CoD: Black Ops - How violent is too violent?

[badgersprite]

I didn't really even notice any of the things you're talking about. The animation of these acts didn't feel particularly graphic to me. I don't even remember seeing any blood at all in a lot of those sequences. I remember a guy being split in half at one point, but it looked so cartoony it didn't phase me. But I understand that different people are always going to have different reactions to things like this. Sometimes something feels more extreme to one person than it does for someone else.

This is where things like personal discretion come into play. And you're entirely within your right to not like the direction a game takes in how it shows violence. I think anything that gets people thinking, even if it's just making them question what they like or don't like, is always a good thing.

 

[MatsVS]

A game can never be too violent in and of itself. It can be too violent for you to personally enjoy it, but that does not mean that the game has overreached some universal violence limit.

 

[Nouw]

I'd say the manhunt games are the ones that have taken it too far, but to be honest people do like gore porn. I mean look how many SAW's and slasher films there are. Violence only goes too far when it tries too hard to unsettles the player through large amounts of bloods and gore.

Exactly. The violence and gore in Black Ops is to make the game even better and I think it did.

I haven't played it but I think I know what you mean. Kinda like Saving Private Ryan?
[sub]Knife scene still gives me the creeps[/sub]

 

[Xskills]

The violence of Black Ops is actually pretty well in context. You see an enemy harm someone, you not just want to harm that enemy as an act of battlefield justice or innate retribution, but you better follow the programming from Reznov as well as sympathize with him and your U.S. comrades. Killing the Russian sentry with a knife in the back of the next to get his uniform for infiltration is fairly justified as not just an enemy but you fulfilled that mission with the pretext that you would neutralize an ICBM that would hit the US, which would start Mutually Assured Destruction and kill millions if not billions of people. Black Ops' tour through Vietnam was pretty tasteful not showing some of the actually VC booby traps or agent orange and completely ignoring the My Lai Massacre. Plus Black Ops didn't gamble its story-telling prowess on a massive slaughter of civilians like "No Russian" in MW2.

 

[AK47Marine]

I honestly disagree OP, yes the combat and especially the hand to hand depicted in black ops is fairly brutal but it is brutal because Treyarch was going I think for realism on some level (at least with the violence, the plot is out there lol). There's reports the USSR did test chemical weapons on their own troops, that water knife kill? the one where you jab in then saw out? The exact same method I was taught in the Marines to kill a sentry silently, slamming the knife through the 3rd and 4th c-spine vertebrae (the other knife kill you mentioned) was also mentioned to us as a more advanced silent knife kill.

Black Ops is violent and brutal there's no denying that, but it's violence and brutality in it's place as conveying and telling the story and the reality mixed with the fictional events. This isn't gore porn like was mentioned above, this is a decent attempt to display the brutality that is warfare in all it's terrible glory.

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

If you think the game is too violent for you, then don't play it. That's what the rest of the world needs to get in its head as well.

 

[WolfThomas]

I don't have a problem with some of the violence that is understandable (I'm loathe to throw the word realistic out here) like people losing limbs to explosions, that actually happens. But many of the stealth kills are excessive and inefficient. So I personally have no experience with knifing someone, but my good mate on leave for the holidays is a rifleman in the Australian army. and he thought some of the stuff was ridiculous compared to what he'd been taught officially and not so officially by guys who vetrans. That said he was impressed by some of the other stuff, so it's 6 up and half a dozen down.

 

[Chibz]

Black ops isn't nearly as violent as the Splatterhouse "reimagining". Heh, people complaining about that.