Critique Post

[getsciencedone]

Am I making GLaDOS act out of character. Anything you want to tell me about my playing.

Leave a comment if you do. Anon/screened and all that fun stuff.

Comments

[y_u_dothis]

First of all, I'd recommend enabling anonymous commenting. People who don't know you personally have no reason to trust that you won't do an acrobatic pirouette off the handle if they give you crit, so they'll either not comment at all to avoid wank or make sock journals like this to comment with...which either defeats the purpose of an HMD in the first place, or defeats the purpose of disabling anon comments. Just saying.

Anyway, on to the crit: your GLaDOS is painfully bland for a quirky, murderous AI program. I love the game and the character, but you are really playing it safe with her to the point where she's lifeless and uninteresting as a character. You've been missing opportunities to really make her shine, to really emphasize the personality she has, since her very first post; an insane computer program had just turned human, had just found herself exposed to emotions and hormones and fleshiness and appendages and even gender for the first time. She could have flipped out; she could have gotten hyper-emotional, or had a breakdown, or even grabbed the nearest person and shaken them until they gave her cake. There was so much potential there for something dynamic, something exciting to get people interested in her right off the bat!

Instead, she just sort of went "...hunh" and looked at her hands. Do you see what I mean? You're under-utilizing everything about GLaDOS, as a character, that makes her interesting, that makes her worth playing. It's really jarring to see a character with as much personality as GLaDOS has be sapped of all of it.

I'm not trying to be mean, but this is a really critical problem and my harshness is because you have to fix it if you want to do her justice. Get her out there more; think more about how extremely vast the chasm is between a robot run by (quirky and murderous) AI and a human woman and play more with it. Up all her reactions by several orders of magnitude. She should probably be more unbalanced and psychotic as a human, because now emotions and hormones are coming into play and not only do those make humans do crazy things, but GLaDOS hasn't ever had to adjust to having had them before so she probably doesn't even know how to regulate them. She should be the one doing an acrobatic backflip off the fucking handle. Have her be wittier and more sarcastic; refresh yourself on the canon if you need inspiration, it's only a few hours long. But she really needs to be, and deserves to be, a lot more than she has been so far...because what she most resembles is a speech-to-text program with no personality or inflection at all.

[getsciencedone]

Okay first of all. Crap. Totally thought I had anon enabled. I'll be sure to fix that.

Second. Thank you. No I'm not going to jump of the handle. You have a problem with the way I play GLaDOS, I want to know so I can fix it. Totally serious here.

I need to play her around more. I need to add more quirkyness to her character and more sarcasm. Also more unhinged behaviour. Much more of that.

Right now I have her being nice to some people because she's trying to get more test subjects. However I may have taken this too far. If this is what you mean by blandness. Then yes, I think I understand what you are getting at.

I'll refresh myself on the canon tomorrow and try to work a way into making her better and more realistic. GLaDOS is one of my favorite characters and I'd like to do her justice.

[y_u_dothis]

Fair enough. If you've been having her deliberately blunt her reactions to appear nice and normal to people, I'd recommend making note of that in [small] tags with some inner monologue so people get insight on what she's really thinking/feeling. Otherwise, it just looks like she's being bafflingly reasonable without explanation.

Also, I applaud you for taking crit well, I really do. ♥ I hope to play with GLaDOS in the future sometime, and everyone benefits the more awesome she gets.

[getsciencedone]

[Had to unscreen to reply]

Tags with her real thoughts. Yes, that's a great idea I should do more of. Honestly at the moment she hates everyone and thinks they're all idiots but is trying to hide that all behind a smile. I'll try to show more of her snark in her comments though so it doesn't look like she really cares about anyone here.

Pretty much everyone she's come across she see's as a potentional test subject. Which is why I've had her asking people if they have anything to go back to in their homeworld.
She's also had at least two other people take up her offer to come back and run some tests.

She did get very much more gloating and smug when she was talking with Hatter, who annoyed her the first time they met. I think I need to play her more with people that won't be polite with her right off the bat. Because she'll be less likley to be polite with them, which will lead to more snarkyness/hatred.

About the whole human thing. I'm thinking about having that as a delayed reaction. When she first discovered she was in a human body she was more curious then anything which is why I didn't have her freak out. I think as time goes on she's going to become more and more ....unsteady because of this human body as the novelty of it all wears off.

Also there's the fact that she's rather defenseless at the moment. She's used to commanding an entire Enrichment Center. Once she gets a few regains back she'll probably view that differently.

Also ♥ as well. Like I said, thank you. I'd rather someone come up and tell me what I'm doing wrong then continue to play her wrong.