Hammeroj said:
Oh, boy. Wanting consistency is sick nowadays, isn't it? Look, you're not even quoting a guy who said he wants to kill children, you're quoting a guy who said dead children literally don't exist in the game, even if the story says they do. And that's because? Bethesda obviously had no moral objections to actually killing kids story-wise, yet they get as protective about actually showing anything as humanly possible. That doesn't sound like it's their own developers making that decision, and you're a naive fool to think that for a second.
Drop the hyperbole. Nobody's asking for rape, and don't you dare call anyone in this thread a sociopath for wanting consistency in a fucking game.
I seem to recall a section in the Thieves Guild where a woman recounts about her youth where she was sexually abused by bandits after they had burned her farm and killed her family.
Rape literally doesn't exist in the game, even if the story says it does. I would call that the same kind of inconsistency as the dead children. Sometimes a game can do more by telling you about what has happened and keeping it tastefully abstract so you don't need to render dead children or rape to make the point any more powerful.
Don't have children in a game where you can kill anybody, then. Especially if you can only write them as the most annoying medieval shits possible. And just what makes them so holy, too? Enlighten me, please.
"Infanticide", psh. You are trying as hard as you can, aren't you.
First, you can't kill everyone in an Elder Scrolls game, major quest NPCs are sometimes made revivable so you don't end up in a gamebreaking scenario. Second, you aren't supposed to kill all the townsfolk in an Elder Scrolls game, they exist to add fidelity to the world, spice up encounters like thefts or fighting and provide quests. Most townsfolk flee from combat, rarely drop any good loot, hardly put up a fight and slap you with massive bounties when killed. They are mortal so that random encounters keep some randomness about them and you don't end up in strange scenarios like an immortal old lady beating down a dragon over the course of a week. Elder Scrolls are flexible games, but at no point has the player choice of just murdering everyone on the continent ever (or should ever) been considered as justifiable enough to warrant specific gameplay triggers and quest structure to support it.
And what makes them holy? Well for one the murder of a child is universally considered many magnitudes worse than the murder of adults as it takes advantage of their innate helplessness and betrays the trust between child and adult. Children cannot fully comprehend the danger around them and they instinctively will look to people they trust to keep them safe. Betraying that trust is universally more evil than killing someone who can understand the situation, know the danger or even fight back.
From a cultural and/or religious perspective, its even worse. Many religions and cultures in the Elder Scrolls believe in a requirement or ritual required to ascend to heaven or its equivalent. Most notably the Nords believe in Sovngarde, where only great warriors who die honorably can ascend to and live in the paradise, with the unworthy existing in either the hell variant or purgatory, or even as one of the many ghosts you encounter. Killing a child before it has the chance to live out its life could be essentially condemning them much like how unbaptized children are condemned to limbo in christian theology.
I didn't say I'm entitled, I said Bethesda is a bunch of back-assward morons for caving to pressure from completely irrelevant and ignorant sources.
You're again assuming that the choice was made entirely to avoid moral controversy that wouldn't affect sales or ratings. May I remind you that if the game allowed the murder of children (or even worse, allowed the decapitations and finishing moves to be played on them as well) that the game could very easily get stuck into an AO rating and make the game essentially unsellable. GTA San Andreas lost a lot of money having to refund, re-edit, patch original copies and pay for legal fees when the hot coffee mod went big, and this game wouldn't have nearly the back-draft of extra sales because child murder is hardly a selling point compared to nudity and sex.
You assume that every controversy is the result of uninformed pundits posturing for attention, when in the real world, very real games can suffer massive hits from very reasonable laws like child pornography laws in the case of RapeLay (note I am not defending RapeLay, I am just reminding that game content controversies aren't all over-reactions and that sometimes they are absolutely justified and can affect a game's success).
Again, I have no problem with the mod existing or people using it, I have problems with people demanding it be in the vanilla content.
Let me weigh the pros and cons of making it vanilla content:
Pros: The game is slightly more consistent in certain parts.
You can kill the kids if they annoy you that much.
People who want the content don't have to use mods to get it.
Cons: Could possibly push the game into AO or incite enough legitimate danger to warrant intervention by law.
Would either have to include extreme repercussions to condemn in-universe child murder with essentially game ruining consequences, or undermine the horror of child murder by rendering it ultimately inconsequential in the long term. (IE killing a kid would have to be either so hated that it ruins the message and nature of the quest (if only sparing the structure), or so inconsequential that it doesn't affect it at all, showing immense disrespect).
People hoping to avoid it would have to get mods to remove the child killing.
In short, keep it opt-in rather than opt-out.
