- Joined
- Sep 11, 2013
- Messages
- 36
- Reaction score
- 23
- First Language
- English
- Primarily Uses
I think Muramasa gave the best answer; leave the option up to the player and you can make everyone happy.
That is unless you believe that players, with too many options, can ruin their own game. That a player may give a joking name to a character and then later not get as much out of the game as if they had been assigned a name. But that falls under another discussion of how much/what types of freedoms should a player have.
The larger gaming industry has kind of nullified this issue due to voice acting. Yeah, you can name the character in Mass Effect, but they are just going to be called Shepard the whole time. In Elder Scrolls the game is written so virtually no one ever addresses the protagonist directly (outside of some letters) so the game would play the same whether the character was given a serious name or not. The name you choose never really pops up aside from perhaps the save game file and status screen. FF10 was one of the last 'mainstream' party based games I personally played where you could rename the main character (Tidus) and it was just really bad because you could tell the writers were taking pains to avoid situations where someone might just yell 'Hey, Tidus!' (Dragon Age had a similar problem, but that game tried the silent protagonist, and switched to the it doesn't matter what the character is named, we're going to call him/her the same thing in DA2).
I used to rename characters until Star Ocean 2, where (if I remember correctly) you could rename all the characters, but Rena would still be called Rena during battles. Now I only rename characters wherein there are multiple paths (Fallout 3), and then I tend to give the characters names from literary characters who I use for a model of how the character 'acts'.
When I work on games I assign characters names just because it makes writing scripts a lot easier.
That is unless you believe that players, with too many options, can ruin their own game. That a player may give a joking name to a character and then later not get as much out of the game as if they had been assigned a name. But that falls under another discussion of how much/what types of freedoms should a player have.
The larger gaming industry has kind of nullified this issue due to voice acting. Yeah, you can name the character in Mass Effect, but they are just going to be called Shepard the whole time. In Elder Scrolls the game is written so virtually no one ever addresses the protagonist directly (outside of some letters) so the game would play the same whether the character was given a serious name or not. The name you choose never really pops up aside from perhaps the save game file and status screen. FF10 was one of the last 'mainstream' party based games I personally played where you could rename the main character (Tidus) and it was just really bad because you could tell the writers were taking pains to avoid situations where someone might just yell 'Hey, Tidus!' (Dragon Age had a similar problem, but that game tried the silent protagonist, and switched to the it doesn't matter what the character is named, we're going to call him/her the same thing in DA2).
I used to rename characters until Star Ocean 2, where (if I remember correctly) you could rename all the characters, but Rena would still be called Rena during battles. Now I only rename characters wherein there are multiple paths (Fallout 3), and then I tend to give the characters names from literary characters who I use for a model of how the character 'acts'.
When I work on games I assign characters names just because it makes writing scripts a lot easier.
