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I was between objectives and wandering through the map. I came across one of the ubiquitous caves which I decided to enter. I was attacked by some generic low-level bandits and I cleared the cave.
After dispatching the enemies I was looting through the cave and came across some letters. They detailed a tale of a family that came on hard times in a nearby town and were forced homeless by circumstance, how they were trying to rebuild their lives, etc. I looked around the cave and could tell the individuals mentioned in the letter were accounted for in the cave. I mean, they were generic bandit models but the designer had matched them to the narrative.
I thought about the situation. I was this extremely high level wizardy kind of build trekking though the wilderness and I came across an encampment. When I barged into their makeshift home they rightly were like "get out". And then I slaughtered them all with no reason and was now deciding if the clutter was worth packing and re-selling.
I more or less stopped playing Skyrim after that.
And at one point while playing this already somewhat implausible situation, I thought "that random PLA soldier I just mowed down would not have, in reality, signed up to be the invading force in a petro-conflict". It kind of killed first-person shooters for me for a while, because I accidentally humanized a poorly-programmed bot in a ridiculous, made-up scenario into making me feel bad for them.
I didn't see it like that. Atreus thinks he and his father are normal humans, even if he saw his father perform incredible feats of strength such as carrying a huge tree trunk. Atreus has no idea what his father is capable of, and he himself has been mostly sick and frail. The boy is scared. Nowhere does that scene read as "That looks humanoid, I don't think we should kill it". Draugrs are more humanoid and they've been killing some on the way. The troll is incredibly fierce and the largest opponent they faced until now. That's a completely natural reaction from the boy with no moral implications.
It's actually a little later in the game when they're assaulted by Reavers (actual living humans talking about eating them) that Atreus kills one in self defense and remains shocked by the experience. Kratos shows empathy and care when he comforts him and says "Close your heart to it". [1]
There's a deep thread about humanity and the right or need to kill in self defense in the game, and Atreus goes through a rebellious phase where he thinks godhood gives him the right to do anything. But the troll scene? That's reading too much into it.
1. https://youtu.be/_oOZG5-tqpA?si=w6-PyJXjTZ-qSv2q&t=4173
Which I believe is in contrast with the older games. Haven't played them but from what I've heard he'd pursue conflicts because he enjoyed them. I think this change is because of his ongoing process of coming to terms with being a father which takes the act of killing and twists it inside out.
I may have missed or forgotten the explanation behind that though. I suppose he was always stuck in the safe area around their house?
That aside, the new God of War games are great, and the whole franchise is a good example of how they took a fairly straightforward character - savage, angery fellow - and evolved his story and character over a long span of time, subverting itself etc.
(The Valhalla DLC is where Kratos goes to therapy lolol)
"Don't go there - there are mines there" is what my mother would say occasionally back when we were living in Kuwait in the mid 90s.
I guess it's a similar situation.
I have a strong memory of being 12 years old, lying awake at night with the melancholic feeling this article describes, with the realisation that those beasts never did anything to me and I was essentially going out of my way to trick and slaughter them.
No other game has invoked that feeling in me since. It's a very special game. It remains one of my favourites and a stellar example of what the medium can achieve.
Ikaruga and Journey should be mentioned in the same conversation. More recently, Undertale and Death Stranding, pick up similar conceptual throughlines ("choice" and "connection", respectively), albeit in less elegant ways, owing to their expanded scope.
Funny enough, I enjoy Death Stranding for many of the same reasons that I enjoy arcade-style games: routing, resource management, and failure that feels meaningful, as well as the satisfaction of successfully executing a plan. The story is pretty cool too, but the gameplay is what I really like.
These are two distinct techniques and I feel the latter almost always failed to impress me much, while the first one is where I feel caught, even shocked by myself and the cold-bloodiness to (virtually) follow any suggestion to kill.
Definitely one of those things I didn’t question when I was younger, but as I get older it’s hard not to see it.
EDIT: I was wrong, the term originated from an analysis of Bioshock, but Uncharted was later held up as a strong example of this. And it’s more generally about the contrast between narrative and gameplay mechanics.
I appreciate the honesty of recognizing that you commented without reading the article, but could you not? Your experience could have added so much more had you placed it in context with the rest of the article.
Are orcs as bad as zombies? They are supposedly born LE, and could not (then) be reasonably expected to change. But killing an orc innocent?
Besides the questionable morality of kill=experience=progress in typical hack'n'slash or roguelike, what started to irritate me in there as I grew older as well, was the stupid mechanics where crowds of enemies described as intelligent humanoids (i.e. not animals or robots) facing clearly overpowered high-level PC (famous, even) never surrendered, almost never tried to flee, attacked one-by-one, and shoved no sign of tactical thinking or self-preservation instinct. Despite being armed and (by description) organised, PC could enter a narrow corridor, defeat dozen of them without taking any damage, yet there will be a waiting line eager for demise by a single hit -- even actively advancing towards it. No attempt to regroup, to take advantage of the number superiority, wait in open space, ambush from all directions, or anything like that. Same applies to most FPS: there is a Doomguy running around at unprecedented pace, slaughtering everything that moves, but we will all keep our scattered positions. (This led me to a thought, whether it would be possible to rearrange enemies in canonical Doom map so that all would attack at once at some appropriate spot and whether it would guarantee their victory or not.)
Many things are unnatural in games: you don't instantly recover from a beating by eating one apple in real life, but we're ok with it in games because it makes the gameplay fun.
https://youtu.be/LNidsMesxSE?si=fGFCTCHm77OJiYu3&t=260
Contrast with Dwarf Fortress where you'll end up as a crutch user because it's more ¡FUN! that way.
Fallout 76 mobs, for example, make use of line of sight harder than other Bethesda games. They won't spawn where the players are looking, and prefer to spawn at their backs to get a free cheap shot and stagger. With enough players looking everywhere, they might be forced to spawn visibly, but near an object they can use as cover. Also, they have a sixth sense that makes them walk towards a cover if you aim your weapon at them from afar while hidden.
It's also notable that a near-death enemy will sometimes flee out of your reach to regen health, and attack you again when it's healthy enough. They will also flee/cover if they're a melee type and you climb where they can't reach you, waiting for you to climb down.
I guess the idea was making them realistic, but sometimes this behavior devolves into hide and seek, which can become frustrating as they can use ridiculous things as cover, like chain link fences, floor grills, or a sapling.
I have enough realism IRL, I prefer games that prioritize entertaining mechanics rather than frustrating realism.
Fighting hordes with one or two strong heroes, that's a good thing. You need to rout those mobs. Each additional engaged melee enemy makes it easier and easier to hit you, and before long the individually weak goblins are climbing all over you, taking off your armor (so they can shiv you to death), smear you with goblin fluids, among other indignities.
Anyone with high EGO or strong Mental Defense- which is any Big Bad Guy, unless it is a "Big Bad Also Dumb Guy" like a troll or a rancor - will be harder to turn with a Morale roll. BBADGs can also be fun since you have a chance of stealing control from the bads, with a contested Skill roll (Animal Handling, Diplomacy, Tasty Snacks, etc). I always feel bad for the cave troll in FotR, so that's fun.
This sort of thing works more or less the same in DND-based systems, just swap in Will save, and keep in mind the difference of standard deviation between 1d20 and 3d6. An impossible penalty with 3d6 is just another Tuesday with 1d20.
[0] Like most things HERO, follow the rule of doubling. -1 for every halving of the original force.
[1] i.e., Willpower
[2] BODY is what kills you, disables your bits, makes you Bleed. PAIN is equal to BLEED is equal to the hit to Morale roll. Eh, my "stacking BLEED" is a houserule so, take that with $.02, it's not stock. HERO bleed rules are for pansies.
I think the Grunts in Halo would run too.
Mostly it seems to be treated as a gimmick or joke in FPS and RPG. Individual enemy AI is usually pretty bad in these genres, so they probably just don’t have the capacity to act smart enough to act scared.
Of course, it’s a main feature in some tactical games, like the Total War series. That’s more of an explicit mechanic though.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3028330/Battlefield_REDSE...
It's not unknown in human warfare either:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_wave_attack#Use
There's a similar human need to protect what is precious. Defending your family, defending your motherland. Cities being seiged by a superior opponent don't just abandon the city in cowardice, because they know the opponent will just gain ground and still come after them. They don't want to, they'd rather you stopped, but they have to defend their territories, even if it means their annihilation. If you win, everyone gets killed, ravaged, enslaved, ... If they only have sticks, and you have missiles and jets... they have to use sticks. Can you imagine how they feel?
But yes, you're probably thinking of RPGs where the enemies are preprogrammed with the same hostility no matter what the circumstances, even if you're a God-killer and they're defending 5 coins and half-eaten sandwich in their den.
The original Gothic for example. When you were high level, other low level NPC would rather run.
I also thought hard about the concept, how to make FPS games still fun, but a bit more realistic. The thing is, in most settings this means reducing lots of enemies - as realistic would be, once you start shooting, they all come for you. Not 3. And then maybe another 2. And so on.. and then you would not have a chance, unless you get special powers (or quick save and quick load part of the mechanics)
I see somebody in another comment complaining that enemies who get frightened rob the player of the fun of battles. So it depends what it's all about.
Chasing enemies is much more annoying than them coming to you, so that would be a punishment to the player.
Players don't like when you punish them in that way, they want to kill the monsters they don't want an upgrade that makes you more powerful make it harder to kill monsters since now they start running.
But when humanoid enemies behave in plainly stupid ways it's a real immersion-breaker for me. I've been gaming a looooong time, so I'm quite adept at the necessary mental gymnastics to enjoy stuff anyway... but... still... games could be better here. (And by "better" I mean "more fun")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC375rujZhs
I have been playing video games for decades at this point but that one really shook me up. You pretty much execute a toy begging for its life. As soon as that scene was over it genuinely took me a few days to come back to it.
That was a hard rewatch: https://youtu.be/12FNU8bNEbE?si=BKZCynsHhoz5GN2m&t=65
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bnKr0M1Tzs
I find that as I get older I respond more to media like this. I'm not sure if it's emotional intelligence, being more present, or something else.
I’m happy for you that you felt that was dark. Well, IDK, maybe I’m happy for you, hard to say.
New players to Dark Souls assume that they need to kill every monster in their way to proceed. But the design of the game itself, with its repeated corpse runs to boss arenas where they get splatted over and over again, eventually teaches the player that running past enemies where possible is actually an expected way to play. Furthermore, leveling up is not required to beat the game, nor is killing enemies the only way to acquire souls. And there are plenty of opportunities for the player to choose whether or not to kill entirely peaceful NPCs, most notably Priscilla, who is posed like a boss while standing in what looks like a boss arena in a place where you fully expected to find a boss to fight, and yet she begs you to leave peacefully and does not bar your exit. It's not as clear-cut as Shadow of the Colossus (in particular it's not actually clear what the ethics of killing hollows is, given that they're cursed to repeatedly rise in undeath for all eternity), but the core theme of the game is futility.
The article uses the word "dilemma" exactly once in the introduction, mostly because that's not really what the article is about. Instead it's a reflection of the melancholy of playing a game where, justified as your actions may be, the entire act of killing is surrounded in sadness.
In Dark Souls specifically (mild spoilers) your character is fighting to prevent essentially the end of a world that's falling into decay. Yes, you kill enemies, but the enemies themselves are corrupted creatures who went mad and you only kill them to prevent the corruption to spread even more. Your end may be justified, but that doesn't mean you can't be sad about having to kill them to begin with.
It's highly debatable whether players actually feel melancholy when fighting monsters in Dark Souls. Putting aside the fact that the story is notoriously cryptic and reliant on player speculation, yes, the lore of Dark Souls is tragic. However, this is the sadness of the 'lore,' not an emotion driven by the 'gameplay.' The problem is that this tragedy must be pieced together by reading flavor text. Does the game actually communicate this naturally during play? Not really. The player is simply thrown into a brutally hostile world and left to suffer. In reality, players hunt these monsters to buy gear or level up, not out of melancholy.
Shadow of the Colossus portrays tragedy brilliantly in this regard because you actively track down and stab peacefully existing creatures. But I strongly question whether Dark Souls and Spec Ops: The Line belong in that same category. Spec Ops: The Line forces you to commit atrocities just to emphasize a protagonist going mad, and in Dark Souls, every monster is inherently hostile toward you. I find it hard to believe a player would feel genuine melancholy from this kind of deceptive design, where the game fixes your choices entirely on a linear track just to force a tragic point.
Normally, when an enemy is that hostile, your only thought is, 'I just need to kill this bastard.' The sadness in Dark Souls is a retroactive feeling you get from piecing together flavor text. While I appreciate the depth of that narrative, it's very hard to put it on the same level as making unprovoked attacks on peaceful monsters (Shadow of the Colossus) or actually having the mechanical choice to spare them (Undertale).
It's more nuanced than that, and "in Dark Souls, every monster is inherently hostile toward you" is not true.
Most games have a clear division between hostile mobs you kill for XP and loot, and story NPCs which you cannot / are not supposed to attack.
That line doesn't really exist in Dark Souls. Most (all?) story NPCs can be killed, which has specific consequences if the player chooses to do so. And there are monsters throughout the game world that are functionally identical to hostile monsters - they look the same, drop the same resources if you attack and kill them - but are simply not hostile to you and are just minding their own business.
It IS more subtle than in other games, and might not even be obvious to the player at first. This gradual realization was actually one of my favorite parts of playing Dark Souls.
But there are definitely intentional gameplay elements that support this, it is not strictly text lore.
Also, and this is trivial tiddlywinkies, the designers bothered to do a little bit of light reading about how guns actually work. I am continually distracted by impossible mechanisms in later FO games.
There is no honor in killing, only in exercising your duty towards serving and protecting others.
The "good ending" depends on your behavior in the three open areas of the game.
You can still kill "monsters" (mutated humans, animals, cannibals, bandits) without impact, but you should minimize killing other humans, such as slaves, or even hostile but "misguided" NPCs (people that just want you to stay out of their settlement, that you are required to traverse, and who will shoot you on sight).
This is something you can actually achieve pretty easily, just by using stealth.
But reading older posts on this game, many people found this difficult, as the game made easy and satisfying to kill from the shadows.
Some people says they will be judged (only) by God and history. In SOMA, there is neither.
I tried emulating it a few years before that when I didn't have any workable screen for my PS2 and that was not so good. A game that pushed the original hardware to its limit also pushed the emulator past its limit. Might be better with more powerful hardware than mine?
However, I've heard the remake is perfectly good, and surely easier to play with modern PC hardware!
And the absolutely horrid framerate is the thing that I remember most about the game. It absolutely ruined the experience for me and made me stop 'trying' to play it.
And no, it isn't me a primarily a PC gamer complaining about 30fps. It was like 15-20fps. It's was absolute ass, bordering on unplayable.
It's like you weren't grappling with a colossus, instead you're constantly fighting the laggy 15fps framerate.
And I don't mean it just by the standards of today, I mean by standards of the day.
God of War games hit 50-60fps pretty well on PS2 and had all the epic bosses and set pieces
https://hollowknight.wiki/w/Cogwork_Dancers
That said, this is a common thing in articles about e.g. video games - "I wish they mentioned X". I too wish that but at the same time, one needs limits.
There is also the romp through the Hunter's Nightmare, whose first act is replete with beasts cowering in fear at the sight of the player character. Even if you spare them you'll usually see them brutally slain by mad hunter compatriots anyway
And it's no mistake that all the "kin" type characters you encounter in the game, like Rom, Ebrietas, and Moon Presence, are all deeply tragic.
Thematically Bloodborne is deeply concerned with humanization/dehumanization and how those interact with violence, and it plays a lot with this in the narrative to subvert with the usual power fantasy of the soulslike genre -- the beasts cowering in fear in the nightmare seem more human than the mad hunters, Ebrietas appears to be grieving when you encounter her, and with Rom you might systematically murder her children before directing your blade at her. Like you can live out that power fantasy, but it won't always feel great.
So no, I don't think that Ebrietas being optional works against this idea at all. It just allows the narrative to explore different facets of this question -- it humanizes her, and if you choose to fight her it's because you chose to be the aggressor.
Arguably, not much in Bloodborne is even actually happening.
(My confidence on all this isn't super high, but this is like the one video game I do play, and I've gone a little deep on the lore.)
It's an old isometric Infinity Engine game - although the engine is heavily hacked - but if you get the urge to play an older game, and you don't mind reading a whole bunch of text, well, it's got the rep for a reason. Although it's been nigh 30 years I can't bring myself to spoil it. It's a good 'un.
There also are plenty of cute-animal mobs that weren't going to bother you unless you started something. An example that still stands out for me is the first set of sleeping bears in LOTRO.
Taking shots on animals living their life in the forest and on the fields imposes a moral/ethical question, especially if you are not being attacked or would otherwise starve to death.
Assuming the deer were in such a social structure to begin with, they'll be alone for maybe a day before another stag steps up. Deer do not exist in a gender ratio of 6:1.
EDIT: it does, I just had to google "Ebrietas latin" (and got https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ebrietas), otherwise it only returned references to the monster.
There is one key item in the game called “Eyes of a blood-drunk hunter”
The idea that monsters can be understood, and spared because in the end they’re exhibiting human flaws, is such a powerful storytelling device.
Sapkowski is from Poland, though. Still Slav, but still.
-G. K. Chesterton
Pacifist is more like a puzzle game, and I didn’t find it all that challenging at all.
If you go the “kill only some people” route, I don’t think you would ever really be strong enough for this to be fun due to not levelling up enough to keep up with later stage enemies. So you’re going to be heavily incentivized to go full pacifist to bypass levelling entirely or genocide to get enough levels. Then of course you’ll hit the wall at the end…
It's clearly the intended progression, since the second playthrough then changes to reflect the fact that the game "remembers" your first one.
My guess is that Toby's intent was for you to play the game normally, get one of the many, many different Neutral endings, reset to get the Pacifist ending, and then a few years later come back to Genocide after hearing about this weird route where you get to fight the other font skeleton.
In the imagination that art produces, and I agree with the article that Shadow of the Colossus deserves that label, enemies are not bodies, they're persons. In great art they can be more real than reality. In fantasies bodies are consumed for gratification and stimulation, they have no interior life.
It's also the difference between pornography and erotic art. In the former the people depicted become objects not even bodies but body parts, they're profaned. The only person that matters is the consumer. In erotic art it's the opposite, the eroticism happens between the subjects of the art, the viewer is placed at a distance.
There's a lot of games that have wrestled with this in regards to violence. Kojima back in the day already in Metal Gear Solid 2 but he made it an explicit design choice in Death Stranding (less so in the second than the first one, sadly I suspect for commercial reasons) in a way that reminded me a lot of SotC.
Must be quite the opposite of a real gamer, so I naturally like the simpler and less complex approach.
More or less the easy stuff, and I'm not completely alone.
I think first and foremost, a particular game should be fun from quite early on before you have developed much deep experience, and then any progress through different levels should be logical and straightforward.
In both respects from my simple-minded starting point I guess I enjoy it most when it's about as rewarding as finishing off an order of french fries :)
Talk about excitement rising to melancholy amounts . . .
Both "Chrono Trigger" and "Crono Cross" make you question your actions and whether or not it was worth on a monster genocide.
This is more correlated with modern games. Modern games, at the least non-Indie games, dumbed down the gameplay. I am not saying such games are awful per se, but they are often very simplified to the 1990s era in many ways.
Many old RPG games are quite complex; or told as a story. The old Betrayal at Krondor was kind of like a novel - unsurprisingly since Feist wrote most of the content (save various adjustments made to the gameplay itself). Yes, graphics are bad, options are too few, but storyline-wise this was my favourite RPG. Another example would be "Realms of Arcania" (in german the three DSA games). Again, graphics today are not great, and playing it in english versus german is actually worse (one of the few games where german was better than english, by the way), but the gameplay options in the second part were nice. Part 3 was a bit different, and people critisized it, but I still liked that you would explore a "real" city while still having tons of options available. Other RPGs such as Baldur's Gate 2 are a bit different - DnD itself is IMO a very bad system for RPGs (takes too long to explain now, but just look at static alignment systems - that makes zero sense) and most of it was focused on hack-and-slay for power and items, so it has the same problems. But with mods you can kind of extend the story and add more storylines, thus having more options. So BG2 is not the best example here, compared to the other two; even before that, if you remember the old Ultima series, the NPCs kind of had a regular life, worked at specific times, went to work leaving their homes (and you could then pillage that) and so forth. A lot of the "why do I want to slay the cute monster", is driven by the underlying design. These games often try to dumb down everything. I noticed this first with World of Warcraft. To me these games never were interesting, as it seems to have been deliberately dumbed down. Many of those games today are more like a movie with a bit interaction in between. That's imo not quite a game anymore. There are some exceptions though; I liked little nightmares, but this is also a simplified, mostly linear gameplay. This problem keeps on coming back again and again. For some reason modern games hate complexity. Either humans became dumber, or designers wanted to simplify things.
Those mechanisms ideally also represent some fictional world, so there's something approximately similar to a story to be found there, but that's plenty enough story already. The rest is the player actually having adventures, spontaneously. There's some use for a story in providing a goal and an ending, but beyond that it's likely to put the game on rails, like a movie or a novel.
I mean, a linear game has a charm of its own. I also enjoy point-and-clicks. There are different genres of game. But I think an interactive organic open world is the true one.
2. you're comparing unfairly (looking at the most complex examples from the past and comparing them to modern average). There were LOTS of very simplistic games in the past. You just don't think about most of them. Some genres went extinct because of how simplistic they were (see the dungeon crawlers where there was no dialogue or story whatsoever - just moving at 90 degree and hitting monsters) - it's the "old music was better" fallacy - you don't remember the old music that sucked.
If you compare most complex modern games they blow out of the water anything from the past. Let's say Baldur's Gate 3 or Dwarf Fortress or Minecraft compared to let's say Elite or Betrayal at Krondor.
There's another reason for this beyond those practical limitations. The imaginary world that these games inhabit isn't more or less complex depending on the bit depth of each pixel. The difference is made up by the player's own imagination. There's a tradeoff in the space of possibilities of what something could be -- if you give the player more data (better resolution, animations, whatever), then they're more constrained and less free to imagine their own version. One or the other isn't strictly better; stunning visuals provide one kind of value, uncertainty and suspense and filling in the blanks can bring another sort of value. (And both can destroy their own sources of value -- a high-definition but cartoonish boss image or animation can ruin the mood just as much as a botched reveal of some mysterious aspect of the setting.)
...huh? This is very much not true. The most difficult[0] encounters happen on the Genocide route, in which you powerlevel like it's a normal JRPG until the encounters run out. Pacifist is only slightly harder than a "No Mercy" neutral run[1].
For the first two thirds of this article I was screaming "BUT WHAT ABOUT UNDERTALE". Toby Fox basically wrote the book on the moral quandries of killing monsters in video games, and this article does not do his work justice. It feels like the author wanted to briefly mention it at the end as a way to cap off the essay. And, while I haven't played Shadow of the Colossus, I suspect the inspection of that is about as surface-level as the tacked-on mention of UNDERTALE at the end.
I feel like I just read a high school English essay.
[0] Mechanically and emotionally.
[1] As in, a run in which you kill everything you see, but do not exhaust the kill limit.
Regular JRPG farming is not enough to trigger this route. You need to farm out every single area with enemies, starting from the very first one and never leaving one unfarmed, otherwise you accidentally exit the route even if you keep trying. You seem to know this but somehow pretend it's the normal JRPG experience?
As for Shadow of the Colossus, this article has flaws but its analysis of that game isn't one of them. It's very much what "everyone" knows about the game.