Slycne said:
Dreiko said:
I have an issue with the talk on the topic of the blank slate character. I understand how Susan says she knows who her character is and how she would act, the problem I see with that is that, like she said, she knows who she is in all of the games which allow you to do that type of character, ending up with Shepard, The Warden and the hero in Oblivion all sharing a brain and acting similarly. In fact, that a Specter, a gray warden and a prisoner who we know nothing about all would act the same is quite immersion-breaking and doesn't make sense.
I can see how you can make up your character's back-story and childhood and stuff but the fact remains that all of those things will NEVER be actually part of the game. You may imagine them to be true but they will never actually affect what you'll be encountering from the game, only what you'll be pretending to encounter when the game gives you an ambiguous option. To me, that's just lying to yourself rather than role-playing, since if you were role-playing then the events in the past of the protagonist would actually be part of the game in a more serious manner than just in the perception of the player.
While you can never change what's been programmed into the game certainly, you can however let those ideas influence what you do. For instance, there is a moment somewhat early on in Mass Effect 2 where you chase off some looters. You can then produce to either take what they were planning to loot or leave it. I might be slightly fuzzy on the details, but I don't even think theirs a renegade/paragon hit for either one. So mechanically there is no particular reason not to take it, but if you were role playing a "good" character it would be hard to justify it to yourself to steal these peoples savings.
So they can have an effect on the game.
I understand that and I myself do indeed follow a pattern of action (for example, my Fallout 3 character was an opportunist "chaotic neutral" type character, basically just me putting myself in the shoes of the guy and doing what felt "right" all things considered) but anything more than that and it's too removed from the game's reality for it to have any effect on my experience.
Say for example that in my made up role playing fantasy my Skyrim character is being lead to his execution due to killing a royal guard who tried to have his way with my character's wife. Wouldn't it be sorta odd for the existence of the wife that, according to what was said in the podcast, is experienced as real as everything else in the game, a person loved so much by my character that he was willing to kill a guard KNOWING he was to be executed if caught, to suddenly stop mattering.
Doesn't the fact that nowhere in the game does the character show any hint of care for his love that I imagined in existence instantly shatter the illusion of her actually existing? If I truly were the main character of Skyrim with this past first thing I'd do would be taking her to safety and being assured by my actions that no harm could come to her by either dragons or horny guards or anything else. But no, alas, my love doesn't exist in Skyrim, I can never actually be myself while having any sort of imagined back story or past in that game cause the game won't let me do what I'd do with the baggage I'm carrying. I think it's best to simply not imagine anything and just play the game, that way you can do what you'd do, even if the scenarios are much more limited.
