10 Video Game Tricks Players Fall For EVERY Time
5. Trusting Characters That Ultimately Betray You
Whether in the real world or the world of a video game, people want to believe that those closest and kindest to them genuinely have their best interests in mind.
While it’s fairly unlikely that someone's actual best friend, boss, teacher, romantic partner, or parent is going to betray that bond, the same can’t be said of the people they latch onto in the virtual space. On the contrary, gamers continuously fail to learn their lesson no matter how many times they’re double-crossed.
The last 25 years alone have been ripe with initially friendly characters who turn out to be devious adversaries.
Just look at conniving punk Eric Sparrow in Tony Hawk’s Underground; the legendarily cunning Atlas in Bioshock; the amusingly antagonistic GLaDOS in Portal; the disgustingly perverse Mark Jefferson in Life is Strange; and the ruthless General Shepard in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 for proof of that.
Even after experiencing multiple deceptions across multiple titles, plenty of players are happy to trust whomever they come across in their next adventure as long as the person in question isn't overtly bad from the start.
Perhaps that’s why the ultimate treacheries presented within the successors to some those games – among various other titles – still left people shocked, such as Wheatly in Portal 2 and Russell Adler in Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War.