Henry ate them, the bugger
Agreed, It’s annoying to ahve immortal children but I would be ok with that for the sake of a bit more of 'realism" when walking around.
Thought children are one thing but old people are missing too. The few that look a bit past their prime still don’t look really old. Now I know that being 40 would probably be old at that time and some NPC’s look at least that old but the thing is a person of 40 would have looked way older. We don’t see any white haired heavy lined faced person in the game. Well spoiler there is 1 during a quest with a nice mustache on top of his grey hair but that’s it.
So where are the children/young teens and older people ?
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I’d like to have seen some kids running about like Skyrim and a few mums with babes in arms around town to amp up the immersion; its a hard-hearted player that wouldn’t spare a few grotchens for a Skalitz refugee cradling a baby.
But what with the certification issues, additional dev costs and even more NPCs to strain the FPS I’m pretty sanguine with the compromise.
N.B. On my evil run of Fallout 3 I found you could convince a bunch of kids from Lamplight to follow you and sell them all to the slavers in Paradise City…mwahahaha!
The witcher 2 & 3 did this pretty well, but with a system that prevented Geralt to strike a friendly character.
In KCD, children should be implemented, but with safeguards, like having them fleeing away the instant Henry draw a weapon, make them immune to arrows (or flee instantly when you try to shoot them from a distance), getting them back into their houses, never to be found again (they’re hiding), before you leave the area.
There were plenty of solutions to circonvent players abusing systems, or otherwise to sell the game everywhere, like cutting/modifying potentially litigious content from game in some countries (like Germany did with green blood in plenty of games).
It will eventually be added later, either officially or by mod, like all missing content yet (horsemen, chariots, merchant caravans, blacksmithing, ect.).
I presume it was low on their “must be in the game” list, so they cut it down before release.
I never knew I would make such a wall of text, there’s a TL;DR at the bottom.
I’ve never heard of a single country that bans games because kids die.
I mean in the south park games gameplay essentially revolves around killing children or is it different because it’s “comedy”? You can argue that all the kids you kill are just “permanently knocked unconscious” but then you have Kenny who, upon death gets consumed by rats and in tfbw returns as a ghost.
Yet both games weren’t surrounded in controversy, they banned some scenes in the EU and AUS console versions but these were all of a “sexual nature” (such as shrinking yourself to crawl up a gay man’s ass, or fighting one of the underpants gnomes while shrunk and also dodging your father’s balls while he screws your mother.
None of the “pulled from certain regions” parts in tsot involved a kid dying.
Then there’s Bullworth Academy/Bully which has you out and out beating the crap out of kids and the PS2 release went down without a hitch. It was only when it was re-released did people start complaining that “it corrupts children”
DOS2 has kids in it IIRC and I’m fairly sure they aren’t immortal. It never got attacked by the media, I remember spellforce 3 has a quest where you look for some crippled man’s daughter who had gone to wash bandages for the stumps that are left of his legs, turns out she was raped and murdered by bandits; you have the option of telling the man the truth, or saying she slipped and broke her neck.
So how does this child death thing work? It seems it’s fine in games with an “animated” graphics style or gameplay where they’re just knocked out (bully) and it’s okay in CRPGs too so the developers seem to be the issue here.
Fact of the matter is that no game featuring child death has done worse from it. COD2/3 still sold far too many copies and the mod that made the horribly annoying kids in Skyrim murderable never got taken down, did it?
It just looks like some developers lack the testicular fortitude to include the killing of kids in KCD despite promises of realism.
Right now you don’t think twice about choking out and killing those roadside knights but if it was a fourteen year old dressed in his father’s armour (which he got as his father was killed by cumans) challenging people to duels more like a young Don Quixote (I hope I spelt that right) you might actually think about beating him and telling him to train harder, but not killing him, paying him to leave and go home to his mother and to help her rebuild rather than also getting killed and if you beat him and tell him to train harder, or kill him outright you could be approached by a beggar woman in one of the town’s yelling about her missing child (if you killed him it would be a very hard speech check before she starts screaming “child killer” and if you beat him and told him to train harder a quest to track him down and bring him home (captured by bandits maybe?) after which you’ll be rewarded with his armour and he will agree that he is too young to be out challenging people to duels but wants you to find him someone suitable to train him as a knight.
Even a random encounter followed by a quest as simple as this would make the game much more interesting and you could be given other quests like “clear the bandits from our forest” but they turn out to be a bunch of orphaned kids so you can either kill them or persuade them (and sassau monastery) to go there and help by learning to cut stone as apprentices to the stonemasons and have some join the church.
I mean, the game has a priest screwing someone on camera so they kept historical accuracy when it comes to the church (and considering how the church reacted today to Angels and Demons/The Da Vinci Code it was a slightly ballsy move but they don’t have children? Honestly I see it as a cop out as no game with child death in it (unless it’s sold as a feature) is going to get anything more than a little bad press.
You could kill children in MGSV too IIRC, I don’t remember/aren’t sure if it resulted in instant mission failure (by that point you could just deploy your super weapon (Quiet with a silenced tranq rifle) and the whole base would be asleep by the time you’d walked over to it.
It did have child death, child medical experimentation and child soldiers in it however.
Also MGSV GZ had you rescue a girl (no older than sixteen) who had been tortured, raped and had explosives sewn into her. Her last line once you remove and defuse the bomb sewn into her chest cavity was something like “snake, that’s not the only place they put a bomb in me”, translating to “snake they put semtex up my snatch”.
Neither game got any heat and both were instead praised for their realism and the fact that the devs went there. In fact I wouldn’t be at all surprised if MGSV;GZ was released with such a gap between MGSV TPP was because it was for testing the waters and seeing how people would react to a teenage girl being tortured, raped and exploded just so they could see how far they could go in the full release MGSV.
Didn’t warhorse Studios want a super realistic game too? I still don’t understand why they shy away from children in the game, other games have done it and presented it in a realistic manner to the time and location, so long as there were severe in game consequences for killing a child (even including a penalty to sleep for some time if you had no choice but to kill them; IE you killed a child who was part of a group of bandits with a stray arrow, requiring confession to a priest or consumption of the kill any potion for five days after) I couldn’t see any issue with it getting rated.
There might be a few fools who would condemn the game in the news/on twitter like the woman who condemned mass effect claiming it was a “sex simulator” only to admit she never played it and heard about it from a friend.
It would add depth and make the game feel more like you are making a choice that matters on certain things.
TL;DR plenty of popular games include child death, the most recent ones never had an issue with regions, ratings or public backlash; unless the game revolves around killing children it is usually well recieved, provided it’s a good game see.
@Sirius
The skalitz scene with a few children in it would only add to the depth of the game’s story. You would see parents jumping into the path or arrows so their children could get to the castle and people dying distracting the gun and from killing children, you could even have a cuman soldier protect one of the quality children only to be cut down by a mounted knight for “disobeying orders” while the child runs to safety.
I mean MGSV had this scene:
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There are old people, or at least as old they get. Most people in the middle ages didn’t age past 60.
You can’t strike miller Peshek and the Prior at the monastery and if you shoot an arrow at them it’ll always miss.
Not sure if there are other people this applies too.
Did Skyrim or fallout have kids?
Yes I know that’s what I said, 40 is already old and 60 ancient, but thing is at 40 they should look like people in their 60 or 70 now but most people ingame say 95% of them look barely middle aged, and i mean middle aged for that time meaning very early 30. Where are the old people with white hair and very heavily lined faces that walk slowly, maybe with a cane ?
People who had to use a cane to get around usually didn’t get around at all, they just stayed at home and were cared for.
Yes to both, in fallout they are like any other npc, and in Skyrim they are invulnerable.
Have you heard of games being refused classification? You know that PEGI 18 thing that plays at the start of the game?
Well, many countries, many platforms, many retailers, will not sell refused classification games.
That is why. There is no, you can’t do X law, but as it turns out, killing children means not getting the classification, and that is a defacto ban. Countries do not ban killing kids. It’s the classification system.
The short version? Money. They don’t want to risk sales.
Most likely to the same place that you give bethesda and Call of Duty a free pass for sending children to.
COD MW2 - “NO RUSSIAN” - ZERO children at the airport. “Oh my god so contrversial”
KCD - Zero children. “I wanted real realism!!”
This
There would be more age related diseases too back then, no flu vaccination and no knowledge of heart disease or cancer so things like a minor melanoma, a particularly cold winter, the flu, malnutrition amongst the poor and since most water would kill you; mild alcoholism amongst everyone. Only very lucky peasants and well cared for nobleman would live to past fifty. Women usually outlived men, especially in times where women stayed at home and men went to war and old widows were usually the subject of rumours and witch trials in an attempt to seize land. As well as that if you had Alzheimer’s disease, other age related mental illnesses or mental illness from chronic alcohol consumption (WK syndrome, etc) you were seen as being tested or punished by God. In some societies it was normal to lead the mad, elderly family members put into a forest, take flight and “let god decide”, others would effectively keep their elderly parent locked up, but under good conditions and tell others that “they’re ill” so they didn’t wander into the town and break the law, not knowing what they were doing (and since there was very little leniency given towards those with age related mental illnesses) or make a public spectacle of themselves leading to shunning of them and the child caring for them.
Those born into wealthy homes may be sent to monastaries, which acted as early asylums and homes for the elderly; however they may be subject to barbaric medical treatments such as trepanning.
The middle ages were not a good time to be old.
The same question that could be asked is; since there is a major war on, why aren’t we seeing any cases of PTSD amongst survivors.
FO4 has some kids. With mods, many more. You can arm them and provide a select number of kid outfits. Murdering non hostile NPCs isn’t my cup of tea so haven’t tested to see if I can slaughter them
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PTSD is something quite recent, in those times people were more used to those things.
It’s probably a mutation from around 1800 or so, since it’s hereditary. and even now only around 20% of people who’ve been to war develop PTSD.
As well as disease. Back then, post war disease was appalling. Marigold concoctions weren’t enough
While it’s true that PTSD and earlier shell shock are relatively recent names to describe it, there are accounts of similar reactions in ancient times.
The difference is today they apply for welfare or disability, and back then they either got over it or died.
As for why it’s not featured prominently in the game, it’s simply not part of the story. It’s touched on briefly of course, but the story is a classic revenge tale with a little rags to riches and side questing thrown in.
“Soldier’s disease” has been around for as long as civilized society.
As for it being hereditary, can you point me to a source for that, I find it hard to believe due to the fact that it occurs (and has occurred) without any real pattern.
It’s probably gone up in recent years mainly due to weapons like the machine gun and the fact that we consider a much larger amount of people to be civilians, or unsuitable (usually too young) for war than was considered 150+ years ago.
It’s much harder to come back from a war to find out that ‘you’ve’ killed more civilians or people under the age of 18.
PTSD does seem to be more prevalent in certain cultures than others, for example the ‘scientists’ working for unit 731 under the Japanese Empire in China seemed to suffer very little mentally when it came to their conscience and the war crimes/genocide they committed, some were mentally fit enough to teach anatomy or microbiology in universities in Japan up until the 90s, when they retired. As to why they remained free to teach; the allies; mainly the US who fought almost exclusively in the Pacific theatre let them go provided the research was given to the victor.
It’s on Wikipedia, easiest source there is (though maybe not entirely reliable).
There’s a gene that enables you to get PTSD, or at least that’s how I understand it.