Max Payne 3 was revealed recently and boy, did the hard-boiled noir cop let himself go. No longer the soap opera stud he was in Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne - he really fell - he's bald, sports a tangled beard and looks like he had a few too many chalupas. He sort of resembles Carl from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, y'know, if Carl was a former New York City detective who had his family murdered.
Upon first look it's quite a bold design choice for the character considering his neo-noir origins. Outside of Frank Miller's Sin City, you don't typically see bearded, bald guys with paunches gunning around. Even if you do, they're built like brick walls. But not Max. He looks more comfortable downing a few Coronas than he does somersaulting in bullet-time anymore. The only drastic design change between games that compares to this might be Old Snake from Metal Gear Solid 4. Can it be that Old Snake's geriatric adventure opened the way for more over the hill main characters?
But wait, at the same time there's something awfully plain about this new Max Payne. Oh yeah, he's bald. Like every other space marine and gravelly-voiced gunman in a game designed by a Western studio. Look at this:
Hmm.
Is hair still too difficult to render properly? Is it a waste of resources? Or do these artists just have a severe crush on Bruce Willis from Unbreakable - notice the penchant for hoods, too. Or do they do this to balance out the abundance of
girly Gackt look-alikes in all those Japanese games?
Max Payne 3 was revealed recently and boy, did the hard-boiled noir cop let himself go. No longer the soap opera stud he was in Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne - he really fell - he's bald, sports a tangled beard and looks like he had a few too many chalupas. He sort of resembles Carl from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, y'know, if Carl was a former New York City detective who had his family murdered.
Comments (1)
re: bald protagonists
Clearly, I take this one a little bit personally because of the dude on the bottom left (though I would like to point out that I was in no way involved with the decision about his hairstyle), so bear with me. :)
I think one detail that often gets forgotten is that it's one thing to make hair look good in a screenshot, it's another to make sure that hair looks good in motion.
So the question becomes: is it worth devoting resources (both in development time to create the tech and assets for good looking hair AND the runtime resources [the easiest and not quite correct way of thinking about this is to think about how much of an effect it has on framerate] in favor of any other feature [like, for example, a more complex AI]) to make long flowing locks in order to differentiate your hero, or are those resources better spent elsewhere?
This is a bit of an old anecdote, but I remember hearing about how one programmer spent an entire year making sure Lara Croft's ponytail looked good. An entire year! Maybe more! And making sure the damn thing waves nicely in the air doesn't come cheap either. [WARNING: examples for the sake of argument, all scenarios are totally made up!] Making sure Lara's ponytail moves nicely might mean that every other character in the game has 4 fewer animatable joints. Or, maybe, there can only be up to 10 characters on-screen instead of 12.
I think CliffyB said it best when he said, "it's not about making the best game possible. It's about making the best game possible with the resources you have."
In Tomb Raider's case, the ponytail is iconic, and every extra detail on Lara Croft makes a huge difference. Tomb Raider is about Lara Croft looking cool doing cool shit, so, in this example, spending those resources on hair is entirely worth it.
Is it possible that every game developer has a huge mancrush on Bruce Willis? Sure. I know I do. But usually the answer to the question "why is every protagonist bald?" has more to do with resource management than personal preference. The real interesting question to ask when thinking about this issue is: "what game features would I sacrifice in order to have different hair?" with the additional followup of "how would I know that that's a smart sacrifice when only a half of the game has been built?".