Has anyone else grown weary of mindless killing being so prevalent in games?

[Bertylicious]

Sometimes you want to explore the darkness of the human condition. The drive to dominate and destroy juxtaposed with a journey of justice through a maze of ill-defined morality that causes you to really question what is right, what is the value of life against the value of success and to explore who you are and what you're really about.

Other times you just want to have giant lizards with bazookas strapped to them stepping on people.

So no.

 

[itsthesheppy]

Ever since playing Spec Ops: The Line, 'unease' has been my most prevalent feeling when mowing down waves of bad guys in games.

Spoiler

I assumed the whole "heroic helicopter rampage" at the end of Far Cry 3 was a hallucination because it was so ridiculous, over the top, and unbelievable.

 

[Mikejames]

I'm sick of it being prerequisite to making a big budget, high quality, AAA title. IT was some other journalist who was talking about what Bioshock Infinite would have been like without being based around killing hundreds of people; all that nuance, culture and literature plays second fiddle to iron sights and blood spatter. Then there was Tomb Raider, a girl's bid for survival ruined by the requirement that it has to be a cover based shooter.


Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it.

Yeah... There will always be games focused strictly on the shooting/multiplayer aspects, but it's when other unrelated titles are forced to accommodate for their success by imitating them that bothers me. What happened to niche genres?

 

[piinyouri]

It doesn't bother me honestly.
It would bother me more the game was (irregardless of how the killing was handled/or implemented) just boring on it's own terms.

 

[Busard]

I'm okay with it, as long as it's fun.

Seriously, games are a bunch of pixels, and even after playing Spec Ops: The line, I still enjoy going into ninja gaiden or Metal Gear Rising and slashing some people to bits. I didn't need Spec Ops to tell me the usual FPS genre was shitty.

Problem isn't killing, problem is the lack of depth (either may it be in gameplay, or story) that killing has.

 

[MrHide-Patten]

Whilst I wouldn't say I'm sick of killing as a core mechanic I would like to see more alternatives to conflict resolution. i suppose that one thing I really liked about Deus Ex: Human Revolution, it rewarded you with more EXP for merely knocking out the guys as opposed to killing them and you feel like more of a bad ass being able to kock out a guy with the sleep dart and he falls asleep just behind a desk where NOBODY WILL SEE HIM!

But there are games like Bioshock Infinite and Spec Ops that sort of cast a "realistic" light on the severity of murder. Whilst in Bioshock there was lots of exploding heads, Booker really felt like an anti hero and the disgusted comments from Elizabeth sort of make it feel more real, but it doesn't glorify it.

 

[GameChanger]

I just wish developers would come up with other kinds of gameplay in the AAA business. :/

 

[Vorpal_Smilodon]

The catalyst for this thread is that I've been playing Guild Wars 2, which is a really enjoyable game, but expects you to kill hundreds or thousands(or more if you keep playing, its a MMO) of sentient beings for little to no reason. Starting as an asura character made me really enjoy npc interactions with skritt (similar to gully dwarves) but elsewhere in the game they're enemies to be slaughtered wholesale and it really sits wrong with me.

The catalyst for this thread was GW2, an MMO? Wait, you mean that ONE game out of countless MMO's where you have the option to do level up without killing anything (if you were really determined), you get a ton of xp just for exploring/vistas. The devs really went out of their way to reward you xp for doing just about anything non-violent, at least half the hearts I've done offer an option to interact with stuff or collect stuff instead of killing anything. Come to think of it, GW2 is easily the most "pacifist" MMO I've played to date...talk about the wrong catalyst

Well, Guild Wars 1 was the only other MMO I've played and that felt more like a card game to me than a real combat game.

Providing the mechanics are tightly refined, I greatly enjoy killing my way through games. I get immense gratification from killing with skill and/or style, and will nearly always choose the lethal option, unless the target/npc happens to be an innocent or characterised in such a way as to elicit sympathy.

Killing is also often consistent with the protagonist's characterisation, moveset, and equipment. Take Corvo in Dishonored, for instance. There is no way in the world that I am going to refrain from killing with such an amazingly lethal toolset at my disposal. The guy is a master assassin, charged with assassinating fiends and taking revenge. A passive run in such a game seems boring and restrictive to me, not to mention in direct contradiction to his character and the overall tone of the game.

But...to each their own, I guess...ya bunch o' wet sissy fartin' blubbercunts. Aaargh!

Well, you touch on what I'm getting at without seeing it fully: I'm saying that it seems like in a lot of games the enemies are sometimes people that have been characterized sympthetically unintentionally, or the player character is portrayed as someone who wouldn't want to be killing so many people (GTA 4, Red Dead Redemption and LA Noire are all bad for this)

I'm not knocking games where you play someone with a legitimate reason to be killing people, be it Mark of the Ninja or Saints Row.

 

[Delerien]

Well it really depends. I get kinda annoyed when in games like Skyrim, Mass Effect, Dragon Age etc. i still have to kill everyone who gets in my way. At some point i just feel like some of my enemies (especially pesky bandits) should have the sense to say: "Here comes the savior of whatever it is we're living in, maybe i will not attack him/her because there is no way this will end well for me." I liked the idea in Skyrim that the Guard often stops attacking you if you sheath your weapon, it's a step in the right direction.

 

[Darkbladex96]

It's not as though I hate actiony shooters mind you, but as graphics and quality gets better and better from the days of cartoony violence I do wish developers paid a bit more reverence for death. That's why I enjoy games like Red Orchestra far more than Call of Duty and its ilk, not just because of the supposedly 'realistic gameplay' but because it paints war as violent and miserable, not something to glorify.

To be fair, COD MW 1,2,3 didn't glorify war, if anything it showed how bad things can get. They've got a bit of wank to them, but when you have scenes such as the nuke killing your character, slaughtering thousands of civilians, etc. you tend to get the feeling that COD isn't saying (in it's story line), "Look how fun and great war is!". Black ops 1 and 2 glorify it more so than the main series, so if you meant those than I totally back you on your point.


OT: Most games I've played are marketed for adults, as an adult you should be able to determine the difference between a video game showing death and real life. I fully understand that if what I was watching on my screen was actually real footage that I'd be mortified, but it's not. It's a bunch of pixels that depict events that can happen in life and we should be able to understand that while the game may be fun, it is still just a simulation of life. It's almost like saying, "Does a robot have a soul?" not going into beliefs here or anything, but when it comes to fiction vs reality a competent human being should be able to play what they want while still realising,"this is fake, in real life these actions would mortify me/have some negative impact on me".

No CoD game glorifies war. The MW series has those moments that you mentioned and Black Ops makes it pretty apparent that sparking these conflicts comes at a pretty hefty emotional toll on the characters directly involved, like when Woods was tricked into killing Mason.

 

[quantumsoul]

Not sure if anyone mentioned this yet but there is a game where if you chose to kill or not, impacts the story.

It's a free game called Iji. It's very well done.

http://www.remar.se/daniel/iji.php

 

[latiasracer]

Yeah i have, That's why i have been playing aload of DayZ recently (Everyone is a bastard, So the killing of other players seems very justified )

I like games like Fallout, STALKER and Metro 2033 where you have an active choice, and can choose between going in all guns blazing or take the painstakingly frustrating stealth option...

 

[snekadid]

That Alpha Protocol orphan statistic was one of the stupidest things I've seen in a game, not in concept but in practice. I had killed about 100 people and had about 1200 orphans created.... that means on average every single person I killed had about 12 kids. I felt justified in my apparent annihilation of a group of people that were trying to balloon population and stopping them before having 20+ kids each.

I can beat your human revo pacifist fail, I shot a guy with a tranq dart and it apparently hit him hard enough to snap his neck like a twig and killed him on impact. Why this has any impact on your discussion I have no idea since they weren't forcing you to kill people and the existence of the possibility for someone to die by accident adds to realism, not a sense of bloodlust.

 

[bug_of_war]

No CoD game glorifies war. The MW series has those moments that you mentioned and Black Ops makes it pretty apparent that sparking these conflicts comes at a pretty hefty emotional toll on the characters directly involved, like when Woods was tricked into killing Mason.

Oh yeah...damn my memory can be shit some times. I forgot the part about Woods in general in BLOPS2, and I guess 1 also had it's moments, but the ending really rubbed me the wrong way with Mason swimming 2 km upwards with 1 breath, only to be pulled into a boat with many ships surrounding it and jet fighters flying above and having someone say, "We did it! We won!". I dunno if that's glorifying war, but it did seem somewhat odd. Anyways, my bad on the COD part.

 

[JagermanXcell]

I'm getting a bit tired of it, a bit though.

Obviously Spec Ops the Line changed just about mine and everyone's views on mindless mass murder. Then I played Bioshock Infinite and literally didn't mind killing so many racists and the Vox Populi who strayed away from their conviction the moment they started killing everyone (racists, woman, children, non-racists, ect.). At one point during both games Spec Ops and Infinite, I thought all the death the protagonists experienced wouldn't mean a damn thing, that was until both games 3rd acts. Lets just say all the killing
EFFECTS THE PLOT.

And thats what we need more of.
To bad AAA won't do it... except Infinite, thank the all knowing prophet Ken Levine.

 

[TheDoctor455]

I'm sick of it. I really really am.

What I want is a game that treats death with the sort of reverence it deserves, even for those you're fighting. A game which doesn't glorify the combat but instead shows death for what it is: Cruel and ugly. Most games just use it as a statistic or worse, as points.

I still await the game where killing even one person will have an impact. Where my character feels the repercussions of that act, the weight behind having just taken something from the world which can never be restored.

It's not as though I hate actiony shooters mind you, but as graphics and quality gets better and better from the days of cartoony violence I do wish developers paid a bit more reverence for death. That's why I enjoy games like Red Orchestra far more than Call of Duty and its ilk, not just because of the supposedly 'realistic gameplay' but because it paints war as violent and miserable, not something to glorify. First time I was playing online and heard another player crying for his mother as he bled to death it genuinely shook me, that's just not something I'm used to in any sort of multiplayer game. And that's good! It sort of grounds the game and brings the perspective back to something more reasonable.

You need to play Spec Ops: The Line.

Takes it much more seriously than CoD or Red Orchestra do.

OT:

Yeah... it gets a bit tiresome. Like in DA2... most of the fights are just kind of there... doesn't seem to be much reason for them to be there except to pad out the levels and give you xp. For instance, in one quest where you're trying to stop a Templar from doing something very, very evil... you go through a tunnel that is just filled with spiders and other generic monsters. You only fight actual templars at the very end of the overly re-used level. Does that make any damn sense?

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

I love violence and killing. We've already established that it doesn't make me a psychopath because fantasy violence is different from real violence, so where's the shame in admitting it. I'm glad that many games unashamedly use killing and violence for their gameplay. It's fun.

At the same time...I'd like to see more options. Even if they end up being just more deceptive ways to kill. But this is not an issue of some kind of pro-violence agenda, this is lack of creativity/opportunity/time on the part of the developers. Games whose whole shtick is allowing you to play in many different ways generally do have non-lethal or non-violent options (Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Dishonored, Metal Gear games), but I still rarely see diplomatic options that aren't a universal game mechanic.

Basically I want more options but only really want them for semi-important characters and not where it doesn't make sense (fighting an enemy soldier for example in open combat).

Last thing, I personally am getting a bit annoyed at how easily turning a mirror on the protagonist's violence earns a game praise since Spec Ops. From now on doing that is no longer original in my books.

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

Not really, then again most of the talk has been about killing humans of which there are very few of in Torchlight 2.

That and playing on the higher difficulty levels where those animated suits of armour, sentient fungus, undead dwarfs and tentacle demons can really dish out the damage and pose a serous threat tends to stifle any thoughts of mercy.

I can see your point although and agree that the the likes of Spec Ops: The Line and Dishonored should be more common then what they are now.

 

[VoidWanderer]

Alpha Protocol had one line in the stats screen that overshadows most of my other experience with the game: Orphans Created. Just that number added the sense that the people you're killing are real in the game world instead of disposable numbers that exist only to be shot.

Playing through Deus Ex Human Revolution I failed a pacifist run because one of the guards I knocked out fell to his death off the building he was standing ontop of.

Some of my favorite games are Fallout New Vegas and Planescape Torment, where you get to go into situations and you actually get to choose what side you're on! You can choose to betray both sides, or abstain from conflict, instead of being mindlessly pointed at the enemies, and its great!

The catalyst for this thread is that I've been playing Guild Wars 2, which is a really enjoyable game, but expects you to kill hundreds or thousands(or more if you keep playing, its a MMO) of sentient beings for little to no reason. Starting as an asura character made me really enjoy npc interactions with skritt (similar to gully dwarves) but elsewhere in the game they're enemies to be slaughtered wholesale and it really sits wrong with me.

Take note that I don't dislike violence in games, or even mindless killing of morality free things like zombies, or mindlessly killing because you're playing an evil character (fun!) I just feel like a small handful of games that present intelligent choices (most stealth games for example) have somewhat ruined for me the majority of games where its just assumed that you'll kill anything designated as enemies.


PS: yes I've played Spec Ops the Line

And this is why I am looking forward to Thief 4, and why I enjoy the Lego games so much!