Slashdot Mirror
Character Development In Games
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."
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!)--
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.