If you are young "shadow of the collosus" is a game I highly recommend you dig up and play, it set a special unique tone for the 2000-2010 era
The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters
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Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters
#32> This non-battle turned out to be a powerful experience, but its power stemmed mostly from the contrast between this and my other monster encounters. 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…
1. there's a trade-off between graphics/sound quality and story complexity. The better quality your voiced dialogue is - the more you have to pay for every additional line - so you tend to shorten it. Same with graphics - it's one thing to paint 8 frames of 32x32 sprites. It's another to motion-capture, model, texture, and process 100s of different versions of each character animations.
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.
Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters
#33On a similar theme, The old knight and the dragon: https://www.instagram.com/p/DY0YtdtHdLb/?img_index=1
Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters
#34Odd that it doesn’t mention Metal Gear Solid, which was casting doubt on the morality of the player character’s actions and painting boss fights as tragic affairs back in 1998, even though it does mention MGS love letter Spec Ops: The Line (and even though MGS is a media darling and probably significantly overdiscussed in general).
Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters
#35I can agree with the other examples, but including Dark Souls feels like a stretch. In Dark Souls, the primary currency for progression—'souls'—is fundamentally earned by killing enemies. No matter how tragic a monster's lore might be, the moment it drops the exact resource the player needs to level up, can we really call that a genuine moral dilemma? I agree with applying this to Undertale, but using Dark Souls seve…
I vouched for your comment because, while (IMO) dead wrong, I didn't think it was "this should be flagged" wrong.
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.
Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters
#36One game that really annoyed me was Assassin's Creed Odyssey. It was an amazing game. Beautiful scenery, great story. And then I played the fate of Atlantis expansion. In order to progress the story, you have to weaken Persephone's hold on the realm, which I did. However even if you reduce her influence to zero (which I did), you still can't progress unless you betray a friend (even though there's no utility in that anymore).
Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters
#37Another interesting example are hunting games such as Hunter Call of the Wild. I played that for countless hours. While some people simply go for reckless trophy hunting, I thought about most of the shots I took; there's a flock of deer with a single stag, surrounded by does. I knew I would feel awful taking out that single stag, leaving the does behind alone. Could taking it out now be considered "crowd control", ho…
> there's a flock of deer with a single stag, surrounded by does. I knew I would feel awful taking out that single stag, leaving the does behind alone. 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.
Well, that might be technically correct. Yet it still doesn't feel good to destroy this social group they formed, to decide it's okay that this animal feels alone for that day. That's one of the points of the article as I understood it: is it ethical to play god and decide on that animals' fate?
Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters
#38I can agree with the other examples, but including Dark Souls feels like a stretch. In Dark Souls, the primary currency for progression—'souls'—is fundamentally earned by killing enemies. No matter how tragic a monster's lore might be, the moment it drops the exact resource the player needs to level up, can we really call that a genuine moral dilemma? I agree with applying this to Undertale, but using Dark Souls seve…
I vouched for your comment because, while (IMO) dead wrong, I didn't think it was "this should be flagged" wrong. 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 specifi…
And even more-so, with the extra information you discover, and especially the alternate ending, your end may very-much not be justified.
Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters
#39> Before the encounter with the first Troll, the dumbfounded mythical character, Atreus, asks: “We’re going to fight that?!?” Kratos, the main character, answers: “We have no choice,” in a matter-of-fact, almost resigned way, as if shruggingly accepting the design conventions of the game itself. I didn't see it like that. Atreus thinks he and his father are normal humans, even if he saw his father perform incredible…
Atreus' question come out of fear, but Kratos' response is what the article focus on. Kratos does not take any joy in killing, he does that out of necessity and would have loved for that necessity not to arise. He could have boasted "I have killed bigger things", but instead he choose words of resignation against a kill or be killed fate he was trying to escape
Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters
#40I can agree with the other examples, but including Dark Souls feels like a stretch. In Dark Souls, the primary currency for progression—'souls'—is fundamentally earned by killing enemies. No matter how tragic a monster's lore might be, the moment it drops the exact resource the player needs to level up, can we really call that a genuine moral dilemma? I agree with applying this to Undertale, but using Dark Souls seve…
I vouched for your comment because, while (IMO) dead wrong, I didn't think it was "this should be flagged" wrong. 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 specifi…
While I agree to some extent, realistically, if we follow that logic, wouldn't we have to feel a sense of melancholy every time we kill an enemy in almost any game?
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).