Character in Gaming
by chris ~ April 26th, 2009. Filed under: Gaming.
I’ve written a new article for Crispy Gamer about the need to invest more development time (and machine cycles) in creating compelling virtual characters. Here’s an excerpt:
Recent releases like Gears of War 2 and Killzone 2 have offered gamers visual fidelity of unparalleled quality. For over a decade, improving visuals has been the focal point of development in gaming, and titles have advanced by great leaps during that time. We’ve also improved the audio in our games, and arguably even moved into telling deeper, more interesting stories. Text-adventure advocates may disagree with that last point, but certainly we expect a great deal more story from today’s mass-market titles, such as Gears of War, than we did of titles like Bubble Bomb or DOOM.
Unfortunately, the characters that populate our games seem to have been lost in the shuffle. One could easily argue that modern gaming characters are shallower and less compelling than their ancestors, some of whom had great reams of text-driven dialogue to spout. Even in a Game of the Year-quality title like Fallout 3, we’re still presented with primary story characters about whom we know virtually nothing, and with whom we have a hard time forming compelling, coherent relationships.
You can read the entire article over at Crispy Gamer!
