regalalchemist

Purpose "Idea Draft One"
The purpose of a character is to supply a replacement for a person or other entity. We have begun to replace our games "high purpose" characters with many characters of little to no importance. There are many ways to look at these characters. There exists a three level system that allows me to roughly see the importance/purpose of a character which is as follows, "Class" or "Tier" one characters are main characters whom we learn the most about. Keep in mind that a main character doesn't mean the same thing a main character means in most gaming conversation, In this sense it means a character the plot focuses on. The second class is a character who appears early in the story and just seems to be there this would be our classical main characters(i.e. Mario,or Sonic,etc). The third class being Unknown/Opportunity characters. These consist of characters that aren't fleshed out very well for a purpose, Like to leave mystery or to cause the main character to interact with them (Again the main character is the character who is very fleshed out). This causes a conflict/action and moves said character from class three to class one. There is a second form of class three in which the main character(s) don't interact with the character causing the character to be left without a story or left without a purpose. This is what our industry is focusing on now, loosely explained characters with no story or personality doing a thing and then a thing happens and then you fix it and then the screen goes black. And you wonder whether or not you should have bought a game that was sixty dollars just to get the same experience as you've been getting for the last five years "only different".

Our industry has A LOT of problems with it. But I could have never imagined it would have to deal with companies not putting enough effort into the games they made because they want more money. But there is some hope. We still know exactly how to make great characters with full purpose, we just lack the effort (Which I will address in the end). Back to the fact we have these characters in the industry, they exist and are very prevalent as characters that we love. I say this because I've seen them and (like the boy who cried wolf) I'm beginning to feel like no one is even going to believe me when I try and tell people about them. But they exist I swear. So rather than just ramble on about the existence of these characters like an old man with a lot of free, time let's see some examples.

-Portal Series-

-Mario Series-

-Halo Series-

These characters are of very little population and there is a sea of uselessness in between them and their new counterparts.Look at it this way, if I were to make a game I'd use less characters in order to make more purpose for the ones i do have.This makes them look great in comparison however it ultimately destroys the concept of even having characters in a game that have a purpose.Really in the end it comes down to the question of "Are the Triple-A companies going to want to work hard on the games?" Which I think we all know isn't true at all. But we need to urge the developers that do care (All be it mostly indie teams.) to put as much into their characters purpose as possible.
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