At least "bad ass" is better than annoying whiny little anime-kids.

as long as it is considered a legitimate form of FUN.

there are plenty of games that provide greater character depth. you are inappropriately complaining about these tps/fps that provide the fun experiences its players want. they dont want some emo thats trying to slice its wrists when you want the knife in someone else.

 Blah. They are both equally terrible. Thank God there are still many games with characters that don't fit either one of those labels. And they can be found both in RPGs and action games.

Master Chief is actually a direct descendent of Mr.T and Chuch Norris.. He doesn't need to scream "I'm a badass"!!

I agree. It does get tiresome to see the same character over and over again with a new face fighting a new enemy horde. And I don't think that a protagonist has to be a "bitch" to show a little personality. Just demonstrate a few human vulnerabilities and the player character will feel more like my good buddy and less like a wild gorilla tripping on his own hormones.

Travis Touchdown is a good example of a character with some real charm. He kicked a lot of ass, despite being horny, lonesome and insecure.

Well I agree with the sentiment of the OP. Too many characters today are bland and generic. there attitudes and lines are predictable. The writing is horrible and targetted towards frustrated teens.

Even in the recent WoW expansion recently there was a cutscene at the wrath gate. It basically went. "I challenge YOU!""You Dare Challenge ME!" " I will kill you" " I will Kill you all"3rd party comes in"How dare YOU!""Now I can kill everyone"....Just plain simple macho talk that really is the result of lazy unimaginative writing. Usually when I see this in the game or movie it makes me cringe and embaressed to like this medium.

Of course there are always stand outs. Stuff that is written or presented as macho and for whatever reason succeeds. Perhaps it is self injected humor or really tight writing or in the case of First Blood all of the tough talk being done by someone else or just you know shown(while the hero shows emotional distress and weakness). Hey I like movies like Running Man, Predator, Total Recall, Bourne Trilogy(except the 3rd one), D13, Transporter and so forth. They take you on a ride throwing everything in the book at you. The issue is that it is so overused in video games today it is just lazy.

Not every movie or game that attempts this will suck or feel generic but most will. Unless this is your cup of tea than you will eat up each and everyone.

However as story telling movies forward and games. And designs allow for characters to use more then just two moves(jump and shoot). And detail extends from 8x8 sprites to 120 polygons with blocky textures to more more detailed characters perhaps it is reasonable to ask for more out of game designers than sophmoric characters and writing.

It doesn't have to be emo. It just has to be different

I agree with the OP; the character has been done to death, and was generally horrible anyways. Look at the cover of KZ2; how many times have we seen that?

I didn't really see this addressed outside of the title so what exactly is "bad ass" art direction?

No kidding. Everybody was babbling on and on about the Wrath Gate event. I get to it and I find it's basically a machinima with horrible melodramatic dialogue in place of the normal silly/humourous dialogue. And the quest text was so well done in that expansion, too.

I hate WoW the most when it pretends to be story-driven.

@ Onyx

I'm guessing it refers to characters with over muscled, gorilla-like physiques and the usual post-apocalyptic grey and brown settings.

Speaking of lack of originality, the Helghast look eerily familiar to the enemy characters in an obscure Japanese anime that has been around for many years before.

The anime is called Jin Roh, and no, the character above is not from Killzone 2.