Action Games: Characters Part 2

So, I’ve finally gotten a chance to play some Dark Souls, and I have to say, while I like it, I’m kind of disappointed I rolled a Sorcerer as my first character.  Maybe the magic gets better, but right now, I’m just not enjoying it that much.  I think I’m going to reroll some kind of sword and board Paladin or something, unless heavy armor sucks.  However, this does segue nicely into what I wanted to talk about last Thursday (and Wednesday….), but I wound up watching Tucker and Dale vs. Evil with my friends and never wrote anything: protagonist variation in action games.  Now, Dark Souls is not an action game, although its combat does seem to have some nice elements from action games, nor does it have a set character (you make your own at start), but it does do something I like: it tries to mix up styles.  Mixing up styles leads to different protagonists and that leads to different experiences.

One thing I’ve been somewhat upset about for the past few years is the lack of sorcerer/wizard protagonists in action games.  Yes, there are heroes who have a handful of spells and magical powers in action games, but most of these guys are still burly barbarian men who scowl like Space Marines (another issue, but we’ll get to that later) and focus on beating and stabbing monsters to death.  Actual spellcaster types as heroes though are rather lacking, probably because conventional wisdom says that players would prefer to hit people with a sword than burn them to cinders, or maybe because spells are seen as too complicated.  I don’t know why there aren’t more of them, but I imagine part of it is that it’s difficult to figure out the mechanics of making an action game for a sorcerer.  After all, it’s pretty easy to figure out how to swing a sword.

See, Link's got the right idea!

Sure, it’s not easy to swing a sword in real life, but it’s not hard to figure out some basic mechanics for racking up combos and special attacks when it comes to a sword (or a chain whip as is more likely the case).  This is not easy for spells.  Can you juggle with a fireball (and not be a fighting game character), or are we going to have to bust out a wind spell?  Can you even give a wind spell a visual characteristic that doesn’t look cheesy?  So, yeah, it’s going to be a bit difficult for developers to figure out what to do, so I can understand the lack of these characters, but I think it’s time we break developers out of that comfort zone.

Building a sorcerer hero from the ground up is going to cause a developer to really look at and examine typical action game tropes.  Are juggles and combos necessary for the game, or can we do something else with magic to make the game just as engaging to play as God of War?  Maybe instead of trying to get a chain of hits to a rhythm, a spellcaster might fight several, weaker enemies and see how many she can roast with a single spell.  Boss monsters, instead of being gigantic, Shadow of the Colossus rip offs could instead implement some sort of counterspell system, although hopefully one that’s different than the tennis game Ganondorf likes to play.

Looking at the basic design of action games is going to make developers start trying different things, and different things means newer characters.  Hopefully, newer characters means we won’t have a bald, over-muscled scowler as a hero, and instead, we’ll get some one with a look all of their own, like a slender, athletic sorcerer, or a stocky, but jolly bard?  The two things may not be completely interconnected, but they are going to feed into each other, and the over genericization of action games has begun to lead to super generic video game heroes, which is always upsetting.