Player Character or NPCs? Who is more important?

[ddq]

When either developing or playing an adventure game, who do you find more important: the player character or NPCs?

While there are usually more NPCs in number, the PC is the one with whom the player spends the most time. From whom should the majority of the humor come? How well does each connect with players?

I know that I often gravitate toward well characterized NPCs when playing non-adventure games. This seems especially true in, for example, Half-Life 2 and Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door, where your protagonist is mute or vocally suppressed, respectively. In adventure games, however, the player characters usually grow on me the most.

So what are your thoughts? Who deserves more design attention? Have you ever strongly disliked a game for its poor protagonist despite its good NPCs, or vice versa?
Thanks.

[Gilbert]

I think for adventure games, there're sort of equal number of them which have their main attention on the player (especially those first person exploration ones, other examples are like, The Dig, in which there are only a handful of characters in it anyway) and the NPCs (like DOTT, etc.), so I think it's just a design/personal choice as to which should get more attention.

However, as you mentioned "humour" I think it certainly won't work if most of them were just from the player. For humourous effect I'll say it would be better to have more variety of jokes, so it works best if NPCs of different personalities have more involvement (unless it's a game where you are in control of several player characters, each with his/her own personality, like in DOTT, but DOTT has involvement of BOTH the players and the NPCs for humourous effects).

Better still, is that there're some balance between the player and the NPCs, that the humour comes mostly from the interaction between the player and the NPCs. In this way you'll have a better integrated game, where the jokes won't look that "forced" or out-of-place, like you're just putting a bunch of unrelated stuff together.

[Ali]

They're certainly equally important, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they should have the same level of characterisation. Player characters are ofthen best when they're like heroes in children's stories: likeable but slightly blank like Guybrush Threepwood in MI1 or Tintin.

I agree with you about Half-Life - it has the best introductory sequence I've ever played and it made me wish that it would turn out to be an adventure game. However, I think the mute protagonist is even more effective in the Myst games. I think the reason it works is because, like slightly blank main characters, the player is able to impress something onto the player.

That said, if your game's plot relates to the player characters history, emotions or psychology then I guess they would need to be very well fleshed out and the success of the character would be a matter of good writing.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

As with writing any story, your central protagonist(s) should always have the most focus and the most attention paid to them so that the player/reader can relate to them and their situations whether they are black, white, alien, good or evil.  I got some pretty good advice on protagonist and secondary character creation from Writing the Breakout Novel:

1.  The protagonist should have multiple layers of challenges going on, all of them tied together in some way.  The more the better.

2.  Any secondary characters you intend to focus on should have their own challenges going on, but these challenges should tie in some way with the protagonist and his/her struggles.


In this way, the secondary characters can have important issues of their own, but somehow these conflicts all go back to the protragonist in some way.

Focus on the player character but don't neglect secondary characters who can have an impact on the story.  This makes the world you create more believable.

[Ali]

I got some pretty good advice on protagonist and secondary character creation from Writing the Breakout Novel:

Writing a novelisation of Breakout eh? Who is the main character, the bat or the ball? I'd write it about one of the bricks you have to hit twice before the ball goes through. And for the sequel Dr Mario!