> 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 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.
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
> he does that out of necessity and would have loved for that necessity not to arise
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.
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)
Perhaps not a monster, but in "It takes two", there is a particular scene where you have to murder a friendly stuffed elephant to get your in-game daughter to cry.
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.
I’m apparently a heartless monster or something, but that elicited less than zero for me. I wanted it to end because the squeeky annoying voice and over the top cuteness was for effect.
I’m happy for you that you felt that was dark. Well, IDK, maybe I’m happy for you, hard to say.
> 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 (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.)
While I agree it's incredibly jarring in some games, I'm always thinking back at a presentation by David Rosen on procedural animation: "First, do no harm to the gameplay". He's talking about animations in particular, but I feel that should be a core pillar for any game designer.
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.
This is, IMO something that has infected modern mainstream TTRPG: Monsters hardly run away, even if a fireball just killed half of you. One thing B/X AD&D got right were the heavy use of Moral Checks, e.g. Check their morale on first death in enemy party, when half have died, etc. In fact, fighting is deadly and scary. And these morale checks differentiated undead as that enemy that knows no fear and had no morale checks, unless forced upon them by a Cleric's Turn Undead.
I think games don’t have to be fun. There’s plenty of games where fun would be super inappropriate and yet the games are very popular. This applies to a lot of psychological or survival horror games. I think better is that a game must be compelling. There must be something encouraging you to play more, more so than any frustration or conflict the game introduces.
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 the "fun aspect" of seeing them flee and not restraining your movement at all could be slightly more satisfying than taking them down in a single hit one-by-one for the thousand time.
It sounds like you might be interested in the idea of a PvP multiplayer game. I've never found myself concerned with the morality of camping/flanking/wiping an entire squad in BF6 without mercy because I know they urgently wish to do the exact same thing to me.
The monsters running away when wounded is a basic element in the Monster Hunter games, which are still very unique in how they present the relationship between the player character and the world.
There's a mod for Battletech (the video game) where people act realistically and it is catastrophically boring. The second you get sufficient advantage over an enemy they panic and promptly eject to save themselves at the cost of their company's mech. Yes, yes, it's what you would do, but it means I only fight 50% of the enemy.
The 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 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.
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.
Yes, it confirmed that the key was conveying a complex and intentional artistic vision through the gameplay. If a game is effective, but removing the gameplay makes it ineffective, then, as a game, it's art.
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.
To me, these reflections upon my aggressive and violent behavior in a game are much more impactful than games that put me into dilemma situations, where you are already presented with a nicely arranged moral problem in the moment.
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.
When I tried to play SotC, I got too distracted exploring the world to actually go after the bosses. Should blow the dust off it and try again one of these days.
Long ago in the previous century, it was D&D that provided this scenario. DMs would offer us scenarios where "killing all the orcs" was detailed into "including the women and children in the cave", just to see how we'd react.
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?
The first game I thought of when reading the article was Shadow of the Colossus, mostly because the article opens with a screenshot of the game and talks about it in detail.
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.
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.
IDK if i'd go that far... there's usually clear paragon and renegade pathways. I'd agree that they do include a few morally ambiguous quandaries, but they are not regularly encountered.
Odd 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.
MGS (and MGS2) are prominent enough, and directly relevant enough, and predate Shadow of the Colossus enough, that not mentioning them is a conspicuous omission, and not just something it would have been nice to add. In fact not mentioning them makes the article somewhat misleading, especially when at the same time it chooses to highlight Spec Ops: The Line.
I 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 severely dilutes your argument. If Dark Souls counts, then countless text-heavy JRPGs with sad villain backstories would also fit the bill. Ultimately, for a true moral dilemma to exist in game design, there has to be a scenario where the player doesn't strictly need to kill mechanically, yet they are forced to confront the choice of doing so
> the moment it drops the exact resource the player needs to level up, can we really call that a genuine moral dilemma?
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.
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.
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).
That reminds me of the Bhagavad Gita, where Arjuna and Krishna have a long conversation before a battle where the former is supposed to perform his duties towards the people he's sworn to protect, but which would mean most likely killing close relatives that he cares about.
There is no honor in killing, only in exercising your duty towards serving and protecting others.
I'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.
It's interesting that metro and Stalker both feature this sort of decision tree. I wonder what it is about that culture that leads to this gameplay element.
If you've got the ability to play the original, it still held up fantastically when I last played it properly (2-odd years ago).
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!
I would highly recommend the original if possible. I feel the remake removed a lot of the atmosphere and direction in the pursuit of showing off asset fidelity. The original holds up amazingly well for its time and feels like playing a painting.
If you are old and haven't played it yet too though. There's a few games that are a pretty unique experience like that, Bloodborne is another, but also consider Journey and probably a list of others.
One 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).
Makes me think of that dragon that you can sneak up to near the beginning of Elden Ring and take it out with chip damage over about half an hour without waking it up.
For a mainstream boss example I nominate the Lonely Giant in Elder Scrolls Online.
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.
Another 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", how rangers call it? Maybe, under specific circumstances. Or is that just a lie I tell to myself to justify the trophy?
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.
> 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?
I wonder how they arrived at the name "Ebrietas"? Does it have something to do with being inebriated?
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.
Or Nier, which are inspired by and connected to Shadow of the Colossus in the same way as SotC is connected to Zelda (explicitly mentioned in the article)
Nier: Replicant definitely belongs in the list. Yoko Taro successfully asks "What if the opponents you fight were the main character of their own stories with their own good and justifiable motivations?" as well as any of the other games mentioned.
Came here to mention the same thing. It's one of the pillars of the whole Witcher saga, but most clearly it's visible in Sapkowski's short stories - The Lesser Evil, A Grain of Truth, A Question of Price, The Witcher, to name just a few.
This 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.
I never even considered one might play Undertale where you only kill some people but not others, the game doesn’t really ever incentivize you to do a “mixed” run.
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…
> Contrary to Flowey’s advice, the game can be finished without a single kill, leading to a special ending, but this pacifist route is markedly more difficult.
...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.
> in which you powerlevel like it's a normal JRPG until the encounters run out
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
> 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 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
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
> he does that out of necessity and would have loved for that necessity not to arise
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.
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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)
> suppose he was always stuck in the safe area around their house?
"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.
Perhaps not a monster, but in "It takes two", there is a particular scene where you have to murder a friendly stuffed elephant to get your in-game daughter to cry.
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
The ending credits show her patched back up with needle and thread, but they know what they did.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bnKr0M1Tzs
I’m apparently a heartless monster or something, but that elicited less than zero for me. I wanted it to end because the squeeky annoying voice and over the top cuteness was for effect.
I’m happy for you that you felt that was dark. Well, IDK, maybe I’m happy for you, hard to say.
> 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 (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.)
While I agree it's incredibly jarring in some games, I'm always thinking back at a presentation by David Rosen on procedural animation: "First, do no harm to the gameplay". He's talking about animations in particular, but I feel that should be a core pillar for any game designer.
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
This is, IMO something that has infected modern mainstream TTRPG: Monsters hardly run away, even if a fireball just killed half of you. One thing B/X AD&D got right were the heavy use of Moral Checks, e.g. Check their morale on first death in enemy party, when half have died, etc. In fact, fighting is deadly and scary. And these morale checks differentiated undead as that enemy that knows no fear and had no morale checks, unless forced upon them by a Cleric's Turn Undead.
I'd fix my typos and spelling now that I have my coffee, but it will not let me.
Game developers (mostly... hopefully?) try to optimize for the "fun" aspect of a game, not the "realism of the flight/flight instinct" aspect
I think games don’t have to be fun. There’s plenty of games where fun would be super inappropriate and yet the games are very popular. This applies to a lot of psychological or survival horror games. I think better is that a game must be compelling. There must be something encouraging you to play more, more so than any frustration or conflict the game introduces.
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 the "fun aspect" of seeing them flee and not restraining your movement at all could be slightly more satisfying than taking them down in a single hit one-by-one for the thousand time.
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It sounds like you might be interested in the idea of a PvP multiplayer game. I've never found myself concerned with the morality of camping/flanking/wiping an entire squad in BF6 without mercy because I know they urgently wish to do the exact same thing to me.
But one where death is permanent / seriously bad; in Battlefield you just respawn so dying is not a major issue.
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>CalebCity: “How fearless minions are in ANY video game”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC375rujZhs
The monsters running away when wounded is a basic element in the Monster Hunter games, which are still very unique in how they present the relationship between the player character and the world.
There's a mod for Battletech (the video game) where people act realistically and it is catastrophically boring. The second you get sufficient advantage over an enemy they panic and promptly eject to save themselves at the cost of their company's mech. Yes, yes, it's what you would do, but it means I only fight 50% of the enemy.
Googling returned ‘PanicSystem’ https://www.nexusmods.com/battletech/mods/461 which says it builds on 2 other mods - I don't know if you used this one or another it built on etc?
The solution for your problem is playing a Souls game
The 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 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.
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.
Yes, it confirmed that the key was conveying a complex and intentional artistic vision through the gameplay. If a game is effective, but removing the gameplay makes it ineffective, then, as a game, it's art.
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.
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To me, these reflections upon my aggressive and violent behavior in a game are much more impactful than games that put me into dilemma situations, where you are already presented with a nicely arranged moral problem in the moment.
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.
The Uncharted games are weird like this. They get lauded for their storyline, yet Drake is out their killing hordes of guys for what ? Some treasure ?
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When I tried to play SotC, I got too distracted exploring the world to actually go after the bosses. Should blow the dust off it and try again one of these days.
Long ago in the previous century, it was D&D that provided this scenario. DMs would offer us scenarios where "killing all the orcs" was detailed into "including the women and children in the cave", just to see how we'd react.
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?
The first game I thought of when reading the article was Shadow of the Colossus, mostly because the article opens with a screenshot of the game and talks about it in detail.
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.
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.
IDK if i'd go that far... there's usually clear paragon and renegade pathways. I'd agree that they do include a few morally ambiguous quandaries, but they are not regularly encountered.
Fits the setting well. Especially New vegas.
Odd 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.
MGS (and MGS2) are prominent enough, and directly relevant enough, and predate Shadow of the Colossus enough, that not mentioning them is a conspicuous omission, and not just something it would have been nice to add. In fact not mentioning them makes the article somewhat misleading, especially when at the same time it chooses to highlight Spec Ops: The Line.
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Slaying people is optional in MGS2 and higher, gameplay-wise. There’s not even a dilemma as long as you can handle hand-to-hand combat and a dart gun.
I 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 severely dilutes your argument. If Dark Souls counts, then countless text-heavy JRPGs with sad villain backstories would also fit the bill. Ultimately, for a true moral dilemma to exist in game design, there has to be a scenario where the player doesn't strictly need to kill mechanically, yet they are forced to confront the choice of doing so
> the moment it drops the exact resource the player needs to level up, can we really call that a genuine moral dilemma?
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.
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.
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).
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And even more-so, with the extra information you discover, and especially the alternate ending, your end may very-much not be justified.
That reminds me of the Bhagavad Gita, where Arjuna and Krishna have a long conversation before a battle where the former is supposed to perform his duties towards the people he's sworn to protect, but which would mean most likely killing close relatives that he cares about.
There is no honor in killing, only in exercising your duty towards serving and protecting others.
I'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.
It's interesting that metro and Stalker both feature this sort of decision tree. I wonder what it is about that culture that leads to this gameplay element.
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
When you say "dig up," do you recommend the remaster or the original?
If you've got the ability to play the original, it still held up fantastically when I last played it properly (2-odd years ago).
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!
I would highly recommend the original if possible. I feel the remake removed a lot of the atmosphere and direction in the pursuit of showing off asset fidelity. The original holds up amazingly well for its time and feels like playing a painting.
If you are old and haven't played it yet too though. There's a few games that are a pretty unique experience like that, Bloodborne is another, but also consider Journey and probably a list of others.
One 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).
The Cogwork Dancers in Hollow Knight: Silksong are a recent example of this
https://hollowknight.wiki/w/Cogwork_Dancers
Makes me think of that dragon that you can sneak up to near the beginning of Elden Ring and take it out with chip damage over about half an hour without waking it up.
For a mainstream boss example I nominate the Lonely Giant in Elder Scrolls Online.
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.
LOTRO = Lord Of The Rings Online
Another 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", how rangers call it? Maybe, under specific circumstances. Or is that just a lie I tell to myself to justify the trophy?
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.
> 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?
I wonder how they arrived at the name "Ebrietas"? Does it have something to do with being inebriated?
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.
Probably more likely related to the Mexican moth, considering the character designs.
On a similar theme, The old knight and the dragon: https://www.instagram.com/p/DY0YtdtHdLb/?img_index=1
No mention of the Witcher? The whole franchise is based on moral dilemmas like that.
Or Nier, which are inspired by and connected to Shadow of the Colossus in the same way as SotC is connected to Zelda (explicitly mentioned in the article)
Nier: Replicant definitely belongs in the list. Yoko Taro successfully asks "What if the opponents you fight were the main character of their own stories with their own good and justifiable motivations?" as well as any of the other games mentioned.
There are so few (2) succubi mutagens in Witcher3. Gotta do what you gotta do, 30% damage is nothing to scoff at.
Maybe the author, being Czech, wanted to look beyond the quintessential Slavic contribution to the genre. It’s the only explanation I can think of.
The idea that monsters can be understood, and spared because in the end they’re exhibiting human flaws, is such a powerful storytelling device.
>author, being Czech
Sapkowski is from Poland, though. Still Slav, but still.
Came here to mention the same thing. It's one of the pillars of the whole Witcher saga, but most clearly it's visible in Sapkowski's short stories - The Lesser Evil, A Grain of Truth, A Question of Price, The Witcher, to name just a few.
The Shadow of the Colossus video essay meme has transferred into text, we are devolving!
These are their kitchens and living rooms. You leap in swinging your broadsword.
This 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.
I never even considered one might play Undertale where you only kill some people but not others, the game doesn’t really ever incentivize you to do a “mixed” run.
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…
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I mean this has been a this has been a theme going back further than "Shadow of the Colossus" or "Undertale".
Both "Chrono Trigger" and "Crono Cross" make you question your actions and whether or not it was worth on a monster genocide.
> Contrary to Flowey’s advice, the game can be finished without a single kill, leading to a special ending, but this pacifist route is markedly more difficult.
...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.
> in which you powerlevel like it's a normal JRPG until the encounters run out
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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