Scars of War Dev Blog Update
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 860
The general method taken to solve this tricky problem is to try to create a background generic enough to cover all possibilities. One player is the noble knight, the other a cold blooded killer? Hmmmm, how does one motivate both of them to go off and save the world? I know, family! Even mobsters love their mothers, right? Right! So we'll kill off/kidnap their mother/sister/dog. That way the good character will be motivated to save their family and the evil one will seek revenge.
Well, that's the logic that goes through a lot of designers minds, mainly beacuse they don't really have any grounding in a writing background, or they just don't think it through very clearly. Lets ignore the (If you try and satisfy everyone you end up satisfying no one) issue for a moment. The primary mistake made here is to depend on the player caring about a character they only meet for 5 minutes, enough so that they swear to save them/bloody vengence when the villain kidnaps/murders them. This is not going to work.
Now, if you tried to make the player care about a character that they had had time to connect to over the entire game, cool. That's a well known literary trick. But otherwise the player simply doesn't have the time to bond with the character.
