Games with the highest body counts.

[DanDanikov]

I believe in Twisted Metal 2, the main character at the end wishes to kill every sentient being in existence, so that's going to be pretty high. As far as 4X games go (which have a natural inclination to high death counts due to dealing on the scale of planets and interstellar warefare) my first guess would have been GalCiv 2.

However, I believe we should make a distinction between death counts and body counts... body count suggests bodies on screen, which is quite different from a pretty picture of entire galaxies exploding. My first instinct on that would be the total war series, with extra large units; the restrictions and unit sizes for the last few games have all been rather similar, so I'm not sure which has the theoretical maximum, but with the reinforcement system you can get a lot of bodies on the ground.

 

[Andyrofl]

Going 1v1, L4D2 vs. Dead Rising (1 or 2), I'd say Dead Rising has to take the cake. Anyone that has gone for the Zombie Genocide achievement and wasted a trumendous 6+ hours of their life, doing the same circuit ending up with 53,594 or 72,000 (Dead Rising 1&2, respectively) kills for just the one play through can attest to what I'm saying. Single player (though I realise L4D2 is really just playing multiplayer with some block headed AI) play throughs of the same time periods, Dead Rising would easily yield a higher death toll, if that's what you were going for.

That being said. You can kill 100+ people running 50m down the sidewalk with your bio-shield out on Prototype...so...you do the math =P

 

[Captain-Giggles]

Shadow the Hedgehog, because it implies you destroy the earth at the end of the neutral (or was it evil?) path.

 

[J-dog42]

When I stopped playing Black Ops just before Christmas, the stats that pop up showed that about 140% of the worlds population had been killed. So with that number being roughly 8 billion people, I would sat that is a pretty high body count.

 

[YouCallMeNighthawk]

I would have to go with the COD series. The amount of people online killing each other plus the ones who aren't online and just playing zombies or spec ops and campaign.

Got to be a winner.

 

[JWRosser]

I reckon an RTS.

Build a massive army, send them in and...oh poo they're dead. Oh well, time to make a new one!

 

[Signa]

I'd love to point to games like Civilization and say how the body count can be in the millions in just one turn, but I think the spirit of this thread is focused more on kills the player personally gets. With that in mind, I can't think of a game with more kills than the Left 4 Dead series. I swear there are better answers, but given there usually is a bodycount of 1,200 in one 40 minute game, I'm hard pressed to think of a game where I can pull that much carnage through a natural playthrough.

I really would like to answer GTA3 or any of it's cousins, but if you kill just 10-20 people, you are going to get the cops on your ass and then it's all an upward fight after that. Besides, if you are just cruising around for bonus objectives, the bodycount is going to be really low. It's impossible to play L4D without getting swarmed and needing to blast your way though. If not impossible, it is at least expected in an average game.

 

[Fusionxl]

Serious Sam, without a shadow of doubt. If you didn't fire a gun for more than 15 seconds then your game had to have been paused.

 

[Admiral Stukov]

Probably WoW, but that's boring so I'm going to say Fallout 3 with the Mart's Mutant Mod with IncreasedIncreased spawnrate, which increases all spawns with 5x and Feral ghouls with 10x.

And richer vendors, and all vendors have a lot more ammo.
Carpetbombing The Mall with the MIRV is extremely fun, not to speak about going down the subway tunnels with a flamer and point it in the general direction of the ghoul horde.