STORY DEVELOPEMENT: KILLING OFF CHARACTERS

As an aside, Call of Duty 4 did the best job of killing off characters I have ever seen in a video game. Hot damn.

I don't know how many good topics I wanted to revive because I never got the chance to respond =) Besides, new topics aren't necessarily opening up at a fast rate.

Keep in mind only thing with creative license, the only real "rule" about stories or your games, and that is that there are no rules at all. Never and always have no place here =) But it is good to hear how people would react to these happenings.

As game developers do you view killing off Characters as a useful Story Device, do you feel that it is over used, or do you feel that is just pointless, and if so what occasion for each question.

There are various ways of killing off characters and various reasons, some more right than others. I hate to immediately point to obvious examples, but Aeris (Final Fantasy VII) and Paul Johnson (Call of Duty 4) immediately some to mind.

Whilst both character deaths are indeed imprinted in the mind of almost every gamer out there, I don't think they had a huge impact on the gameplay. Though Aeris' death was important to the storyline, what with her being the last of her kind, and her constantly helping Cloud, it didn't change how the game played. I barely used her in my party as it was so she was never really missed and her death just felt like another plot twist and never really affected me. The same with Paul Johnson in CoD4. I thought his death was dramatic, well executed and suited the moral purpose of the game's plot while delivering shock value. Playing as him beforehand wasn;t pointless as it introduced the conflict with Al Asad nicely. The point is, the second he was dead and I was back playing as Soap, I forgot all about him, and again, didn;t miss him in the slightest.

To be quite honest, Final Fantasy VII would have been perfectly enjoyable with or without Aeris and CoD4 without Paul. The characters inevitably felt expendable to me, and of course, it's because they were scripted to die.

There are character deaths all the time, but I think the best deaths are the ones that just happen. There's no build up to it, no indication it's coming, it just hits them. And not only that, but for it to have an impact on the gameplay. Say for example, a comrade dies and you get their weapon (for example, a sniper rifle you'll have to later use heavily), if it doesn't have a long term effect on the gameplay then I'm not going to miss them.

In that sense I much prefer deaths that just happen out of nowhere and either give you an extra item or weapon or even ability to soldier on, or leave you screwed and looking to take down something really tough on your own.

Not one for drama me, eh?

I think that, if you're going to kill of a PC, make the player decide who bites it. This can lead to their thinking "Did I make the right choice?", especially if both characters are powerful. If you have the protagonist of your game thinking the same thing (obviously in a way that the player knows he/she/it is thinking this), it can lead to some good PC-Player correlation, hopefully causing the player to identify with the protagonist more.

EDIT: Good going Nick; P3 OWNS when it c=comes to killing of characters, like Mitsuru's dad, and