Yeah because AE was a continuation of AO and AO was the start of Abe's character arc, therefore the start of his character development from our perspective.
It worked for AE, even if there were still some cringe worthy moments of forced humour, but AE and AO were not the same game and both carried different atmospheres. AO was someone who I can guarantee was the goof he's been portrayed that... up until he found out his "employers" planned to kill him and his buddies for food and they were all being kept in the dark about it. Then the entire rest of the game is basically him going through a massive crisis and trying to get everyone the hell out of there before they all, you know, DIE. They even showed right off the bat he was kind of happy go lucky and generally a laid back goof considering he thought he had a good job and was happily waxing the damn floor before the events of the story.
I can guarantee his levels of goofiness would drop an insane amount during all that. They would pick back up for AE slowly along the course of the game because you can never change who you are at your core, but even then he was still kind of cautious and uncertain about everything while everyone else around him and inhabiting the world showed they were much more confident and were generally goofy in comparison. It was a good contrast and showed how the different characters handled the past events and current scenarios. And heck, the further into AE you got, the more confident Abe became. It was pretty cool.
The way AE's story was told allowed the focus to be on the characters and their general silliness. The way that silliness was portrayed didn't take away from the story at all. AE was more focused on expanding on the world itself, rather than telling the tragic story of this naive slave with a ~destiny~.
Comparing AE character's portrayal to AO's character portrayals only works when talking about perspective and character development. It's likely in AO everyone around him and inhabiting the universe acted just as it was shown in AE but that wasn't important to the story, so there's absolutely no need to show it.
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