- Joined
- Dec 31, 2004
- Messages
- 20,876
- Reaction score
- 419
I've seen this idea suggested here and on the Steam forums and at first I figured it simply couldn't work, but I decided to play devil's advocate and imagine a situation where it could, but would take a seriously massive amount of effort on Valve's behalf.
The main problem with custom characters is I think most people don't want to play this game with four Gordon Freemans. One of the best things about L4D is the character dialogue and how the four survivors interact. What I'd suggest is when creating a character, as well as obviously being able to customise the face and clothes of the survivor, having a choice of backstories and personalities to select.
Say if when selecting your character you had a choice of ten voices (five per gender), twenty backstories, fifty names and a long list of personality traits. Say a typical character sheet could be:
Name: James
Voice: Deep Male
Backstory: Lawyer
Traits:
The obvious problem would be creating the massive amount of dialogue needed to show off all these traits and a robust dynamic dialogue system that could generate interesting conversations with any combination of characters in different maps.
The idea would be you create a survivor (uploaded to Steamcloud) and then when you join a lobby you pick which of your survivors you want and an avatar showing a preview of everyone's survivor appears (so that you can see if two of them are too similar and change accordingly). At the start of the campaign all the survivors introduce themselves (like at the start of Dead Centre) and grow more familiar as the campaign progresses. Steamcloud tracks who's played with who and survivors who have met before will act like they know each other. If you've clocked up enough hours together they'll greet as old friends.
I never expect anything like that to ever happen though, seeing the massive amount of effort, writing and voice recordings that would needed.
The main problem with custom characters is I think most people don't want to play this game with four Gordon Freemans. One of the best things about L4D is the character dialogue and how the four survivors interact. What I'd suggest is when creating a character, as well as obviously being able to customise the face and clothes of the survivor, having a choice of backstories and personalities to select.
Say if when selecting your character you had a choice of ten voices (five per gender), twenty backstories, fifty names and a long list of personality traits. Say a typical character sheet could be:
Name: James
Voice: Deep Male
Backstory: Lawyer
Traits:
- Neat-freak
- Afraid of flying
- Anti-social
- Hates car alarms
- Never heard of the Midnight Riders
- Hates CEDA
- Movie buff
- Hates vans
- Experienced with guns
The obvious problem would be creating the massive amount of dialogue needed to show off all these traits and a robust dynamic dialogue system that could generate interesting conversations with any combination of characters in different maps.
The idea would be you create a survivor (uploaded to Steamcloud) and then when you join a lobby you pick which of your survivors you want and an avatar showing a preview of everyone's survivor appears (so that you can see if two of them are too similar and change accordingly). At the start of the campaign all the survivors introduce themselves (like at the start of Dead Centre) and grow more familiar as the campaign progresses. Steamcloud tracks who's played with who and survivors who have met before will act like they know each other. If you've clocked up enough hours together they'll greet as old friends.
I never expect anything like that to ever happen though, seeing the massive amount of effort, writing and voice recordings that would needed.
