Lack of other characters in 'walking simulators', does it bother you?

I was having an interesting conversation with a friend of mine recently. We were discussing the release of Tacoma and he said he didn't have any interest in playing it. Not because he didn't enjoy Gone Home but because he's getting tired of how a lot of these types of games (Firewatch, Edith Finch, Gone to the Rapture, etc.) mostly lack other characters or in person character interaction. You walk around in an empty world with only ghosts to tell you about the story. The reason, he states, that it bothers him is simply because it is becoming increasinly clear that the lack of other characters is a practical rather than artistic choice and it's taking him out of the experience.

Naturally in a smaller team with potentially less money to go around you need to cut some corners to get your game made and skipping on having to model, animate and maybe even voice other characters is a big and easy thing to skip if you can tell a story without them.

I personally was never bothered by it, but when he brought it up I had to reflect on the games and in thinking about it I can certainly see where he's coming from. Thus I was curious how you guys feel about it. Is the lack of other fully existing characters in these games a deterrent? Or do you accept it as a 'genre' specific thing?

I think he's 100% correct. I didn't care at first but it's really becoming noticeable and starting to take me out of these kinds of games. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter wasn't perfect but it at least was a step forward in this regard.

I can definitely see where he comes from, though I feel Firewatch (the only one I've played, actually) did it extremely well. Even though it wasn't physical, the interaction between characters was great. I have no interest in playing other ones though, for various reasons.

I mean I definitely would be more interested in a "walking simulator" with a whole host of characters to interact and have dialogue with. But yeah you're going to need a bigger budget for that and it's not easy to pull off correctly.

You guys might want to check out OBSERVER, that rutger hauer scifi game from the layers of fear devs, came out today. It at least features some talking to other people and making dialog choices from the little I've played so far.

@lestephan: That's cool, I was looking at it on Steam couple of days ago but wasn't sure exactly what it was. Hearing that though I might check it out.

I definitely notice it. Not just walking sims, there's a certain type of "experience"-style indie darling that even has zero dialogue, your Brothers, Limbo, Inside and Journey for instance. I appreciate that some of them(Like Firewatch, and Edith Finch) have incorporated dialogue between characters. It's odd to have these more personal, emotional experiences completely alone after the party already ended and everyone else left. I think that's why To The Moon is one of my favorites while games like Limbo and Journey are games I don't really think about afterwards. It's more involving when the plot is happening around you instead of before you got there.

Based on my minimal experience with the genre, (Gone Home, Beginner's Guide, Firewatch, Vanishing of Ethan Carter, and does the Stanley Parable count? Maybe a bit different) that hasn't been a problem for me personally. Coincidentally, the ones with no people I've enjoyed the most and the one with the most observable characters (Vanishing), I liked the least. These games tend to be more personal or grounded and not seeing NPCs with looping animations and repeating dialogue, forcing the players to imagine them, allows me to learn about the most relatable characters in gaming.

Not saying it couldn't be done or shouldn't be done and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter isn't indicative of anything. I just personally don't have a problem with the lack of NPCs 'cause I've had a good time with them. It's very hard to do anyways, I mean look at pretty much every game in existence. How many of them do characters well.

Sometimes it's good to leave things to the imagination. Look at what they're doing with Rachel in Life is Strange, nobody wanted that.

It's obviously a budget issue, animating and lip-syncing character animation is so much more expensive and time-consuming than environment art. So I get it, especially coming from indie studios. But generally I'm not a fan of that style of storytelling, where you're some latecomer who shows up after the more interesting story is already over, and pieces together what happened. It's not just walking simulators either; a lot of big budget action games like the first few Bioshocks have this same problem. I think it's telling that the designers of Tacoma and Gone Home come from a Bioshock pedigree, because in all three I felt like the character introduced in the epilogue of a novel who walks into the room and scratches his head.

That said, I really loved Firewatch, because I felt like I was a character who was actively involved in an ongoing story and had an evolving relationship with another human being, rather than just a guy who showed up after the interesting parts were already over. So I think a game with little-to-no NPCs can be done well, if the designers can fill that gap with something else. But I do agree that a game like Gone Home (and presumably Tacoma, though I haven't played it) which is basically just "Audio Log: The Video Game", just does not interest me in the slightest.

I think looking at them as "rummaging simulators" more accurately describes the players perspective. If i'm going to take a deep dive on someone's history and personal effects then I'd rather not meet any of these people face-to-face. Games such as Tacoma have the ability to tell a story by removing the interpersonal element so you don't have any "guilt" (or read: more narrative complexity) over going through someones very personal shit without recourse.

I believe that bringing NPC characters into these games actually causes more issues in terms of morals and story telling, not that this couldn't be done, which goes against the idea of a "budget" / "non-AAA" / "small team" game.

Would I like to see a human element brought into this genre? Hell yes! But I understand it massively adds to the complexity and therefore budget of games in this genre. It's a good question that's worth discussing but I don't think it should devalue the tight experiences of games like Tacoma, Firewatch, Gone Home etc.

Yes and no. I would say what bothers me more is what we decided to call it because it seems oddly given that these these types of games are almost always some sort of mystery. i.e. something happened here and you have piece together what it was exactly. Don't get me wrong, I love mysteries, thrillers, all that shit. I live for it. However, that's essentially what defines this genre now. Now the term "Walking simulator" in my mind doesn't really mean walk around and enjoy shit. It's synonymous with first-person mystery and/or thriller as far as I'm concerned.

I realize it's probably a weird problem to have, but meh, whatever. If we're going to give this genre such a broad label, I would like to see some more variation. Like, I dunno, why not a game about a couple of friends on a hiking trip where nothing goes wrong? There's no mystery to solve or anything. The game is just you bonding with these characters. Throw in some dialogue choices for replay value. Add in some alternate routes. Because this is an indie game though, nothing can ever be that simple so over the course of the game you learn one of your friends is moving away, another found out they have cancer, and the last is wrestling with their sexuality. Also it takes place in 1980 because fuck it.

I don't mean to make light of those things, but the point is there's a lot you can do with characters and setting. There are probably walking simulators that don't fit into the whole mystery mold, but the ones that get all the attention sure as hell do. I just wanna see some developers take a crack at mixing things up.

I've never had a problem with it and it's not that easy to just conclude that because the game lacks the presence of a character that it was a decision made to save on development resources. Using Firewatch and Tacoma as examples of this being the case ignores the context of the stories themselves. Especially in Firewatch, where the motivation for several of the characters to be in a place away from other people is an important part of the overall narrative. I've always found these games to be archaeological in nature and purposefully designed to be a solitary internal experience for the player. So many games create worlds with many characters but they are a majority of hollow examples of character meant to create the illusion of a living world. I've been playing Breath of the Wild and the game has numerous characters, but I've yet to meet any that have had any important impact on me or that appear to have rich internal lives that I can learn about or intuit. The same goes for many other open world games where a majority of the characters exist to create the appearance of a functioning world and are in reality just going about a daily cyclical routine of zero consequence to you or the game world. In many of these cases I wouldn't even call them a character, rather just a cipher moving through space as part of an approach to world design.

Some are for sure, but I think several of these games have isolation and loneliness as themes of sorts. There's room for other things for sure, but I will say games like Gone Home, Tacoma, and Firewatch use that aspect.

The Witness made me incredibly stressed out at times because there was just emptiness on the island.

The sight is dismal;/And our affairs from England come too late:/The ears are senseless that should give us hearing,/To tell him his commandment is fulfill'd,/That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead:/Where should we have our thanks?

I mean, I'd probably still play that Hamlet epilogue walking simulator and you're damn right that I'd play the Hell out of a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead game.

I haven't played many walking simulators, but the solitude in these type of games has bothered me at times. Gone Home felt so lifeless without any characters to bounce plot points off of, whereas the story in Firewatch hit so much harder for me because I was discovering the secrets of this forest with another person, even if you don't see them until the end of the game.

I'm kinda with your buddy. Gone home was great, but I don't think I can do too many more monologue games.