Extra Punctuation: What Is the Matter with You People?

[blindthrall]

Children should only be killed if it actually serves a purpose to the story. Like if you choose to loot a dungeon instead of saving the orphanage-kids die. Or if you're in a firefight and some kid runs into the crossfire. Or if you hear a noise in a darkened room and chuck a grenade in, but it was just a little kid scared of you. But you shouldn't be able to just just waltz up to a kid and start hacking away. Hell, make the player character refuse to do it, like I imagine alot of gamers would in real life. This is realistic enough. To use Yatzhee's analogy, you wouldn't want to fuck a little kid, but if one was running around in an orgy, that's the parent's fault.

I think more games, but specifically FarCry2, should have had child soldiers. It's perfectly justifiable to kill anybody if they're trying to kill you, and it would be nice to see child killers get fucked up by the quarry every once in a while. It's not like these things don't already happen in real life.

 

[krazykidd]

I actually like invincible children , that means i can put loads of bullets into them and they keep coming back for more ! Like in fall Out 3.

Although if they weren't annoying i wouldn't want to kill them.

 

[blindthrall]

Mayor MacReady (sp?) in Little Lamplight, Fallout 3. THAT is the reason why I should be able to kill the gobby little shits. Or at least have non-lethal ways to shut them up (and no, the mute button doesn't count).

After reading this column, I tried to remember why I was pro child killing in video games in the first place and now I do. I don't want kids to have to die in games, but if you do make them immortal, then don't make them the most annoying and arrogant people in the game. Because then you get the feeling that the only reason that they are like that is because you can't "change their attitude". It's deliberately bating you in front of your cage, is what it is.

I kinda liked MacReady. Princess was the one I wanted to disembowel with a railroad spike.

 

[Blind Sight]

Yahtzee's just using social taboos in an attempt to make the evil 'child haters' feel bad. It's a petty and childish move. He goes on and on about child murder, but he completely fails to mention how plenty of people blindly murder adult innocents in Skyrim, people who are just minding their own business. Is murdering innocents some acceptable level of bad but murdering children is not? I wasn't aware that morality was age-dependent. He's strawmanning the modders like mad. Of course the majority of people who agree with him will act in the same way, thumbing down their noses and acting morally superior. Tis expected.

From the bit of Skyrim I was able to recently play, I can say that most of the modders are doing it exactly for the reason he dismisses: immersion. A buddy of mine went to a village where the whole town had been wiped out, but the children. And they just casually wandered around town, oblivious to their dead mothers, fathers, etc. It's just a massively confusing contrast that's more hilarious then depressing. However, with a mod, you would go into the town, see the dead (including the children) and become angry. Basically, rather then having an immersion-breaking response, you'd have an emotional one. And I fail to see the problem with that.

Of course, there's also some people who have modded it just because Bethesda seems to make their children characters as obnoxious as they can. And after the 'AssholeVille' that was most of Little Lamplight I can kind of understand.

 

[Togs]

Love how the counterarguement to Yahtzee's point is "ET RUINZ MAH IMMERSHUN!"

Let me reiterate-

"What the fuck is wrong with you people!?"

(As for the killing of kids, I think an acceptable compromise would be to link each child to an adult NPC. If the adult is killed, the child simply fades out. This way, the "whole village" is killed, but there is no need to depict dead kids -- what, are you going to loot them? -- and no need to empower the player to kill them.)

The best solution I can think of.

But I gotta agree, for a race of such badass's you'd expect the Nords to be all about the respect and discipline- instead their kids are spoilt mouthy brats.

 

[everfreeDragon]

As many have said, watching a dragon roast a family only for the child to walk away from their parents burning body like nothing happened is a massive immersion breaker. And the amount of meta in the children's dialog is painful, you can't tell me they don't realise they have complete immortality with the way they talk to the player character.

 

[oldtaku]

I have no desire to just randomly chop up kids (or normal villagers). I even played hide and seek. But as my stealthy thief character, I strongly dislike immortal little snitches. Witnesses must go.

If they have the same logic as animals (the bugged chicken aside) then it'd be fine that they're untouchable. But untouchable little mobile alarmbots is the worst of both.

 

[Zhukov]

That doesn't make sense.

If it's all about the tone of the game and the restrictions that enforce that tone, why would Skyrim allow the player to murder entire villages worth of innocents? How does putting an arrow through the throat of every farmer you see match the whole adventurer thing any more than methodically killing kids?

 

[JesterRaiin]

For me it's very simple : no immortal beings. If it isn't supposed to be killed then it shouldn't be there at all. However i'm an old fart and i know the difference between real life and game and no amount of hyperrealisic gore will ever change it.

BTW : Some time ago i went for a little trip to Egypt and was surprised to find very small amount of women. In some cities they were almost completely absent. Since then i'm completely ok with lack of some obvious elements in videogames.

"Anyway, everyone knows children never die in fantasy stories, even if everyone else in the village does. 'Cos then the child is expected to go off and train for fifteen years until they're built like a bullock barbecue and can take revenge on the dark lord who orchestrated it all. It's pretty much the law."

Roses are red
violets are blue
in Soviet Russia
your father avenges you

 

[q_tf]

Dude, there is a slight difference between depicting the murder and the sexual intercourse with a child, the latter being illegal in most jurisdictions.

I always pictured you as some kind of a bitter misantrophist who expresses his anger and disappointment through video reviews and now this stupid reasoning in favor of kids being immortal. Are you actually nice?

BTW: Kill their parents, that'll give them what they deserve. IMO Bethesda should bind their existance to their parents state: Parents dead->remove children. Or they could have implemented some kind of a "fading away when dead" thing instead of an actual death animation.

 

[Blind Sight]

Skyrim lets you be evil so you go about your merry way.

Yay! Rob, Kill, Slaughter, betray, burn (I assume there's some way to light people on fire in the game), slaughter, slaughter, slaughter, genocide, murder some more.

What? You can't kill children, that's too evil.

Tis not a bad point. I was playing through Fallout 3 as basically a cannibalistic mass murdering zombie Confederate psychopath in a stealth suit (yes it was silly as hell). I had basically ripped my way across the Wasteland, selling people I didn't like into slavery, wiping out entire towns because their goods were overpriced, killing Three Dog because he said mean things about me on the radio, etc. Then I get to Little Lamplight. The extent of my evil there was making a little girl cry and just kind of responding rudely to people's questions. Yeah, weird contrast.

 

[Woodsey]

"And then I read the news story that modders have put child murdering back into Skyrim."

This should be called "allowing for Skyrim children to die," because that's the overall purpose. Alright, murdering them might be the main specific, but once a town's had a dragon fuck the ever-loving shit out of it, it is a little bizarre to see Little Timmy survive.

MW3's is pointless and lazy, simply allowing it in Skyrim is not really the same thing. If people are going to take issue with the latter, then don't play the games at all, because you won't be able to handle the fact that people will slit a hobo's throat for a carrot.

"The designers of Skyrim are trying to create a setting in which you forge an epic fantasy story. And whether your story is one of a fine upstanding swordsman, or a neutral mercenary, or a morally flexible assassin-thief, pausing on your way to work to methodically slice your way through a row of innocent schoolchildren is going to turn that story into something it doesn't want to be."

And yet you can spend 10s of hours picking flowers and making potions that let you sprint for longer. Hardly an epic, yet still an option.

The designers of Skyrim set out to create a world in which you can do whatever the hell you want; they don't let kids die because its deemed to be in poor taste because... well, because.

 

[Otaku World Order]

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?

 

[Trishbot]

Maybe I've just grown to hate children due to constant exposure to morons on Xbox Live, but whenever I see a sarcastic, annoying child in Skyrim, my blood boils, I see red, I taste blood, and I imagine him tea-bagging my corpse.

If nothing else, I'd like to at least dangling him off a cliff or throw him in a monster-infested cave.

Concerning MW3... yeah, the series has devolved from "substance" to "shlock", and I don't think money-grubbing Kotick minds or dimwitted, hype-buying fans of the series care. They could release a COD game at this point that is nothing but shooting defenseless women and minorities and it would STILL sell a ton more than most other deserving games.