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[Evan Balster]

I thought this might be a fun thing to talk about.

Share some examples of characters in games, or relationships between them, that have had some meaningful effect on you.  Whether that's attachment to said characters, amusement, surprise or fear.  The goal is to find interesting case studies in character development achieved in the strange narrative world of gaming, where the presence of a dynamic player who can observe, ignore, or interact with other characters changes how they're expressed.


So I'll go first.

Though I haven't actually played through more than half the game, Shadow of the Colossus impressed me a lot with Agro.  Agro, the character's horse, is very well-animated and expressive; I say this as a person who grew up around horses and has perhaps a few hundred hours' experience riding.

If you stand around, Agro meanders, leans, makes little noises.  You can walk off, and he'll  wait for your call or whistle to come running.  In high-pressure situations, he'll be visibly agitated and will run to you if you're knocked off of him, whinnying loudly.  He also runs up concerned when a specific recurring event occurs which incapacitates you.  The creature even seems to get impatient when you leave him alone.  Also, unlike with your own character, when trying to walk Agro off a ledge, he simply stops.  Horses aren't stupid.

The result of all this, and the necessary dependence on him (both for transportation and combat) is that I got quite attached to Agro in the six to eight hours I did play.  In combat situations I felt bad when I let him get knocked around, even though he can't be killed or incapacitated.  If I was going to leave him someplace for a while I'd mutter "I'll be back later" under my breath or some such.

I think character attachment is the first step towards creating an impactful narrative, and SoTC did this well.  I think we'd all benefit from taking notes 

[Musenik]

I'd like to contrast the above, excellent example, with a couple 'fun' characters. Sten in Dragon Age, and Minsc from Baldur's gate. These characters are enjoyable. One has a stoic cold logic that is both humorous and unsettling. The other is a hilariously written dumb strong type.

However, I suspect I would find the above horse more interesting. It lives and breaths and acts, and has a credible personality. Bioware characters talk the talk and fight. They rarely change as a result of the story, except when they fall into evil, or repent from it. Been there a few too many times. Still enjoyable characters are better than boring characters.

[cynicalsandel]

I don't want to spoil anything, but the family relationships in Mother 3 had a pretty big effect on me. It is the only video game that I've actually cried during. It's not just that the relationships are there, but also the messages that they portray. Helplessness is a significant one, in my opinion. I can't remember any other games in particular, but I'm pretty sure I've seen others mention helplessness as a powerful story mechanic in other video games.

Even though I wasn't part of the video game world, I felt like I was. The relationship between the antagonist and protagonists had me consistently asking the question "Why is this happening?" even though it is just a video game.

Maybe I'm biased because Mother 3 is my favorite video game, but I think it is worth mentioning.

[s0]

Bayonetta.

[.]

I don't want to spoil anything, but the family relationships in Mother 3 had a pretty big effect on me. It is the only video game that I've actually cried during. It's not just that the relationships are there, but also the messages that they portray. Helplessness is a significant one, in my opinion. I can't remember any other games in particular, but I'm pretty sure I've seen others mention helplessness as a powerful story mechanic in other video games.

Even though I wasn't part of the video game world, I felt like I was. The relationship between the antagonist and protagonists had me consistently asking the question "Why is this happening?" even though it is just a video game.

Maybe I'm biased because Mother 3 is my favorite video game, but I think it is worth mentioning.

Mother 3 is my favorite game as well, save nostalgia. It made me cry too, and it does that to most people.

The thing that really creates that REAL experience are simply how the character talk and what they say. I don't just mean the ones that are relevant to the plot. Almost every single NPCs is unique, sprite-wise and personality wise. When they talk, it's almost never about what you and your party need to progress, and if it is, it's done with style. It plays out just like a conversation with a person in real life, and of course, every single one will have their own persona and have their own communication style, and that's what Mother 3 has.

Looking at old RPGs, villagers would be given scripts that mostly only applies to your progress, and they just might as well have been billboards. Go here. Do that. I heard x will help you with y. And so on. The fun in Mother 3 comes from just listening to what people have to say. I found that a thrill. Everyone is just so real.

Then the main characters. It's hard to describe without spoilers, but what really made Mother 3 sad is the concept of peaceful and loving groups of people being torn apart by a sudden advent of totalitarianism, and then to see what they become at the end.

...

It's really hard to put into words.

[Seth]

The great thing about Mother 3 is that it doesn't really try to hard to be epic.  There are so many games that try to give an epic experience by creating a giant world, but in the process everything gets spread so thin.  Even in Earthbound, there are repeats of character sprites who walk around saying things that are so clearly irrelevant to their lives it just painfully obvious they actually don't have lives. Mother 3 focuses on a small town and in doing so makes it seem much more real.  Majora's Mask did this well, too.

[Peevish]

I remember being surprised at how attached I got to Glottis in Grim Fandango. I could tell he was supposed to be the comic relief and I never found him as funny as it seemed he was supposed to be. But dammit if I didn't get choked up at the ending.

[DecipherOne]

I thought the fact that dog meat in fallout 3 could actually be killed was a way to produce an interesting narrative. I wrote an article  about it a few years ago which can be found http://www.gatheringofgamers.com/profile.php?profile=723&action=view&section=chronicles&chronicle_id=1218

It's a little lengthy, but the main points being that it shocked me when he died and I actually felt loss from it. It wasn't the dialogue or story aspects that made the character relationship great, but more so my attachment to him as a companion and dependence on him in certain situations. To have all that suddenly stripped away sucked. When your companions are only incapacitated at times, their value is lessened in my eyes, and it will in fact change the way the player looks at the character and, as such, will change the way they interact with the world.

[Evan Balster]

So, too, can the relationship be cheapened by reloading an old save.


You know what I want?

A game where you're on an adventure with your best friend, and you can foul up, and he can die, and it gets a lot harder.  You reload your old save, from before that, and he's gone.

A complete punch in the gut in terms of "you didn't expect that, did you" with a meaningful effect.  Perhaps even more interesting would be if you could restart the game and he still wouldn't be there.  Maybe you'd even start by his gravestone.  You'd be alone.  No witty banter, no "maybe this is a bad idea", no help over the wall.

[DecipherOne]

A complete punch in the gut in terms of "you didn't expect that, did you" with a meaningful effect.  Perhaps even more interesting would be if you could restart the game and he still wouldn't be there.  Maybe you'd even start by his gravestone.  You'd be alone.  No witty banter, no "maybe this is a bad idea", no help over the wall.

Forcing the player to actually experience loss is a great idea and the save game reload does lessen that. In my situation, I actually wanted to experience those things to I never reloaded, I lived with the consequences. It does become dangerous to the point of frustrating the player so they don't want to play any more however. That being said, making sure the player knows that all decisions are final and possibly offering a different type of game play mode could be the way around such perils.

[Captain_404]

If you're willing to frustrate an immense amount of players, go for it. Even the offering of a save implies the ability to revert fully to an earlier state, when that unspoken pact is broken players will come for your blood.

Still, I think it's interesting. It would be neat to see a game whose core mechanic revolved around reverting to past save states, but each time you went back the state would decay somehow. It would serve as a reset, but an unreliable one. Maybe you could gain back the character you just lost, but as a result would lose some other character instead, or some important powerup, or maybe even nothing at all.