By Jeremy Hannaford (Contributor) – Email
Print Edition: November 13, 2013
While playing the Battlefield 4 campaign, I came across a certain trend most first-person shooters continue to follow which has become irritating. In a world where we have the technology to cause massive particle and material destruction, compose moving and captivating stories, and make online multiplayer the pinnacle of the gaming community, why do we still have silent protagonists?
This aspect of first-person shooters has been a fad ever since Gordon Freeman from Half-Life. For a time, it was humorous. The memes and comics were a great laugh at the idea of world-changing events lying on the shoulders of a resolved mute. But that fad has started to fade away. Now it’s just become ridiculous.
In Battlefield 4, developed by DICE, you play as a marine code-named Wreaker. You are put in charge of “Tombstone” squad after your commanding officer dies in the latest mission. And Wreaker doesn’t say a bloody word! There are so many moments in the story when he is asked questions or led into conversations and all that follows is awkward silence. It is so painful that it leads me to believe that DICE put little to no effort into the campaign at all.
The point of this isn’t to comment on Battlefield 4’s campaign, which is honestly awful, but to question why the player’s character is silent. It made sense in the early 90s, but now it’s just stupid. Call of Duty: Black Ops gave Alex Mason a voice and was of the best stories in the entire series because of it. A narrative that has a character controlling the situation around him and not simply following endless orders is someone worth engaging with. But even the Call of Duty series has followed this ridiculous ideal. Captain Price has always been a prominent character in the Modern Warfare series and even he succumbs to silence in the final act of Modern Warfare 3 despite having spoken throughout the entire game. Moments like “Ramirez, do everything,” need to stop once and for all!
But that has become common in most first-person shooters. The campaign doesn’t matter; it’s all about the mulitplayer. Which is all well and good, but why make a campaign in the first place if you know it’s not going to be as good as the multiplayer experience? Some would say the single-player is a tutorial for the multiplayer. Others would say that some people don’t have online capabilities. If that is the case, they are limiting themselves from so much content that online offers. But some would also say that without a campaign, the game fails. Case in point, MAG.
MAG (Massive Action Game) was an online multiplayer-only shooter game developed by Zipper Interactive, the creators of the SOCOM series. The game had an intriguing concept and while it received decent reviews, it failed with the public and its servers will be shut down in 2014. It is not certain that a mashed-together campaign involving a mute protagonist could have saved this game. It didn’t have the appeal Sony had intended, but it would have helped encourage sales for those who aren’t as inclined to go online for multiplayer.
In any case, first-person shooters can have playable characters with the ability of speech. It helps build narrative (especially when some games need it desperately) and removes any awkward conversations that require an NPC to lead out of it. And it needs to start becoming the norm.
