I really don't get why this whole argument has come up lately...
Yahtzee, Devs and everyone who doesn't want kiddies to die: Shut up. You are never going to convince people otherwise. They will install their mods, and go about their merry way.
Modders and everyone who wants it: Mod. Install. Enjoy. Shut up. You are never going to get devs to put that kind of thing in a game and probably shouldn't. I'm as pro kill-able kids as it get's, but the amount of bad publicity for games simply isn't worth it.
My point is, there is NO argument to be had! Neither side will EVER convince the other!
I'm pro mod, not trying to convince devs to risk their neck adding something we can easily get ourselves. My opinion is voiced here purely on the principle that I believe we should be allowed to put ANYTHING in ANY game we damn well please.
I won't bother defending case by case hypothetical extremes that respond to this because the likely answer is. "Don't want it, don't download it. I won't."
But if people want obscene mods than more power to them.
Honestly I'm still confused why this mod is getting all the attention, have people even looked at the game balance changes? Now THAT is some evil nonsensical stuff.
"And if we're talking Skyrim, if realism is your concern I'd think you'd want to start with making all the characters look and act like actual human beings."
Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.
The NPCs in Skyrim are the murderers of any sense of immersion.
In seriousness, I GUESS I'm anti-mod, only in the sense I wonder what this says about the community. That and I find the realism/immersion argument to be hilarious.
"I can't stand it that children are treated as immortal in a game where I can face off against fictional monsters and defeat them with incredible powers. It just totally breaks immersion that something unrealistic is happening in SKYRIM!"
Otherwise, I just don't really care. Let kids have their baby killing mods, I guess. Though I was also amused that the pedophilia issue seems largely an elephant in the room, especially if "realism/immersion" is the issue.
I feel like Yahtzee has already answered his own question on this one (even if he tries to deny it by saying it doesn't fit in the story). I quote:
"Most gamers are dickheads and if you give them any kind of freedom, their first instinct will be to abuse it. If you give them guns, they will shoot old ladies. If you give them cars, they will run over old ladies. If you give them aircraft, they will ascend to the highest possible heights and hurl themselves out onto an old lady. And if you give them customizable outfits, their first instinct will be to take off their clothes and run around the streets hip thrusting in the faces of old ladies. If you try to stop them doing all this, they'll hate you for it."
Mod tools, one of the more permissive modding communities out there and a little barrier of 'no you can't' is just about all it takes. It doesn't detract from the fact that child killing is horrible, but you did after all explain to us that gamers are dickheads. Dickheads like horrible things and to roleplay doing horrible things.
Agree. I was reading through this thread and got positively disgusted that there were a whole slew of people championing the fact that they proudly engaged in...
CopperBoom said:
What about "Skyrim Sex Life"
which is just about killing women and artfully placing them because you cannot have as many wives as he wants?
...Stuff like that. I find it sickening that people would do that on purpose and find it "fun". It's one thing to kill darkspawn, dragons, zombies or bad guys. It's another entirely to take pleasure in murdering innocent civilians simply to feed sociopathic desires.
I saw the 'shocking' moment of MW3 on the internet before I bought the game. I wasn't shocked, and I even skipped the damn thing in game for the sole reason that it was just wasting 30 seconds where I could be playing the game. Disappointing.
What if Skyrim had standard controls for making love to people? Say, left click to deploy a bunch of flowers, right click to stick it in. Would you mod the game to allow players to also fuck children? Not because you want to, you understand, but just for the sake of realism. When you set out to seduce every single person in a town you don't feel properly fulfilled unless the neighbourhood kids have also been ticked off the list. Of course not. This is a horrible notion.
It's because gamers will always push the rules to the limits. For example, one may go out of their way in L.A. Noire simly to hit every pedestrian they can, simply because the game doesn't react. This is why I will go out of my way to try and do the most unexpected things in the most linear FPS games: I want to see how the game reacts. Most of the time, I put the game in an unwinnable state.
I agree with Yahtzee here- except, of course, for the fact that the goddamn immortals in Skyrim are a liability. The number of times my plan to, say, murder NPC A (To steal his whatever) has been foiled by a hidden witness in the corner, who I then could not get rid of in any fashion... that is what breaks immersion.
Hell, I'd rather they didn't have the fucking token children at all. They all looked and sounded identical, and existed purely to aggravate you. No effort went into their presence, all they can do is grief and run to the guards.
It just bothers me, that Bethesda puts together this new excellent "Witness" crime system, and then ruins it by having half the NPCs unkillable. What is the point?
Well, well, well Mr. Croshaw, didn't you want to kill your own children in your Fable 2 review?
Let me just check this out. Yeppp here you go on Minute 3:50 you start ranting about the fact that you disapprovingly lack the ability to kill your own kids.
How come this change of heart?
Got a new girlfriend?
Had some hearwarming family reunion with your mum and dad?
Is the Christmass Love creeping up to you?
Double Moral Standard anyone?
[sorry for the sarcasm]
Seriously this is the first time I wholeheartedly disagree with your contradicting argument.
In the perfect world the game would allow you to rape and pillage everyone including your dog from fable giving you all the choice you want but you as a player don't need to do that to get your satisfaction.
You could play Fallout 2 without having sex or murdering a kid. It was a great choice and VERY fullfilling NOT to do that and to resist temptation.
Yes, we don't live in a perfect world so the futile prudish behaviour stemming from cencorship, misinterpreted religious fanatism, plain propaganda and wrong educational values are reasons behind such wasted barriers to stop amorality that are as useful and effective as Ubisoft's DRM is in stopping piracy.
can't i kill the children for being smarmy and smart mouthed? like the kids in Dragons' Reach "are you a new servant?" or when i go into my house and find one of them in there! i feel well within my right to give them a stabbing for that. i don't let Nazeem get away with his smack-talk
I'm a good character, committing very few if any crimes, never murdering anyone unless they are at least slightly evil.
I killed Nazeem after hearing him say "Have you gotten to the Cloud District lately? Ho, what am I saying, of course you haven't" for the hundredth time. I felt so freaking good absorbing his soul and using it for a speechcraft-enchanted necklace.
There needs to be at LEAST an option for making those kids shut the hell up. A good persuasion check (or slap across the face), or even a talk with their mother, would be sufficient. It need not be murder, but there needs to be something, otherwise just leave them out of the game. PLEASE, Bethesda.
I haven't played Skyrim yet so I may be wrong in this.
What's wrong about making children mortal to other NPCs/dragons/other monsters? It doesn't have to be the player character doing the killing.
I think it's fine to have kids that are invincible to the player character alone, that way it's still immersive to the non-child-killing people who want more realism in their fantasy experience.
My characters in Skyrim don't really strike me as the types who would go around killing children. Even the most "evil" of them would probably not see the penalty of killing them being worth the profit. So I personally, won't be downloading the mod. However (and this is a big However), them being completely immortal and obnoxious and completely lacking any conversation options really pisses in my cereal. As many of the previous posters have brought up, the awe and terror of a dragon attack is lessened somewhat when you see little timmy taking a hot round of dragon shout to the face and living when the same blast of molten awful killed everybody around him. But then, this mound of stupid gets another heaping helping when Bethesda (who are either trolling us silly or trying to get us to want to murder children), make most of the children say things from that hit tv show: "Kids Say the Most Obnoxious, Insulting Things!"
Now what I would suggest is a better mod. For those playing a grimdark character who murders everybody, they can have the child killing mod with my blessing. However, for the rest of us, how about some tweaks to the game: make it so that you can have some conversation choices with them. Something where you can interact with them just like you can with adult npcs. Hell, even a quest to find some girl's lost dolly that she dropped when her family fled from a giant attack would be acceptable. Anything to change their attitude towards you, which seems to be set to negative all the time. Also, an intimidate option would be nice. Something where if you fail, the little tyke gets scared and tells an adult about you (giving you a bounty) and if you succeed he shuts up and avoids you. Notice, none of this needs to involve the player being able to kill children. They are simply other options that Bethesda seemed to sadly miss. Hell, you don't even need these, simply a change in dialogue for certain events would suffice.
You would think that after slaying a dragon for his father, Balgruuf's kid would not say: "Hmmph, another traveler come to blah blah blah..." But instead he would say: "OH MAN, ARE YOU THE TRAVELER THAT SLEW THAT DRAGON?!?!? AWESOME! DID IT BREATHE FIRE? DID YOU KILL IT WITH THAT SWORD? CAN I HOLD IT?!, etc."
Also, say, if you strut into town as a level one clad in last year's rusty armor, the kids will probably see you as a little ***** who smells funny. However, if you walk into town at level 30 wearing the ancient bone armor of the dread lich, I would suspect children would either avoid you out of fear or gape at you in awe.
Secondly, as another poster pointed out, children dying due to wild animals, mosters, bandits and dragons could knock things up an emotional notch for the player. Imagine coming across a burned out village filled with charred corpses of the young and old and finding out from a survivor that a dragon came by out of nowhere and killed them all. I, for one, would be angry with rage and find out where the dragon went so that I could shove some swords up its ass.
Skyrim exists in a universe were murder and genocide are par for the course. Despite what Disney has taught us, in the approximate time in history that TES emulates, kids died. They died of famine, plague, natural disaster, animal attacks, and sometimes a straight up sword in the face.
Not to mention, the game programmers made the children in the games extremely antagonistic purely because they knew you had no recourse. In a world where anything can die, one of the things that is all but asking for it, shouldn't be immune.
And much like everyone else who speaks negatively about this, why are people being such hypocrites? No qualms at all about permitting the burning and pillaging an entire town, but oh killing the now orphaned, destitute and homeless kids? Then you've just gone too far.
Get some bloody perspective folks. Also, it's arguments like this that people use as the first step to push censorship. First it's no children, then it's no humans, then it's nothing at all and we're all playing Hello Kitty Island Adventure for the rest of our days.
There are 2 entirely legit reasons for the child killing mod.
1. Entire town is attacked by dragon, people die. Except for the children, they're immune to fire.
This is what people mean by the realism argument. These children aren't just prancing around - they are in dangerous and tragic situations. The fact that they're immune to danger completely ends any immersion.
2. They are the most annoying assholes on the planet.
Seriously, Bethesda's rubbing it in our faces now. Every kid will only talk to you to straight up threaten you in Skyrim. It's getting a bit ridiculous.
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