With Portal 2 being one of the most successful Valve video game releases when it comes to critical reception, the developers who worked on it are now talking a little more about the choices they have made for the game and the reasons behind them.
A lot of people wondered whether Valve was making game main character Chell a female Gordon Freeman, considering her athletic skills and her decision to never talk during either Portal or its sequel.
Speaking at the Game Center that has been set up at the New York University, Erick Wolpaw, who is one of the main writers working on
Portal 2, has said, “We always assumed she could talk and simply just chooses not to, what with these robots all being dicks. She's not giving them the satisfaction of saying anything.”
The Valve developer also believes that the entire setup of the game and the way humor is worked into it benefit from the fact that Chell does not say anything but is very adept at expressing things through her interactions with other characters in the same universe.
He added, “Portal is definitely the world gone mad with a straight man. And the straight man is you... Because you have to write in the margins in the game, time is kind of at a premium. The fact that there's already this established thing where you can have a silent protagonist, that saves us a lot of time.”
Erick Wolpaw believes that the talking bits of
Portal 2 are safe and sound in the hands on experienced actors like J.K. Simmons, Stephen Merchant and Ellen McLain and that making Chell speak might actually make her less interesting to gamers.
Valve has dropped a number of hints about Chell's past in the two Portal games and in other material linked to the franchise, but it's still not clear who she is, which probably means that the company is already working on Portal 3, which might deliver some answers.
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