30 réponses à ce sujet

[TheOgre]

If they wanted to do a voiced protagonist, Hawke should have been a good framework but they deviated from that. Commanding Hawke, the tone really matters, and it carries over into the scenes..

I don't like sharing a chuckle with someone after I threatened them. I want to be a serious and scary person to the person receiving the disapproval of my voice.

I prefer silent characters, because they avoid mismatched tones or actions. You tell them what you want to tell them. Nothing short or more. Auto dialogue is not fun to see when it goes against your message.

[Teddie Sage]

Why do people keep equating roleplaying with playing a self-insert? Unless I'm misunderstanding what a self-insert is.
 

Roleplaying is always basically fanfiction. That's all it has ever been. In a BioWare game, that generally means that the player decides what the character's mental state is, how he interprets the world around him, and what he means when he says and does the things the game allows (and in a silent protagonist game, the details of how the lines are delivered).

None of that requires that the player override any onscreen content. None of that even requires that the player imagine offscreen content beyond the thoughts of the player character. We could play BioWare's game, choosing among BioWare's options, while still roleplaying a character of our design.

The voice (and especially the paraphrase) makes this much harder to do.

 

Basically, self-insert (for me) are you in the first person. You see everything through your eyes or use phrases that belong to you and you only, though in games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, there are only short phrases you can choose from. To me, it would be easier to imagine myself as Link from The Legend of Zelda has he has no lines than using a character that already has lines, because I can imagine what he says instead of having to select choices given by an engine.

 

Some people don't mind the choices, but to me hardcore self-insert is all about imagining what you would say if you were in the game, if you were the character. Like I said in a post above, sometimes in games with silent protagonists which offer us lines, I'm like: "That's now how I would've said this, but this was the lesser evil of the options." 

 

This happens for voiced protagonists as well, which is why, in the end, I can't consider those characters mine but BioWare's properties.

[Sylvius the Mad]

Basically, self-insert (for me) are you in the first person. You see everything through your eyes or use phrases that belong to you and you only, though in games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, there are only short phrases you can choose from. To me, it would be easier to imagine myself as Link from The Legend of Zelda has he has no lines than using a character that already has lines, because I can imagine what he says instead of having to select choices given by an engine.

Some people don't mind the choices, but to me hardcore self-insert is all about imagining what you would say if you were in the game, if you were the character. Like I said in a post above, sometimes in games with silent protagonists which offer us lines, I'm like: "That's now how I would've said this, but this was the lesser evil of the options."

This happens for voiced protagonists as well, which is why, in the end, I can't consider those characters mine but BioWare's properties.

Well it's not me I'm inserting, but the character I've designed, and he's likely quite different from me. I don't think people often try to play self-inserts without idealising them, anyway. Most of us would run away if faced with an armed assailant.

As for the lines, I see it as the character considering different options (that have occurred to him) and then choosing one. In any real-life situation, there are a wide variety of different things you could say, but you choose to say only one of them. In BioWare's games, I often spend quite a lot of time deciding among the dialogue options, trying to find a specific intent I can put behind one of those sets of words that is consistent with the character I'm playing. Because I know the exact line in advance, and because I can design an intent to suit those words, I can maintain the coherence of my character's personality.

With a voiced protagonist, where each line has but one possible delivery (that is hidden from us until afterward), and the words themselves are also hidden, I have significant trouble trying to get the character's behaviour to conform to my design (something I didn't usually find difficult with the silent protagonist).

I get the impression that BioWare thought that everyone played as you do, because your approach requires very little adaptation (if any) to work with a voiced protagonist. But my more roleplaying-centric approach (I see little difference between how I play a tabletop character and a silent BioWare character, or indeed how I act in real life) struggles mightily with the voice+paraphrase.

[Darkly Tranquil]

I can go either way on the voiced protagonist thing. It's great the first time through when you are hearing it all for the first time, but I find that on subsequent playthroughs, having the same voice for a "different" character detracts from the experience significantly because I feel like it's my first protagonist wearing a mask (since I associate the voice with the first character). I can see why it's appealing for the general audience and people who will only play it once and then move on, but for those of us who like to play multiple times to explore all the story paths, having the same voice can end up being a distraction. In any case, it's not an issue that I have strong feelings about; I can take or leave a voiced protagonist as it comes.

[Elsariel]

I really like voiced protagonists. I don't know that I'd care to go back to a silent protagonist. I do wish we had more than just two voices to choose from per gender but I know that would make things rather complicated and expensive.

[Frond]

Perhaps one day they'll use microphone technology to allow us to speak our own lines to NPCs.