KotorEffect3 wrote...
Sion1138 wrote...
A nobody, perhaps a scavenger with a little cargo vessel.
Do it like the Elder Scrolls, start with a blank slate, and in prison. There's no better starting point for a hero's journey than a prison.
And I would like the chance to become a villain.
That works well for TES because of the open ended nature of those games. Bioware games are story driven and story intensive games. Which means I like the fact that bioware protaginists have an established background and story giving them a certain perspective so we as players have something tangible to work with when it comes to our motivations. Playing as a colonist ruthless Shepard I was extremely motivated when I confronted Balak to take him down because of that Shepard's background and history involving batarian extremists. Though I don't know if we ever will see this again in a bioware game I loved the origin stories in DAO where not only did we have six different backgrounds to choose from but we actualy got to play those backgrounds giving us all kinds of perspective going into the main game.
Once again I am not knocking the prisoner with no established background concept and how TES uses it but it works for TES being that those games are very open ended. Bioware games are different and having established backgrounds to work with goes a long way in helping us define our characters.
Quite so, but I don't think that motivations should be derived from anything outside of the game itself. Except in that you bring your own character traits with you into the game world and let the circumstances within modify those traits to the degree that they will.
You could just as easily fill the blanks in yourself
Or choices could be provided to you, but without consequence in-game, perhaps only in dialogue, so that you may choose from a wide variety instead of just two or three options.
In game design, this comes down to the choice of role-playing vs. cinematic flow. There is room for compromise.
If you played KotOR, that game did both. You started out with a blank slate, you didn't know anything about your character's history until later when it was revealed who you were.
But, the game gave you plenty of material to form a perspective on the world even before the great reveal. So there was a history but you could choose to disregard it. You derived your motivations from what the game world presented.
Also, as you mentioned, Dragon Age offered six distinct origin stories, which served as prologues to the main story. That's another way to do it.
So I say, either explore the origin or leave it out.
Retour en haut
Mercenaries, I feel, are more open to interpretation and other options than spectres. I played as a spectre with Shepard; now I would like to play as something else. 
