Realism in the game/time period

SirRight · February 27, 2014, 3:24pm

There have been many topics brought up on various subjects. Consider the year is 1403 and the viewpoint of people was different than what it is today (hopefully we are more enlightened now).

People would like to see topics such as gore, homosexuality, anti-semitism, the mistreating of women, well you get the idea, put into the game in order to give it realism.

May I suggest that there should be checkboxes that one can select or deselect, prior to playing, in order to give each person the desired realism they desire.

An example would be for homosexuality: Another Lord asks your Lord to discretely look into his son’s activities. He suspects that his son may be doing things that the Church would torture and kill him for, if they found out. If the father finds out first, he can then move his son to another province and put him into a priesthood for conversion.

The game could give you many options: To report the homosexuality to the father, or to the local magistrate, or to lie or say nothing, or to pursue the same avenue. Each action would have different consequences. If a person did not check the box then this quest wouldn’t even show up.

The same type of thing could be done for every other type of realism checkbox: the beaten housewife, the over charging jewish moneylender, etc. There could be twists in what you think is really happening or just the education on how people were treated or perceived back then.

A parental guidance feature could also be employed to prevent blood and gore, or not allow a person to try to bed as many maidens or wives as possible (with the consequence of the angry husband/father).

I’ve been quite verbose, now I’ll let you think this over.

TOUGHGUY · February 27, 2014, 3:32pm

This is quite probably the worst idea I have seen on this forum, and let me tell you, I’ve seen quite a few.

You are suggesting disintegrating the developers’ creative vision to appease the feelings of hurt tumblr users.

Gabe · February 27, 2014, 3:34pm

My guess is Warhorse will steer clear of anything that could be offensive or put the ESRB dogs on their track.
Who would choose which quest falls into which category? Is a quest anti=semitist just for making you borrow money from a jew, or isn’t it until you have to beat one up? Is it mistreating of women if a lord is having an affair with a servant girl or not until he has her thrown out of the castle in middle of winter?
You see by checking one of those boxes you would either miss a lot of content that you don’t find offensive, or see something that you hoped checking the box would prevent.
It would put a lot of constrains on the main questline. What if something from what you wrote would have its well deserved place in the overall story? They would have to cut it out or you would not be able to finish the game!

SirRight · March 1, 2014, 4:02am

My idea is that these would be side quests that wouldn’t need to be played in order to finish the game. Whether we like it or not, the true history would bother some people and I think it would be nice if they had the choice to not encounter certain things in the game. I would want to see everything, but that’s just me.

Classification would only be required for any content that would obviously upset certain groups of people.

Minute · March 1, 2014, 6:20am

why would the devs need to put in a horribly contrived system to hide content from the player. If the player doesn’t want to do something, don’t do it. If they can’t handle the thought that not every single person follows their homogenous line of thinking, maybe consider withdrawing from society and never interacting with people or media?

Seriously, these are social skills people should have learned by age 4.

EnKidu01 · March 1, 2014, 6:34am

You guys must stop overeact on the “REALISTIC” part of the “Realistic RPG”. By realistic I believe they ment no FANTASY RPG stuff (dragons, skeleton warriors, zombies, wizzards etc). Warhorse is doing a game. Game should be entertaining and I have my FULL confidence in them being able to succeed. My opinion.

Quatermain · March 1, 2014, 8:06am

I find the idea of selective realism to be rather humorous. Though I suspect this accidental.

Gabe · March 1, 2014, 8:27am

That is what ESRB is here for. If you heed their recommendation, you should be able to handle anything that the game shows you.
What you propose would be like switching off killing in Assassins Creed, or reckless driving in GTA.

SirRight · March 1, 2014, 4:41pm

I don’t think anyone here is overreacting; there are good points on both sides. I am the kind of person that I would want the full experience, to see what the truth is no matter how ugly. On this forum there are a number of threads where people are pushing to have a certain realism in the game (i.e. homosexuality) and others who don’t want the past to be brought up and ruin the game for them (i.e. anti-semitism).

There was an author of a book that had some factual data that certain parts of the Muslim community did not want to see out in print; he has been in hiding for years now because he still has a “hit” put out on him.

My point is that not everyone is so open minded upon certain subjects and a checkbox system would be good for those people to choose whether the events unfolded or not.

Gabe, your ESRB comment may be the better way to handle this matter but might remove all questionably quests vice just the ones people don’t wish to experience.