HK-47 said:
How can you be speaking with your own thoughts when the game doesnt react them? It's just assumes Gordon said something. Not really an amazingly awesome storytelling mechanism. Dialogue is still preset for everyone else (hence why I find L4D's randomly generated dialogue superior and a place to keep an eye for the future of writing in games.) I mean my name isnt Gordon Freeman yet I'm constantly referred to as such. Clearly this is a character I am controlling, not an avatar. I'd be better off connecting to him rather than trying (and failing) to evoke the feeling that I am him.
Yeah, I never really got into the whole "I am the character" thing. The Half Life games themselves seem almost schizophrenic to me, because it has amazingly well crafted characters, but all those characters center around a guy that never says anything, and never does anything unless prompted to.
I actually think the Left 4 Dead games do an outstanding job in all aspects of story telling. Pretty much everything is contextual, so my character only reacts when there's something to react to, and the story only exists if I want to go dig it up between character dialog, and the stuff written on the walls in the safe houses. Everything requires my input though, which does a far better job of making me interested in those characters and story.
Voice emotes also greatly help recent Valve games... or, that may just be how me and my friends like to screw with them constantly. For example, I cannot think of Louis and Francis as characters in Left 4 Dead now, without thinking of me playing as Francis constantly jamming on the laugh emote, and listening to my buddy play as Louis constantly going "NO! OH NO! NO! We... are gonna be OKAY! OH NO!" Do the same thing when I'm playing TF2 as well though. I refuse to communicate with voice chat, and just spam emotes while playing as a Pyro, which generally makes me as unhelpful as I can possibly be.
Back on track though. This far along, I think of a silent protagonist as lazy on the developers part. Unless there's some great and new amazing way to emote or react in first person that doesn't require speech, I just get kind of annoyed that a character can go through so much, and not have anything to say about it. For the example of contextual emoting, the characters in the Sims might as well not be saying anything at all, because it's all gibberish, but they'll still react to things as they happen. Where as in most FPS games these days, I feel more and more that I'm just a camera with a gun. Everyone will shout and holler for me to do something, but I have no way to say "fuck off, do it yourself" or "wait a minute, assholes." Which doesn't matter, because those NPC's will continue to stand there and repeat the same shit until I do what they ask anyways, or they'll say it once, and just stand around like idiots waiting for me to trigger something.