WingedKagouti on 7/3/2011 at 08:23
Morrowind & Oblivion.
Wormrat on 7/3/2011 at 09:10
State of Emergency. I've never played it, but from what I can tell, it's like Rockstar took the "rampage" challenges from GTA and designed a whole game around them.
henke on 7/3/2011 at 10:00
I played a bit of State of Emergency. It was no good. The game-engine's capability to render huge crowds onscreen at once was the sole impressive/good thing about it.
june gloom on 7/3/2011 at 10:22
I dunno, I liked it. It was stupid and brainless but kind of fun.
Sg3 on 7/3/2011 at 15:07
Quote Posted by Phatose
These don't really seem to have anything to do with Moral Choices though. From the list, I'd say he's going more for the Catharsis factor then anything to do with morality at all.
In Prototype for example, you don't make a moral choice to kill civilians or not. You're going to kill them one way or another. The closest to morality you'll get there is choosing not to eat anybody who's not shooting at you, and not to go apeshit in central park for no reason. But you're going to kill innocents whether you mean to or not.
Nah. In
Prototype, I consistently played a "good" character who took extreme pains to protect civilians. I managed to kill under 500 on my first playthrough, under 200 in my second, and something like 120 in my third. I don't currently play the game because I don't own it (I was playing it when I was staying at my brother's place), but if I did, I'm sure I'd eventually get the final number down to something like 30 accidents. Given that most people's body counts are in the thousands without even going out of their way to rampage, I think that's pretty good for being stuck with a player character who is a monster with so much mass that he accidentally crushes people when he falls.
Every time I set out to play a "bad" character in that game, I somehow ended up playing a good character in short order. One of these days I really am going to play
Prototype in the normal manner (I.E. mass-murderer), and I've certainly played other games in that manner. But to sum up my fascination with moral choices in games as "catharsis" demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of how my mind works. I don't think I even played
Mass Effect all the way through with an evil character (while I've done three or four play-throughs with compassionate characters). I did do a Dark Side character with
Knights of the Old Republic, though.
Ideally, any game that I play will give me complete freedom to either treat characters with compassion, ignore then, harm them, or destroy them. Of course, when enemies are shooting at me, choosing to be compassionate or to ignore them will get me killed. That's how life works. But I feel that the player should have plenty of opportunities to engage in choices. I've been very interested in moral choices ever since I played
Knights of the Old Republic, which I believe is the first game that I played which really emphasized them. But even
K.o.t.O.R. and it's sequel and
Mass Effect never allowed you to slaughter thousands of relative innocents. They more or less consistently forced you to save galaxies, so that even evil player characters ended up being rather anti-genocidal. And most of the non-hostile N.P.C.s were invincible.
I have no clue how
Grand Theft Auto handles "moral choice," if at all, because I've only seen the game played for a few minutes, from which it became immediately apparent that the game was exceedingly poor quality (which has nothing to do with the amount of violence), and I completely lost any interest. I don't think I'd like that game even if the quality were up to my standards, though. I'm repulsed by the notion of playing a "gangsta"-type character, and that's what
G.T.A. seems all about to me. But then, as I said, I've never played it, and won't, so who knows.
So, to conclude, I suppose that the list of games is technically a list of all games that allow the player to slaughter hundreds of non-hostile opponents, but the ones that I myself am interested in are P.C. games which allow that behavior but present it as a moral choice by also offering the opposite alternative. Can't think of any that really fit that criteria, although
Prototype and
Mass Effect almost do. I'm not really interested in a game where you must kill innocents, any more than I'm interested in a game where I must not kill innocents. In my favorite game,
Thief: The Dark Project, I played on Expert difficulty, which required that I not kill anyone; however, it was my choice to play on Expert. So technically, the game didn't force me to be bloodless.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go play some
Hitman: Contracts and kill everyone in the mission. [smile]
CCCToad on 7/3/2011 at 15:36
I know they're not technically "people", but if you want to see large quantities of bodies being sliced, shot, and torn to shreds at once nothing beats dead rising.
henke on 7/3/2011 at 16:14
Quote Posted by Sg3
I have no clue how
Grand Theft Auto handles "moral choice," if at all...
It handles it the same way Prototype does, which is to say: not at all. You can try to play it as a "good guy" but during one car-chase or another you'll almost certainly slide of the road and smash into some pedestrians. Or some poor sap will get caught in the crossfire between you and some rival gangbangers.
Jason Moyer on 7/3/2011 at 16:38
The Saboteur lets you slaughter anyone you want to, although IIRC it lowers the morale of the resistance and the citizens.
d0om on 7/3/2011 at 16:51
Master of Orion 2 with Exterminate? Option when you conqueror another race's world?
You can either wait for them to assimilate into your society (which is very slow for some government types), or just kill them all quickly and repopulate with your own people. (Or mind control if you are telepathic.) Later on you can blow up entire planets with a big weapon, which is about as much slaughter as you can get!
In the realm of more personal games, StoneKeep lets you kill all the innocent dwarves / faeries if you want to, although doing so will make the game a lot harder. UFO-Enemy unknown (XCOM in the states) will also let you kill innocents, but it will count against your score. The more moral issue is how much risk to put innocents in when deploying explosive weapons; do you risk your soldiers' lives to save an innocent?
Manwe on 7/3/2011 at 19:45
Quote Posted by Sg3
and I couldn't think of more than a few P.C. games that allow the player such broad moral freedom as to allow him to essentially go postal.
Any open-world game released in the last ten years allows you to do just that. And they're not exactly hard to find considering it's probably the most widespread genre nowadays. Although not all of them might have been released on the PC. As for trying to play Prototype like a good guy, and finding any form of moral choice in it... Er, I think you completely missed the point of the game.
Quote:
I have no clue how Grand Theft Auto handles "moral choice," if at all, because I've only seen the game played for a few minutes, from which it became immediately apparent that the game was exceedingly poor quality (which has nothing to do with the amount of violence), and I completely lost any interest. I don't think I'd like that game even if the quality were up to my standards, though. I'm repulsed by the notion of playing a "gangsta"-type character, and that's what G.T.A. seems all about to me. But then, as I said, I've never played it, and won't, so who knows.
So you're ok with playing a mass murdering psycho in Prototype or a cold blooded assassin in Hitman but you're repulsed by the idea of playing a petty criminal, albeit one with an actual personality and some attitude ? And GTA isn't up to your standards but Prototype is ? You mean THE Prototype, the one copy pasted from the latest Spiderman game, right down to the boring grindfest gameplay ?
