The Fallout games often exemplify this: nearly every decision you make is morally ambiguous, and often has far-reaching repercussions in the story and world.
Fits the setting well. Especially New vegas.
The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters
41–50 of 149 posts
Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Game developers (mostly... hopefully?) try to optimize for the "fun" aspect of a game, not the "realism of the flight/flight instinct" aspect
Sure, but I don't think they must be mutually exclusive; on the contrary: in the late stages when your character is a tank, swarms of minions that posed a challenge in early stages become just a nuisance, mostly. You are walking legend slaying dragons for breakfast, everybody and their dog knows about your invincibility … but instead of giving you some respect, they try to bite your heels on the first sight. I guess…
Similarly, a mindless swarm doesn't present much opportunity for tactics, compared to a group with individual self-preservation instincts, and a manipulatable group morale level, or individual fear level mechanisms. On the other hand it's true that realism is not the goal. Reality is no fun, that's why we're playing a game. But it's a sort of distorted echo of reality, I suppose.
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.
Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters
#43The first game I thought of upon reading the title of the article was 'Shadow of the Colossus'. There's a particular boss about half-way through the game who resides in a small secluded garden and the process of defeating them involves tricking them in to ramming over columns etc. until they are trapped. I have a strong memory of being 12 years old, lying awake at night with the melancholic feeling this article descr…
Shadow of the Colossus came out around the zeitgeist of when people really started earnestly debating if videogames were art. After that game there was no more debate.
Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters
#44I've just finished playing Metro Exodus, which is another example.
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.
Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters
#45> As a result, the game offers no easy satisfaction of hacking and slashing through weaker opponents. 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 (f…
>CalebCity: “How fearless minions are in ANY video game”
Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters
#46This article had me until it said the pacifist run in Undertale was more difficult. Anyone that has attempted a “genocide” route where you kill everyone will probably tell you that that boss is probably one of the hardest things they ever done in a videogame - if they can beat it at all.
Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters
#47This article had me until it said the pacifist run in Undertale was more difficult. Anyone that has attempted a “genocide” route where you kill everyone will probably tell you that that boss is probably one of the hardest things they ever done in a videogame - if they can beat it at all.
The article didn't say that a pacifist run was more difficult than a genocide route.
Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters
#48> 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…
Thing is, stories are not gameplay. You praise "like a novel" but oppose "like a movie". I don't see much difference, and I don't want my game to be either of those things. I want it to have mechanisms, which I interact with tactically to bring out their emergent properties and exploit them. I want it to be a functioning, complex, living thing. So the mention of NPC behavior in Ultima is the right idea: you can understand how the NPCs work, and you can make use of your understanding for fun and profit.
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.
Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters
#49> 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…
That segment of the game does take a bit of suspension of disbelief though - it's like Atreus was born yesterday, instead of growing up there.
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)
Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters
#50Odd 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).
I think the article is intentionally focused, if it were to mention every game that is related we'd be here for a while.
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.