Yeah and then they condemn people for not doing everything non lethally like they do. Like, sorry but not everyone is going to be lucky enough to not kill somebody by knocking them out cold or throwing them down stairs or whatever.
I remember there was some enemy dialogue in Deus Ex Human Revolution if you have a lower body count (not necessarily completely pacifist), or at least a lower one in the prison DLC specifically where an enemy commander is talking to his soldiers about this tendency to not kill, and he mentions most of the people you knocked out are comatose because that’s what happens when you get your lights punched out by a metal fist. I think only the knockout gas (also something no one’s managed to achieve irl because sedatives are generally lethal at too high a dosage) is actually “safe”. And also that they have no idea what motivates you to show this restraint and that they’re kinda screwed if you decide to just start killing people since you’re already resourceful enough to run circles around them with this massive handicap.
I then immediately tossed a gas grenade from the vent I was hiding in, knocking them all unconscious.
Human Revolution is kinda funny in that regard since it’s one of the most famous examples of a pacifist run being encouraged but the reasons for it are purely gameplay. There’s no story reason to do it. In fact thanks to a bug you can get a character killed by doing this. NG+ is your only incentive. Most of your enemies just straight up aren’t good people and aside from the intro mission, no one I can remember blows smoke about killing being wrong. And if you spare the main bad guy of the first mission, he helps you once, then after doing so, shows up as an enemy in a Terrorist-occupied apartment. You’re better off killing him the second time you meet him if you can pull it off without the cops shooting you.
As contentious as Mankind Divided was, there was a lot more incentive to actually bother with this, at least for a few enemy factions.
True. I’ve talked about it before in this thread but very few games that encourage pacifist runs have managed to make it compelling, either as a meta commentary or just as a story. Way too many don’t actually make the enemy more likable or sympathetic, they just say you get a better ending by not killing them somehow. You can be fighting a ton of unrepentant murderers and jackbooted thugs but if you kill too many people call you a psychopath and you get locked into the worst ending.
Even better examples tend to treat all the factions equally when they’re clearly not. I love the Metro series but there’s a couple occasions where you gain morality points that determine your ending by sparing enemies, and in at least two cases the morality points are gained by sneaking through NAZI bases without killing anyone. These people run death camps. You cannot tell me killing them implies something negative about one’s moral character or would have more bad results than good.
And all of this is put into games otherwise built around combat so the game punishes you for engaging in the actual mechanics. “Yes, 90 percent of the gameplay is combat and we put in a ton of fun mechanics to facilitate that which we marketed aggressively but to get the good ending you have to not use them. Yeah the writers had some milquetoast commentary about the nature of violence and power fantasy they wanted to put in.” If you want a game about peaceful solutions to conflicts then just make one.
It’s funny because the big game people think of when it comes to pacifist runs being done right is Undertale. I myself think it’s the only one that really works (I’ve like other games that had pacifist runs but never BECAUSE of said runs), mainly because the core gameplay people came for is still intact. The bullet hell mechanics are always present and navigating them as they change throughout the fight happens whether you kill or spare, it just changes in different ways. The only actual combat mini game where you try to land a hit is a basic timing mini game.
Another big part of it is definitely that these are people you’d WANT to spare for their own sake. It’s telling that UT has a lot of fans who aren’t even fans of Bullet Hell. I myself was never even tempted to do a genocide run because I’m simply very bad at bullet hell. But all the strong character writing in the world won’t help you if the game can’t remain fun while you’re playing it. The main reason I didn’t go pacifist in Deus Ex and hated having to minimize casualties in fames like Dishonored is because going around knocking everyone out while refusing to use your more violent toolsets and skills is BORING.
This is somewhat unrelated but I’m putting it here to save posts. It’s less a trope and more a lack of one but I hate how so many stories have ancient technology or magic artifacts that have all sorts of mystique and intrigue about it and it’s builders and the possibilities enabled only for it to turn out to be a big enemy final boss and once it’s dead, the idea of researching and reverse-engineering it is completely forgotten about.
Like, I don’t care if we found an evil robot or whatever instead of something that seems immediately useful, find out how that stuff works! Every unknown mechanism could revolutionize countless aspects of society as we know it if we figure out whatever lost science goes into it. This also goes for whatever research goes into stuff the villain is weaponizing. Steal it, don’t destroy it, you morons!
It does also tie into the pacifism thing in the sense that everyone who wants to use the big robot for its intended purpose is automatically a villain no matter what side they’re on and using a lost super weapon is something inherently unheroic no matter what it’s used for or why. Like, even if it’s something that can easily be used only against military targets, apparently a weapon being big and scary and blowing up a bunch of stuff at once is inherently more evil than going over and blowing it all up yourselves, risking the lives of your comrades to do so. I guess it’s only ok to fight for a good cig it’s a fair fight. Grade schooler level ethics.
Talking on pacifist runs I hate when games take away the option to kill the main villain if we already went through the entire game slaughtering henchmen who most likely weren’t even all that bad . I think most choice games avoid this trope but some don’t because a lot artificially rail road you to a specific ending .
Last of us is one of my favorite games of all time period but realistically I don’t think Abby would gotten spared with the amount of violence you do in the game . You kill every one including a pregnant chick yet you spare the main person who actually committed the murder. I hate that trope in tv shows,movies etc so much kill henchmen number 5 yet the main bad guy who ordered henchmen number five around is let go free. It even worse because I think the play style the game offers doesn’t not really fit with the theme at the end.
I just don’t believe a real person who committed all the acts the protagonist did would be like hey I murdered all these ppl but then the one person I really wanted to kill gets let go . It be one thing if the game gave you the option to spare them but it doesn’t you murder each one in the most violent ways possible .
“Well, you see, the moral is that revenge is bad.”
Yes yes, fascinating. I definitely haven’t heard that a thousand times before. Definitely needed another story telling me revenge is bad.
Like, it’s not just that it’s an obvious moral, I just straight up don’t agree. Not when it’s for an actual wrongdoing, that’s for sure. And not when it’s proportional. Idk what could make me agree but it’d have to be some sort of earth-shattering revelation. If the last hundred stories couldn’t do it, I doubt one more’ll do the trick.
Another pretty infamous example was No More Heroes 2 where the final boss was so bad the entire top ten list YouTube community just had an agreement it’d make every worst boss list they made, and apparently it was on purpose for an anti-revenge moral. The guy who kinda started the trend I’m talking about (Alex Rochon, he voices Caine on TADC now) did a pretty brilliant bait and switch on his final countdown that I’ll just put here because I’m not gonna be able to summarize it in a way that makes it clear why I found it so funny:
“Anyway, since then I’ve seen a lot of different opinions about this boss, including a few defenses of it as a metaphor for revenge being unsatisfying, so now that I have more critical experience under my hat you might be surprised to hear that I HATE THIS FUCKER MORE THAN EVER!”
And then went on to say that quite frankly NO message you’re trying to deliver should come at the expense of gameplay. It’s a GAME. If you can’t make it fun or engaging, you failed.
I know pretty much everyone adds a dozen caveats to criticism like that, there aren’t many absolutes in media critique, but I actually think that’s pretty black and white. Even games that are actively described as not being fun in a traditional sense (one example I’ve heard is Pathologic) are at least grueling in an engaging way. That can be considered a sort of fun. This just had straight up bad game design but on purpose. It doesn’t matter if the result was intentional or not, being bad on purpose doesn’t mean you did a good job or we should evaluate your work differently, you still just did bad.
Honestly I just tend to see it as a challenge to complete like fully stealthing a game or not dying once. A self challenge to spice things up probably why the finger wagging doesn’t really brothers me much
I’d say Dishonored’s story logic is pretty solid (more bodies → more rats → worse plague), but your mileage may of course vary, and of course if the gameplay isn’t fun to you then it isn’t fun to you.
If a game makes such a weapon not inherently bad or disastrous for the world. Then the writers are bad. Not the trope. So called super weapons are frowned upon even when they can be used on “military bases” only on account of the fact that you cannot guarantee it will never be used for something else. And that weapons with such a destructive nature tend to never be so clean. Nuclear weapons leave radiation. Skaven plague bombs leave a plague behind. Nano machines dont discriminate and eat everything alive.
A super weaon that can discriminate between combatants. Is clean. And doesn’t come at some sort of severe cost is inherently bad writing. A person who would never use it to subjugate their opponents is better off destroying it or keeping it disabled as possible deterrent if the need applies.
Thus. Yes. The weapon is inherently more evil than the risk it takes for the party to remove it. People who make weapons like that rarely intend to use it for good forever. And its often easier to just destroy the weapon than to reshape the culture and nature of an entire state that has created it.
I won’t remark much on the TLOU stuff on account of spoilers. But pacifist runs being difficult and limiting your gameplay isnt bad game design. It isnt good either, as good would require you to implement mechanics dedicated solely to that pacifist loop that makes it satisfying (see undertale). But by design. Limiting your options is the point of a pacifist run. It is far easier to kill a man than fight with your hand tied.
To bring up dishonored. Placing aside the story elements (rats/hives). The conditions to be pacifist are tough because by design. Solving a problem by taking down the root of the issue or gathering evidence to get someone put away legally is far more difficult than simply going over and teleporting a knife into them. If a game made being a pacifist equal to or easier than a non pacifist run then it has failed. To hold a moral high ground is more difficult, it is a struggle and it isnt always rewarded.
Dishonored’s kinda funny. In a way, that the logic for avoiding murder and mayhem is sound, but gameplay is so, so much more fun if you’re murderhoboing. Like, in a pacifist run you just ghost about, whereas as a murderhobo you can sic rat swarms, hack the gates and trick people to cross them, toss objects at people, drop them from heights, not to mention classic murder methods like gadgets and weapons…yeah, well. I wasn’t burdening myself with morality when playing it.
Speaking of “pacifist” runs, I loved Alpha Protocol’s way to have fun at expense of those, where it had orphan counter for murderhoboing and hospital bills for “pacifist” runs. Because, when you think about it, those “non-lethal” takedowns are not really equal to “no consequence” takedowns.
Back to hated tropes that are related to the current subject discussed: protagonist has the bad guy at gunpoint/cornered in some other way, then morality pet goes “If you kill them, you’ll be the same as them/turn into them!”, the hero drops the gun and I am left thinking “No, bitch, I am not the same, nor will I turn into them, here are 10 reasons why and I’m sure I can come up with more”. Like, parallel like that can work, can be powerful, but the writer must work to make it so, otherwise it just makes the protagonist look stupid.
Ironically Dishonored is one of my least favorite examples because it says “play your way” then gives one way the bad ending. It doesn’t matter what the internal logic is, that’s bad.
Only if the weapon is meant to be an allegory for WMDs specifically. Just because it’s a super weapon doesn’t necessarily mean that. There’s works out there from way back when saying that freaking modern artillery is evil and we should have kept fighting with muskets. The problem isn’t not understanding the capacity for harm the weapons do, the problem is the incredibly simplistic notion that war is bad and making new ways to fight it is also bad.
That’s completely nonsensical. The weapon is not the problem, the reason for fighting is. And the fact is that while it may be EASIER in the short term to just destroy the weapon, that only works until someone figures out how to make it again. It doesn’t matter how much knowledge you destroy related to it either. People will figure it out. It only makes sense if the weapon is derived from some unique, one of a kind source that you can just break and be done with it. That’s it how that works. You’re not gonna destroy all the world’s sulfur deposits to stop gunpowder.
Like, I know it sounds cynical but there is no “what if the weapon just doesn’t get made” in the real world. There is “who will make it first” and “how do we stop things from getting to the point where they are used” and “is preventing this worth the cost in this circumstance”. Asking “what if we just didn’t invent it” for any sort of technology is like asking “what if the world was made of pudding”. Completely irrelevant to any possible real world scenario.
Precisely. Regardless of the internal logic, eschewing all your guns and bomb traps and cool powers to just choke people out is BORING. It works in games like Metal Gear and Hitman because all the mechanics are based around sneaking in easier and more fun ways with only a few areas where “guns blazing” is even possible. That ain’t Dishonored.
I mean “play your way” never meant “every way gets the good ending”. You can kill every target and still get the low chaos ending, it’s only if you murder hobo and slaughter every random shmuck you see that you spike into high chaos. Low or high, you still have a lot of ways to approach your problems (D2 does this better imo, you have a lot more “loud” non-lethal options).
Most of the random guards you kill have horrific backstories or future plans for crimes or whatever if you scan them. If a narrative contrives that me killing somebody who plans to stab a couple people then himself (actually a thing the heart can reveal) raises chaos, it’s dumb.
Also again, I DON’T CARE if it has internal logic that is consistent. That’s a Watsonian critique. My critique is Doyalist. I’m not complaining that it’s not internally consistent, I’m complaining that getting a satisfactory ending requires you to play in a way that’s BORING. It is BORING to go around knocking every jackboot thug unconscious and not use my sword too often. It’s BORING to have all the cool powers be lethal and rarely get to use them. Even if I can use them a little, I’d rather use them more without having one of my team mates lecture me about it in the end game and jeopardize the whole mission by calling a bunch of guards with a flare to prove a point. No amount of justifying the internal reality will make this FUN.
If a strange figure appears to you in your dreams and gifts you with the magically preserved heart of your dead lover, and that heart speaks horrors to you, and you take those horrors as a reason to go on a vigilante murder spree? That makes you the bad guy. It’s just how it works. There isn’t a path where that makes you a heroic figure.
That aside, I think the ‘pacifist’ path through Dishonored is pretty good, because it’s not some sunshine and roses path where you just let people off the hook. All of the nonlethal things you do to people are horrible, much more cruel than a quick death by the sword.
The stuff it says is verifiably true in most cases where you see the results. It’s macabre but that’s not enough for an ethical stance. And these people are very much in the process of committing various atrocities. The heart isn’t the reason for fighting, it’s just further evidence that this whole thing is dumb.
Honestly, I agree with you on this. What grinds my gears even more is that if you’re bad at stealth, you get attacked by guards who have no issue killing you instead of arresting you, and somehow, you’re painted to be the bad guy when you end up having to kill them in self-defense. The ferryman pissed me off so bad in the end when he alerted the bad guys to my presence, as if self-defense isn’t valid.
I mean I wasn’t just going around killing dudes for the sake of it, I was legitimately trying to be stealthy, and their response was to try to kill me lmao. If the ferryman has an issue with that, then that clown can go do these missions himself and try to stay on his high horse while people try to kill him.
I mean what’s especially funny to me about Dishonored is that we’re treated like the good guys when we’re literally still monarchists. It’s hard for me to take anyone in this game seriously about morality when all the “good guys” are monarchists (but they’re benevolent, trust us!).
And the counter someone will probably make is something like “if you’re bad at stealth, why are you playing a stealth game?” And that just brings us back to the “play your way” bit. It didn’t SAY it was a stealth game, it said it COULD BE a stealth game IF YOU SO CHOSE. And then everyone treats you like a psychopath if you don’t and you get the bad ending. Don’t tell me I don’t have to do something and then reveal the ending people will actually want is locked behind you doing that thing.
