If someone can figure out how to make a characterless RPG, let me know. In the meantime, both the player character (customized or premade) and non-playing characters are an important aspect to role playing games, but just having characters doesn’t make a compelling story. While I’ll be straying into basic concepts also found in general story writing as opposed to writing specific to video games and RPGs, I find that some story driven games focus on the game part and throw in characters or plot as garnish or don’t give them the time they need to really work.
People are flawed. So should characters. This can be harder to do with customized player characters, especially in MMORPGs that have to account for a million variables, much less character growth in a certain amount of time or through a certain story arc.
This is a problem derived from the push to give players the most control over their character. While the player is able to control how their character responds to a decision, what they mourn over, etc., it comes at a loss of the writer’s control over the narrative. A player character still needs to face a personal conflict (other than the external conflict) and overcome it. Too often, we only see a focus on the external conflict. If the world is in danger, saving the world is the resolution needed, but it’s not compelling on a character level. Now, if the world is in danger but the base personality of the character you play struggles with killing others, that provides a more interesting path to get to the end of the game.
Characters with a lack of personality are great for players to project on, and that can be a benefit in some cases. I’d argue that it does more harm than good. Skyrim is fun to explore, but the character you play is a blank slate with no personal quest based on their race or background. The game itself doesn’t lend towards a sense of character for you to build on. You play quests, not a character. It’s why your melee combat inclined character that knows two spells can become Archmage of the College.
Now, let’s look at Knights of the Old Republic II, the LucasGames sequel to the early 2000’s Star Wars RPG. In a continuation of my love for rushed games with interesting stories and application, KOTOR2 allows for character customization up to a certain point. Your character still has a background that you can’t change, because it’s a driving force in the plot. Taking the character driven route into crafting a story can make a poorly executed game something that still sticks with someone nearly two decades later.
In the first game, you play as Revan, who leads Jedi and non-Jedi alike to fight the devastating effects of war thirsty Mandalorians. In KOTOR2, you play as one of Revan’s generals. By the end of the war, the massive amount of death causes you to cut yourself off from the Force and go into exile. The game doesn’t dump all this information on you, though. It reveals it in bits and pieces, through characters approaching you that you don’t know but the character you’re playing knows. You’re not just playing a character; you’re getting to know the character. You can still decide how they feel about things, whether they regret their past actions or not, but the fact that the character has this block to overcome that’s linked to a set backstory is something not a lot of customizable playing characters have.
Another poorly received game that’s one of my favorites, Dragon Age II, has an inherent character concept that the player cannot change. The biggest hurdle in the main character, Hawke, is keeping their family together. You start the game trying to save your family from the oncoming horde of darkspawn, but in the prologue, one of your siblings still dies. Later, your other sibling can die, become enlisted in a group to save their life, or be put in the Circle or enlist as a Templar. No matter what, that sibling goes away. Then your mom dies, and you’re left with your shitty uncle. What’s left is the connections Hawke has with their friends, and even those connections are strained and put to the test in the conclusion of the game.
Dragon Age: Inquisition foregoes this set in stone, personal conflict in favor of allowing the playing character to decide how they feel about their general situation. What doesn’t quite help is that it places the character’s backstory in the background and doesn’t effect game play or story (with some exceptions). Arguably, the game is about a larger plot that effects more than one city, such as in Dragon Age II, but focusing only on the larger external conflict does a disservice to the personal attachment to why we’re fighting to save the world other than we’re one of the dumbasses that lives on it.
Obviously, linear RPGs with a set character, like The Last of Us and the Tomb Raider reboot series, can better combine external with internal conflicts because the nature of the writing allows for writers to have control over the narrative. For non-linear games, writers need to pull back from the never ending quest of “give the player the utmost control” of the story and go back to the roots of linear storytelling of planning a character for the player to explore. We need to care about the character first and build them through player choices after, not the other way around.
Video Games Deconstructed 