Maybe someone could make a mod…
I’ve asked and asked and asked and nobody can cite that killing children = game banned in certain countries.
I’ve already stated that MGSV had child soldiers that WERE able to be killed by the player character, not sure if it counted as a mission failure but I even posted the “devil’s house” scene from MGSV which shows child medical experimentation.
Yet it was critically acclaimed
And not banned anywhere that I know of
If you made a game where you could kill kids and most of it involved killing kids there would be public outcry.
Having them there for realism only makes a game better, games have done it before (fallout original games) and there was no complaint.
I think the devs might have even wanted kids in the game but just couldn’t be bothered with the issue of voice actors for them, adults can voice act children though it takes talent to sound authentic.
Nightengale can’t be targeted with melee. And arrows seem not to make contact. Haven’t heard anyone complain about a loss of immersion because of it. The same mechanic could be applied to kid NPCs
Killing children means that ratings bodies refuse classification. Unclassified games are not allowed to be sold in most countries.
I’ve already cited MGSV as a recent game where you could kill kids, it got nothing but praise for it’s “realism” despite probably being the worst of the MGS games to be released.
Here’s a quote from ESRB regarding the matter of banning games due to their content.
in egregious cases, the game may be removed from the store.
Depending on what the group of trained raters define as egregious (child murder likely to be among them), a game containing such content may (often will) be removed from the shelves of the ESRB retail council (ERC) members (Being Amazon, Best Buy, GameStop, Target and walmart). That’s the most that ESRB can do on it’s own. However, nations also have their own standards when legalizing games and when these standards are not met, nationwide ban can also be enforced regardless of the ERC’s decision.
So, including killable children is a mess of "May"s and "Coulds"s and "would"s, that’s why developers tend to not include them at all to avoid all the hassle. Another simple solution though would be to make them immortal, so i guess WH just decided to go with the nonexistant option and stick with their (almost) everyone is killable strategy.
You obviously don’t understand how vague and inconsistent ratings bodies can be. Rather than taking the risk, games companies do everything they can to avoid not being refused classification.
Sometimes they will pass a game, sometimes not, given that, how much time, money and effort would you put in to something, if you have limited resources, on something that would just be knocked back and you’d then have to scrap?
Anyway, THAT is why killable children are not included in games.
It’s the same for movies. You can find all sorts of inconsistencies in the ratings process.
If a company cares enough about their artistic vision to include killable children, and then it becomes the norm, we will probably see more of it. Given the choice between artistic vision, and shekels, they choose shekels every single time.
It would add realism and I doubt the ESRB would care all that much. AFAIK they still classified Hatred, it still sells on the steam store; it might not be about killing kids however it is about going on a shooting spree (oh how edgy) which is kind of the RL flavour of the month right now.
With hatred you can claim the Vegas shooting was a “copycat” of the game and run with the old (and completely disproven) hypothesis that videogames cause violence.
The only way I could see KCD get “pulled from shelves” or banned in certain countries is if someone walks into a school dressed in full plate armour and starts killing children with a longsword.
Also you have to admit, the major worry is for consoles. When it came to south park TSOT they removed scenes in the console versions for some regions, but the PC version had universal content and sold via steam, everywhere.
I await your mod release then. Oh, you’re not going to waste time, money and effort on it? Well, neither are these guys.
Unlike my mod release (oh wow you are so funny, you should do standup) they are getting paid for a game where they claimed they would put realism first.
Yet all of the children seem to have been eaten by a grue.
They probably should have had their torches out at night. Footpads.
Even though it didn’t include kids cod2 had an entire mission that involved you shooting up a civilian packed airport then at the security forces dispatched after you. All they did was put a “some viewers may find this upsetting, do you wish to skip this mission” in and it was done.
I’m sure the devs could have an “immortal children” button for people who’s feelings are too fragile to handle child pixels dying.
They got paid. How much more, if any, do you think they’d get for making children?
There’s plenty of things I’d change before I cared about children being in the game. Timmy and Runt are both referred to as being much larger than normal in game, and yet, they’re identical in size to everyone else.
That’s another reason there’s no children. Sizes. Door sizing. Pathing. Targeting. More time money and effort for what? How many people looked at this game and decided not to buy it because of the lack of children? The answer is zero.
If you want to foot the bill for it, I’m sure they’d be willing.
You’re starting to go from “participating in debate” to “fanboy”
The whole “why don’t YOU pay for it” attitude comes off as extremely childish.
Why don’t YOU pay to make runt bigger?
See what I mean.
If they included a DLC which along with content promised more realism (ie kids) I would pay for it.
It really all depends on how a game does stuff and right now you have no incentive to be “honourable” or “decent” kids can usually make people think twice, if done well it would hardly be a kid killing sim.
I mean when you saw that knight in his shiny expensive armour at the roadside while you were getting your butt pulverized by bandits with wood clubs then realized you could just choke him, kill him (optional but if you plan on moving him, recommended) then steal everything off him/his corpse and walk around in your newly ill gotten armour did you really give a fuck about the knight at the side of the road or did fucks go out the window when you saw that fancy armour?
Now what would you do of his poorly dressed, 13-14 year old son came after you as a random encounter in one of the cities and challenged you to a duel for killing his father (as he was watching from the bushes or some shit), in the time period it would be much more acceptable just to call him a liar and thief (charisma, etc) and run him through with your sword.
Or would you bring him and the.armour back to his father to regain some honour, if you didn’t kill him. Or fight the child with your bare fists then pay to have one of the millers to take him in and train him as a mill boy (at a fair cost to you in groschen) instead of killing him outright.
I mean honestly I don’t care if some guy’s feet hurt but bandages are cheap so giving them over is more of a “do I care enough to stop him whining” choice.
Same goes for the guys selling stolen stuff, it’s not like you’re ever going to get caught.
Along with children these things need addressed and they would come before children honestly but the only thing I can see is a “false morality” system like fallout’s Karma system.
Unless the devs added a “rumours” system where word would eventually reach settlements of your (mis)deeds and depending on how people view you in said settlements would add to how much heed they pay to them.
Not at all. I would prefer children too. As would several other people. You can see all the many things people would like to see changed on these forums. Ultimately though, money is the reason none of this will happen.
What I have been trying to do is to answer your question, why? I’ve laid it out as simply as I can. I’m sure you understand why now.
Whether or not you agree with their reasoning is another matter, I can see that you don’t, but that is irrelevant.
They were too afraid to try it with the initial release.
Which is why putting it in DLC may be a viable option.
As for the ESRB and other ratings boards, I’m sure developers can ask first to get an idea of how the game will be rated. A simple question of “The game would include children and they wouldn’t be mortal however the game never requires you to kill any children, that would be up to the player; how would that affect the rating?” Is a damn simple question and I doubt games are rated in a court like double jeopardy system where they bring down a gavel and the only way to change things is through the ESRB court of appeals.
For example with COD2 the ratings board probably said they’d give the game a more favourable rating if the game didn’t force players to shoot civilians or allowed players to skip the sequence entirely after seeing it.
I mean for MGSV this is probably exactly what Konami did and the answer they got back was likely “so long as it isn’t encouraged, or is actively discouraged, go for it”.
I mean you have games with ethnic cleansing, mass murder, genocide, spree killing, scenes of a sexual nature (which is the whole GTA:SA Hot Coffee scandal is anything to go on, sex is worse than spree killing) yet children seem to be this boundary that few dare to cross.
If more games did it less people would complain.
And releasing it as part of a DLC where they can be turned on/off would probably be the safest way to do things.
Speaking truthfully though, game and movie rating systems seem to show all that’s wrong with society such as murder = better than sex or drugs and killing pixel kids = no go zone, because think of the children.
They were actually aiming at a lower rating than they got. Minimal blood. No decapitation or dismemberment in combat. They were trying to go for 15. They ended up with PEGI 18.
DLC is certainly a possibility. I’d be very surprised if it actually happens though.
Mods seem far more likely. I know in Mount and Blade, all enemies are the same size, but mods have been made with different sized enemies. They cause a lot of graphical and item drop issues, but they do show the different sizes.
There is already an answer to that (sort of) from ESRB. Ratings are often tied with the degree of player control, as in what you can do is taken to account over what you must do throughout the course of the game. But, this is just according to ESRB, which is by no means the only standard for game rating.
However, DLCs can be rated separately from the core game so that is another way to add additional content without bumping the main game’s rating higher but this also only applies to rated DLCs, not those that have went unrated and were banned.
They rated this 18?!
That is an absolute joke. Now I can see where some of the “ratings board” people are coming from. I mean that’s the same as MGSV:TPP was rated.
Honestly they can’t rate the game much higher mow than to go for the “adults only” rating which, the last time I checked, you were an adult when you were over the age of 18.
Personally the idea of rating games is fucking retarded, I remember playing the original GTA games when I was 6, yet I’ve never committed a violent crime (or a crime that would involve a victim such as fraud, theft, etc) in my adult life.
Yet I still remember that mission in GTA 2 where you turned people into hotdogs.
Honestly the ratings boards need to get their heads out of their arses, they’ve scientifically proven that video games don’t cause violence (I bet if they caught Ted Bundy today he would blame video games and not porn), after all “video games made me do it” simply seem to be a criminal or moral defence, or for sociopaths (like Ted Bundy did with porn, or to cite an entirely different type of sociopath, Anita Sarkeesian does now with games) an extra way to screw with people.
Ironically I have a really close friend going up for some fairly serious criminal charges (which I honestly believe to be a bunch of bullshit, but he knew the risks) and I’ve known him from the age of two or three, his mother never allowed him to play “those new violent videogames” I remember having to smuggle my PS2 in when I could to release him from the original sonic on the Sega and I was like 13 (he was a year younger) at the time.
the piper came through a few weeks ago.
If this is some obscure slang term that I’m late on the uptake (googling yielded no results) it’s because I never look at the ratings on games, even if I have kids of my own I would put my judgement ahead of a ratings board. Honestly that’s all ratings have ever been to me, a sticker on a game for parents too lazy to sample the content of a game.
You seem preoccupied by this topic. Why?