Comment by jdw64
9 hours ago
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).
The praise heaped on Spec Ops makes me embarrassed for games as a medium. This is a game that forces you to commit mass murder in order to progress the storyline, pretends that something profound has just been demonstrated, and then tries to guilt trip you about it for the rest of the experience. It's a mess of dumb, trite, "war is hell" cliché and I wish we would collectively forget about it.
And even more-so, with the extra information you discover, and especially the alternate ending, your end may very-much not be justified.