Extra Punctuation: What Is the Matter with You People?

[Kendall Coombs]

Well worded as (seemingly) always, and while ive agreed with probably 98% of the opinions ive seen from you on here, I cant quite agree here. Realism doesnt have to boil down to just "can i kill em or can i not". One example, u pull an arrow back in ur bow, or charge up soem area of effect type spell to hit a hostile target (who is presumably above the age of 18) but a kid was running by around the corner u did not see. in either case u acidentally hit said child by mistake. You can now be more immersed into the tale because of how bad you feel, because you killed a kid. This sort of scenario enhances the games effect, which is enough of a reason as to why it SHOULD be there.
tying into one of the points you made tho, Bethesda desperately needs to work on making their npc's actually feel somewhat believable. they're entirely shallow hollow and empty beings. which, is why i feel nothing when i kill any of them. killing is wrong in general, but its "considered ok" (skyrim or saint's row, right?)
that's because we do not register these npc's as ppl, because they just arent remotely realistic enough (majority of games) or because we accept that we are playing a role with our character. if u decide to go into skyrim ala Voldemort (however u spell that shizzle) or some other evil fantasy a hole, then its a tad ridiculous to be unable to do something like wipe out a town.
I say at the very least, find a way to deal with it if it makes u squamish game companies. When i killed lil girl's parents as an evil dude in riverwood, or whatever the crappy first town was called, (the blacksmith)it was quite off putting to come back days/weeks/longer later, see the girl fine n wanderin around, parents bodies still chillin in the home, and listen to her dialogue which indicated she was mildly annoyed with me. that spells weakness, and if they dont want to add some code that has her move in with her uncle, then dont make them the highlander.

Also, major respect for your Dead island thoughts, what a flaming pile

 

[TEBrown52]

I think that boundaries have to be set. For some reason as the human species we take pleasure in taking things to its limit to see what happens to use/them/it what have you... Think of all the you teenagers/young adults that you know or knew consuming alcohol to an extreme at some point to see how much they could handle. What I am trying to say is that this is a boundary set up so we are not asking for something potentially more horrific then murdering children... It does not matter where murdering children fall on your "horrific" scale.

 

[Teague Stockton]

Pretty sure there are rainbow ponies Yahtzee, just putting it out there

 

[viranimus]

What is wrong with you people?

Personally, Its because I am an evil hate filled prick who understands that video game NPCs exist for no other reason than to torment, torture and outright destroy. Games allow me to vent the innate desire to end someone just because I didnt like the color of his moustache without consequence. That way when I am forced to endure the real world It gives me the resolve to endure the unadulterated stupidity and aggravation of having to deal with the public without having to bottle up my rage into a tiny ball in the pit of my stomach that eventually becomes uncontrollable and shatters in an orgy of blood and death.


Why on earth would you want to play a game just so you can be the same prototypical good guy archtype that your forced to comply to in real life. Video games are a form of escapism, and allow us to experience what it is to do things that we would never try or even want to do in real life .

 

[Archaenus]

Well it's good to see that there's a decent voice of reason on the subject, good to know I'm not the only one who thought it was just weird. I thought the whole point of a game is to get away from mimicking real life and to give you some form of entertainment for a while. I pretty much have to agree with Yahtzee that there's too much "realism" with the whole tidal wave of military shooters that there are; and that doesn't make it 'more fun', all my favourite games don't focus on the fact that given the universal freedom of the game, I can go shooting babies out of cannons or raping dogs......

 

[elvor0]

Funny enough I seem to remember you complaining about NOT being able to kill children in a game yourself Mr Crowshaw. Fable 2 i think it was, Saying something about "So much for total freedom ey?" "Suddenly we're getting off-message" I don't think it so much that children are the only ones you can't kill, but more that children are the only ones who can't die. If I can kill everything else and everything else can kill everything else, why do the kids get a free pass? And I doubt people would mind so such but it seems that the kids have become aware of their invulnerably in almost every game they are in and won't stop taunting the player about it.

But you won't be happy until someone makes a mod that allows you marry Barbas will you?

To be fair, Fable has always bragged about it's freedom of choice and blah, blah, blah. I think it was more a case of Yahtzee ragging on all the Molyneux Hype Speak.

Speaking of Fable, I remember a whole bunch of people were bitching about the dog dying in Fable 2 to the point that Lionhead had to add a DLC patch where you could bring the stupid mutt back. Now we have Skyrim and we're getting "invincible children ruins my immersion".

I guess my question is, would someone make a patch to make killing dogs okay?

Yes...that was because the dog was a core game mechanic, it was impossible to get a lot of the loot without him, if he just helped you in combat, I would agree with you, but he was integral to finding dig spots and other various things.

Edit: aaaand I've just noticed that was a massive necro post >< Damn you related content!

 

[minimacker]

The children of Skyrim. It's almost like they're taunting you with their immortality. (No, I'm not playing with a killable-kids mod. Yet.)

"Oh, look. Another wanderer here to lick my fathers boots."
"I thought adventurers were supposed to look tough."
"You're new around here, so I'll go easy on you."
"You don't look so tough, I bet I could take you."

There's no dialogue option of telling them that you're the God Damn Batman Dragonborn and that you can hurl them off a cliff with nothing but your voice if you so wanted to.

But no, they know they're immortal and they're going to spend every second of it shoving it to your face.
I'm not surprised some people said "Fuck it!" and modded it in.

 

[stef1987]

huh, I didn't knew you couldn't kill children in Skyrim.
Never tried to

I did notice you can't kill jarls and some other characters, or maybe only when they're part of an active quest or something ?
that annoys me, because often there are people that are fairly evil, yet I can't kill them, instead I have to do something for them, or just leave a quest uncompleted :s

 

[Xakk Zeliff]

Sometimes I think the writer's strike - remember that? - somehow crippled every market for which we use writers. It's silly, I know, but it seems like writing has been getting more and more shit recently. Like all story departments are made of the same people who produce Fear Factor. Either they're entirely hiring at their lake houses, or someone's got the writers' hands tied with barbed wire after first draft.

As for the kid thing, I seem to remember that Little Lamplight was protected by many vicious dogs - realistically even in game terms, as I had to resort to my unique flamer to kill one, but they were killable. I wonder what that means.
On topic, cmon. It's a video game, have you forgotten where these came from? Shoot everything that moves, or it will kill or impede you, or you can get something out of it. I'm pretty sure there's no definition of progress which included the idea of suddenly restricting previously free actions. We could always kill everything before, whether it was a cute little bunny, or a tragically mutated cancer patient. Doesn't matter, let some god sort em out.
Further, to be more specific to the topic, I kind of hate most NPCs. Because they don't do much of anything. They're moving window dressing, from go bot fleeing civilians in a shooter to the meat-chest roombas in a Bethseda game. Fable, especially 2, is an exception because it's people have homes, jobs, families, opinions. But in Fallout they only exist to walk back and forth, on their preprogrammed routes with their preprogrammed actions and quips. They're almost immune to manipulation, except that a weapon reliably causes them to do something new and exciting when applied. Additionally, in many cases NPCs can be an obstacle, catching the player attempting something stealthy, or cluttering the compass with lots of blips. Easiest solution? You guessed it. Then we have the children. Same problems, but no solution, because you can't kill kids.
Let me leave off by pointing something out. In F3, we had the Mesmetron, which gave a host of new ways to make otherwise repetitive enemies and NPCs interactive. Except it could not, despite being potentially nonlethal, be used on kids. Because enslaving kids is monstrous...oh wait. You can sweet talk a young girl, specifically one of the least annoying children, out of the cave into the hands of slavers.

 

[Katya Topolkaraeva]

Personally, if there was sex in a game i would absolutely insist on getting the mod that lets you poke children! For the same reason that i got the mod that lets you kill children in Skyrim: because there is no logical reason why if i can kill everything else i shouldn't be able to. (also because they are super annoying)

 

[ReinWeisserRitter]

This coming from the same person who complained they couldn't kill their children in Fable, eh.

I've no doubt your videos are supposed to be there to shake people up and startle them to an extent, with some of your personal opinion mixed in, but that wouldn't make you any better than what you've complained about in Modern Warfare games, either, because then you're just doing it either because you think you should, or because you think other people think you should. If you mean it, then at least it's honest, but then it contradicts what you said here, and indeed what you often say in your side columns.

It's not like I'm unaware that everyone's s hypocrite (or that I'm digging up an old article here), but it comes off as particularly absurd when a man who understands that perhaps as well as anyone is as guilty of it, while using his position of influence to berate others for their own seal beating, and he himself is wielding a club.

 

[Mr.Governor]

"And I decided that it was time to murder my entire family,this was the point where I discovered that you can't kill children of course.So much for total freedom,eh.What? So it's alright for someone else too shoot me in the face and throw me off a building while I'm a kid but the moment I try to spread the love,then ooh we're suddenly getting off message"

Straight from his Fable 2 review,gj

 

[ZeroFarks]

I think Fallout 1 (or was it 2?) handled this issue the best way: Yes, you could kill kids. Like the annoying buggers who kept trying to pick your pockets every time you walked past, for instance. Or they could simply get caught in the crossfire of other fights by accident. Regardless, point is, the player could bump them off.

But there were consequences: There was a hidden "perk" called "Child Killer" and once you got it then everyone in the world started to hate your guts. Wanted posters with your face would appear all over town and bounty hunters would constantly come looking for you. Your allies would abandon you & some people would refuse to so much as speak to you ever again.

Which meant that any decent character would try to avoid killing the little miscreants, whether by accident or design. Once the most truly psychotic "not give a flying fark" loners could pull it off and live to tell about it. Which, if you think about, is fine. One would expect a psychotic lone murder-machine to kill kids as readily as anyone else. One does not expect it from a hero. Both bases are covered, both paths are clearly laid out. Realism is attained, the options & possibilities are there but no one can say that the immoral whack-job isn't suffering for their sins.

 

[MaddKossack115]

Ironically, I think the "censored" version of the "shock moment" of MW3 proved MORE shocking than the "uncensored" version - instead of cutting away to that stupid tourist family catching the chemical bomb attack on camera by ironic accident, the player finds the chemical bomb in the truck he and his squad chased - just as it goes off in his face. It packed the same punch as the nuke from the first Modern Warfare in the "your character can be killed off just like that", but also held more of an implicit mortality rate than the uncut version - we only see the mother and kid, and presumably the dad operating the camera with the later, but with the former, not only do you die, but so does Gaz/Ghost (again), the other guys in your squad, the police officers thinking the whole thing who gathered around thinking the whole crash was just a pullover gone wrong, AND the crowd of British civilians that the police officers were holding back from the crime scene.

So, not only do we realize that virtually ALL of the characters we saw on that screen would've likely died as a result, but the fact the bomb goes off when you open it up gives a nagging "Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!" feeling - if you hadn't opened the box, the bomb wouldn't have gone off, and everybody (or at least, the people in your immediate vicinity) would've been spared the Russian gas attacks. Makes you wonder why they didn't scrap the "family dies from gas attack" scene and just stuck with the "you and everybody around you dies from gas attack" scene... I guess it was felt more "impactful" for American citizens (i.e., designed to be biased to the almost all-American audience that actually buys COD for the story modes, and not just the multiplayer brawls everybody else in the world is looking for), going under the logic "HEY! You probably are a husband/wife/kid, and your family likes to go on vacation, right? Well, it'd certainly be a shame if TERRORISTS blew up a bomb where you were vacationing, now wouldn't it?".