next »

[Manuel Magalhães]

(that assuming that the cast is interesting)

[James Coote]

If you're aiming for the players to become attached to a character, you should be able to do it straight off the first time the player sees them

If they're not interesting after an hour of interacting with them, I doubt they're that interesting at all. How often do you spend an hour talking crap with someone before you think "forget this guy, he's boring" ?

That said, they might be there in the background for a while, then later do something that really gets the player's attention and makes them see the character in a whole new light

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i'd go for much much longer than the available options here. i'd say it takes 20-30 hours or more for me to grow attached to a set of characters, and to fully feel as if i know them. sometimes even longer than that. human beings are complex like that

another way of asking this is: how long do you have to spend with a real person before you believe that you "know" them and come to care about them? it's usually a whole lot more than 5 hours

[Lynx]

I'll differ, I think you can form attachments to people in less time than that.  It's not about quantity, it's about quality; if you're just making small talk, you won't learn much, but if you're going through life-and-death or other stressful situations together, you might form more of an attachment with the game characters.

It's also about how many characters you're trying to get the player to care about.  30 minutes might be enough for a single character.  20-30 hours might be required for a smorgasbord of 8-10 characters since you have to spread the 'limelight' time around.

Portal?  A 2-3 hours enterprise and people certainly formed feelings about GlaDOS.  To the Moon?  4-5 hours.  And so forth.

[ink.inc]

all it takes is pantsu

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i didn't have any feelings towards glados. maybe i see 'care' in a different sense. by care i mean: when the game is over, you miss them, and if they die in the game, you cry

[Lynx]

I'd argue a significant number of people cared!  Let's not make this about Portal, though; you could insert any number of interesting, yet short games.  RPGs skew the gameplay time upward, but are they the only games where one can care about the characters being presented?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

as i see it, the game length doesn't matter, what matters if how much time someone spends playing a game. if i play through a game multiple times, each playthrough adds to my caring about the characters, so that i may not have cared about them the first two times i played, but by the third time playing through i began to grow attached to them. that happened to me with plenty of non-rpgs, such as the resident evil games. so it doesn't have to be 20-30 hours in one playthrough, you can count multiple playthroughs

you can also count multiple games in a series as adding up: for instance, i didn't care about mario after playing mario 1, but after playing through mario 2 and 3 and super mario world, and watching the super mario bros. super show, *then* i cared about mario; so a single character can reach the cared-about status through the time span of multiple games adding up