Games where You're Not "The Guy"

[GENOSAD]

I had a conversation with a friend a while ago where he argued that Master Chief isn't "The Guy" or any sort of "chosen one" because he's really just one of thousands of Spartans. As someone who hadn't played through the Halo series yet, I agreed with him at first until I noticed just how much everyone in Halo sucks the player's cock at the first sight of them. Everything is about Master Chief, and while he might not have been The Guy if he wasn't the last living Spartan, he's the only person in the galaxy who actually has the power to turn the tide in humanity's favor, which is precisely what defines him as The Guy.
Reach is a different story though, not just because you die at the end, but because you're one in a group of other Spartans who are just as powerless to the conflict as any human space marine would have been. It's why I put Reach as "pretty good, I guess" in opposition to the absolute slog that was the rest of the series (aside from ODST, I'll still defend it).

I also came across a video about S.T.A.L.K.E.R. more recently, where the uploader talks about how The Zone is uncaring to you as the player, and as such you're not really The Guy. I had flashbacks to that same Halo conversation where it was clear that my friend was just grasping at straws for reasons to define Halo as the best series ever, when in reality he was just nostalgic for it. On the surface, you could say that you don't play as The Guy in Shadow of Chernobyl, but once you get through the story, you find out that you were playing as a stalker who already held a high status in The Zone. Surely, that's enough for you to be known as The Guy even if the devs did everything they could to make you feel like a true loner. You'd have a better case for saying that you're not The Guy in Clear Sky (where the titular faction goes as far as to say you're the only one with the power to help them with their goal) or Call of Pripyat (can't think of a counterpoint because I haven't finished it yet lol).
He also differentiates games that don't care about you with games that actively hate you, such as Getting over It, which is set up in such a "fuck you" way that the player is still, in some regard, The Guy being ridiculed. Psychological games like Silent Hill or The Binding of Isaac exist in a similar sense where, although they're not set up in such a ball-busting manner, the protagonists' journeys are entirely centered around inner conflict. Again: The Guy Being Ridiculed. It got me to thinking not just about games where you aren't The Guy, but also of what it really means to not be "The Guy."

To give the best definition I can come up with: In order to not be The Guy, you have to be set in a world of apathy where you're deprived of power, but not belittled by everything. You also need to not have any sort of status before the events of the game. Whether or not you have some sort of status afterwards is debatable, as by the end of the game you would have become The Guy, while having played as Him before he gained that status.

Some examples to wit:

• Any multiplayer horde shooter (Deep Rock Galactic and Helldivers come to mind)
• Shadows of Doubt
• Hypnospace Outlaw
• Hobo: Tough Life (yes, I'm just scrolling through my Steam library to come up with these)
• Papers, Please
• Mineycrafta
• Project Zomboid (debatable, since the game is very overt about the "this is how you die" aspect, going into The Guy Being Ridiculed territory)

 

[vulonkaaz]

• The Sims
• basically every simulation game
• Animal Crossing (before the 3DS version)
• Va-11 Hall-A
• basically every multiplayer game

my definition of not being The Guy would be not being too special compared to other people and not having a story that has like major implication for the universe as a whole

 

[GENOSAD]

The Sims

Nigga you literally play as God in this.

Animal Crossing (before the 3DS version)
Va-11 Hall-A

Comfort games, absolutely! Can't believe I didn't consider small-scale genres like that, I was more wrapped up in the concept of adventure-based games.

You're totally right about multiplayer games, although I was thinking more in line with singleplayer games. Kinda my fault for bringing multiplayer horde shooters into the mix in my OP.

 

[赤い男]

Call of Pripyat (can't think of a counterpoint because I haven't finished it yet lol).

Degtyarev is THE GUY, he faced almost the same shit as strelok, is implied that at the end of the game he earns his status as another "legend of the zone"

My primary issue with the stalker narrative revolves around its ludonarrative dissonance. (same as i have with gta 4) Throughout the game, you find yourself eliminating countless individuals and mutants, confronting entire armies and elite forces solo, and ultimately vanquishing psychic paramilitaries like the monolith. Yet, despite these feats, the prevailing message remains: "the zone is indifferent, perilous, and you are merely a disposable pawn." Frankly, this disjunction never truly resonated with me. Instead, I found myself effortlessly mastering the zone, bending it to my will. In essence, the protagonists, emerge as the unequivocal masters of the zone.

Stalker's plot is stupid and is mostly aesthetics, substance over matter, which is still fucking awesome.

i would argue that rarely any game does that part right, because is very situational, and based mostly on roleplaying

Project Zomboid

I have a 6 months playthrought and i stopped playing because i literally created a self sustaining base, i cleared the entire rosewood from zombies, and is just an stable settlement with nothing to do, people hypes up the difficulty, but once you get used to the game YOU ARE THE GUY.

• basically every multiplayer game

Unless you become a competitive e-athlete, then you are the guy

• Va-11 Hall-A

JILL IS THE GAL!

Try harder geno, you are starting to sound like a youtube essay, the only thing lacking is that smugness that comes from overthinking a trivial topic.

 

[赤い男]

Everyone can become THE GUY with enough effort, that's why i love RPG's and sandbox like kenshi

You start like a hobo, and you ended up beating the crap with a turbo suplex RKO to cat-long

 

[wonderfullife]

I suppose some other more obvious options would be games like Kenshi and games from the Mount & Blade series as they are often advertised as placing you in the shoes of an average person. Both games/series start you out as a nobody. By the end of the game you don't even have to become special. Personally, I very rarely go down the route of becoming a ruler in MB Warband and just enjoy trying to build a caravan or merchant character.
In Kenshi you are often "belittled" by just about everything, in the beginning at least.

X4 has maybe a similar concept, though I am only just beginning to learn this game. You start out with very little and are left to you own devices to figure out how you would like to proceed with going about your space adventures. It seems very in depth, and complicated, maybe to a fault because as a new player I definitely do not feel like "the guy" and am constantly overwhelmed with everything going on in the game.

Might be a debatable option as you don't really play as one soldier, but I think the original Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon has an aspect of this. Quite the contrast to the later games where you are essentially a hollywood action movie protagonist. The original is one of my favourites, highly recommend if you like shooters.
You'll play as squad of special forces soldiers. That alone might be too much of the guy syndrome but relative to each other and the enemy, each soldier isn't necessarily better. Everyone can die, permanently in your game. You die just as quickly as the enemy AI dies. A couple shots and you go down, you have a chance of only being wounded but often enough the guy is killed which removes him from the rest of the game. You'll then take over as another one of the Squad, and continue on. It really is up to you as the player to do well, running around aimlessly with no care will get your entire squad shot and killed very quickly. If the enemy gets the jump on you, nothing will be done by the game to help you out, you have to react yourself and figure out where they are and how to counter.

 

[№56]

Titanfall 1 had a "multiplayer campaign" where you could play through a series of maps in a fixed order with added story cutscenes. It was essentially the exact same thing as the game's regular multiplayer, but with "mission briefings" before every round started and transmissions from the various story characters that would pop up while you played the game. It might have been an interesting idea in theory, but in practice it was pretty stupid and didn't offer anything new compared to the rest of the game (which wasn't great to begin with.) Whether your team won or lost didn't affect the outcome of the story at all and the only way to play it was to join a session that was already in progress, dropping you into the middle of the story without any explanation of what was going on.
That was exactly what happened to me the one time I tried playing the multiplayer campaign. I joined on the very last map of the story and was greeted with a cutscene of my character launching off a space carrier while some general exhorted us all to do our duty and that he was counting on us etc. - no real explanation of what we were fighting for or what the stakes were. Then when the game started my team quickly got its collective ass kicked, but the little video transmissions from the game's real protagonists (who I wasn't playing as and who weren't even present in the game itself) didn't reflect it at all. The heroes and villains argued with each other over some issue I didn't understand and in the end one of them heroically blew themselves up in an explosion that killed me and all the other players, faceless grunts who ultimately didn't matter at all. The fictional characters won and all the humans lost. It was an almost perfect unintentional subversion of Call of Duty-style FPS campaigns.
That's the only game I've ever played that gave off a "you are not the guy" feeling, and it wasn't a very fun experience.

 

[Antoine]

I had a conversation with a friend a while ago where he argued that Master Chief isn't "The Guy" or any sort of "chosen one" because he's really just one of thousands of Spartans. As someone who hadn't played through the Halo series yet, I agreed with him at first until I noticed just how much everyone in Halo sucks the player's cock at the first sight of them. Everything is about Master Chief, and while he might not have been The Guy if he wasn't the last living Spartan, he's the only person in the galaxy who actually has the power to turn the tide in humanity's favor, which is precisely what defines him as The Guy.
Reach is a different story though, not just because you die at the end, but because you're one in a group of other Spartans who are just as powerless to the conflict as any human space marine would have been. It's why I put Reach as "pretty good, I guess" in opposition to the absolute slog that was the rest of the series (aside from ODST, I'll still defend it).

Interestingly Halo was originally planned as a "strategy game" in the vein of Bungie's Myth. In that game the Spartans would have just been your elite guys with no individual superhuman carrying the day. This gets to the heart of the problem, which is that it's rather hard to create an interesting game bound to a single character in which you aren't the guy.

This leads into some of the answers being given in this thread, zomboid and kenshi, which are pseudo strategy games themselves, using elements like isometric or bird's eye cameras and large scale world simulation. Much of the appeal of strategy games all along I believe was that they were games which presented action scenarios which weren't bound to the guy. People like Dawn of War 1 because it's about smashing waves of soldiers into each other, not because they like using it as a Starcraft alternative and really like memorising the build orders and optimal unit dynamics. The strategy perspective allows it to depict 40k in a way games like Space Marine can't. Massive impersonal scale.

Now arguably in every strategy game you are the guy, in the sense you're the commander. But another way to interpret them is that they're individual action games which make your control distant and abstract enough to not create a the guy factor.

When I play something like old X-Com I'm arguably the guy, the commander. But mission to mission it feels more like I'm playing as a small handful of expendable guys who are absolutely not the guy.

Halo itself is a game about being the guy. But one of my favourite elements was always the marines. Those guys are so fun because their behaviour is very robust and autonomous, they're very lively in their realisation and presence, because they were designed as "strategy game" units. They were made to be fun to watch from an impersonal perspective. I believe it was a massive missed opportunity in Halo to remove the master chief and make a game about marines. Now, idiots will say that's what ODST is, but since there are fewer marines in that game it's actually far more of the guy than Halo CE. Ditto for Reach if you ask me. So much of that game is one man armying through battles where nobody else has a notable presence.

Halo Wars realised some of this appeal, but was a weightless 2000s RTS game. Handles like that Lord of the Rings game. Not Myth.

I also came across a video about S.T.A.L.K.E.R. more recently, where the uploader talks about how The Zone is uncaring to you as the player, and as such you're not really The Guy. I had flashbacks to that same Halo conversation where it was clear that my friend was just grasping at straws for reasons to define Halo as the best series ever, when in reality he was just nostalgic for it. On the surface, you could say that you don't play as The Guy in Shadow of Chernobyl, but once you get through the story, you find out that you were playing as a stalker who already held a high status in The Zone. Surely, that's enough for you to be known as The Guy even if the devs did everything they could to make you feel like a true loner. You'd have a better case for saying that you're not The Guy in Clear Sky (where the titular faction goes as far as to say you're the only one with the power to help them with their goal) or Call of Pripyat (can't think of a counterpoint because I haven't finished it yet lol).
He also differentiates games that don't care about you with games that actively hate you, such as Getting over It, which is set up in such a "fuck you" way that the player is still, in some regard, The Guy being ridiculed. Psychological games like Silent Hill or The Binding of Isaac exist in a similar sense where, although they're not set up in such a ball-busting manner, the protagonists' journeys are entirely centered around inner conflict. Again: The Guy Being Ridiculed. It got me to thinking not just about games where you aren't The Guy, but also of what it really means to not be "The Guy."

View attachment 92820​

Every STALKER fan needs to take their goddamn medication and realise that /v/ greentexts trying to sound hardcore by spreading myths about the game are not actually accurate descriptions of STALKER. I've only played SoC but it's basically worse FarCry1.

Of course, the myths and unrealised ambitions of STALKER took on a life of their own and eventually inspired games which actually handle like that. The Hardcore STALKER mods (GAMMA and such) and Escape From Tarkov were both obviously made by people who loved the ideas of what STALKER could have and wanted to be. How do you feel about those?

To give the best definition I can come up with: In order to not be The Guy, you have to be set in a world of apathy where you're deprived of power, but not belittled by everything. You also need to not have any sort of status before the events of the game. Whether or not you have some sort of status afterwards is debatable, as by the end of the game you would have become The Guy, while having played as Him before he gained that status.

Some examples to wit:

• Any multiplayer horde shooter (Deep Rock Galactic and Helldivers come to mind)
• Shadows of Doubt
• Hypnospace Outlaw
• Hobo: Tough Life (yes, I'm just scrolling through my Steam library to come up with these)
• Papers, Please
• Mineycrafta
• Project Zomboid (debatable, since the game is very overt about the "this is how you die" aspect, going into The Guy Being Ridiculed territory)

I disagree since this basically makes the first act of every CRPG a "not the guy" game. Even though you're the only one with meaningful power or agency. A better standard in my opinion would be simulated autonomy of the world outside of yourself. Can entities and forces other than yourself do anything?

For example, I've recently been enjoying the works of Kuju London. They made Battalion Wars. But before that they made the video game tie-in for the movie Reign of Fire. Interestingly, the Reign of Fire game feels a lot like Battalion Wars. They clearly had the same ambition in each case. And that was to make a war game that felt alive. Reign of Fire is about convoys of vehicles and infantrymen running around firing glowing tracers into the sky to bring down dragons. Your role in this is to control one vehicle and coordinate with your allied forces to accomplish objectives. The levels and objectives are structured like those of a strategy game, and that's what it feels like. A strategy game in which you control one unit and are following orders like everyone else. You might be the most effective fighter, but are you the guy? I think an effective illusion that you aren't is created by the presentation and scale.



Then of course there's Battalion Wars. An action game in which you shoot from unit to unit in a little living toy soldier battlefield. Speaking of Battlefields, as far as I know one other game used this idea of swapping between entities in a battlefield that defined Battalion Wars.





Flip around a little? How do these strike as you as "not the guy" games? Only objection I can imagine is that you aren't really a guy at all. You're more like an observing force. Maybe a fair point, but I think this concession is the only way this is workable. Also relevant, the old Battlefront games, now recently re-released after several failed attempts at recapturing this audience. (too hard to readily find footage of this one because they named the new games the same thing as the old ones).

I loved these games because they really felt like I wasn't the guy, instead I was a piece of Star Wars or whatever else was going on. Much more fun than another shitfire survival game in which I'm technically beholden to so many forces but I can easily game and break them all and the other entities all have to cheat around them to not die immediately.

I feel like Drakengard 1 fits this category well because despite the fact you actually are "the guy" it never feels like it because the gameplay is so bad it makes you wish you were dying of trenchfoot in WW1 instead. In addition, every character (including the mc, whose only character trait is that he likes to kill people) is some kind of psychopath, and yes, this includes both child characters. While Drakengard 1's sequels (even Drakengard 3) and the NieR series have much better gameplay, none of them quite replicate the same surreal feeling of facelessness that Drakengard 1 does, like you and the enemy are on the same level, because in the sequels and spinoffs you feel somewhat empowered, whereas in the OG even the camera is your enemy. I'd recommend checking it out if you want an amazing story and to understand how CBT feels psychologically.

View attachment 92829

Take your medicine. Despite what /v/ told you Drakengard is actually very fun to play, in addition to being beautiful. And the characters are not psychopaths. And you are not on the same level as your enemies. You kill them by the hundred. What the fuck are you saying?

 

[MindControlBoxer]

Literally any multiplayer game that has simulation roots or implies to simulate something.
You can be "the guy" if you're really sweaty but the fun factors in those games its being part of a cohesive team. This goes from mobas to sports games to shooters.
I wouldn't consider 4x or strategy games because its usually an abstraction of the guy or you are literally the guy in the command central giving orders.
The line its blurry but also very district.
You can easily be "the guy" on cod despite being on a team while its hard to be "the guy" on battlefield since its a much more team reliant game.
Hard to do on single player because when you're playing by yourself you are the guy, otherwise there is no game.
Something like bf2 on the ps2 or conflict desert storm are technically riding that blurry line where you control not one guy but a squadron of people you can switch around.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOknLDZIOvk&list=PLyex3XU-d_c_-sKU0ujcwL6E65mYvqsxQ&index=8




But if those games are not the guy games then all dungeon crawlers and blobbers are technically it either since you create a squad a play with them all yourself.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pfr3I_N5cMw


Technically dms/dks would also be not "the guy" games since you are supposed to be just another guy, you're just the one that makes it, but i don't think that's what you mean.

I feel most competitive multiplayer gaems are the best example of it.
In sportball games for example, each one of these guys are a guy, but they all play a role in the greater scheme of things.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfQNK02vdUA


Hey @Antoine You would really like these "GAYmer word" sportsball games if you truly like this genre, its right up your alley I think.

 

[Antoine]

Apehoop is not very interesting as games or an aesthetic. I don't want to feel like I'm at/in a sportsball game, and moving a ball around into a hoop is boring. It does do the group effort with bouncing player input thing I like. Just I like it more if it's used to represent virtually anything else.

In something like a 2K basketball game the effect is something like a more complex table football. You never really get a feel for a player as one player. The collective team is like a tool which you're really manipulating all at once since things move so fast. If you were bound to one player I'd actually find the game a lot more interesting. Still not enough to play, but that's a more interesting idea at least.

And Call of Duty sucks because it's just the worst part of the "FPS: The Guy" experience haphazardly divided into eighths or whatever. Everyone is functionally playing out the most boring part of those games, which is that you're just moving through rooms killing everything as a floating turret. Only now it's harder. You aren't integrated into a very alive feeling experience.

Games like Project Reality, Squad, and Foxhole do this much more interestingly. The superior agency of players over bots is used to simulate more complex interactions and systems and create a far more alive world in which there is actually some scale to make you feel less the guy. Functionally an online game of Call of Duty is still about you and only you. What is winning or losing a round? By contrast Squad and Foxhole place you within a much bigger system made of human parts. Much easier to feel like you're not the guy when so much is going on independent of and superior to you. The only way to get anywhere in these games is to plug into something bigger than yourself and work with it.

 

[MindControlBoxer]

In something like a 2K basketball game the effect is something like a more complex table football. You never really get a feel for a player as one player. The collective team is like a tool which you're really manipulating all at once since things move so fast. If you were bound to one player I'd actually find the game a lot more interesting. Still not enough to play, but that's a more interesting idea at least.

Did you even watch the video? Its a 5v5 tournament each player controls a character Some players are tall an slow and play one role, some are small and quick, some are good at shooting the ball, etc.


Here is an NUBIAN playing it watch the video before you post a comment. Ironically I could see you getting into this "GAYmer word" type games, its the same type of tism scratch.

I do feel like the smaller the scale the more reliant on your teammates skill set it is though, one guy missing the shot on basketball its way more punishing than one ship getting destroyed on eve online in a 3000 ship battle.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwzMSfgJHUk




Call of doody its just a twitch shooter in current year but it wasnt at one point, thats why battle field took over since its a much bigger scale.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3pRra2T8Ao




Also i forgot on my post, Eve online its pretty much that, there is no "guy" just players in a simulated world LARPing. But every time i tried these games they just felt really boring since people have years and years of resources ahead of you, which i guess is the point, to be a small guy in a big world, but at this point its just real life in a different setting I feel like because you are actually invested(sometimes time wise sometimes monetarily sometimes both) in it so your losses are actually IRL srs bsns since you are using the irl resources when you could've been doing something else.

 

[Antoine]

Did you even watch the video? Its a 5v5 tournament each player controls a character Some players are tall an slow and play one role, some are small and quick, some are good at shooting the ball, etc.

Am I supposed to be impressed? It's one of the most pathetic things I've ever seen. Apehoop is a loud, hideous, obnoxious game redeemed by only in its physical incarnation by the viscerality of the game and the physical feats required to play well.

If we take away the physical aspect what are we looking at? An even more ugly and pathetic League of Legends.

Here is an NUBIAN playing it watch the video before you post a comment. Ironically I could see you getting into this "GAYmer word" type games, its the same type of tism scratch.

I do feel like the smaller the scale the more reliant on your teammates skill set it is though, one guy missing the shot on basketball its way more punishing than one ship getting destroyed on eve online in a 3000 ship battle.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwzMSfgJHUk

You've completely failed to understand me. If I wanted to deal with a complex system with many human parts I'd get a job. We can work interdependence and stakes into anything. How about 9v9 Sudoku with each player being responsible for writing the numbers into one square. Losing team gets executed after the game.

The idea of participating in a giant complex war is much more interesting to me than the idea of participating in a game of pro apehoop. The difference we might call aesthetic.

Call of doody its just a twitch shooter in current year but it wasnt at one point, thats why battle field took over since its a much bigger scale.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3pRra2T8Ao

Scale is one thing. Pace and intention are another. Battlefield and its like can get as big as they want, if they refuse to slow the fuck down they're functionally the same thing as Call of Duty since everyone is just sprinting and sliding around trying to burst down people who spawned within 5 seconds of them.

All of these games got insanely fast because the meta for mass player retention is to turn your war game into a rapid fire self esteem slot machine in which you fire yourself at the other side repeatedly and either kill someone or get killed every 30 seconds. This is not interesting to me. It's simple, stupid, and ugly. On one hand a war that feels cool is desired, and on the other, a game that's actually interesting and complex.

Also i forgot on my post, Eve online its pretty much that, there is no "guy" just players in a simulated world LARPing. But every time i tried these games they just felt really boring since people have years and years of resources ahead of you, which i guess is the point, to be a small guy in a big world, but at this point its just real life in a different setting I feel like because you are actually invested(sometimes time wise sometimes monetarily sometimes both) in it so your losses are actually IRL srs bsns since you are using the irl resources when you could've been doing something else.

Yes Eve clearly has stakes and scale but really feels like it devolves into a "who can waste more time" competition. MMOs tend to do this. I don't believe that that much going on in a game is necessarily healthy. The impression is enough. I'm very impressed with how Koei games and Japanese "strategy" in general tend to sell scale without all of the absurd work of trying to build a new working world in a computer with every game. Koei games feel better for what I'm after than paradox ones.

 

[Waitingfor2050]

Some of the games I remember in which your character is unimportant (at least initially).

Soma, the protagonist just finds himself in the thick of it for no reason, just a normal guy (canadian even if I remember correctly) And he is even less "the guy" when you find out he is a copy of his past self. Talk about not being "the one", there is even multiples of you lol.

Cave Story, you are one of the many robots that invaded the floating island, just one of the few that managed to survive by entering sleep mode/turning off after the invasion failed. Most characters just refer to you as some android, no admiration whatsoever.

Risk of Rain 1 and 2, your ship crashes into a planet and it depends on the character you pick but most of them is just "Random mercenary", "Random cook", "Random cargo loader".

In Subnautica you are one of the ship janitors, ship crashes into planet (oh this sounds like Risk of Rain again) and must survive with the help of an AI within your PDA.

Last one off the top of my head, The Forest, you are some random man in an airplane with his son, plane crashes and now you must save your child from cannibals, at all costs. He was very capable for a normal man, managed to fend off a bunch of cannibal tribes. Can't talk about The Forest 2, I'm playing it atm.

 

[GENOSAD]

The Hardcore STALKER mods (GAMMA and such) and Escape From Tarkov were both obviously made by people who loved the ideas of what STALKER could have and wanted to be. How do you feel about those?

The hardcore S.T.A.L.K.E.R. mods are most certainly better at keeping you from being The Guy. From what little I've played of Anomaly, the world gives much less of a fuck about you than the mainline series, and it does feel like they were realizing a vision that GSC wasn't able to achieve.

Haven't played Tarkov, but the general consensus here seems to be that any given multiplayer game is one where you aren't The Guy. From what I do know about it, Tarkov seems to be far, far away from The Guy's realm.

 

[Antoine]

The hardcore S.T.A.L.K.E.R. mods are most certainly better at keeping you from being The Guy. From what little I've played of Anomaly, the world gives much less of a fuck about you than the mainline series, and it does feel like they were realizing a vision that GSC wasn't able to achieve.

Haven't played Tarkov, but the general consensus here seems to be that any given multiplayer game is one where you aren't The Guy. From what I do know about it, Tarkov seems to be far, far away from The Guy's realm.

Looking into STALKER GAMMA I saw it do something I found very interesting, which is that if you play the Shadow of Chernobyl storyline it's modified so that you meet and work with the protagonist of that game, so that you can also play out the other STALKER plots with the same player character. I think that's really, really cool and clever. Of course the fact you can be central to multiple STALKER plots makes you a kind of superguy, but at the same time the game seems to really kick your ass. So doing all of this is like a super hardcore challenge option. I think I like the sound of what they're doing all up.

And as for Tarkov, it's kind of multiplayer. But perhaps in a fashion comparable to something like Death Stranding. Everyone is the protagonist of their own run and the game has a linear (if minimalist) narrative structure linking the things you do. In your own game you are the important go between man helping all the key players in Tarkov. In everyone else's game you're another asshole getting in the way. The game even plays around with this on a meta level at certain points. One of the job-lines is about hunting both AI Bots ("scavs") and other players ("PMCs"). Here's the job complete message for one of the big "Kill Players" jobs in Tarkov.

"Wasting Scavs is no big deal, they are inhuman anyway. But killing everyone indiscriminately, even your own guys... That's rotten business. Get your cash. This is it. Told them I'm out of it. They know about you, so they'll contact you directly if they need you. Don't know about you, but I really don't like this."

This isn't really just a multiplayer game. Tarkov was always a weird pseudo-artsy project.

Tarkov could and in fact does work as a single player game. Some people mod it so the role of other players is taken by bots for a less stressful time. The sense of not being the guy is created by how lethal the game is in both directions. You can kill anything with a good enough shot from the weakest handgun in the game, and the same can happen to you too. In this particular game you are not the guy because the world does no favours for you.

Look at this SV-98 I'm carrying in this screenshot. Doesn't that look like a protagonist's gun? Or a boss's gun? Some guy who thought he was the boss/protagonist was holding it. Then I shot him and took it home with me.

Here's a striking image. Me and another player carrying the exact same minimalist kit to do the same meme-job of close range bolt action rifle kills. Who is the guy in this case? Whoever walks away with the other guy's dogtags. This time it was me. Next time it'll probably be him.

Mechanically you are not the guy. You die to bullets as easily as the hobobot NPCs. Aesthetically you are kind of the guy and kind of not. The story is written as though you don't really matter but are recognised as useful if you play long enough. Your only real power spike over time is money and stuff, which you can lose very easily. And as you get stronger everyone else is too. Again, kind of like Death Stranding in that everyone is The Guy.

 

[Max Chill]

The Zone is uncaring to you as the player

STALKER Anomaly and its iterations embody this perfectly, albeit it took a lot of community involvement before this came into full, at least the most comprehensible, mode of imparting this fact through first hand experience. Might I suggest you start backtracking from STALKER and partake in the literary foundations that formed the Zone as we know it: "Stalker" (1979) by Andrei Tarkovsky, and "Roadside Picnic" by the Strugatsky brothers. they served as the foundations in defining the Zone, which frankly wouldn't even come to fruition without it.

Now, why is backtracking important?
Because at some point, once you start going neck deep like Strelok did, you may be ambushed by the spiritual nature and the essence that underlies the Zone's nature. You will not find that in the Zone of now, lest you encounter my militant brothers in the Red Forest (in which I pray you do not venture in without my guidance). It is not that the Zone is "uncaring", it is simply amoral. This is the Zone's inclination and nature, the primal truth; a steep mountain that you have to climb. This is one of the first truths that most stalkers won't come to reconciliation before their doom or their stay in the Zone. Be wary of those who see the Zone either as an evil or as a good, these men fall in the same traps regardless of the different roads they take.

The essence of the Zone is that there is nothing specific about it, withholding the series of events that brought it to its current malevolent state bent to the will of the C-Consciousness (may God guide us Sin in cleansing them from this synagogue of the wretched). It is a place where a certain limit is set, and a place where you can project your beliefs, fears, and wishes. To some, they see the Zone as their true home. To some, it is a hell they are forced to trudge as a last resort to earn something. Desires, goals, agendas, anything, that's what defines the Zone, but not its essence.

The spirituality of the Zone is that it is a synagogue for all wretched men. In the context of the Zone, wretchedness is detached to morals, detached to whether you are a good or a bad man. No, wretchedness is the one common link between all stalkers who decides to enter the Zone's embrace. Wretchedness, for all intents and purposes, is the state of the soul and spirit.

These are the truths I found in the Zone, truths that won't make its mark on you without entering the Zone and seeing its brutality and benevolence. If you refrain being "that guy" then be of no worry. Legends who are killed inside the Zone are the doing of the greed and envy of men, the Zone has no hand but being the temple that humanity keep spilling blood on for naught.

tldr: these are just spiritual ramblings of a Sin cultist, move along.

 

[GENOSAD]

Might I suggest you start backtracking from STALKER and partake in the literary foundations that formed the Zone as we know it: "Stalker" (1979) by Andrei Tarkovsky, and "Roadside Picnic" by the Strugatsky brothers.

I mean, yeah, I was already planning on doing that, but I don't see how that's conducive to the "being The Guy" discussion.

once you start going neck deep like Strelok did

The fact that people always end up talking about Strelok in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. discussions is honestly proof to me that he really is The Guy. Again, he had already been a legendary stalker before you played as him, and he continued to be so afterwards; you just never knew it. The fact that people continue to talk about him just re-enforces it from an external context.
(I know it's a bit late/pointless to hide this plot point behind a spoiler, but whatever)

 

[turntableToothache]

I wanna be The Guy.


View: https://youtu.be/jyZrQM8SMoU?si=nRVG6ZRDYePbfOI0


He's not the guy.

 

[Prufrock]

Battlefield/Battlefront, BFII(2005)'s campaign is even framed as the recollections of a common soldier after the war, although you play as any number of random clones.

Half-Life: Opposing Force & Blue Shift, where you play as a random U.S. marine and a random security guard, respectively. (There's some cool mods for the HL games made in similar style as well.)

TF2, for what it's worth, has you playing as any one of NINE guys lol.

The trouble with singleplayer not-the-guy shooters is that in order to be enjoyable games with lengthy and, presumably, violent campaigns, you are required to have a killcount in excess of what would be considered realistic or comparable to other common in-universe characters. You might start a Fallout game as some random 'not-the-guy,' but the style of gameplay necessitates slaughter of entire encampments of hostiles. Even if you slap on a mod that makes the playing field more even between the player and hostiles, the player's own knowledge, muscle memory, and ability to reload game files again places him firmly into 'the guy,' territory, even 'transcendent guy' if you consider player knowledge from outside the game itself and the save/checkpoint functions.

 

[Max Chill]

he really is The Guy

I would disagree, partly cause as you've defined that in order to not be "the guy" you'd have to be in an apathetic setting. If you mean "The Guy" in a sense that everyone depends or looks up to you when something bad happens or needs to be dealt with, then Strelok also doesn't fall to this. He has his own, should we say, agenda in the Zone and he actively limits his interaction with most stalkers. The fact that you, in-game past the trilogy, as a player can "beat" his feats is proof enough that he ain't "the guy", his legendary status is simply that akin to Yuri Gagarin except "the first to go in the center of the Zone, back and forth."