Fidelias said:
Nintendolover222 said:
Fidelias said:
Gordon Freeman. I don't know why everyone proclaims him as an awesome character. He just ISN'T a character. For all we know he could be a psychotic maniac who just likes to kill things. Or a coward. Or both. You can't even judge him by his actions, because 90% of what he does is just what he's ordered to do. The other 10% is just running away.
Well, most people love his identity, the shell that they're supposed to fill with their own personality. That's the whole point, YOU decide who he is and depending on who you are he might be a scheming psychotic relishing every bloody killing he commits. He also might be a coward acquiescently following instructions from people much more familiar with the unfamiliar world he finds himself in because he wouldn't know what to do otherwise.
People love him because he is who you design him to be... and because they dig the whole 'theoretical physicist with goatee and glasses with a crowbar'.
But that's the thing; I CAN'T fill him with my own personality, because if it were my character, Freeman wouldn't be doing half the stupid shit that he does. He doesn't have a backstory, and worst of all, he doesn't have a motive. I know, I know, he's saving the world, isn't that motive? Short answer, no. WHY is he saving the world? I mean, it would take a LOT of convincing for me to start trying to shoot stuff, and it's not like Freeman is a soldier or anything. He doesn't really have anymore stake in the fight then anybody else, so why? The fact that we have to ask that question after two games is proof of Freeman being a bad character.
Edit: Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the Half Life games, I really do. It's just that Freeman deserves zero credit for how awesome the games were.
Again, Valve designed Gordon Freeman to be motivated by your own incentives. Why am I shooting these masked guys? Well, for me I saw them brutalising random people, I saw former colleagues of mine hiding underground trying desperately to get people out of the city to help at their insurgent headquarters (meaning things are pretty bad for mankind), and then I didn't get any chance to think it over more because shit got serious and I had to run.
I learnt in Half-Life 1 that if someone is trying to kill you, the best way to stop them is to do the same to them. Sure, it's not the perfect solution, but it worked on fellow Americans so why shouldn't it on these aliens that want me dead anyway? In real life, sometimes you're not going to get the perfect solution and you've got to pick the best option out of what you're dealt.
How I imagined I would deal with it and how you would are clearly quite different, and Valve intended that to happen. It's just some people concluded there could be no reasonable motive for the actions they intended you to justify (I've talked with someone else who shares that view). It all varies, depending on the person, and that's what I love about the game: the experience is different for everyone, even if it is negative for some.
Of course, some people just picked up Half Life 2 and went into video game mindset, expecting the game to tell you how to feel rather than asking YOU to consider why you're killing people. They're usually the ones who don't understand why the game is lauded like it is.
And a backstory? Well, Half Life 2 has the first game as a backstory. I'd imagine Freeman's past prior to those events would be irrelevant anyway, given that he was a theoretical physicist before the Black Mesa Incident I highly doubt the game would be improved if we discovered where he'd lived. If we learnt his parents had passed away I can understand how that might affect some people's decisions, but otherwise I don't think it'd be necessary. Besides, who's going to tell it? I wouldn't expect Kleiner to come up to me and say 'oh, Freeman, remember how your parents died? Yeah, that kinda sucked. Well, see ya'. There hasn't really been room for a backstory what with the frantic pace Freeman's had to maintain over the past few games, and if I've learnt anything from playing the games it's that Valve won't sacrifice the story for anything. Taking time out to have a character bring up Gordon's past (and who would know it, other than him?) would ruin the pacing for me.
