10 Annoying Narrative Video Game Clichés That Need To Die

7. The Out-Of-Body Character Swap

Many of you aren't going to agree with this, but that's hardly the point. If you'll cast your minds back to simpler times, just for a moment, think back to the likes of Half Life and its sequel, think of Doom, Quake, and remember how deeply connected you felt to your character. You were Gordon Freeman. You were that unnamed Space Marine. Through the course of these magnificent adventures we become one with the characters we were portraying. And then Call Of Duty came along and ripped us right out of that dreamworld, by tearing us from one lead character to the next, jumping continents, timelines, sometimes whirling us around so quickly that it was hard to know which character we were meant to be at any given time. Your squad commander is barking "Ramirez, get on that machine gun!" and you're standing there, lurking behind a hedge like an idiot, thinking "Damn it, this Ramirez guy is a slacker", until you realize that you are him. "But I was Soap a moment ago, I'm sure of it!". When Rockstar did the same thing with Grand Theft Auto V, it was too much to bear. Much of GTA: Vice City, San Andreas and GTA IV's charm was down to the relationship that we forged with our character, and by having us spirit-travelling between protagonists like some kind of Zen master killed that immersion in an instant. This method of storytelling reeks of laziness - the writers can't be bothered to come up with a feasible way to build a complete story with one character, so they split the narrative to suit them. It's a recent addition to the world of horrid game cliches, and it doesn't look like it will be disappearing any time soon.