Persona 4 Golden has been out for quite a while and i have been lurking forums about the game and there is always a major complain that arise every now and then: The Silent protagonist.
You know its archetype: He/She is silent to allow the player to more easily put on their shoes (ie You the Player is the character), however some people interpretate that as lazy developer design. The sole porpuse of the silent protagonist is to increase immersion of the player but that arise a question wich answer is always quite personal:
What is the immersion i seek in a game? Immersion is defined and divided in types:
(According to wikipedia)
Full article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...
1.Tactical (or Sensory-motoric) Immersion is experienced when performing tactile or physical operations that involve skill. Players feel “in the zone” while perfecting actions that result in success.
2.Strategic (or Cognitive) Immersion is more cerebral, and is associated with mental challenge and decision making. Chess players experience strategic immersion when choosing a correct solution among a broad array of possibilities, without a corresponding physical set of reactions to effect that decision.
3.Narrative (Emotional) Immersion is realized when the immersant becomes emotionally invested in a story or experience.
4.Spatial Immersion occurs when the immersant feels the simulated world is perceptually convincing and feels he or she is really “there” and the simulated world looks and feels “real”.
5.Total Immersion occurs when all four types of immersion previously described are realized in a single experience.
we can place the Silent protagonist in the Spatial Immersion type, as the decription says this is only achieved when you feel like you are in the games world and that can only be achieved trought your AVATAR.
Now what is an avatar? According to a dictionary "In computing, an avatar is the graphical representation of the user or the user's alter ego or character."
Then again how we perceive the Avatar is different to some people, some see it as its character you are controlling and others preceive it as your character. This will go hand to hand with immersion.
The Silent protagonist is not a character some say as it lacks a personality but that isnt entirely true. Gordon Freeman is not regarded as a character because he doesnt say a thing and people discard all of his exploits just because he doesnt trow some lines here and there. In my book Freeman is a more compelling character than Drake because what freeman has acomplissed is far more outstanding than Drake´s.
The Silent protagonist is open to interpretation so you can judge him based on your point of view, in persona 3 The social Links, the reson why the MC stablished them can be interpreted in many ways: Maybe he only established them so he can fuse stronger personas or maybe because he really cared to have friends or both, at the end isnt clear meaning that the reason you established the SL is your reason not his. Here you arent restrained to what its put on the character here you make your character of what you want him to be.
The reason i love the SP is because he doesnt act in a way i wouldnt, in the words of Juji Horii (Dragon Quest creator ):
"Oh, yes? Generally speaking, I think having the protagonist speak alienates the player. He’s playing as though the character is an extension of himself, so why is his avatar suddenly speaking of its own accord? He’ll be struck with the realization that the character he’s been thinking of as himself up until now is actually someone else entirely. Having the protagonist speak for himself and decide own his own which way the story goes would make players uncomfortable."
here link of the interview http://www.zeldainformer.co...
This line of thinking is what make people like myself like the Silent protagonist, when people seek the other kind of immersions then what the character does has no bearing on the player because that its one of the least of his worries however having a SP when seeking the other immersions specially the narrative immersion can be bad.
What is better a Silent protagonist or a Talkative Protagonist? The answer is none.
A silent protagonist is as good as a character with a set personality, its how you experience immersion that will determine what kind of character is you prefer.
you like that Snake talks? Thats fine.
You like that the P4 MC doesnt speak? Thats fine.
My point is lets not bash a game just because its taking a different approach to immerse the player.
PS: English is not my language so sorry for the bad spelling and if i didnt made my point across.
We were expecting problems with mod support, but there are a lot of other issues.
This is why you get the GOG version on gog you can select the version of the game to download.
On pc fallout 4 fallout new vegas and skyrim are all broken on steam because they all got the same "next gen" update.
Skyrim dec 2023
https://www.pcgamer.com/sky...
Can not find new vegas but anyone that modded it knows the script extender there was also broken
Not accidental, they want modders to stop modding their older games to force them to mod Shitfield.
There doing the same on starfield with a mods store and blocking mods
There goal is like blizzard and what they did with fallout 76 you make mods they can sell and you become a slave.
On skyrim they have "trusted" mod devs now basically a badge that lets your mod on the store you get a crumb of the sale when someone buys it.
lol to the disagrees, the last Skyrim update broke mods too. They've been trying to kill mods to monetize them in creation club for years, it's not a stretch that they purposely put out patches just to break free mods.
The disagrees are from people who have common sense. They aren't trying to kill mods. Most mods for any game will break with a new update because they rely on files/code that have been changed. This isn't new. Even with Bethesda this would happen way before the creation club. Mod support is literally one of the things that got Bethesda to where they are, and they're one of the only devs that releases comprehensive mod tools for each of their games.
Over 14 GBs and doesn't change much at all? What? Taking up that much drive space for a pathetic 'remastering' is shameful.
Par for Bethesda.
LOL people are actually expecting massive improvements or something? From Bethesda?? the same people who released Skyrim multiple times and the all look like shit? THAT Bethesda? are people for real?
The ps5 version doesn't change a ton but from my small playtime it's enough to make me want to replay it just to have it running at 60.
A side note to this my PS4 version no longer boots after it's "update" so I guess that's what it feels like to own a Bethesda game on PC
As of right now, there are no monopolies in the games industry, and for the sake of the medium as a whole, they never should either.
And yet the biggest tech companies in America are essentially that. They buy up all the small comps only to kill them off and steal what they have, and if they can't buy em they bleed them to death.
Eventually they’ll realize the value is with the employee not the company. Buying an IP means nothing if the people who contributed are let go. They’ll get it one day.
tech is different because they buy threats and then kill them. Twitter bought Vine and did nothing with it. Despite people seemingly liking it. Could've had tiktok a decade before bytedance. go figure.
They buy IPs not talent. That's why these buyouts never work and the IPs die. Right now it's too expensive to develop games - but I expect that to shift maybe as AI tools can make it easier. The best games have been indie games for awhile as big developers fuck their ips to death with "games as a service" -
A voice actor from The Coalition's third-person shooter series, Gears of War, has hinted at a new game announcement coming in June.
Hopefully Microsoft will go back to the original story line and get away from that woke nonsense from the last Gears game Gears of Woke! But were talking about Microsoft so all the betting money is on more of the same woke nonsense.
The Locust trilogy concluded with Gears of War 3. I don’t get how Gears 4 and 5 are “woke” .
Good blog! Highly interesting to read.
I always called the silent protagonist "Mr. Personality".
I hate the silent type.
But being serious, so long as the game sets up proper motivation to do things the silent character's way and/or the story is done in a way that doesn't make the character seem oddly over-complacent in a world where your decisions will decide the fate of the planet (or whatever), I don't have any issue with the protagonist being silent.
I honestly think it depends on the game. For example, I had no problem playing as a silent protagonist in Dragon Age origins and Fallout 3. I also didn't mind it in Persona 3 or Persona 4.
However, I felt the main character in Dishonored should've had a voice actor.
I don't like them one bit. They are boring and feel like a plothole to the games because you never really know who the hell they are or from where they come from. I specially hate when other characters speak for him like in Dragon Quest 8 when you do a mission and then the king starts the sequence with:
"So you say that the thief ran away and that we should follow him?" -___-
These kind of protagonists I find them to be the most annoying. And the thing is that JRPG don't offer that much customization anyway so what is the point of this?