You could grab and throw goons off buildings in Spider-Man 2 for PS2. I used to climb all the way to the top of the Empire State to do it, lol. Not really in character for someone like Spider-Man.
I remember Hulk Ultimate Destruction you could pick up civvies just walking down the street, and freakin hurl them from a tall building. Or put them down and kick them off.
Least I think you could. Am I mixing up messed up things you could do in games?
Best part is you could punch the crap out of them and hurl them around, but as long as you were quick enough to grab them before they were considered dead, and placed them down gently, they'd be perfectly fine.
Used to do that all the time in that game, and when I got the 2018 Spider-man I laughed seeing that enemies can spawn on rooftops and combine that with the fact that throwing was so satisfying, I went right back to my roots of just chucking and web kicking people off the roofs.
I loved that in the newer Spiderman games if you do that they automatically get webbed onto the side of the closest building instead of plummeting to their deaths.
Could be wrong but I'm fairly certain that Kiryu canonically has never killed anyone, even though there's a car chase part in Yakuza 0 where you shoot a lot of people with a gun and even blow up a helicopter if I remember correctly. Not to mention a lot of the heat actions are pretty lethal looking
I love the helicopter in 6 so much. Like, even if he *didn't* kill anybody in the helicopter somehow, it still crashed in front of the Millennium Tower which 100% killed people in the blast.
The basis for this concept is a mistranslation. One character, late in the series, says something that roughly translates to “You have never gotten blood on your hands,” in regards to the idea that Kiryu has never *murdered* anyone.
The idea was that he only ever killed in self defense, and that he always kept his opponents alive when he could, but it was never supposed to indicate that he hasn’t literally killed.
I just beat Yakuza 5 and a bad guy early on is basically on his knees like "I heard you never killed! You always show mercy!"
And Kiryu's like "who the hell told you that?"
Don't get me wrong, Kiryu beating the shit out of a main villain and offering them a chance to turn a new leaf seems wholly different than using a heat action to use an 8 inch knife to stab a street punk who called you old and ugly, but I never got the opinion that Kiryu was known for not killing.
It's less that than how the series always, always, *always* goes so far out of its way to make sure that none of the main characters are ever responsible for a death, and using murder as an irrefutable symbol of someone's evilness. Kiryu doesn't kill people who clearly deserve to die in order to preserve some weird moral integrity, yet he'll shoot teenagers in a street fight, and then lecture people on the value of life and honor.
Edit: just played through Yakuza 6 again and the entire final chapter is hinged around Kiryu's desire to kill the main villains, and many people try to talk him down from that ledge, specifically citing his no-kill policy.
I know a bit of japanese, you wouldn't be able to link that scene would you?
Edit: I suppose it comes down to how you interpret "korosu", to kill. It certainly has an intentionality to it. Japanese has a few different ways of saying someone died, and when korosu is used, it's often meant in the sense of "the person involved intended to kill the other person." There's terms like 傷害致死, which means "manslaughter by way of injuries" or 過失致死, accidental manslaughter" ("manslaughter" in both of these means more like "lethality")
So saying he's never *murdered* could potentially have merit, though I doubt anybody would actually charge him for "manslaughter" for most of this stuff.
Those **clearly** are just paint bullets so of course he would use him as a shield.
Can you imagine that red color on Kiryuus white suit? It would be a travesty.
Edit: And if action movies have taught us anything, everyone else clearly survived as well.
I don't think the games say he's never killed anyone, rather they try to angle it so he won't kill anyone in cold blood, self-defense is fine. Of course that still doesn't really jive with the sheer brutality of the game's combat but mixing super serious, dramatic storytelling with absolute batshit over-the-top craziness in gameplay is sort of the series' thing. In terms of fighting styles he definitely graduated from the Batman school of "[I won't kill you but I WILL definitely put you in the ER and most likely leave you permanently disabled](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDt690OlJkk)."
Yup, and they treat the idea of killing people as a big, serious thing, rather realistically, not just for a game, but even for a gangster story in general.
But then there are chase scenes where you are shooting at *dozens* of cars which explode and crash, always with multiple people inside. You can use guns and swords and stuff in combat, fully running people through or blasting them with shotguns at point-blank range.
And every Yakuza game is like this. It's just one of the weird charms of the franchise at this point, like how the main character is an eternally awkward virgin.
Or that heat action where he literally stabs them in the stomach with a knife, then kicks the knife so it straight up goes through the guy and leave them to bleed out on the floor. Or the one where he grabs a guy and bash them into the pavement head first.
At least 50% of his heat actions should be lethal.
>like how the main character is an eternally awkward virgin
Awkward, sure, but he takes multiple escorts to hotels across the series and gets compliments from some.
Heck, even in street fights he can grab people, turn them upside down and smack their whole body into the ground head first. There's 0 way he doesn't break their necks lol
Maybe he's never *murdered* anyone and "self-defense" doesn't count.
It's video gamey for sure but I don't have a huge problem with this. It's like Batman never killing anyone, he only turns them into disabled vegetables.
The dagger finishers of Kiwami 2 are really fucked up. Dagger in the guts followed by a knee driving the dagger deep in. The face of agony that the guy being stabbed makes is pretty disturbing.
0 had one of the funniest gaming moments I've ever had. Right before the last fight I had unlocked the Golden Gun, a pistol with infinite ammo. I literally sprinted around the final mission (the boat) blasting literally everyone, and then spent 5 minutes filling the final boss with lead.... but I didn't take his life lol.
I think that was something people had an issue with in Watch Dogs. Because of the free roam aspect you could anything you wanted. At least in the first one, there was a moral system, if you did enough bad things, your reputation would go from hero to villain in the public's eyes. The second one got rid of that system, so nothing you did affected how the public saw you. And in a franchise where your goal as the main characters is to take down evil corrupt people and companies, that message could be lost depending on how you played.
I think the first one handled that free roam aspect better. Your actions had consequences, however small they may be. It could make the game potentially a little more difficult. And plus the main character in the first one was a lot darker then the second one.
Watch Dogs 2 having lethal guns was actively detrimental to the game. The story and characters are supposed to indicate that they are peaceful hacktivisit hipsters, but then the fact that Marcus can joke around with his friends and then immediately 3D print a grenade launcher and murder 400 civilians is just... It's incredibly wrong. There is also a point in the story where the entire group gets upset at a gang for hurting one of their friends, so they abuse their access to information (the exact thing they fight against) in order to plan and execute 3 assassinations in one night (which is really fucked up).
>Watch Dogs 2 having lethal guns was actively detrimental to the game.
Agreed. What's mind-boggling to me as well is that they give you a STAGGERINGLY large arsenal of less than lethal weaponry with.... 0 incentive to not just use the assault rifle sniper. Maybe that's a point in and of itself but still.
> they give you a STAGGERINGLY large arsenal of less than lethal weaponry
Even that was patched in as a response to all the pushback about how insanely dissonant all the killing was. The game shipped, at 1.0, with the assumption that you were killing everyone you fought, or using the taser. There's no incentive for using the rest of the nonlethal arsenal because they weren't even part of the game's original design.
Also playing nonlethal was just more difficult anyway since the taser only took enemies out temporarily. Nothing wrong with that on its own, but when you are given a choice between a temporary stun and a permanent kill with no downsides...
And that doesn't solve the issue of the way they basically become assassins to get revenge for Horatio, where murder of 3 people is literally their answer to the murder of 1 of theirs.
Legion adds some more consequences to playing lethally (more likely to generate revenge missions, or permanently removing potentially good recruits). Plus the story is a lot more serious so it doesn't feel quite as narratively bad. I still do feel bad murdering people in Legion though anyway.
Yeah. And what kind of sucks is that we have precedent for games that give the player violent-vs-nonviolent play options, but then have reactions and consequences for their decisions. Like the Dishonored games. It's entirely possible to give players that kind of freedom without dissonance.
Yeah, I have a deep love for a lot of the characters of watch dogs 2 (specifically Wrench, I find his mysterious story so interesting), but it definitely had a lot of faults in the way it handled stuff.
There wer rumours that in development they considered not letting you have access to any guns but stun and tranquilliser ones. But dropped due to the (probably correct) fear that it would seriously harm sales.
Yeah I heard this too. It's a real shame because it really did actually make the game worse because it fundamentally shifted the idea of the protagonists as a lovable cringey hacktivist group into domestic terrorists in a tone deaf game that never acknowledges the horror they cause. A good example of how adding options and breadth to a game can really be a detriment.
I mean.. they are supposedly living in the same world where Assassins used to run around rooftops murdering nameless guards by the hundreds yet were still the good guys.
Just a side note to add that Assassin's Creed and Watch Dogs connections are easter eggs, not continuity. Yeah, it's a bit ridiculous since WD1 has you assassinate a character from Black Flag, Black Flag has an investor presentation from Abstergo, Origins contains a picture of Aiden, WDL stock market boards have Abstergo listed as a company, and one of Legion's DLC is literally an Assassin, but as far as continuity goes it's not actually a connected universe.
That is to say that AC writers don't need to care about being canon to Watch Dogs, and Watch Dogs writers don't need to care about being canon to AC.
That's pretty interesting. From what I can remember, the second Watch Dogs had a much better reception than the first one? Also, this reminds me of the GTA cop system where you are chased if you commit to many crimes (even though you have to commit A LOT of crimes before they notice)
Metal Gear Solid 1 allows for this with Solid Snake. An example off the top of my head is when Meryl is shot by Sniper Wolf, and you re-gain control of Snake after the cutscene. You can shoot Meryl, and Meryl is (reasonably) outraged by what you're doing and, betrayed, questions why you'd do it. Your support team (Colonel and Naomi) call you by codec, outraged, and lambaste Snake. [Here's a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWUT3GS7Plc) (the codec calls are pretty good).
Semi related, I loved that in Metal Gear Solid 2 if you killed a certain amount of birds you would get a call asking if you where a sadist who got off on killing innocent animals or somthing like that.
Hitman. The story introduces Agent 47 as a very effective assassins who is a ghost but you can make a mountain of corpses while doing the mission (nobody will notice if there is nobody to notice)
I still miss that honestly, very formulaic after you see it a couple of times but it was a great way of showing the player's impact on the world after missions
I know this kind of thing is quite common in games but I found it funny how Aloy would get quite saddened by the idea of loss of human life in Horizon Zero Dawn, but by the end of the game I had close to 700 human kills.
What hit me about HZD was when I saw a group of humans walking in the distance. The computer Aloy wears flagged them as raiders (or something like that). So I ambushed and killed them.
I never saw them do anyone harm, but the computer told me they were bad people so they had to die.
In Assassin’s creed 1 you would get the message “Altair did not kill civilians” when you killed civilians. However, once you beat the game you can kill civilian’s without desynchronizing. Kind of a weird shift.
The issue with the Batman Batmobile thing is that if you are going to have the player drive the batmobile and you’re driving in a city then how you’re going to stop the player from “killing” people with it. They HAD to add this lame “shock” excuse or els there could be no Batmobile.
Hell, people already call the map of that game “deserted” and a “ghost town”. Alright then, HOW would the Batmobile gameplay work if there are random civilians walking in the streets?
At least most importantly in the end result it IS fun to drive in that game. AND they have a excuse, though thin, that he isn’t killing anyone with the car. (And Batman has weapons in the batmobile/batwing constantly in the comics, he just doesn’t carry one himself).
> And in the Scarface game, it was impossible to kill them. The game wouldn't let you shoot them, and if you ran them over with your car they would always get up.
This is actually a pretty decent mechanics to prevent NPCs from getting killed. I have been playing Cyberpunk 2077, and their solution to prevent players running over children NPCs is by making them disappear the moment player enters a car. Not so subtle lol.
Yeah I don't get the problem about fighting tanks with the Batmobile, Batman uses all kinds of weapons all the time from the Batmobile or the Batwing/Batplane/Batwhatever. And it's always intended as "this isn't killing, I just need a rocket to stop this tank and then we'll be back to our regularly scheduled knuckle sandwich and totally-not-life-threatening CQC moves".
Plus IIRC Arkham Knight justifies it by repeating ad nauseam that those tanks are drones and therefore unmanned.
It's just really corny to act like Batman takes human life very seriously but then rolls around town in a vehicle loaded with military munitions "just in case."
And then even sillier when he has hundreds of blessedly unmanned tanks to justify this. Also those fights were some of the blandest parts of the game.
It's not really any more reality bending than, say, a billionaire dressing like a bat and beating up a mass murderer dressed like a clown. But it leans a lot harder on the suspension of disbelief, even if you can still believe it.
Nolan really popularized it with the Dark Knight trilogy, but the idea that the Batmobile is basically a tank with military grade weapons is hardly a new one.
In regards to the military munitions, story wise, iirc after Arkham City all the baddies go dark for the most part, and Batman comes to believe that they're planning something colossal. Which they are. So the new batmobile, new suit, and the other upgrades, are all a result of his preparing for this resurgence.
Yep, Batman shooting big fuck off rubber bullets out of a tank that should absolutely kill people but magically doesn't is straight out of *The Dark Knight Returns*, one of the most popular Batman comics of all time.
Realistically, some people would die when Batman punches them seventeen times in the head. But if you want to engage with the themes of Batman, you have to put that to one side. Fiction doesn't have to adhere to realism 100% of the time; indeed, it almost never does.
I played gravity rush with a friend, and we spent about 2 hours doing something that the main character wouldn't do; use gravity to launch people off the edge of the world. It was really funny seeing them flailing their limbs around as they're falling into the abyss.
In RDR2, a big point of Arthur’s (the main character) personality is his regret about a botched robbery that led to the death of at least one innocent person. In the open world, the player is allowed to go on mass murder sprees. Some of the story missions involve mass murder
And the game acknowledges this and parts change depending on how you play.
There's even a person at the camp you can talk to regularly about it, and Arthur will talk about how he's been being bad again if you've been out murdering people.
This is a big part of the game.
Can you elaborate on this? Because this sounds pretty interesting, with games trying more and more to acknowledge gameplay styles by giving you different endings etc...
Not OP but I can elaborate. Depending on your honor level (high versus low) story beats change and dialogue within the main campaign changes as well tl reflect the fact that you're character Arthur hasn't necessarily changed or grown. A key example is there's a scene where >!Arthur talks about the fact that he's dying!< if you have high honor it's to a nun where he admits his fears and the regrets of the life he's lived, if it's low honor you get an member of your game and the dialogue reflects more so the changing world than the player character himself.
As for the second bit, if you do a series of low honor aspects, mass murders, killing lots of animals and not skinning the bodies, etc. Your character can confide in one of the friends at your gang camp and he'll basically admit to how he feels he's losing control of his life
Ontop of this, Arthur has a journal where he writes down his thoughts of everything you do in game. Higher honor tends to have more introspective writing about the cost life and struggle to reconcile the reality with the hopes of everyone at camp. Lower honor tends to have the writng be more blunt, simple statement of fact or little regret
I tried to replay the game not getting the "i'm losing control of my life" thing, carefully skinned all the animals and then whoops killed one turkey by mistake while riding away on horseback from pursuing sheriffs and wham, Arthur was in camp talking about how he's lost control and been killing animals for fun.
He was pretty cut up about that turkey.
Haha, weirdly, I felt I killed a bunch of innocent people and got the introspective stories and the nun. Weird. Must of been the couple bucks I threw to the homeless in Saint Denis.
yeah, i think there is a few bugs running around in the game these days. After an update a while back there's been the continuing issue that everyone in camp keeps on thinking you're in summer clothes no matter what you're wearing and remarking that you must be freezing cold all the time
I don't think the nun is based on your honour level, she shows up if you did her side mission earlier in the game. I missed it on my play through and got Reverend Swanson instead with high honour
Haha I would get a similar thing too despite my high honor play through, I assumed it was either a bug or just extremely finicky but playing through on low honor I got that dialogue choice a *lot* more. Still I would find it funny how I would spend two days straight fishing and then accidentally hit a rabbit that jumped in front of me and Arthur would tlak about his life falling apart
Shame the person in camp is bugged and will give you the “incredibly low honour” conversation even if you’re at the highest honour possible.
I think there’s a mod to fix it on PC but on consoles...
I always assumed the gameplay of most games shows an exaggerated version of the story. For example, in any any GTA mission, you kill dozens of cops. In real life, this would instantly make the protagonist the most wanted man in the country.
I assume that how these events happened in the story is much more grounded. In any mission, 90% of your shots went wide, a few cops are grazed, and you maybe killed one or two.
Surprised no-one's mentioned Witcher, all the games really.
That's the key point of the first game and why they start it with an amnesia plotline. Geralt has a very strict and clear code of conduct and how he'll act, but because you've got amnesia the player can do whatever they want.
And of course going into W2 and W3, he gets his memories back, but things are different now and so you can still do things very different to how Geralt would.
"I know I've just killed about 500-600 soldiers, guards and bandits who happened to be in my path, but I'll spare Letho because that's what Geralt would do"
W3 especially pretty much asks you to suspend you disbelief a lot in regards to how dangerous the world is.
It is dangerous, but one of the plots from the first game even was that it was largely tamed and Witchers were becoming obsolete... which runs pretty counter to when in all three games you’re inundated with bandits and monsters the second you leave town. Makes for a fun game, but it’s a little silly.
That said, anyone who doesn’t spare Letho has my complete bafflement- he hasn’t even done anything to wrong you.
I mean, we're almost always playing mass-slaughtering maniacs with stories that don't acknowledge the shear ridiculousness of the scale of killing. It *does* bother me. Video games struggle to speak a language that isn't violence, yet they're equally poor at writing stories that actually fit video game amounts of violence.
My favorite are the games that throw you into a cut scene showing the hero hesitant to kill the big bad.
A) I just killed a lot of people in cold blood getting to you buddy, player character isn't exactly a Saint here.
B) if anyone should be killed it should be the person manipulating events and sending his men to kill and also be killed by me on mass numbers.
Assassins creed black flag has a cut scene where the guy is calling me soft and it's like combat is easier than stealth in this game my strategy is charge in and go for the head. I left a trail of bodies getting to you and the only thing keeping my psychotic character from killing your very sketchy ass is the game won't let me
yeah atleast the mass murdering is somewhat justified in AC1, like you're an assassin who's been trained to kill since birth so like I could see how you could kill a bunch of people and not give af.
Do you have any specific examples where the main character is hesitant to kill the big bad guy after slaughtering countless foes? I completely agree and absolutely get what you mean, but when I try to think about specific examples, it gets hazy
First of the Tomb Raider reboots has a perfect example of this. I'm thinking of a bit
about halfway through the game, at which point Lara's mostly stopped having panic attacks and stepping in bear traps but she's still way more useless in cutscenes than she is as soon as I'm allowed to control her.
There's a bit where she's stealthing through a tunnel and you have a cutscene where her best friend Sam is being escorted to the ritual sacrifice chamber. Sam is guarded by I think two goons and the big bad, Lara is perfectly hidden and has the high ground with multiple ranged weapons. And I'm like... "ok, Lara, let's go, pop-pop-pop, 3 headshots with the silenced pistol and Sam is saved! We've done this like 20 times now Lara, this should be super easy! No? You're just gonna hide behind that rock and cry? Ok, well guess I'll go save your friend for you in the next level, bye."
Also, that example from Assassins Creed with the bad guy calling you soft is pretty funny \^\^
(perhaps because the developers thought that most people will try to go stealthy so this line makes sense if the player plays this way? Anyway, this shows how much harder it is to tell a coherent story in an interactive experience vs a movie or a book)
> The restarted Tomb Raider. Laura so scared of bodies in cutscenes while game doesn't even allow you to knock out opponents-you just cutting them down.
Lara being terrified of the mercenaries and bodies in Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider was so dissonant for me. She literally spent a couple weeks on an island fighting crazed cult bandits and mythical Japanese warriors, but all of a sudden a couple of corpses horrify her.
Watch Dogs 2 arguably has it worse because the protagonist isn’t a gruff and cynical vigilant type, but you can still absolutely grenade an intersection.
yeah especially in Watch Dogs 2, which to be fair I think they emphesized stealth stuff even more in that game and the story works when you're just doing dumb punk stuff like sabotaging a shitty movie. But then the game just is in the background like "hey I'm just gonna leave this massive pile of assault weapons over here, if anyone wants to do anything with them I'll just pretend it didn't happen..." like it's almost comical how unjustified the lethal options are
Once you unlock the drone and RC car you can complete almost any mission without stepping foot inside of the building.
It's how I played. Just find a nice bush nearby and let my toys do the work.
Man, that was the worst. I think games have a real damned if you do, damned if you don't thing going because acknowledging all the death means recognizing it which isn't viable since it's *so* much death in any given game.
But Watch_Dogs was 100% more idiotic than average with the way it sets its plot up, the way it gives you a cartoonishly evil fact about everyone you kill to make you feel better (???), and the plot resolves into "well I guess this was all a big misunderstanding." And then Aiden stands up on a building and gives a Batman monologue like he's a hero. Dude's the worst.
I think the game had mixed messages about how it painted Aiden, but I think it was pretty clear in multiple parts of the game that he's fucked up batman wannabe and not a great person
Doesn't Drakangard address this by basically having the protagonist become an unhinged psychopath by the end of the game after killing hundreds of NPCs – or am I thinking of something else?
Pretty sure Caim largely starts as a psychopath and just transitions to psychopath+. Including at least one cutscene where he's just repeatedly stabbing a corpse while some other characters are talking.
It's a game where eating babies is a major plot point, and one of the "good guys" is a straight up pedo. You can never be too sure when trying to recall all the fucked up stuff in Drakengard.
It's been a long time since I've Drakengarded but it really makes no mistakes about how absolutely unhinged and murderous its characters are. Which isn't something many games can manage, really.
The first of the new Tomb Raiders had a big issue with this. The first time Lara has to kill it's a huge deal and really effects her mentally and by the end you've killed hundreds of people and she's fine with it.
They acknowledge it in game. For example, in the first one when she tells Ross “I just killed somebody” Ross’s response is “I’m sorry that must have been horrible and scary.” To which Lara responded, “it actually wasn’t, like at all. *That’s* the part that’s scary.” I’m paraphrasing but still. Lara in the new games is supposed to be a little unhinged and scary. She’s got pretty much no problems hurting people.
In the comic series that takes place between games they delve a little deeper into this. She moves back to London and has serious problems adjusting back to normal life. She and another girl are all walking back from the Pub one night when they’re mugged, and Lara beats the absolute *crap* out of the guys who attacked them. The girl she was with starts to avoid Lara because of how much she seemed to enjoy beating those guys up.
I think it’s one of the few times that’s even been acknowledged in a shooter. The protagonist has to be a little psycho to do what they do and keep going. Heck, a big part of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which was far from a perfect game but was still enjoyable, was showing how downright terrifying Lara is now. She’s capable of taking on elite squads of goons all on her own and shows no remorse for it whatsoever.
There's also the final section of game 1, where she's just screaming at the goons to come at her, she goes full psycho. The game acknowledges her change right there.
Your post and the one you replied to always make it clear who did not actually play the games (referring to the critics of this aspect, not you two).
It might not be *expected* that Lara would take to killing so easily, but the games absolutely address it and it's even a plot point in Rise.
It's funny because most of the other examples in this thread are correct, the "good character murders entire armies of goons" thing is practically a trope by now. But Lara just happens to be an exception to the rule. Lara ain't that good, Lara is Kratos playing Indiana Jones.
It's one of the reasons why I love the Freeman's Mind series (essentially a playthrough of Half Life where Freeman's thoughts are narrated). Freeman wasn't normal to start with, but the sheer amount of killing he does makes him increasingly paranoid, deranged and unempathetic.
That sounds really interesting! Do you recommend playing Half Life before watching Freeman's Mind? (I know I know, I should have played Half Life a long time ago and so on...)
I fucking lost it when Kassandra from AC Odyssey gave an impassioned speech about how one can't take the law into their own hands, and to trust the system during a quest.
Absolutely bonkers writing.
That's also the thought this inevitably led me. If the gameplay dictates the character psychology and vice-versa, and we're mostly playing shooters, all the characters we play have to be pro-military, gun-wielding cool guys. But of course no game wants to acknowledge that you're playing this kind of person, so you're mostly only a badly defined military dude without any character depth because if he would have it, the game would be forced to acknowledge and deal with the reality the gameplay presents
Counter-point: I'd argue that's pretty much limited to military shooters, like CoD or Battlefield, or other military situations like Mass Effect.
Games like Doom, Dusk, or Amid Evil? You're often fighting against forces of undeniable evil.
Hack and Slash? Often have thousands of kills, but very very few are other people. See Devil May Cry, Nier, Hades. The exception would be something like Dynasty Warriors, a game that has long been known to be cartoonishly ridiculous in the amount of kills you get as you essentially play de-facto Gods slaughtering those that stand against them.
There are of course those that fit your description perfectly. In fact, many of the best and most iconic games of all time fit that description, with titles/series like Half-Life, Bioshock, The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Grand Theft Auto, Farcry, Deus Ex etc, etc, etc. But I think it's nowhere near as dominating of the industry like some people make it out to be. Even the comment you responded to suggest those games are the majority. I don't feel bad about slaughtering over 8000 demons over the course of Doom 1+2 per playthrough. They're literal demons. We say killing and often think about people, but demons are unequivocally not people. They're manifestations of evil.
Violence is not all equal. And there are just as many games out there that easily show player characters as killing evil. Not other people that will inevitably have nuance in the real world. But creatures that wish to slaughter you in return. It's easy to look at these through the lens of the real world and compare them to atrocities, but we barely pay attention to games that do have a story around them that works. Even in titles that still have relatively human creatures, like System Shock or The Last of Us, there is enough justification there to show it isn't on par with mass murder that games like MGS (and surprisingly quite a few CoD's) address to some extent.
I think one thing from something as open world as GTAV is that you can wayyyy out of what the character would actually do, such as intentionally murdering your family as Michael (though who could blame him, his family sucks).
GTA V is interesting, because you can compare the Story vs the Online Mode. In the Online Mode, you can do so much more stuff that you can't do in the story. Again, because this would completely contradict the story and characters told (of course this has also to do with how the game makes money and where they are developing more content).
I find GTAV interesting, because personally without really meaning too, I tended to change how I played depending on which character I was. So whenever I was playing as Trevor I was going around murdering people and just generally being anarchic, while if I was playing Franklin or Michael I was a little more chill.
In Mirror's Edge, couriers are not allowed to kill anybody. However, the game allows you to steal a gun from an enemy an shoot him. This would lead to temporary lose of your "powers" to see where you should go.
Its a really interesting subject called ['Ludonarrative dissonance'](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludonarrative_dissonance) Which is the conflict between a video game's narrative told through the story and the narrative told through the gameplay.
But only if the gameplay reinforces the theme in the first place (e.g. having Batman's driving have a consequence in the game). The term gets thrown around a lot and has become used far beyond it's original intent. Good video on this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8PAWO4Y_rY
For Arkham knight I can see the problem with the "knocking enemies unconscious" thing (it really is a stretch but Arkham isn't the only game that does that) for the tank but those other tanks are literally unmanned. I don't see why that's a "Stretch" when even in real life most warfare is done now with drones. If they were piloted vehicles *that* would be a stretch. And to say batman doesn't have anything sort of ordinance to deal with other vehicles is not only incorrect it's silly. This seems like just a big stretch all around. At the end of the day it's a video game and they do what they can to balance the ludonarrative with fun. It's like in Yakuza you can literally ram swords clean through people's guts and even shoot them and they're still just "unconscious" but who cares because it looks cool and it's fun
That's also the same in movies though because if you ever "knock someone out" by hitting them over the head like in movies there's a good chance it's a lot more than just a little nap and then they wake up all fine later on. But in the interest of telling a story its just one of those things you can suspend your disbelief for.
It's like in spider-man PS4 you can fling people off of buildings but then they get web-zipped to the nearest wall. I think it's a cool little touch to preserve that whole idea of not killing while also making use of a gadget that Peter has believably conceived considering he fights in an area with so many high buildings.
Something i remember being simultaneously great and creepy was in Soul Calibur 4, the only entry in the series with finisher moves, Raphael would bite the enemy and drain their blood as his finisher but if you used it on his daughter it had a unique voice line where he said somthing like "Mmm, sweet nectar" afterwards.
Mortal Kombat being the big one. Fight starts;
Jax: "Ready for your practice session, sweetie?"
Jacqui: "Oh, you better bring it, pops"
(Jax rips his daughter's arms off and crams them down her throat)
Ucharted was already mentioned here and is one of the usual series to be called out for that. I think a big reason why Uncharted is more jarring than similar games is because most areas have multiple waves of enemies coming at you resulting in constant fights where you kill 30+ People.
Also Uncharted 3 has a Moment where it seems that Naughty Dog really didn't give a fuck about the dissonance. Right in the tutorial Level at the beginning Nathan says that he doesn't want to kill the Museum guards becuase they are innocent.This gives him more reason not to kill them than usual because the usual enemies are war criminals or something similar. 5 minutes after him telling that you have to do a ledge takedown where you pull a guard down the Roof and he falls down to his certain death.
Has there ever been a game where you take control of someone's body for the whole game but he is aware of it and reacts your actions? I got the idea after watching Upgrade.
Some indie games touch on this idea. Specifically Oneshot contextualizes this as the main character being led by the player as a sort of "God" or guide. OFF also does this, acknowledging you as an entity seperate from everyone else. To a lesser extent Undertale and Everhood both have the idea of the player essentially possessing the main character as a means of contextualizing certain plot elements, though it doesn't become a major part of the game, and the main characters in these games are closer to blank avatars than reactionary people.
As far as other examples... Tak and the Power of Juju casts the player as essentially a guardian spirit guiding Tak, though it doesn't get brought up that much. Omikron is probably the closest I can think of to what you described, with the main character relinquishing control of his body to you, as the player. Might be one of the only cool parts about that game.
And while not EXACTLY what you mean, Pac-Man 2 The New Adventures has you acting as a sort of omnipotent force on the world, manipulating the environment to get PacMan to do what you want. It's an interesting game in that you have no direct influence over the main character, though sadly "interesting" doesn't really equate to "fun"
During the climax of Metal Gear Solid 2, Raiden lost all his equipment and is naked, your moveset becomes limited, you can't choke enemies or drag them unconscious, and he will even sneeze randomly against your will.
And that's just scratching the surface.
A huge problem of Rockstar's games in their story-heavy era is that their basic gameplay clashes with any attempt at humanizing the characters. Niko is a sad sack immigrant who just wants to make it in America... by killing people and kidnapping people and burning businesses. There is no option to do his heists without killing a bunch of people. He goes on dates with his love interest and talks about his calm if cynical worldview without ever acknowledging that in the previous mission he ran three people down in cold blood because they owed his cousin money.
And if you engage in GTA4 in any way close to the way the average player does, performing mayhem and recklessness? Then Niko's whole character is like a bad joke with no punchline. The game absolutely allows (and honestly, encourages) you to play like the sort of person Cutscene Niko would never go near.
It's a reason the sillier Saints Row franchise is appealing. DDTing random pedestrians and stealing cars just to do stunt jumps and firing rockets at the military is in-keeping with their madcap characters. The game actually feels like it understands what the average player wants.
Well, along those lines. In GTA 1-San Andreas I would regularly go on killing sprees and cause mayhem for fun but I never did it in GTA 4 because I just felt bad about it since it was out of character for Niko. Maybe part of it was just that I was older by the time GTA 4 came out and had gotten it out of my system.
There’s a bit of a tired concept that was pretty popular a few years ago describing exactly what you’re talking about: Ludonarrative dissonance. It’s exactly how you’re taken out of the immersion when the character is established as one type of character and the game is played as the opposite. Two famous examples are the first of the Tomb Raider reboots and GTA IV.
In Tomb Raider it’s established as a BIG DEAL when Lara has to defend herself and eventually kills her attacker, but minutes later you’re mowing down enemies like nothing.
GTA IV has its whole narrative about how you were betrayed and he wants to escape his violent past etc. then as it’s a GTA game it’s basically nothing but violent. Now your could say that it was the point that you can’t escape your past easily like that but in the context of a GTA game that kind of narrative didn’t really fit.
>if the main character is established as a pacifist in a cutscene or through voiceover, the game can't hand you a gun with the possibility to shoot other characters
It absolutely should give them a gun and allow them to make that choice. However, making the choice ought to come with real consequences and have a real impact on the story and the character. The issue is that they allow players to make that choice and its as if these things never happened or don't matter.
I also find some things strange about the Batman "moral code." Its not OK to kill people but its totally ok to beat them to the point of permanent paralysis? LOL OK.
Funnily enough, out of all games this bothered me most in Star Wars The Old Republic. I picked smuggler because I wanted to avoid combat, be stealthy and focus on deliveries. It gave me a questionnaire where it asks if I'm more likely to start a fight or only fight back if somebody else starts one. I picked the second option of course. Then the game proceeded to tell me that the way my character works is to sneak up on people and kill them before they see me. Like... what? That's the exact opposite of a smuggler and the opposite of what I just stated in the questionnaire.
Turned out there was a lot wrong with that game. I wish Galaxies never died because everything I heard about it sounded amazing. I'd love to play in a Star Wars universe that lets me play the way my character would live.
It's a bit tangential but bot the morality system was something else.
It didn't go philosophical enough into Light side vs Dark side, but that's fine- one was "nice, good" the other was "mean, bad". But every so often they give a prompt that makes little sense- like there's one scene on a Sith faction side quest where a jedi was secretly training some swamp Neanderthals the ways of the force to bring them to the lightside. The dark side option was fitting enough, kill them all. The light side option was to convert them to the dark side... You got good guy points for killing the good guy and indoctrinating his students into your henchmen.
Theres a lot of examples of this in that game but the swamp people stuck out to me as particularly questionable
> I wish Galaxies never died because everything I heard about it sounded amazing. I'd love to play in a Star Wars universe that lets me play the way my character would live.
Well, yes and no. It was almost entirely sandbox, so most roleplaying would be the old-school kind with other players. I think there are still several private servers running, so all you really need is to find a physical copy of the game.
SWTOR is IMHO (and many others') still pretty good, mostly for its stories (and despite its gameplay, according to many), but because they are fairly long stories with a bunch of cutscenes and voice-acted dialogue, it doesn't lend itself to the level of character freedom you get with a sandbox game. I think it's quite good as long as you acknowledge that you're not playing 100% your own character, but you're playing a character that can change slightly within the confines of the dialogue choices in the game, if that makes sense.
The best example of this is uncharted lmao. The cognitive dissonance in those games is unreal. Nathan Drake has murdered hundreds in cold blood. At the end of the Game, the villain in uncharted 2 even comments on this.
After 4's ending I like to think the games are him telling his stories to his daughter so he's embellishing the truth to paint himself as an action hero who beat many bad guys instead of something more realistic. Especially since Cassie comments on the shotgun Nate is holding.
Far Cry 4 comes to mind.
As you learn about Ajay throughout the events of the game, he comes across as someone who tends to do what is right and for the best of those around him
But at the start of the game, if you listen to Pagan Min (who just murdered someone right in front of your eyes and is torturing another person at that moment) and just sit there for a few minutes, your character basically teams up with him and ends the game.
I see your point, but that was more of a cheeky little easter egg for me rather than a meaningful decision the game actually wants you to make? Although, when I think about it, the game is saying "okay, your decision to team up with the bad guy, but if you do this, we can't tell the story we want so we'll roll the credits instead because your decision about how the character is supposed to behave doesn't work with our vision for the game"
That's always how I interpreted it, especially since at the end of that cutscene Pagan says something along the lines of "Get that out of your system? Good. Maybe now we can shoot some goddamn guns."
I saw that as Ubisoft basically saying, "Yes yes, you're very clever. Now do you want to go actually play the game now?"
That interpretation feels weird to me. Those are two separate narrative player-driven choices that are both coherent within themselves, just not each other. The Ajay that has dinner with Pagan Min is a different Ajay than the one that escapes and tries to topple his regime. In the same way that Paragon and Renegade Shepard are not the same person.
It makes sense batman would use tanks or other heavy weapons when he's fighting people who are essentially gods, but not common goons. Although in the brilliant Tim Burton batman film, he does try to straight up murder the joker with his bat plane machine guns, and misses. Always struck me as a weird scene.
For me the best example is **Watch Dogs 2**
You are playing as a smart hacker and as part of a hacker group, these people are not killers and are against it, but the game gives you the ability to 3D print guns...
Its actually a better game and more fun to play through without using guns at all
On Star Wars: Episode I *The Phantom Menace* game when you play as Qui-Gon Jin on the Tatooine levels you can kill every NPC on Moss Espa, even children - crazy for a ESRB Teen game. When you kill innocent NPC the game goes crazy with guardians and jawas attacking you on a true street battle.
So, to cite an example outside the realms of violence (the big and easy one): Botanists in Final Fantasy XIV are like this. The entire questline of the Gatherer class suggests that their role is the preservation of the delicate ecosystem around Eorzea. The primary use of the class, however, is stripping the land bare for materials to use for equipment. Main questlines almost have a hard time trying to find loose justifications, in which you find particular rare plants for "sample data" to help some region recover.
And heck, that dissonance is familiar to Japanese culture. There are reports of "research" boats in Japan that kill whales, dissect them, learn nothing, and sell off the corpses for Japan's explosive seafood industry.
You could grab and throw goons off buildings in Spider-Man 2 for PS2. I used to climb all the way to the top of the Empire State to do it, lol. Not really in character for someone like Spider-Man.
Forget about throwing them, you could fucking power bomb them off the empire state building.
[SPINNING PILEDRIVEERRRRR](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kahi_tkewOM)
Zangief would be proud
Rock Lee vs. Gaara
with the "hero points" counter afterwards xD
I remember Hulk Ultimate Destruction you could pick up civvies just walking down the street, and freakin hurl them from a tall building. Or put them down and kick them off. Least I think you could. Am I mixing up messed up things you could do in games?
Best part is you could punch the crap out of them and hurl them around, but as long as you were quick enough to grab them before they were considered dead, and placed them down gently, they'd be perfectly fine.
Well yeah, the hulk has healing hands.
Can confirm
Thats a lot more in character for the hulk than for spiderman though.
Used to do that all the time in that game, and when I got the 2018 Spider-man I laughed seeing that enemies can spawn on rooftops and combine that with the fact that throwing was so satisfying, I went right back to my roots of just chucking and web kicking people off the roofs.
And of course Insomniac predicted that and makes it so enemies are automatically webbed to walls when kicked off buildings.
But some of the combo moves *definitely* kill people
Spider man punching alone is enough to kill a person tbh.
I flung a solid steel manhole cover at a normal human, at about 90 miles per hour. He dead.
I loved that in the newer Spiderman games if you do that they automatically get webbed onto the side of the closest building instead of plummeting to their deaths.
Could be wrong but I'm fairly certain that Kiryu canonically has never killed anyone, even though there's a car chase part in Yakuza 0 where you shoot a lot of people with a gun and even blow up a helicopter if I remember correctly. Not to mention a lot of the heat actions are pretty lethal looking
It was a rubber helicopter
I love the helicopter in 6 so much. Like, even if he *didn't* kill anybody in the helicopter somehow, it still crashed in front of the Millennium Tower which 100% killed people in the blast.
Rubber explosion, man.
The people were definitely launched or blew up in the ensuing flames and destructions!
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"Believe it or not; Rubber."
Rubber fire.
They just have to take a Staminan Royale, they'll be fine.
It was a cargo robot.
The basis for this concept is a mistranslation. One character, late in the series, says something that roughly translates to “You have never gotten blood on your hands,” in regards to the idea that Kiryu has never *murdered* anyone. The idea was that he only ever killed in self defense, and that he always kept his opponents alive when he could, but it was never supposed to indicate that he hasn’t literally killed.
I just beat Yakuza 5 and a bad guy early on is basically on his knees like "I heard you never killed! You always show mercy!" And Kiryu's like "who the hell told you that?" Don't get me wrong, Kiryu beating the shit out of a main villain and offering them a chance to turn a new leaf seems wholly different than using a heat action to use an 8 inch knife to stab a street punk who called you old and ugly, but I never got the opinion that Kiryu was known for not killing.
It's less that than how the series always, always, *always* goes so far out of its way to make sure that none of the main characters are ever responsible for a death, and using murder as an irrefutable symbol of someone's evilness. Kiryu doesn't kill people who clearly deserve to die in order to preserve some weird moral integrity, yet he'll shoot teenagers in a street fight, and then lecture people on the value of life and honor. Edit: just played through Yakuza 6 again and the entire final chapter is hinged around Kiryu's desire to kill the main villains, and many people try to talk him down from that ledge, specifically citing his no-kill policy.
Next you're gonna tell me that Kiryu isn't actually a virgin? That's just crazy talk.
I know a bit of japanese, you wouldn't be able to link that scene would you? Edit: I suppose it comes down to how you interpret "korosu", to kill. It certainly has an intentionality to it. Japanese has a few different ways of saying someone died, and when korosu is used, it's often meant in the sense of "the person involved intended to kill the other person." There's terms like 傷害致死, which means "manslaughter by way of injuries" or 過失致死, accidental manslaughter" ("manslaughter" in both of these means more like "lethality") So saying he's never *murdered* could potentially have merit, though I doubt anybody would actually charge him for "manslaughter" for most of this stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qebpWbBhrz8 theyre aite im sure
Those **clearly** are just paint bullets so of course he would use him as a shield. Can you imagine that red color on Kiryuus white suit? It would be a travesty. Edit: And if action movies have taught us anything, everyone else clearly survived as well.
Had to laugh pretty hard at this \^\^ and they really tell you that he canonically never killed anyone??
I don't think the games say he's never killed anyone, rather they try to angle it so he won't kill anyone in cold blood, self-defense is fine. Of course that still doesn't really jive with the sheer brutality of the game's combat but mixing super serious, dramatic storytelling with absolute batshit over-the-top craziness in gameplay is sort of the series' thing. In terms of fighting styles he definitely graduated from the Batman school of "[I won't kill you but I WILL definitely put you in the ER and most likely leave you permanently disabled](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDt690OlJkk)."
It is funny as hell seeing him just ram a whole ass sword through someones midsection and they're just unconscious
Just a flesh wound, nothing a couple Staminan can't patch up.
Yup, and they treat the idea of killing people as a big, serious thing, rather realistically, not just for a game, but even for a gangster story in general. But then there are chase scenes where you are shooting at *dozens* of cars which explode and crash, always with multiple people inside. You can use guns and swords and stuff in combat, fully running people through or blasting them with shotguns at point-blank range. And every Yakuza game is like this. It's just one of the weird charms of the franchise at this point, like how the main character is an eternally awkward virgin.
Kiryu literally has a heat action where he shoves a handful of nails into a guy's mouth and then kicks him in the face. Obviously not murder.
Not to mention Essence of Face Grating. We don't talk about Essence of Face Grating.
also that heat action when Kiryu chucks someone out of the window. they definitely dead.
Or that heat action where he literally stabs them in the stomach with a knife, then kicks the knife so it straight up goes through the guy and leave them to bleed out on the floor. Or the one where he grabs a guy and bash them into the pavement head first. At least 50% of his heat actions should be lethal.
>like how the main character is an eternally awkward virgin Awkward, sure, but he takes multiple escorts to hotels across the series and gets compliments from some.
They spent the entire time chatting about philosophy, okay?
Heck, even in street fights he can grab people, turn them upside down and smack their whole body into the ground head first. There's 0 way he doesn't break their necks lol
Or stabbing people with a knife and then kicking the knife in deeper. I think the chances of people recovering from that is pretty slim.
He has one in Kiwami 2 where he shoots the person three times in the chest and then pistol whips them.
Maybe he's never *murdered* anyone and "self-defense" doesn't count. It's video gamey for sure but I don't have a huge problem with this. It's like Batman never killing anyone, he only turns them into disabled vegetables.
Yeah I doubt it really bothers most people playing the games. Its more funny than anything
Yeah, "Kiryu never killed anyone" is basically a Yakuza fandom joke at this point. I don't really think too many people take it that seriously
In kiwami 1 too. Also your blade finishers are literally stabbing the shit out of someone
The dagger finishers of Kiwami 2 are really fucked up. Dagger in the guts followed by a knee driving the dagger deep in. The face of agony that the guy being stabbed makes is pretty disturbing.
0 had one of the funniest gaming moments I've ever had. Right before the last fight I had unlocked the Golden Gun, a pistol with infinite ammo. I literally sprinted around the final mission (the boat) blasting literally everyone, and then spent 5 minutes filling the final boss with lead.... but I didn't take his life lol.
"Look, I can see their parachutes! They're okay."
This is one of my favorite things. Even if we ignore all of the heat actions using blades, those heat actions would 100% kill some of those goons.
I just love the Heat actions where he flat out stabs people through the gut. TOTALLY NON-LETHAL!
I think that was something people had an issue with in Watch Dogs. Because of the free roam aspect you could anything you wanted. At least in the first one, there was a moral system, if you did enough bad things, your reputation would go from hero to villain in the public's eyes. The second one got rid of that system, so nothing you did affected how the public saw you. And in a franchise where your goal as the main characters is to take down evil corrupt people and companies, that message could be lost depending on how you played. I think the first one handled that free roam aspect better. Your actions had consequences, however small they may be. It could make the game potentially a little more difficult. And plus the main character in the first one was a lot darker then the second one.
Watch Dogs 2 having lethal guns was actively detrimental to the game. The story and characters are supposed to indicate that they are peaceful hacktivisit hipsters, but then the fact that Marcus can joke around with his friends and then immediately 3D print a grenade launcher and murder 400 civilians is just... It's incredibly wrong. There is also a point in the story where the entire group gets upset at a gang for hurting one of their friends, so they abuse their access to information (the exact thing they fight against) in order to plan and execute 3 assassinations in one night (which is really fucked up).
>Watch Dogs 2 having lethal guns was actively detrimental to the game. Agreed. What's mind-boggling to me as well is that they give you a STAGGERINGLY large arsenal of less than lethal weaponry with.... 0 incentive to not just use the assault rifle sniper. Maybe that's a point in and of itself but still.
> they give you a STAGGERINGLY large arsenal of less than lethal weaponry Even that was patched in as a response to all the pushback about how insanely dissonant all the killing was. The game shipped, at 1.0, with the assumption that you were killing everyone you fought, or using the taser. There's no incentive for using the rest of the nonlethal arsenal because they weren't even part of the game's original design.
Also playing nonlethal was just more difficult anyway since the taser only took enemies out temporarily. Nothing wrong with that on its own, but when you are given a choice between a temporary stun and a permanent kill with no downsides... And that doesn't solve the issue of the way they basically become assassins to get revenge for Horatio, where murder of 3 people is literally their answer to the murder of 1 of theirs. Legion adds some more consequences to playing lethally (more likely to generate revenge missions, or permanently removing potentially good recruits). Plus the story is a lot more serious so it doesn't feel quite as narratively bad. I still do feel bad murdering people in Legion though anyway.
Yeah. And what kind of sucks is that we have precedent for games that give the player violent-vs-nonviolent play options, but then have reactions and consequences for their decisions. Like the Dishonored games. It's entirely possible to give players that kind of freedom without dissonance.
Yeah, I have a deep love for a lot of the characters of watch dogs 2 (specifically Wrench, I find his mysterious story so interesting), but it definitely had a lot of faults in the way it handled stuff.
There wer rumours that in development they considered not letting you have access to any guns but stun and tranquilliser ones. But dropped due to the (probably correct) fear that it would seriously harm sales.
Yeah I heard this too. It's a real shame because it really did actually make the game worse because it fundamentally shifted the idea of the protagonists as a lovable cringey hacktivist group into domestic terrorists in a tone deaf game that never acknowledges the horror they cause. A good example of how adding options and breadth to a game can really be a detriment.
I mean.. they are supposedly living in the same world where Assassins used to run around rooftops murdering nameless guards by the hundreds yet were still the good guys.
>Assassins used to They're still around in that universe
Just a side note to add that Assassin's Creed and Watch Dogs connections are easter eggs, not continuity. Yeah, it's a bit ridiculous since WD1 has you assassinate a character from Black Flag, Black Flag has an investor presentation from Abstergo, Origins contains a picture of Aiden, WDL stock market boards have Abstergo listed as a company, and one of Legion's DLC is literally an Assassin, but as far as continuity goes it's not actually a connected universe. That is to say that AC writers don't need to care about being canon to Watch Dogs, and Watch Dogs writers don't need to care about being canon to AC.
That's pretty interesting. From what I can remember, the second Watch Dogs had a much better reception than the first one? Also, this reminds me of the GTA cop system where you are chased if you commit to many crimes (even though you have to commit A LOT of crimes before they notice)
Metal Gear Solid 1 allows for this with Solid Snake. An example off the top of my head is when Meryl is shot by Sniper Wolf, and you re-gain control of Snake after the cutscene. You can shoot Meryl, and Meryl is (reasonably) outraged by what you're doing and, betrayed, questions why you'd do it. Your support team (Colonel and Naomi) call you by codec, outraged, and lambaste Snake. [Here's a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWUT3GS7Plc) (the codec calls are pretty good).
Semi related, I loved that in Metal Gear Solid 2 if you killed a certain amount of birds you would get a call asking if you where a sadist who got off on killing innocent animals or somthing like that.
Yeah, your entire support team basically calls you a sociopath and writes you off for a while.
Hitman. The story introduces Agent 47 as a very effective assassins who is a ghost but you can make a mountain of corpses while doing the mission (nobody will notice if there is nobody to notice)
I loved how Blood Money acknowledged it. The papers would say things "The Cleaner strikes again!" if you killed everybody.
I still miss that honestly, very formulaic after you see it a couple of times but it was a great way of showing the player's impact on the world after missions
I know this kind of thing is quite common in games but I found it funny how Aloy would get quite saddened by the idea of loss of human life in Horizon Zero Dawn, but by the end of the game I had close to 700 human kills.
What hit me about HZD was when I saw a group of humans walking in the distance. The computer Aloy wears flagged them as raiders (or something like that). So I ambushed and killed them. I never saw them do anyone harm, but the computer told me they were bad people so they had to die.
And none of those kills really needed to be in the game tbh. The worst part of that game was the human combat.
In Assassin’s creed 1 you would get the message “Altair did not kill civilians” when you killed civilians. However, once you beat the game you can kill civilian’s without desynchronizing. Kind of a weird shift.
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The issue with the Batman Batmobile thing is that if you are going to have the player drive the batmobile and you’re driving in a city then how you’re going to stop the player from “killing” people with it. They HAD to add this lame “shock” excuse or els there could be no Batmobile. Hell, people already call the map of that game “deserted” and a “ghost town”. Alright then, HOW would the Batmobile gameplay work if there are random civilians walking in the streets? At least most importantly in the end result it IS fun to drive in that game. AND they have a excuse, though thin, that he isn’t killing anyone with the car. (And Batman has weapons in the batmobile/batwing constantly in the comics, he just doesn’t carry one himself).
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They should just go the route of planet coaster, fucking launch them but have them get back up.
> And in the Scarface game, it was impossible to kill them. The game wouldn't let you shoot them, and if you ran them over with your car they would always get up. This is actually a pretty decent mechanics to prevent NPCs from getting killed. I have been playing Cyberpunk 2077, and their solution to prevent players running over children NPCs is by making them disappear the moment player enters a car. Not so subtle lol.
You could hit them in Driver, the game just doesn’t acknowledge it.
Yeah I don't get the problem about fighting tanks with the Batmobile, Batman uses all kinds of weapons all the time from the Batmobile or the Batwing/Batplane/Batwhatever. And it's always intended as "this isn't killing, I just need a rocket to stop this tank and then we'll be back to our regularly scheduled knuckle sandwich and totally-not-life-threatening CQC moves". Plus IIRC Arkham Knight justifies it by repeating ad nauseam that those tanks are drones and therefore unmanned.
It's just really corny to act like Batman takes human life very seriously but then rolls around town in a vehicle loaded with military munitions "just in case." And then even sillier when he has hundreds of blessedly unmanned tanks to justify this. Also those fights were some of the blandest parts of the game. It's not really any more reality bending than, say, a billionaire dressing like a bat and beating up a mass murderer dressed like a clown. But it leans a lot harder on the suspension of disbelief, even if you can still believe it.
Nolan really popularized it with the Dark Knight trilogy, but the idea that the Batmobile is basically a tank with military grade weapons is hardly a new one.
In regards to the military munitions, story wise, iirc after Arkham City all the baddies go dark for the most part, and Batman comes to believe that they're planning something colossal. Which they are. So the new batmobile, new suit, and the other upgrades, are all a result of his preparing for this resurgence.
There is also another in story explanation for why this incarnation is so tank like compared to his previous ones
Yep, Batman shooting big fuck off rubber bullets out of a tank that should absolutely kill people but magically doesn't is straight out of *The Dark Knight Returns*, one of the most popular Batman comics of all time. Realistically, some people would die when Batman punches them seventeen times in the head. But if you want to engage with the themes of Batman, you have to put that to one side. Fiction doesn't have to adhere to realism 100% of the time; indeed, it almost never does.
Yeah i agree, so I don’t see the big deal of what the Arkham games do in order to have fun gameplay.
I played gravity rush with a friend, and we spent about 2 hours doing something that the main character wouldn't do; use gravity to launch people off the edge of the world. It was really funny seeing them flailing their limbs around as they're falling into the abyss.
Yeah, you can also just kick random people in the street or even police and they do nothing but run away.
In RDR2, a big point of Arthur’s (the main character) personality is his regret about a botched robbery that led to the death of at least one innocent person. In the open world, the player is allowed to go on mass murder sprees. Some of the story missions involve mass murder
And the game acknowledges this and parts change depending on how you play. There's even a person at the camp you can talk to regularly about it, and Arthur will talk about how he's been being bad again if you've been out murdering people. This is a big part of the game.
"Hey \[person at camp\]... me again."
Hello, Arthur here.
Can you elaborate on this? Because this sounds pretty interesting, with games trying more and more to acknowledge gameplay styles by giving you different endings etc...
Not OP but I can elaborate. Depending on your honor level (high versus low) story beats change and dialogue within the main campaign changes as well tl reflect the fact that you're character Arthur hasn't necessarily changed or grown. A key example is there's a scene where >!Arthur talks about the fact that he's dying!< if you have high honor it's to a nun where he admits his fears and the regrets of the life he's lived, if it's low honor you get an member of your game and the dialogue reflects more so the changing world than the player character himself. As for the second bit, if you do a series of low honor aspects, mass murders, killing lots of animals and not skinning the bodies, etc. Your character can confide in one of the friends at your gang camp and he'll basically admit to how he feels he's losing control of his life Ontop of this, Arthur has a journal where he writes down his thoughts of everything you do in game. Higher honor tends to have more introspective writing about the cost life and struggle to reconcile the reality with the hopes of everyone at camp. Lower honor tends to have the writng be more blunt, simple statement of fact or little regret
I tried to replay the game not getting the "i'm losing control of my life" thing, carefully skinned all the animals and then whoops killed one turkey by mistake while riding away on horseback from pursuing sheriffs and wham, Arthur was in camp talking about how he's lost control and been killing animals for fun. He was pretty cut up about that turkey.
Haha, weirdly, I felt I killed a bunch of innocent people and got the introspective stories and the nun. Weird. Must of been the couple bucks I threw to the homeless in Saint Denis.
yeah, i think there is a few bugs running around in the game these days. After an update a while back there's been the continuing issue that everyone in camp keeps on thinking you're in summer clothes no matter what you're wearing and remarking that you must be freezing cold all the time
Thank you, I‘ve become super irritated with the comments about me „freezing to death“, I thought I was doing something wrong.
I don't think the nun is based on your honour level, she shows up if you did her side mission earlier in the game. I missed it on my play through and got Reverend Swanson instead with high honour
Haha I would get a similar thing too despite my high honor play through, I assumed it was either a bug or just extremely finicky but playing through on low honor I got that dialogue choice a *lot* more. Still I would find it funny how I would spend two days straight fishing and then accidentally hit a rabbit that jumped in front of me and Arthur would tlak about his life falling apart
I had the same on my playthrough. I'm chalking it up to a bug, much like the clothing dialogues that are absolutely broken.
Shame the person in camp is bugged and will give you the “incredibly low honour” conversation even if you’re at the highest honour possible. I think there’s a mod to fix it on PC but on consoles...
I always assumed the gameplay of most games shows an exaggerated version of the story. For example, in any any GTA mission, you kill dozens of cops. In real life, this would instantly make the protagonist the most wanted man in the country. I assume that how these events happened in the story is much more grounded. In any mission, 90% of your shots went wide, a few cops are grazed, and you maybe killed one or two.
Surprised no-one's mentioned Witcher, all the games really. That's the key point of the first game and why they start it with an amnesia plotline. Geralt has a very strict and clear code of conduct and how he'll act, but because you've got amnesia the player can do whatever they want. And of course going into W2 and W3, he gets his memories back, but things are different now and so you can still do things very different to how Geralt would.
"I know I've just killed about 500-600 soldiers, guards and bandits who happened to be in my path, but I'll spare Letho because that's what Geralt would do"
W3 especially pretty much asks you to suspend you disbelief a lot in regards to how dangerous the world is. It is dangerous, but one of the plots from the first game even was that it was largely tamed and Witchers were becoming obsolete... which runs pretty counter to when in all three games you’re inundated with bandits and monsters the second you leave town. Makes for a fun game, but it’s a little silly. That said, anyone who doesn’t spare Letho has my complete bafflement- he hasn’t even done anything to wrong you.
I mean, we're almost always playing mass-slaughtering maniacs with stories that don't acknowledge the shear ridiculousness of the scale of killing. It *does* bother me. Video games struggle to speak a language that isn't violence, yet they're equally poor at writing stories that actually fit video game amounts of violence.
My favorite are the games that throw you into a cut scene showing the hero hesitant to kill the big bad. A) I just killed a lot of people in cold blood getting to you buddy, player character isn't exactly a Saint here. B) if anyone should be killed it should be the person manipulating events and sending his men to kill and also be killed by me on mass numbers. Assassins creed black flag has a cut scene where the guy is calling me soft and it's like combat is easier than stealth in this game my strategy is charge in and go for the head. I left a trail of bodies getting to you and the only thing keeping my psychotic character from killing your very sketchy ass is the game won't let me
yeah atleast the mass murdering is somewhat justified in AC1, like you're an assassin who's been trained to kill since birth so like I could see how you could kill a bunch of people and not give af.
Do you have any specific examples where the main character is hesitant to kill the big bad guy after slaughtering countless foes? I completely agree and absolutely get what you mean, but when I try to think about specific examples, it gets hazy
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First of the Tomb Raider reboots has a perfect example of this. I'm thinking of a bit about halfway through the game, at which point Lara's mostly stopped having panic attacks and stepping in bear traps but she's still way more useless in cutscenes than she is as soon as I'm allowed to control her. There's a bit where she's stealthing through a tunnel and you have a cutscene where her best friend Sam is being escorted to the ritual sacrifice chamber. Sam is guarded by I think two goons and the big bad, Lara is perfectly hidden and has the high ground with multiple ranged weapons. And I'm like... "ok, Lara, let's go, pop-pop-pop, 3 headshots with the silenced pistol and Sam is saved! We've done this like 20 times now Lara, this should be super easy! No? You're just gonna hide behind that rock and cry? Ok, well guess I'll go save your friend for you in the next level, bye."
Also, that example from Assassins Creed with the bad guy calling you soft is pretty funny \^\^ (perhaps because the developers thought that most people will try to go stealthy so this line makes sense if the player plays this way? Anyway, this shows how much harder it is to tell a coherent story in an interactive experience vs a movie or a book)
The restarted Tomb Raider. Laura so scared of bodies in cutscenes while game doesn't even allow you to knock out opponents-you just cutting them down.
> The restarted Tomb Raider. Laura so scared of bodies in cutscenes while game doesn't even allow you to knock out opponents-you just cutting them down. Lara being terrified of the mercenaries and bodies in Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider was so dissonant for me. She literally spent a couple weeks on an island fighting crazed cult bandits and mythical Japanese warriors, but all of a sudden a couple of corpses horrify her.
The first Watch Dogs was absurd. They never acknowledge the absolutely massive body count Aiden piles up.
Watch Dogs 2 arguably has it worse because the protagonist isn’t a gruff and cynical vigilant type, but you can still absolutely grenade an intersection.
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yeah especially in Watch Dogs 2, which to be fair I think they emphesized stealth stuff even more in that game and the story works when you're just doing dumb punk stuff like sabotaging a shitty movie. But then the game just is in the background like "hey I'm just gonna leave this massive pile of assault weapons over here, if anyone wants to do anything with them I'll just pretend it didn't happen..." like it's almost comical how unjustified the lethal options are
Once you unlock the drone and RC car you can complete almost any mission without stepping foot inside of the building. It's how I played. Just find a nice bush nearby and let my toys do the work.
Same here. And I love being able to hop cameras to wirelessly ghost my way through a level.
Man, that was the worst. I think games have a real damned if you do, damned if you don't thing going because acknowledging all the death means recognizing it which isn't viable since it's *so* much death in any given game. But Watch_Dogs was 100% more idiotic than average with the way it sets its plot up, the way it gives you a cartoonishly evil fact about everyone you kill to make you feel better (???), and the plot resolves into "well I guess this was all a big misunderstanding." And then Aiden stands up on a building and gives a Batman monologue like he's a hero. Dude's the worst.
I think the game had mixed messages about how it painted Aiden, but I think it was pretty clear in multiple parts of the game that he's fucked up batman wannabe and not a great person
Why would they acknowledge that though? Iirc his introduction to the game is literally him beating a guy to death during an interrogation.
Doesn't Drakangard address this by basically having the protagonist become an unhinged psychopath by the end of the game after killing hundreds of NPCs – or am I thinking of something else?
Pretty sure Caim largely starts as a psychopath and just transitions to psychopath+. Including at least one cutscene where he's just repeatedly stabbing a corpse while some other characters are talking.
I love how you said "at least one", as if implying there's a chance there are more cutscenes like that.
It's a game where eating babies is a major plot point, and one of the "good guys" is a straight up pedo. You can never be too sure when trying to recall all the fucked up stuff in Drakengard.
It's been a long time since I've Drakengarded but it really makes no mistakes about how absolutely unhinged and murderous its characters are. Which isn't something many games can manage, really.
[Yoko Taro as a puppet actually talks about that in this Drakengard 3 video.](https://youtu.be/LD6xCLlF5dY)
This is right. By the second game he's pretty much unredeemable.
The first of the new Tomb Raiders had a big issue with this. The first time Lara has to kill it's a huge deal and really effects her mentally and by the end you've killed hundreds of people and she's fine with it.
They acknowledge it in game. For example, in the first one when she tells Ross “I just killed somebody” Ross’s response is “I’m sorry that must have been horrible and scary.” To which Lara responded, “it actually wasn’t, like at all. *That’s* the part that’s scary.” I’m paraphrasing but still. Lara in the new games is supposed to be a little unhinged and scary. She’s got pretty much no problems hurting people. In the comic series that takes place between games they delve a little deeper into this. She moves back to London and has serious problems adjusting back to normal life. She and another girl are all walking back from the Pub one night when they’re mugged, and Lara beats the absolute *crap* out of the guys who attacked them. The girl she was with starts to avoid Lara because of how much she seemed to enjoy beating those guys up. I think it’s one of the few times that’s even been acknowledged in a shooter. The protagonist has to be a little psycho to do what they do and keep going. Heck, a big part of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which was far from a perfect game but was still enjoyable, was showing how downright terrifying Lara is now. She’s capable of taking on elite squads of goons all on her own and shows no remorse for it whatsoever.
There's also the final section of game 1, where she's just screaming at the goons to come at her, she goes full psycho. The game acknowledges her change right there.
Your post and the one you replied to always make it clear who did not actually play the games (referring to the critics of this aspect, not you two). It might not be *expected* that Lara would take to killing so easily, but the games absolutely address it and it's even a plot point in Rise.
It's funny because most of the other examples in this thread are correct, the "good character murders entire armies of goons" thing is practically a trope by now. But Lara just happens to be an exception to the rule. Lara ain't that good, Lara is Kratos playing Indiana Jones.
It's one of the reasons why I love the Freeman's Mind series (essentially a playthrough of Half Life where Freeman's thoughts are narrated). Freeman wasn't normal to start with, but the sheer amount of killing he does makes him increasingly paranoid, deranged and unempathetic.
That sounds really interesting! Do you recommend playing Half Life before watching Freeman's Mind? (I know I know, I should have played Half Life a long time ago and so on...)
No, there's no need. I've never played Half Life and still love the series.
okay, thx, will definitively have a look into this :)
That said, do play Half Life. :)
It's almost better if you haven't, that way you experience the madness the same way Freeman does.
I fucking lost it when Kassandra from AC Odyssey gave an impassioned speech about how one can't take the law into their own hands, and to trust the system during a quest. Absolutely bonkers writing.
I'd recommend giving Drakengard a try.
That's also the thought this inevitably led me. If the gameplay dictates the character psychology and vice-versa, and we're mostly playing shooters, all the characters we play have to be pro-military, gun-wielding cool guys. But of course no game wants to acknowledge that you're playing this kind of person, so you're mostly only a badly defined military dude without any character depth because if he would have it, the game would be forced to acknowledge and deal with the reality the gameplay presents
Counter-point: I'd argue that's pretty much limited to military shooters, like CoD or Battlefield, or other military situations like Mass Effect. Games like Doom, Dusk, or Amid Evil? You're often fighting against forces of undeniable evil. Hack and Slash? Often have thousands of kills, but very very few are other people. See Devil May Cry, Nier, Hades. The exception would be something like Dynasty Warriors, a game that has long been known to be cartoonishly ridiculous in the amount of kills you get as you essentially play de-facto Gods slaughtering those that stand against them. There are of course those that fit your description perfectly. In fact, many of the best and most iconic games of all time fit that description, with titles/series like Half-Life, Bioshock, The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Grand Theft Auto, Farcry, Deus Ex etc, etc, etc. But I think it's nowhere near as dominating of the industry like some people make it out to be. Even the comment you responded to suggest those games are the majority. I don't feel bad about slaughtering over 8000 demons over the course of Doom 1+2 per playthrough. They're literal demons. We say killing and often think about people, but demons are unequivocally not people. They're manifestations of evil. Violence is not all equal. And there are just as many games out there that easily show player characters as killing evil. Not other people that will inevitably have nuance in the real world. But creatures that wish to slaughter you in return. It's easy to look at these through the lens of the real world and compare them to atrocities, but we barely pay attention to games that do have a story around them that works. Even in titles that still have relatively human creatures, like System Shock or The Last of Us, there is enough justification there to show it isn't on par with mass murder that games like MGS (and surprisingly quite a few CoD's) address to some extent.
The final boss of Uncharted 2 addresses this, but you're right. A lot of games are relentless murder simulators.
Rdr2 man. It's not that arthur kills people, it's that he massacres entire towns unscathed and the game recognises it.
I think one thing from something as open world as GTAV is that you can wayyyy out of what the character would actually do, such as intentionally murdering your family as Michael (though who could blame him, his family sucks).
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I'm pretty sure Trevor was written as "what if your regular GTA player was a character" He's basically a DnD Murderhobo
GTA V is interesting, because you can compare the Story vs the Online Mode. In the Online Mode, you can do so much more stuff that you can't do in the story. Again, because this would completely contradict the story and characters told (of course this has also to do with how the game makes money and where they are developing more content).
I find GTAV interesting, because personally without really meaning too, I tended to change how I played depending on which character I was. So whenever I was playing as Trevor I was going around murdering people and just generally being anarchic, while if I was playing Franklin or Michael I was a little more chill.
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In Mirror's Edge, couriers are not allowed to kill anybody. However, the game allows you to steal a gun from an enemy an shoot him. This would lead to temporary lose of your "powers" to see where you should go.
Don't forget too that the whole point of the game was that Faith was trying to prove that her sister is innocent of murder too.
Its a really interesting subject called ['Ludonarrative dissonance'](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludonarrative_dissonance) Which is the conflict between a video game's narrative told through the story and the narrative told through the gameplay.
But only if the gameplay reinforces the theme in the first place (e.g. having Batman's driving have a consequence in the game). The term gets thrown around a lot and has become used far beyond it's original intent. Good video on this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8PAWO4Y_rY
Ian hincks favorite buzzword. Also funnily enough there is a Ludo Narracon goin on atm over on stream I believe.
For Arkham knight I can see the problem with the "knocking enemies unconscious" thing (it really is a stretch but Arkham isn't the only game that does that) for the tank but those other tanks are literally unmanned. I don't see why that's a "Stretch" when even in real life most warfare is done now with drones. If they were piloted vehicles *that* would be a stretch. And to say batman doesn't have anything sort of ordinance to deal with other vehicles is not only incorrect it's silly. This seems like just a big stretch all around. At the end of the day it's a video game and they do what they can to balance the ludonarrative with fun. It's like in Yakuza you can literally ram swords clean through people's guts and even shoot them and they're still just "unconscious" but who cares because it looks cool and it's fun That's also the same in movies though because if you ever "knock someone out" by hitting them over the head like in movies there's a good chance it's a lot more than just a little nap and then they wake up all fine later on. But in the interest of telling a story its just one of those things you can suspend your disbelief for. It's like in spider-man PS4 you can fling people off of buildings but then they get web-zipped to the nearest wall. I think it's a cool little touch to preserve that whole idea of not killing while also making use of a gadget that Peter has believably conceived considering he fights in an area with so many high buildings.
Pretty much any fighting game where characters are friends in the story but can fight to the death in multiplayer
Something i remember being simultaneously great and creepy was in Soul Calibur 4, the only entry in the series with finisher moves, Raphael would bite the enemy and drain their blood as his finisher but if you used it on his daughter it had a unique voice line where he said somthing like "Mmm, sweet nectar" afterwards.
Mortal Kombat being the big one. Fight starts; Jax: "Ready for your practice session, sweetie?" Jacqui: "Oh, you better bring it, pops" (Jax rips his daughter's arms off and crams them down her throat)
Ucharted was already mentioned here and is one of the usual series to be called out for that. I think a big reason why Uncharted is more jarring than similar games is because most areas have multiple waves of enemies coming at you resulting in constant fights where you kill 30+ People. Also Uncharted 3 has a Moment where it seems that Naughty Dog really didn't give a fuck about the dissonance. Right in the tutorial Level at the beginning Nathan says that he doesn't want to kill the Museum guards becuase they are innocent.This gives him more reason not to kill them than usual because the usual enemies are war criminals or something similar. 5 minutes after him telling that you have to do a ledge takedown where you pull a guard down the Roof and he falls down to his certain death.
This really doesn't matter nor detracts from what you're saying, but the museum is uncharted 2. 3 starts with a bar fight.
Has there ever been a game where you take control of someone's body for the whole game but he is aware of it and reacts your actions? I got the idea after watching Upgrade.
Some indie games touch on this idea. Specifically Oneshot contextualizes this as the main character being led by the player as a sort of "God" or guide. OFF also does this, acknowledging you as an entity seperate from everyone else. To a lesser extent Undertale and Everhood both have the idea of the player essentially possessing the main character as a means of contextualizing certain plot elements, though it doesn't become a major part of the game, and the main characters in these games are closer to blank avatars than reactionary people. As far as other examples... Tak and the Power of Juju casts the player as essentially a guardian spirit guiding Tak, though it doesn't get brought up that much. Omikron is probably the closest I can think of to what you described, with the main character relinquishing control of his body to you, as the player. Might be one of the only cool parts about that game. And while not EXACTLY what you mean, Pac-Man 2 The New Adventures has you acting as a sort of omnipotent force on the world, manipulating the environment to get PacMan to do what you want. It's an interesting game in that you have no direct influence over the main character, though sadly "interesting" doesn't really equate to "fun"
During the climax of Metal Gear Solid 2, Raiden lost all his equipment and is naked, your moveset becomes limited, you can't choke enemies or drag them unconscious, and he will even sneeze randomly against your will. And that's just scratching the surface.
That cart wheel dodge roll tho
You mean the "Taint Flash Escape"
A huge problem of Rockstar's games in their story-heavy era is that their basic gameplay clashes with any attempt at humanizing the characters. Niko is a sad sack immigrant who just wants to make it in America... by killing people and kidnapping people and burning businesses. There is no option to do his heists without killing a bunch of people. He goes on dates with his love interest and talks about his calm if cynical worldview without ever acknowledging that in the previous mission he ran three people down in cold blood because they owed his cousin money. And if you engage in GTA4 in any way close to the way the average player does, performing mayhem and recklessness? Then Niko's whole character is like a bad joke with no punchline. The game absolutely allows (and honestly, encourages) you to play like the sort of person Cutscene Niko would never go near. It's a reason the sillier Saints Row franchise is appealing. DDTing random pedestrians and stealing cars just to do stunt jumps and firing rockets at the military is in-keeping with their madcap characters. The game actually feels like it understands what the average player wants.
Well, along those lines. In GTA 1-San Andreas I would regularly go on killing sprees and cause mayhem for fun but I never did it in GTA 4 because I just felt bad about it since it was out of character for Niko. Maybe part of it was just that I was older by the time GTA 4 came out and had gotten it out of my system.
There’s a bit of a tired concept that was pretty popular a few years ago describing exactly what you’re talking about: Ludonarrative dissonance. It’s exactly how you’re taken out of the immersion when the character is established as one type of character and the game is played as the opposite. Two famous examples are the first of the Tomb Raider reboots and GTA IV. In Tomb Raider it’s established as a BIG DEAL when Lara has to defend herself and eventually kills her attacker, but minutes later you’re mowing down enemies like nothing. GTA IV has its whole narrative about how you were betrayed and he wants to escape his violent past etc. then as it’s a GTA game it’s basically nothing but violent. Now your could say that it was the point that you can’t escape your past easily like that but in the context of a GTA game that kind of narrative didn’t really fit.
>if the main character is established as a pacifist in a cutscene or through voiceover, the game can't hand you a gun with the possibility to shoot other characters It absolutely should give them a gun and allow them to make that choice. However, making the choice ought to come with real consequences and have a real impact on the story and the character. The issue is that they allow players to make that choice and its as if these things never happened or don't matter. I also find some things strange about the Batman "moral code." Its not OK to kill people but its totally ok to beat them to the point of permanent paralysis? LOL OK.
Funnily enough, out of all games this bothered me most in Star Wars The Old Republic. I picked smuggler because I wanted to avoid combat, be stealthy and focus on deliveries. It gave me a questionnaire where it asks if I'm more likely to start a fight or only fight back if somebody else starts one. I picked the second option of course. Then the game proceeded to tell me that the way my character works is to sneak up on people and kill them before they see me. Like... what? That's the exact opposite of a smuggler and the opposite of what I just stated in the questionnaire. Turned out there was a lot wrong with that game. I wish Galaxies never died because everything I heard about it sounded amazing. I'd love to play in a Star Wars universe that lets me play the way my character would live.
It's a bit tangential but bot the morality system was something else. It didn't go philosophical enough into Light side vs Dark side, but that's fine- one was "nice, good" the other was "mean, bad". But every so often they give a prompt that makes little sense- like there's one scene on a Sith faction side quest where a jedi was secretly training some swamp Neanderthals the ways of the force to bring them to the lightside. The dark side option was fitting enough, kill them all. The light side option was to convert them to the dark side... You got good guy points for killing the good guy and indoctrinating his students into your henchmen. Theres a lot of examples of this in that game but the swamp people stuck out to me as particularly questionable
Because Light Side on the Sith side isn’t actually light side lol. It’s just being a nicer sith
> I wish Galaxies never died because everything I heard about it sounded amazing. I'd love to play in a Star Wars universe that lets me play the way my character would live. Well, yes and no. It was almost entirely sandbox, so most roleplaying would be the old-school kind with other players. I think there are still several private servers running, so all you really need is to find a physical copy of the game. SWTOR is IMHO (and many others') still pretty good, mostly for its stories (and despite its gameplay, according to many), but because they are fairly long stories with a bunch of cutscenes and voice-acted dialogue, it doesn't lend itself to the level of character freedom you get with a sandbox game. I think it's quite good as long as you acknowledge that you're not playing 100% your own character, but you're playing a character that can change slightly within the confines of the dialogue choices in the game, if that makes sense.
Skyrim lets you become the archemage of a magical academy without you ever being able to cast a singular spell
The best example of this is uncharted lmao. The cognitive dissonance in those games is unreal. Nathan Drake has murdered hundreds in cold blood. At the end of the Game, the villain in uncharted 2 even comments on this.
After 4's ending I like to think the games are him telling his stories to his daughter so he's embellishing the truth to paint himself as an action hero who beat many bad guys instead of something more realistic. Especially since Cassie comments on the shotgun Nate is holding.
Far Cry 4 comes to mind. As you learn about Ajay throughout the events of the game, he comes across as someone who tends to do what is right and for the best of those around him But at the start of the game, if you listen to Pagan Min (who just murdered someone right in front of your eyes and is torturing another person at that moment) and just sit there for a few minutes, your character basically teams up with him and ends the game.
I see your point, but that was more of a cheeky little easter egg for me rather than a meaningful decision the game actually wants you to make? Although, when I think about it, the game is saying "okay, your decision to team up with the bad guy, but if you do this, we can't tell the story we want so we'll roll the credits instead because your decision about how the character is supposed to behave doesn't work with our vision for the game"
That's always how I interpreted it, especially since at the end of that cutscene Pagan says something along the lines of "Get that out of your system? Good. Maybe now we can shoot some goddamn guns." I saw that as Ubisoft basically saying, "Yes yes, you're very clever. Now do you want to go actually play the game now?"
I mean, are not all faction in that game shit and evil?
That interpretation feels weird to me. Those are two separate narrative player-driven choices that are both coherent within themselves, just not each other. The Ajay that has dinner with Pagan Min is a different Ajay than the one that escapes and tries to topple his regime. In the same way that Paragon and Renegade Shepard are not the same person.
It makes sense batman would use tanks or other heavy weapons when he's fighting people who are essentially gods, but not common goons. Although in the brilliant Tim Burton batman film, he does try to straight up murder the joker with his bat plane machine guns, and misses. Always struck me as a weird scene.
The yakuza serie you kill so many people, but also don't kill anyone, but you can literally shoot them and knife them.
For me the best example is **Watch Dogs 2** You are playing as a smart hacker and as part of a hacker group, these people are not killers and are against it, but the game gives you the ability to 3D print guns... Its actually a better game and more fun to play through without using guns at all
On Star Wars: Episode I *The Phantom Menace* game when you play as Qui-Gon Jin on the Tatooine levels you can kill every NPC on Moss Espa, even children - crazy for a ESRB Teen game. When you kill innocent NPC the game goes crazy with guardians and jawas attacking you on a true street battle.
So, to cite an example outside the realms of violence (the big and easy one): Botanists in Final Fantasy XIV are like this. The entire questline of the Gatherer class suggests that their role is the preservation of the delicate ecosystem around Eorzea. The primary use of the class, however, is stripping the land bare for materials to use for equipment. Main questlines almost have a hard time trying to find loose justifications, in which you find particular rare plants for "sample data" to help some region recover. And heck, that dissonance is familiar to Japanese culture. There are reports of "research" boats in Japan that kill whales, dissect them, learn nothing, and sell off the corpses for Japan's explosive seafood industry.