Now that we're in the safety of this hider, I'd just like to say outright, FUCK THE VOICED PROTAGONIST! FUCK HIM TO DEATH! If there's one thing Bethesda (and video games in general) have been known for, it's shitty voice acting. Boy, what joy the board must have felt when the guy in charge suggested, that instead of giving players the creative liberty of imagining their character's voice, to instead hire rising gaming star Whitebread McGeneric with all the funds they diverted away from hiring writers and programmers that know how to make morally challenging factions that feel like they have an actual effect on the world.
What a
genius that guy was! what a
champ! They should make him the new goddamn president of Bethesda and totally ignore the angry teenager outside their studio loudly demanding that the man responsible be slowly lobotomized with a soldering iron!
After all, it's not like anyone was planning on playing as an actual character with their own philosophies or motivations or anything. I remember my days in the magical world of Daggerfall, when even though it crashed every 30 minutes and sometimes you had to switch to climbing mode in order to get up and down stairs, you had the freedom to do practically anything you wanted, traverse across a
gargantuan continent, and, most importantly, play as anyone you wanted. Sure, it wrote your backstory for you, but did you have to pay attention to it? Hell no. Did it ask why your character couldn't use ebony weapons? Pfft, no! It could have been because you were physically allergic to expensive weapons for all the game cared, it let you be exactly who you wanted to be, no questions asked, and that's why I loved it.
Skyrim granted somewhat less liberty, in the form of not really giving a fuck who you were before you got dragged in by the border police. As long as the character you had in mind liked to heave xir weapons back and forth around the screen in a slow, sticky, repetittive manner, and has no basic conception of unarmed combat higher than "Haymaker" and "Camera-Jostling Haymaker" you're fine. Diversity not included.
Fallout has always handled this fairly well, I've felt. I mean, you can be anyone within reason. You're obviously not going to be an alcoholic Geisha archer (I tried it once in Morrowind!) when you're the descendants of a bunch of American Vault Dwellers, but that's alright. I'm fine being anyone within reason. The problem is, Ryan Rehnnolds or whoever the hell it was they hired does not sound like Filthy Willy, the chain-smoking cardshark with a thing for revolvers and knives. He sounds rather like Unrecognizable Fuckface, the generic blank sheet that my character is supposed to fit into. What if my character's southern? What if my character's from North Dakota? Nope! No individuality for you! You're going to be Troy Cookie-Cutter-Ass Baker, the guy whose barely introduced spouse is frozen, and you're going to like it, because focus testing shows that everyone loves that guy!
Well now I genuinely think less of Troy Baker, and I feel that if you were going to railroad us into that shit, you shouldn't have cockteased us with the idea of being anyone we wanted and taken away character customization too. Fuck it, why don't you shovel out the rest of Fallout and just put a pirated copy of Mad Max in the box? At least Mad Max is a pre-established character that I actually enjoy. I don't like your boring Troy Baker Bullshit character encroaching on a creative space that used to be mine. What happened to the days when you got to dictate your and your family's history, rather than an overstated intro and some fucking holotapes? Guess those are gone. They moved all the effort to creating the backstory you hate away from creating a main questline that was actually interesting.
See!? This is what happens when you try to make an inherently impersonal aspect of a game personal. You want to give the players a character they'd like to play, and a nice motivation to get the story going, but suddenly, you realize you just took away any hope of the players having a character they'd like to play, drained their immersion and souls by taking away the opportunity to give them their own personal motivations for carrying on, and overall increased the shittiness of the experience by at least 5 Measurenumbers. You try to make Lobo a serious Character, and he comes out looking like something out of
Stephanie Meyer's rendition of Shadow Over Innsmouth. It's
bullshit, and it's
wrong! Media, a lesson in this, there is! If it ain't FUCKING broke, don't FUCKING fix it! You'll balls it up because you're morons!
