Board 8 > Your First Thought 70: "Generic McDude."

(+) Yeah! (+)

I thought of the Call of Duty guy who was in that one character battle.

Who, looking it up, was in fact Soap MacTavish. (I also didn't realize/remember that there were 3 CoD characters in 2010, but Soap is the one that I was thinking of)

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For fuck's sake.

I think it was Cloud again. I'm not sure if it was him or Jay Solano.

Fuck it.
Jay Solano


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The kid from Tales of Symphonia popped in my head first for some reason.

Lloyd something or another.

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Nathan Drake

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BJ Blazcowicz

Even though the reboot series has characterized him well.


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Nathan Drake

Honestly given how almost every other character like him fares, it kind of impresses me he has any strength. He doesn't have a lot but he has at least a smidge of it.

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First thought was Master Chief, though I think my second thought of Doom protagonist fits better.

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Brain first went to Vyse for some reason. Second thought, Duke Nukem, was a little better.

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StealThisSheen posted...

Soap

That said, I think stuff like that meme above and the whole "Nathan Drake is so generic!" is kinda unfair.

If you're making a game intended to be based in reality, then your characters are going to look "generic" because they're going to look realistic. Realistic isn't absurdly spiky hair, 7 foot swords, and a million zippers.

It is completely fair to say that the character designs in a type of game with unmemorable character designs are unmemorable.

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I feel like Nathan Drake has a pretty memorable design.

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Nathan Drake is really only in the conversation for Generic McDude because he's one of the few western protagonists that Board 8 actually knows about. There was a period around like 2006-2015 where a LOT of protagonists had the same 'white dude with a sharp chin, a scowl, stubble, and a buzzcut' look. Shepard is actually one of them but he gets away with it due to being a spaceman. Drake isn't even in the same ballpark as, for example, The Guy From Infamous.

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hylianknight3 posted...

It is completely fair to say that the character designs in a type of game with unmemorable character designs are unmemorable.

I disagree to the extent that the only reason they're unmemorable in look is because they look like real, regular people that you could actually see every day, and that's the intention. Calling them "generic" suggests they're bad designs.

Like, if you throw Nathan Drake into a Final Fantasy game full of more bizarre, fantastical designs, then yeah, it's super generic to the point that it doesn't even fit the style, and that's bad design. In games like Uncharted, Call of Duty, and the like, it's the opposite. If you throw Cloud or Sora or JRPG protagonist #55 into one of those games, now THEY stand out and look bad.

Basically, the point I'm making is that it's really hard to make "memorable" character designs in realistic games without giving them some kind of bizarre, unrealistic addition to their design in order to stand out from everyday people. That doesn't mean the designs are bad, and stuff like that meme seem super dismissive to that fact. People are just used to more ridiculous designs from Japanese games, but it's not really a fair comparison.

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KamikazePotato posted...

Nathan Drake is really only in the conversation for Generic McDude because he's one of the few western protagonists that Board 8 actually knows about. There was a period around like 2006-2015 where a LOT of protagonists had the same 'white dude with a sharp chin, a scowl, stubble, and a buzzcut' look. Shepard is actually one of them but he gets away with it due to being a spaceman. Drake isn't even in the same ballpark as, for example, The Guy From Infamous.

Shepard also gets away with it because he's based on a good looking model

And has a female counterpart

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StealThisSheen posted...

Basically, the point I'm making is that it's really hard to make "memorable" character designs in realistic games without giving them some kind of bizarre, unrealistic addition to their design in order to stand out from everyday people. That doesn't mean the designs are bad, and stuff like that meme seem super dismissive to that fact. People are just used to more ridiculous designs from Japanese games, but it's not really a fair comparison.

I mostly agree with this but there is some merit to the notion that western protagonists often look samey, or at least used to. I think the trend has shifted over time to making characters that look realistic while still having a memorable design. Someone like Joel is a good example of a realistic, entirely normal-looking character that still has a design with personality.

Comparing them to anime characters is dumb though, yes. Especially when a lot of modern anime characters could stand to be much less overdesigned.

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For instance... Honestly, even though I said Soap because he was the first to come to mind, I'd argue his design isn't even really that generic at all. To people that play CoD, he stands out pretty decently from your typical "grizzled, stubble, buzzcut" dude even if just because he has a goofy haircut that even gets made fun of in the games. We're just so used to crazy hair like Cloud's and Guile's that it doesn't even register to us because Soap's hair is only goofy for a normal guy and not gravity defying batshit insane.

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Snake5555555555 posted...

BJ Blazcowicz

Even though the reboot series has characterized him well.

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StealThisSheen posted...

Basically, the point I'm making is that it's really hard to make "memorable" character designs in realistic games without giving them some kind of bizarre, unrealistic addition to their design in order to stand out from everyday people. That doesn't mean the designs are bad, and stuff like that meme seem super dismissive to that fact. People are just used to more ridiculous designs from Japanese games, but it's not really a fair comparison.

I agree with you in principle, but not with the lack of value judgment. Most of the people I see in real life are pretty generic/unmemorable. Same would be true if I went to a military base (in fact, more so because of uniforms and hairstyle codes), or a camp of archeologists, or whatever.

But I don't want to play as a generic/unmemorable character. Give me spiky hair and a giant sword any day.

Basically reality sucks.
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That's fair enough. I'm not arguing anything about preference.

I'm just saying it's easy to dismiss it down to "Gamers sure love their middle-aged scruffy brown haired guys!" or whatever, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized some of the names being listed here (by myself, even) don't really look like generic cookie cutters of each other at all.

Like, there's pretty much no way people are confusing any of Soap, Nathan Drake, Marcus Fenix, or Joel for each other.

Granted, you do then have cases of like, Male Shep and Cole, but I think overall western games have gotten pretty decent at it.

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Jay Solano

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the Resistance guy
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James Sunderland

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