Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-628612-20151126212359/@comment-26372030-20151214145948

leadblast, while you certainly explain your points well and i can get what you mean about a lack of caring, the fact is i DO engage with the story more if the main character is something of a blank slate, as although you point out we are not fighter pilots, in reality the Ace Combat often try to present us with a idealized concept of what it means to be a Ace. its not a fight sim, its marketed primarily as pure escapism and i find escapism works best if i feel im in the cockpit and not piggybacking behind someone's shoulders.

The main aim of these games is to get you to feel You are the plot, before any story becomes reverent. as a good example Ace combat 5 had me caring about 'MY' squad by having me fly and take off with them, you don't see any names or faces, just call signs and already your invested in the radio chater and experiencing the story before any pre-rendered cut scenes. I saved EDGE from being captured, 'I' took down the Arkbird and 'I' felt an actual loss when CHOPPER went down.

by contrast we have Assault Horizon, where with a real world setting and new ideas the developers clearly tried to develop some of your theory's. giving the playable characters, faces, voices, back story's... the works, this backfired badly when they then needed to justify multiple protagonists with different piloting skills all meeting on the same base at the end of nearly every mission, this suddenly left the story switching every other moment often with disjointed parts and jarring play-styles form one mission to the next. it often left me very confused as to who i was with, who i was against and what at any point was going on.

in my opinion the characters were also sadly horribly under developed in AH, again with the developers trying to be inclusive and cover all the bases of what people might want in a protagonist the result was 3 generic mary sue protagonists and one slightly more interesting and credible bad-guy (indeed if i find im rooting the bad-guy more than my player character in a ace combat game, something somewhere has gone very wrong.) where we are given lovingly crafted first person cut-scenes every other mission and all the three character's can do when they meet is say;

'hi, its good we all came back from that.'

that's it, i struggle to remember a single moment where i felt ANYTHING for who Bishop might meet, hell i had forgotten his name was Bishop, till you posted.

and that's why, they keep the ace combat protagonist a dumb mute.