Which do you prefer? A silent protagonist you can totally project yourself onto, or someone you can fully embody within their respective game world? As the gaming industry gets bigger, more talent will inevitably come on board to help bring a staggering amount of characters to life, but there's always going to be clashes between targeting a mass demographic with those same characters we know we're 'supposed' to like. For example where most people would say someone like Uncharted's Nathan Drake is damn-near loveable, others straight up hate his motormouth persona, with each line that created a special place in our hearts making others want to give him a slap. It's the difference between guys like GTA III's Claude and GTA V's Trevor - the script for Rockstar's immaculate 2001 industry-shaker barely making you realise your character didn't utter a single word. With Trevor though, setting up a set of questionable characteristics and motivations before forcing you to play as that person can be very off-putting across a lengthy runtime for some. In stark contrast to the pixellated characters of old, these days you'd be hard-pressed to find someone in a big-budget title that doesn't have tremendous effort put into making sure you can identify them - even guys like Watch Dogs' Aiden Pearce, who's about as dry as a 10 year-old cracker in-game. Oftentimes characters end up failing despite a gigantic marketing push, as if there's one thing that's gonna happen with thousands of banners screaming "Like this person!", it's a reactionary response of doing the total opposite.
