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this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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It's a tough balance to strike, because while people who are just trying to live their lives are vastly more believable, they don't really make for as interesting a story or character arc. A high concentration of weirdos might break your immersion, but many players will find the weirdos more memorable and be more invested. I remember Nick, Danse, Cait, etc a lot better than I remember... uh... Aela? Lydia? idk man.
By contrast, I'm loving BG3 because of the big plots driving each of the origin characters. Is it normal for such a high concentration of unique situations to be gathered by fate and happenstance? Absolutely not. But I enjoyed it a lot more than a party full of people who are just trying to get home to nice, peaceful lives and families and forget all this adventure nonsense as soon as the big bad is resolved.
That said, I haven't bitten into Starfield yet, so I can't comment on the balance they strike; I'm only commenting on your own impressions vs storytelling experience. If I've gotten something here wrong, please keep that in mind :)
I mean, Danse may be weird, but he's not insane. I'm talking about characters who have a completely bizarre view of the world.
I'm talking about stuff like Codsworth retreating into his inner world at the start of the game, Pickman the serial killer and blood artist, Lorenzo Cabot being driven insane by the mysterious serum, Tinker Tom being a paranoid conspiracy theorist, Captain Ironsides trying to fight China with the USS Constitution, Kyle shooting his brother, the Mechanist, or Kent Connolly with the Silver Shroud obsession. The characters in Dunwich Borers. Hugo. Kasumi Nanako thinking that she's a synth. Malcom the cannibal. Theodore Croup.
Fallout 1, say, had some pretty unusual characters, but it didn't use insanity to the extent that Fallout 4 did.
I would argue Danse was pretty rabid about his purpose, which made the unraveling of his personal issue that much more delightful. Maybe not an unusual personality in the Brotherhood, but removed from that context, I thought he was one of the more fanatical characters we had.
And I get your meaning here, but I still contend I remember and can chat about all those folks you mentioned a lot better than the side cast of most games. Most characters are so normal I can't even remember them to give you examples, and even if I could, they'd all be about the same kind of people anyway.
So I think it's just a matter of different goals that appeal to different people. If the world is grand and immersive, you can get away with more normies. If the world is pretty standard, you need the characters to provide more excitement. I'm guessing Starfield has the benefit of a new setting, like early fallouts did, and doesn't have to lean as hard on having an interesting population - but that's bound to be a negative in some people's books.
Yeah, and reading over my original comment, I can see where you are coming from, because I was just responding to a snippet about characters being unusual, not insane, and was kind of going off on a tangent. Not everyone who is weird is insane.
It's just specifically the insane bit that has bugged me.
Hancock is unusual, a kind of hardcore anarchist/libertarian. But he's not what I'd call insane.
Father has a worldview that has driven him to do some pretty extreme things, but he's not nuts; you can see how, from his position, what he's doing is a reasonable approach.
It's the characters where they just don't act the way that a regular person would, to the point that they'd probably be unable to function in the present-day world, much less in a post-apocalyptic one.
And while I agree that adding quirks can make a character more memorable, I don't think that making memorable characters it requires mucking with their head.
Abernathy Farm has a collection of pretty "ordinary" characters in Fallout 4, but I think that they're reasonably memorable; they have a personal tragedy and some grievances.
Whereas the Children of Atom have a lot of people who have a pretty bizarre worldview, yet most of them just blur into each other for me, aside from a few characters who stand out for other reasons.
Not Fallout 4, but in Fallout: New Vegas, I think that Veronica Santangelo was a pretty interesting character, but she was maybe one of the most "normal" people in her Brotherhood of Steel bunker.
Jake Finch running off to become a raider with the Forged at Saugus Ironworks is a storyline that I have no problem remembering, but he wasn't insane -- just an ordinary person in a pretty brutal environment.
Billy in Kid in a Fridge, where a kid gets trapped in a fridge at the time of the war, ghoulified, and then you take him back to his parents who were also ghoulified and happy to see him. Everyone there was sane, just in a weird situation.