New interview with Daniel Vávra

Gameplay
#82

I disagree. Having immortal people in the game will IMO affect your gameplay and immersion more than lack of children, many people won’t even realize there should be children, while almost everyone will notice they are immortal. Everyone knows they were immortal in Skyrim.[/Quote]
And how does immortal kids affect gameplay in particular? The only reason why it should matter to someone is when he really want to kill kids in the game for whatever reason. And I think if you want to do so you have some serious problem and immersion shouldn’t be the most serious issue. And no, that doesn’t make me a hypocrite since I don’t see the fun in killing kids (or other innocent civilians) in a game that isn’t about the fantasy of mass murder but about me roleplaying the life of somebody during medieval times. So basically, cutting kids out instead of just making them immortal (or better: by making them mortal but with showing people a game over screen once they killed one) hurts the whole game and its vision for just some lunatics who don’t give a shit about the original design of the game, its whole premise, its storytelling, its roleplaying design and who just want to embark on a pointless killing spree. That makes little to absolutely NO sense at all to me and it just shows the poor state of the industry and the immaturity we still have to face here.

[Quote][quote=“LordCrash, post:78, topic:21980”]
Honestly, with all the “hard guy” talk Dan does on twitter it’s laughable to even talk about that.
[/quote]

You have serious problems with understanding context. There is quite a difference between enjoying your artistic freedom within the laws and making your game unsellable in many countries, or even on Steam. You are crazy if you think that he will sacrifice succes of his game just to make a point about political corectness.[/Quote]
Sorry, but you are the one with problems understanding context. Making kids immortal is ONE way to work within the laws. In that case it would be even quite easy for modders to make them mortal again without any problems for Warhorse. But just cutting stuff out because you FEAR regulation is the absolutely wrong way. And yes, I measure people by their words and actions. And if words and actions don’t fit there’s something seriously wrong IMHO.

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#83

I’m curious about your take on the issue, don’t get me wrong. I just want to make clear that this is a HUGE issue for me.

You know, cutting something completely out which is extremely important for a realistic display of life in medieval times is much more severe than just limiting its extend (and give modders the chance to break the limitations afterwards if they want to do so on their own…).

So forgive me, but if you really cut out all kids in the end, the game won’t be the same for me. I’ll still looking forward to it but it won’t be the game I’ve dreamt of anymore.

And again, hurting literally everyone for the sake of appeasing only a few (who don’t even really care about your vision and design and story…) is always the wrong way.

#84

LordCrash, we all agree with you on the topic of killable kids. It’d make the game stand out in the gaming world and break the mold of RPGs. However, you have to see it from their side; appease our backers who have so willingly undergone changes in the game yet have it banned in many countries across the world OR appease the few because the world can’t handle what the world is really like, so they have to destroy what could have been a very good game (Bethesda is King for this. As good as the games were, they basically don’t change anything other than location and storyline. Everyone and everything stays the same.)

However you look at this, whether from your perspective or theirs, you must understand they are making THREE Acts for the game. Meaning it’s coming out as a three-part game, the first Act released this December. If they made killable children so early in the game, they wouldn’t be able to make and release Act II and Act III because, as stated before by someone else here, CoD broke the FPS mold with a airport shooting as terrorists. They received a fuck ton of backlash for it, but Activision is such a big company they paid off being sued. Warhorse doesn’t have the name or money to make killable children and bypass being sued for it. Not yet at least. When they do however, it’ll most likely be when they release the 3rd Act because A) all three Acts would be out in the world by then. B) They can send a patch that unlocks all three Acts to kill children.

Sadly, if they do release the first Act with killable children, we won’t see Warhorse ever again because oddly, killing children is worse than being a terrorist. So it’s either they stand with their backers and be destroyed, ask us to hold on and wait till Act III’s release, or ignore us and be the next Bethesda.

#85

I definitely understand where you’re coming from, but overall I have to agree with LordCrash - for me this is a much, much bigger issue than (say) the lack of a third-person mode. Not just because it was stated during the Kickstarter that there would be children, but because it destroys the whole idea of a ‘realistic’ gameworld - you’re going to do all this research to make everything as accurate as possible, and then simply ignore the existence of half the population? I’ll be interested to hear Dan’s statement in the next update, but I just don’t think ‘making everything else cooler’ is going to cut it in this instance. At the very least you could poll the the backers on which ‘solution’ they’d prefer - I know opinions are divided, but I’m betting most people would still choose immortal children over no children at all.

3 Likes
#86

First, I don’t think that making children killable is the most important issue after all. Actually, I think it’s pretty much unimportant. If you just play the game “the way it’s meant to be played” you’ll probably never get in any situation in which you even think about killing children. It’s not the purpose of the game. You know, much of what we connect with realism is just window-dressing, pure visuals, but that’s ok. We probably won’t be able to burn down every house for fun, rape women or torture people. So why should we be able to kill children if it’s equally socially unaccepted than these other things in games (and elsewhere). Why is it somehow unacceptable of having immortal children while it’s obviously ok to have “non rapable” women? I don’t get it. Is our gamer brain really that broken that we NEED the option to be able to kill everyone just for the sake of being able to? The simple truth is that the world is always limited in its interactivity. You simply can’t rape women and that’s the case for a reason, be it personal taste, laws that forbid it or political or social correctness. Nobody complains about it. But it’s also ok to have immortal children in games for the very same reasons.

Second, I don’t think that being able to kill children in a video games makes you worse than being a terrorist. Actually, that’s a very stupid statement and I highly doubt that even the biggest ideologic dogmatists would claim that. So please, don’t make something up.

#87
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#88

You pretty much summed up this whole topic.

#89

gotta say, i’m with lord crash. take a hard line with those people. dont let them dictate your creativity. having children is obviously something warhorse wanted as well.

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#90

Citation needed. The quote you posted earlier says they plan to have children, not that they will have children in the game. It would be good if people stop pretending like there was some promise. There were many things they pomised openly, but children wasn’t one of those things, the chosen wording was apparently used for good reason.

Holy shit, you really think that you are something special don’t you? There are tons of games where you play like de facto terrorist, but almost no game in which you can kill children. Even Fallout is censored on Steam and children are removed so you couldn’t kill them.

Why so many people still act like if the major problem was that they are affraid of people who would be offended by killable children, and not the fact that they simply don’t want their game to be banned from steam?

And If they don’t want even immortal children, then it’s obviously not because of possible backlash from offended people (PC crowd really don’t mind immortal children), but because other reasons. You are mixing two different problems. Implementing immortal children is obviously not a political corectness problem, but problem technical and with design.

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#91

technical? no. design? i believe there are ways. it might not make many happy, but from these responses, i think would be preferable to no children.

maybe skinny little people :slight_smile:

#92

Well, Vavra said that they came up with a solution, but it’s too much work and they don’t have enough people, so yeah, technical.

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#93

Holy shit, maybe you read the posts I answered next time before you make pointless statements. And I don’t see how talking about the topic (and even being emotional about it) makes me “something special”. So drop the act.

That’s nothing that couldn’t be solved. There have been immortal NPCs before in video games. The question is indeed whether the want to invest time and money in making children for the game, that’ true. But it’s kind of pointless to talk about realistic details in the game if you decide against a huge element that medieval world consisted of. It’d be just a poor decision, making the game much less attractive than its original vision indicated (at least for me and some other folks).

#94

You answered a post where @TheKnightinBlack said that Activision had a problem with allowing players to play as a terrorist and that it’s even worse to have killable children in a game than playing as a terrorist. You said his statement is stupid. Considering the current situation on the market, it’s not his statement which is stupid. Being emotional is one thing, acting like you ate all the wisdom on Earth is another one.

#95

Calling a statement stupid is not “acting like I ate all the wisdom on Earth”. It’s just my opinion on the statement, not more and not less. The rest is just your (over)interpretation based on your general antipathy for my point of view I guess…

And about the comparison: there is a huge difference between the terrorist scene in CoD and a setting that includes killable children. The difference is quite simple: it’s about game design and the goals you have in the respective situation. In the terrorist scene in CoD it was basically your goal to kill innocent people and even if you didn’t want to the game kind of forces you to do so. You were meant to kill innocent people. Nothing like that is planned for KCD IIRC. You will probably never encounter a mission in the game in which you are ordered to kill children or the game forces you to do so. There could be just the POSSIBILITY to do so, for no other reason that your own dark perverted fun. You honstely can’t discuss something like “killable children” without context because context is everything in video games. There are ways to implement killable children in video games (e.g. by properly sue/punish the player for such actions) that are way less problematic than the airport scene in CoD (while I personally think that much of the criticism on it was just another pointless discussion based on ideology rather than on real, rational arguments). And there are surely ways to implement children in video games, no matter if you’re able to kill them. To be honest, the discussion whether they HAVE to be killable shows to me that there is something severly wrong with us gamers or the people who claim that they have to be. Actually, the question if they are killable or immortal is of more or less ZERO importance for the design of KCD since you will probably never come in a situation in which you had to kill a child no matter what (at the very least good game desisgners could avoid that). The only question is if you enable killable children just for the sake of having killable children, like a point on a feature like for the next sandobx game X “has killable children” or “every NPC in this game can be killed”. I’m still wondering why I haven’t seen a game so far which let players rape and torture every NPC in the game. Why is that so? Why is the pointless (context is important !!!) but morbid possibility to be able to kill everyone in video games so important so some games? Don’t get me wrong, I’m no hypocrit. I’ve also killed people in GTA and other games “just for fun” before. But I always acknowleged that this was never the core or the basic design of the game itself but just a side effect. It wouldn’t have made the game any worse if it wouldn’t hvae been possible to do so. Maybe it’s for some I guess. But then again these people don’t buy the respective game for the design its developers envisioned. KCD is meant as a story-driven RPG in a realistically displayed medieval setting. I don’t see why the question why children should be killable or not should be of any importance for the game that is described here, especially for us gamers.

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#96

How is that not exactly the same thing? No, they didn’t say “we 100% guarantee that there will be children”, but they made it clear that at this point - which was when they were asking people for money - they fully intended to include children in the game.

Of course I realise that planned features sometimes have to be cut for reasons of time, money, practicality etc. But in this case the feature is a fairly major one, so I think people have a perfect right to express their concerns. I’m not accusing Warhorse of dishonesty, I just think this is something that needs to be addressed as soon as possible.

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#97

I still say we should all move onto a different topic until Warhorse posts a new topic update on children, because so far we’re going in circles like chickens with their heads cut off.

#98

I completely agree. If I have understood right, there are two problems:

– Legal situation in some countries:

Maybe this problem can be solved by simply disabling attacks on children. If a child is the current target for an attack (focus / drawn weapon) then the shot or hit could be trapped and redirected to a sort of “zero-device” within the combat system. So nothing will happen, sorry to all the misguided souls out there.

I don’t know if it can be done with reasonable effort. It’s just an idea.

– A world full of orphans:

Imho there is no reason for a sophisticated “orphan management system”. The only thing is that the children must be “flagged” as orphans somehow. Then they could just dissapear as soon as they’re out of sight of the player ( after a while ). Some rumours about an orphanage somewhere would be enough for me.

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#99

Exactly my thoughts (in fact, I mentioned that few posts above). It is not exactly elegant solution but much, much better than no children at all.

I´m curious what will be in the update, as @TheKnightinBlack mentioned, we cannot be sure by anything till then.

#100

I think there are bigger problems than “orphan management”.

Honestly, in which situations would you need something like that? Only in situations in which you wipe out whole families and I doubt that a quest or normal task in the game will require something like that.

If people want to “break” the game design by for example killing all inhabitants of a village for no apparent reason they should just live with the consequence that they broke the game design and that there are for example still a lot of (immortal) children running around. Of course that’s not immersive or realistic. But it’s not the failure of the game but the player. If you play the game “the way it’s meant to be played” there will very likely no situation in which you make children to complete orphans (I might remember you that in medieval times big families with a lot of family members were quite usual so you usually don’t create orphans by just killing one or two members of the family, for example the father or uncle or whomever).

I think Warhorse should stop thinking too much about people who don’t want to play the game the way it’s meant to be played (the way they envisioned it). I’m pretty sure children benefit their vision for a realistic medieval RPG. Must they be mortal or better, killable by the player? Probably not. Is something like orphan management needed? Probably not.

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#101

Doesnt have to be the player. What about a Cumans raid killing the parents? Not all families were big… it isnt that hard to image situation in the game that the a child become orphan just by games AI mechanic.

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