent out robots to kill their opponent and stayed inside their massive spaceship. In Crysis 2, the aliens have become way less cool. They are red, squid-like aliens that use nano-suits. They have different forms, don’t use robots, and don’t need a weightless or cold environment. There are no big floating spaceships, except for ANOTHER spaceship buried under Central Park. A spaceship which apparently doesn’t have an inside, except for pipes full of biological weapons. Seriously, I could have written a way better story. A story in which the main character talks!

Some games are better off without dialogue, of course. Bioshock’s mind slave Jack is better off without a voice, except for narration. In fact, giving him a voice would be unnecessary and probably would have ruined the atmosphere. Skyrim substituted written dialogue for actual audio. While it let you imagine any voice for your character, I think a selection of voices would have also been OK. Strategy games don’t need protagonists, such as Starcraft or Command and Conquer. Sure, Starcraft 2 was fine with its cutscenes and personal characters, but the game also had very personal storyline. World in Conflict had a better defined player character (whether he was the protagonist or not is debatable), but he was still a mute.

I know that there are still lots of games with talking protagonists, but a lot of mainstream games don’t. I didn’t even mention some of the more popular games, like Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto. Anyways, the point is that I hope the game industry sees a resurgence of games with awesome characters like the Master Chief or Duke Nukem.

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