Do characters in video games live up to their expectations?
Video games no matter the genre are often filled with powerful heroes and villains. An RPG is probably going to be the best example of where there is one of these Hero or Villain characters, because for a role playing game there has to be these basic elements. Do these characters live up to their names or will the player be disappointed. Perhaps in the law of the game that characters background story depicts them to be almost godlike but, when you play them the game designers have set them on par with the other characters in the game, perhaps the character has specific abilities or has weapons and such that in the game's game play he does not have at his disposal, all of these can lead to disappointment to the player.
I will highlight some of my personal experiences with playing games to help bring light on this question. The most recent game I played was Star Wars The Force Unleashed (TFU) developed by Lucas Arts. TFU is an action RPG which had an in depth story and used some of the big players from the Star Wars Franchise. When you begin the game you play as no other than Darth Vader, the most ruthless Sith Lord in the Star Wars galaxy. You do not need to know very much about Star Wars to understand that Darth Vader has an Ultimate ego, he is more powerful than anyone, so at the start of the game, as a huge Star Wars fan I have an expectation that when I am Darth Vader I am going to Kick Ass! The developers of TFU did a perfect job of allowing Darth Vader to live up to my expectations, in this level he is basically un killable and as the player you feel very powerful as you march your way through the level destroying everyone. For the game developers there were some big incentives to put this at the start of the game, they designed for an enjoyable empowering experience which would get the player hooked to the game and wanting more, even throughout the game there are areas set up where it is very easy to kill everyone with no challenge this is again helping the player feel empowered and so that character will live up to their expectations. However it is not possible to do this in all video games.
Balance is a key aspect in making a good video game, in TFU for the starting level with Vader the game was unbalanced, in other words your character Vader was much stronger than everyone else in the level, of course the developers balanced the rest of the game to provide a challenge but for the reasons stated before to create a better experience they unbalanced the game. In many situations an unbalanced game is not going to work this mainly occurs in multiplayer environments. In a multiplayer environment with the current ideas of what a multiplayer game is, you want to keep things as balanced as possible. If in a multiplayer environment you had overpowered playable characters, then it would destroy the competitiveness within the game. The downside is it is harder for characters to live up to the players expectations
Soul Calibur 4 developed by Bandi Namco games is a typical fighter game and the most enjoyable aspect of this game is the multiplayer. I chose the character of Darth Vader in this game also, and so this makes a very good comparison to the force unleashed as the developers in this game attempt to make the characters balanced for better competition, my friend chose a female character in the game who looks rather week compared to Darth Vader as she only has a small sword and shield. Time after time I lost to this character and got frustrated with the game.
"How could Darth Vader lose to a girl."
"His light saber would cut right through her shield."
"Her weapons would be ineffective against his armor."
These where just some of the things that made Darth Vader a disappointing character to play he could not live up to his reputation as round after round the imperial march was silenced. In this example the idea is taken to the extreme with the cross of genre but it does easily show how a character may not live up to people's expectations and the reasons why.
Warcraft 3, developed by Blizzard Entertainment is one of the greatest RTS games of all time, the Warcraft universe has a tremendous amount of law and this is important to many of the players. In the single player campaigns we again see the trend where characters can be tuned based on their backgrounds to be made more or less powerful however in the multiplayer mode of the game they are balanced out for competitive game play but the Heroes of Warcraft 3 are still much more powerful than the standard units in the game, and in this they live up to their expectations, this introduction of the Hero unit in a RTS meant the player could feel mighty and powerful with their hero. The character of Arthus is one of the main characters in the game, once he obtains a powerful weapon frostmourne he gains a ultimate ego, in the cut scenes and cinematic of the game his power is demonstrated, when you take control of him he lives up to this as it would take several normal enemies to defeat him.
World of Warcraft also developed by Blizzard Entertainment and is the next evolutionary step from Warcraft 3 and it's expansion the frozen throne, World of Warcraft (WoW) is currently the biggest MMORPG on the market with a subscriber base of over 11 million players and according to www.mmogchart.com WOW controls 62.2% (April 2008) of the markets active subscriptions. In WoW you do not get to play one of Warcraft's hero characters but instead create a hero of your own and begin to fight your way through the Warcraft universe and against other players in the Warcraft universe. This game and other MMORPGs like it really begins to reflect on my question from some different views. In WoW the player can become quite powerful reaching the maximum skill level in the game, gain powerful items, spells and also mastering their own personal play skills, once a players character gets to a high level in these aspects they can destroy lower level players and lower level NPC (none playable characters) characters with ease. But if we take it to more complex levels we can see where the expectations of your hero are put to the test, to do this you must have a general understanding of how a mmorpg works. We can take this character and put it against other NPCs it's own level, if the player is skilled and has quality items he may be able to fight several mobs at the same time and so still meets expectations. We then take the character and put it in a Player Vs Player environment and things begin to change, our player is experienced so he has a higher skill level than general players and he has more powerful items and so he may beat a lot of players one vs one but not always, the game is built in a way which balances things out and weaker players can still win, now if we make it a situation where it is one vs multiple players the odds are stacked against our character and he would be struggling to win no matter how bad the other players are. In this MMORPG environment you are just a number and there are millions of people just like you and it is impossible to be that absolute powerful person, no matter how good you are it is simply unobtainable some players will try but no matter how hard their hero will never live up to those expectations.
Expectations of a character I believe is a very individual thing, and everyone has their own expectations of what a character should be. I ask some of my fellow WoW players this question at first most of them denied they had such expectations but after discussing their characters with them I realized that they all had some expectations. My friend Kyle plays the WoW Rogue **** it is an assassin type character and immediately when the player thinks of an assassin ****there are some ideologies that go with it and then some expectations of what that assassin should be. "My rogue has light weight armor and small weapons and so he should be the fastest ****in the game however warriors can charge around much easier in heavy plate that is just silly." Kyle. My friend Kyle originally told me he didn't really have expectations but clearly he does according to him this frustrated him as a player and is a contributing factor to why he no longer has an active subscription to WoW. It is a matter of opinion but possibly the game developers looked over this expectation when creating the rogue ****however though this issue influenced my friends decision to stop playing, he played the game for several years before deciding to stop.
"So come then you heroes, come in all your power and glory, for in the final hour all must serve the one true King." Arthas.
The epic quote from Arthas the hero from Warcraft 3 perhaps puts in perspective your WoW character, in the end no matter how good you are, you are nothing compared to the big players in the Warcraft law. Being a MMORPG the developers simply could not have you as powerful as the storyline characters otherwise 11 million other players would share your power so however many times you are told you are a hero and a champion in some respect you are not much but another number, blizzard had designed for the experience where you do feel as though you are an individual hero but this is just the way they have designed it, in reality your character can be killed by a boar a spider or another character just like you. To challenge the big "players " in the Warcraft law you must work as a team, this is what makes an MMORPG unique. If the player wants to challenge this kind of content and they attempt it alone they will be killed by a single guard or perhaps a fish. My personal expectations of my own character are that he would be able kill a fish but in fact, in game he could easily be killed. I would also like to think I could put up a fight against the ****c Warcraft 3 characters but again my character won't live up to these expectations and it would require me to work with other people to achieve this. However despite my expectations and people's expectations of their characters blizzard when designing WoW needed to try and create the entertaining experience, they have done so with a challenging multiplayer environment which with over 11 million subscribers despite certain expectations not being fulfilled it is proven they created a successful game.
WoW vs Warcraft 3, the expectations above also have an interesting opposition on the other extreme of the scale. The Heavy players in the Warcraft law have very high expectations, and many fans of the franchise do not agree with the fact that these characters can be killed by groups of WoW toons. We can see how the conflict on the scale, here on one end you have the total WoW player who has high expectations for his character and believes he should be powerful and strong, on the other side of the scale there is the Warcraft fan who believes that the Warcraft heroes should be extremely powerful. I asked some other gamers about this to see what their thoughts where. I got mixed opinions and arguments for either side however to put my own opinion forward in some respect this balances out as you get a powerful hero but he isn't powerful enough to kill those other powerful law characters without the help of others and so it sits in the middle of this scale.
Despite these expectations, it does seem that the trend is that people will play a game regardless, WoW is a prime example, it also seems that expectations for characters depends on the players own ideology made up of their own, beliefs, opinions, ideas , knowledge and passed experiences. Single player type games can really unlock the full potential of a characters expectations because all of their power, abilities and ego can be brought to light due to the fact they don't have the kind of restrictions a multiplayer environment has and if the game can provides a true challenging experience the expectations the player may have of a character can be close to met, this is totally up to how good the designers are and how well they design the character to fit the general expectations people have, again every player has different expectations.
In multiplayer situations when balance is involved designers must use several techniques in game design to help the characters live up to their expectations this is a greater challenge because with the current way gamers are, if a certain playable character was over tuned players would not accept it as being fair as the competition of the game would be lost. My belief is every players expectations about characters are different, designers can only tailor for a general experience and cannot meat everyone's expectations and so the battle wages on to whether Chuck Norris would beat Superman in a duel.
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