: Still, I see what Goran is saying. In Eternal, the player is still not the
: force behind his own actions. You never see the player speak, you never
: see his emotions, you never see him making decisions. Even though you
: yourself are not making the decisions, it really creates a very different
: feel. Just pointing that out. I still think Eternal's storyline kicks ass.
: I hope that we can craft the terminals to get the most out of the story,
: to make the player (I mean the person at the computer, sorry that I said
: "player" before refering to the marine) feel as much emotion as
: possible through the plot and really care about the direction in which it
: goes. Well, thats my two and a half cents.
Right. In Eternal, the player-character's motives are always pretty clear, even though his choices do have unintentional consequences. The player-character is the good guy - that's his very nature - and the players' choices are simply which path would seem to best accomplish the obvious goal of doing good, which options and other characters would best help him accomplish this.
In a game like Marathon it's not really possible or in my opinion desirable to ascribe character traits to the player-character other than his goals - that's up to the individual players to fill in, in pursuit of those goals. The writing part comes in with how the other characters interact with each other, and with the players' choices. Hathor's character in particular I want to strongly illuminate, because her relationship with the player is in a sense the most fundamental in the cosmos, and so through her character we can sort of assign second-person traits to the player-character (what Hathor sees in you, as opposed to strictly "you are like X"). This applies to a lesser extent with other characters.
This second-person character assessment is I believe the best method to take in a video game. You do not tell the player "you are X, you like X, you feel X" through cutscenes and the like - that makes the player-character a step removed from the player, because the player might in fact NOT be X, like X, or feel X. But through other characters' reactions to the player, you can shed light on their PERCEPTION of him/her even though inside (in the player's mind) he/she might be entirely different, which is far closer to the experience one gets in real life.
