SIDEKICK 3 HIDDEN GAMES HOW TO
“Companions-out of all NPCs-can have the strongest influence on the player experience and thereby can either greatly increase or impair game enjoyment,” they wrote in a 2018 paper.Ĭompanions act as goal-givers and instructors, provide the player with cues about how to feel and details about the game-world, and support the suspension of disbelief. I’m talking about a specific kind that Katharina Emmerich and her colleagues in the Entertainment Computing Group at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany have called “companions”-persistently accompanying NPCs that support the player as allies in some nondecorative way. I’m not really referring to those sorts of sidekicks. Animals abound, including Epona from The Legend of Zelda, Trico from The Last Guardian, and Palicos from Monster Hunter World. Others, like Tails in Sonic 2, Luigi in Mario Bros., and Diddy Kong in Donkey Kong Country, debuted as player-controlled characters in co-op mode or merely tagged along after the star in single-player mode, then later got their own games. Some are largely cute or comedic foils for a (sometimes nonspeaking) avatar, like Wheatley and GLaDOS from Portal, Claptrap from Borderlands, 343 Guilty Spark from Halo, and Dog from Half-Life 2. Some are squadmates or party members who don’t appear on the screen except in battles, cutscenes, certain story sequences, or when executing selected actions, like Mass Effect’s Garrus Vakarian, Destiny’s Ghost, and Halo’s Cortana (who became an IRL AI assistant). Some sidekicks are typically attached to your character, carry your character, or ride around on them-your Yoshis, Kazooies, Cappys, Clanks, and Daxters, who equip the protagonist with more moves and only occasionally operate independently. “There’s a sense of shared reality and accumulated time together, which doesn’t happen in the same way in other media.”ĪI sidekick characters come in many forms. “One of the most interesting and enduring innovations of games is that feeling of ongoing copresence with an NPC, doing and being together in the gameworld,” says author and researcher Katherine Isbister, a professor in the Department of Computational Media (and the director of the Center for Computational Experience) at the University of California, Santa Cruz. When they work, though, they elevate interacting narratives and deepen the player’s emotional ties to the game. And because they have so many tasks to perform, they’re almost impossible to implement perfectly. They alleviate loneliness, enable banter and teasing, and facilitate character development.
They assist in navigation, puzzle-solving, and combat. AI companions provide friendly faces in a hostile environment. Jesse and a suite of several other nonplayer characters (NPCs) who accompany the protagonists of TLOU2 (including the equally capable and likeable Lev) are prime examples of one of my favorite figures in video games: the competent, personable, computer-controlled sidekick. It felt good having him around to deal with the WLF.”Īll Jesse does is look pretty, eat hot steak sandwich and safeguard his community and loved ones /Ykz31OuGbX- Gene Park June 25, 2020 Screenshot via Sony Interactive Entertainment If I had been journaling, I would have written something similar. In one entry, tucked amid the doodles, dark poetry, and death threats-your usual adolescent angst-she writes a brief tribute to Jesse, a friend who fights alongside her during parts of her quest. Ellie keeps a journal in which she scrawls some of her thoughts as the game goes on. That minor murder hang-up makes it hard to see eye to eye with Ellie sometimes it’s just like, “We snuck around swamps and slit soldiers’ throats yesterday, can’t we do something different today?” But although we didn’t always agree on whether to, say, head back to town and spend our days in peace and safety or venture into Infected-filled buildings and beat people with pipes, there was one moment when we vibed. Your mileage may vary, but for me, murderous rampages are a real relationship red flag.
There’s just one slight personality … well, let’s call it a quirk: She’s hell-bent on violent revenge, no matter how many hundreds of humans and dogs she has to slaughter or torture along the way. She’s got a great sense of humor, strong survival skills, and a unique immunity to the Cordyceps fungal infection-all pluses in a postapocalyptic America populated by cultists, mercenaries, and monsters. Ellie, a playable protagonist of The Last of Us Part II, is a tough teen to love.
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