Development Info Cyclopean Dev Update

[Fucking Quality Poster]

Eh, I like having kill-able children because I like to do play-throughs where my character is a bastard.

If they aren't in there, it won't ruin the game for me, but I would much prefer to have kill-able children in the game.

 

[Grunker]

You missed my point entirely VD. I said nothing about being able to kill children adding to the game. I said fucking up your own meta by not being able to kill them takes something away from it.

In your opinion, not mine. What matters for me is what it adds to the game. If it's nothing than it doesn't affect me at all. I never try to aim at pixels to see if I can kill them. If, however, I want something dead - like a locked wooden door, for example - and can't kill it even with a rocket launcher, then it starts bothering me a lot.

You presume I enjoy clicking at children to see if they die, which I already stated I did not. Picture this:

You are in the middle of ramming a fucking missile up some unsuspecting dude's ass, or you're using a fireball or whatever. Just as you shoot/cast/whatever, in walks Johnny DeLauder from 3rd grade shaking his lollipop all over the place. Boom says fireball, fuck says you... and "That tickles!" says Johnny. My immersion is blown pretty much to shit at that point. If I'm lucky, the lollipop might be blown to pieces, but Johnny is immortality himself. The meta loses it's credibility as I am once again painfully aware that I'm just destroying pixels and some developer has engineered the whole thing.

It's just like the new trend where combat in cities won't hurt innocent bystanders. It throws me completely out of the world.

Incidentally, I see no reason to actually put effort into making children unkillable. If you're not gonna do it anyway, the only person it's affecting is the end-user.

 

[shihonage]

Incidentally, I see no reason to actually put effort into making children unkillable. If you're not gonna do it anyway, the only person it's affecting is the end-user.

It takes more effort to make them killable, because of death animations. But I agree with your post.

 

[Grunker]

Incidentally, I see no reason to actually put effort into making children unkillable. If you're not gonna do it anyway, the only person it's affecting is the end-user.

It takes more effort to make them killable, because of death animations. But I agree with your post.

Go figure, I once again prove my limited understand of computers. It doesn't take much of the legitimacy out of my post though.

 

[Vault Dweller]

You are in the middle of ramming a fucking missile up some unsuspecting dude's ass, or you're using a fireball or whatever. Just as you shoot/cast/whatever, in walks Johnny DeLauder from 3rd grade shaking his lollipop all over the place. Boom says fireball, fuck says you... and "That tickles!" says Johnny. My immersion is blown pretty much to shit at that point.

That happens often to you? Children walking in in the middle of a battle?

 

[DarkUnderlord]

Actually, that happened to me quite a lot in Fallout. Damn kids would always end up right between me, my target and my path of machine-gun fire...

then i would fucking expect to be able to get in there and use it as i pretty damn well please, instead of being told by "god" that i cannot use the lever at that time.

Yeah, I hated that in Morrowind. Finding the Big Bad Foozle's Place™ and getting the voice-over "you're not ready yet" or some BS because I didn't have the magic glove.

 

[Forest Dweller]

That happens often to you? Children walking in in the middle of a battle?

It happened to me once. I accidentally hit a kid while aiming for someone else. Felt terrible about it.

But if that kid hadn't been harmed that would have broken me out of the game in a hurry.

 

[Grunker]

You are in the middle of ramming a fucking missile up some unsuspecting dude's ass, or you're using a fireball or whatever. Just as you shoot/cast/whatever, in walks Johnny DeLauder from 3rd grade shaking his lollipop all over the place. Boom says fireball, fuck says you... and "That tickles!" says Johnny. My immersion is blown pretty much to shit at that point.

That happens often to you? Children walking in in the middle of a battle?

You want me to list every example, or are you just joking?

In Baldur's Gate, for instance, you had quite a few fights where the chance of it happening was pretty big. In Fallout 3, a few fights in Megaton ended up with me throwing a couple of grenades.

In Little Lamplight, both a good-karma-dude and my bad-karma-dude would've blown Sgt. What's-his-ass straight to hell.

If you want me to, I can list some more examples, but it seems like an awful lot of trouble for something that can be solved extremely easily.

I will say this, however: Ultimately, I don't care. Much. Like you say, it's not in anyway going to make or break a game, and it's a small detail. But it's a detail we're discussing right now, and it's also poster-boy for the broader discussion: Is it alright for the designer to edit out something, even if it breaks immersion or seems illogical, if he/she does not trust the player's morals?

 

[shihonage]

Average player's morals:

 

[poocolator]

What are the laws regarding depicting children being killed in movies, in Kwa? I thought there were some laws limiting that sort of thing.

 

[shihonage]

That footage from a DTV Seagal movie spliced with Uwe Boll's "Postal". As we all know, laws of mere mortals do not apply to Uwe Boll.

 

[poocolator]

Uwe Boll's "Postal"

'nuff said.

 

[Forest Dweller]

Am I a bad person if I laugh at that gif?

 

[Melcar]

The acting from the kids is too lulzy for you not to laugh.

 

[Forest Dweller]

It's Steven Seagal's expression that's really funny, since you know it's a from a clip of him shooting "bad guys."

 

[Fucking Quality Poster]

You are in the middle of ramming a fucking missile up some unsuspecting dude's ass, or you're using a fireball or whatever. Just as you shoot/cast/whatever, in walks Johnny DeLauder from 3rd grade shaking his lollipop all over the place. Boom says fireball, fuck says you... and "That tickles!" says Johnny. My immersion is blown pretty much to shit at that point.

That happens often to you? Children walking in in the middle of a battle?

It happened to me many times in Fallout, but that might have been because the kids in FO were programmed to really retarded behavior, ie running around in super-speed and not being able to properly flee when a fight has started between the player and some NPC's.

In this case I would have been pissed off if the children weren't dying from the machinegun fire they were directly in front of, because it reminds me that I am just playing a game and takes me back to RL.

In other games with children, though, they are not so in-your-face, so it's not that big of a deal.

It really is all up to the dev in this case, and the demographics that you want to target.

 

[Forest Dweller]

Ok I take back my comment about the video. I thought the blood effects were added later, but now looking closely I can see that they're not.

 

[Pliskin]

It's also a questionable production decision - if there's any genre that dead children belong to, it's horror.

There is an obvious difference between [finding] dead children in a horror game and being able to kill children because it's a "healthy way of releasing violent impulses".

There's actually a very well done sequence in Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth where a young girl is killed in a rather gruesome manner --- and by gruesome, I mean very. Your* character doesn't kill the child directly, but your action is what leads to her death. End result: Her spirit haunts your* character the rest of the game. Very creepy, actually.

So, yes, it can be done --- and done well. But as an integral part of gameplay? Me, I say if you're going to kill everything else that walks and crawls in the game, why stop at the larval forms? Either put hardcoded limits on the player from the get-go, or turn them loose to live their darkest fantasy. There is no in-between.

And how did this get to be a debate about infanticide?

*("ou" included by request)

 

[Pliskin]

Paying a bit more attention actually reveals that those guys are related to the Twisted rune and run the Slaver business in the whole city. They're the slaver bosses in fact (part of their business runs in the Copper Coronet), so you'll excuse me if I don't shed virtual tears about their demise.

So tell me: Did you know this before or after you killed them all in cold blood?

Having played BG2 only twice --- and the 2nd time just recently --- I can say that I have never come across that piece of info. And the Slaver Eradication Quest is one of the first things I did.

 

[shihonage]

Ok I take back my comment about the video. I thought the blood effects were added later, but now looking closely I can see that they're not.

It's from here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRofA50txLw

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

So tell me: Did you know this before or after you killed them all in cold blood?

OK you probably have a point here, I don't remember 100% but it might very well be that you find the hints on their dead corpses.

 

[Murk]

So tell me: Did you know this before or after you killed them all in cold blood?

OK you probably have a point here, I don't remember 100% but it might very well be that you find the hints on their dead corpses.

This website claims that you get the quest for the Guarded Compound at the end of the Nalia's Annoying Relatives quest.

 

[Melcar]

So tell me: Did you know this before or after you killed them all in cold blood?

OK you probably have a point here, I don't remember 100% but it might very well be that you find the hints on their dead corpses.

This website claims that you get the quest for the Guarded Compound at the end of the Nalia's Annoying Relatives quest.

I remember that you get some hints relating to Nalia's quest where you can easily tie stuff in with the guarded compound. Don't recall anything that told you directly though, so it takes a bit of detective work (more like jumping to conclusions and guessing). I think it was either the fixpack or tweakpack that added more obvious clues to the game regarding this.

 

[Pliskin]

So tell me: Did you know this before or after you killed them all in cold blood?

OK you probably have a point here, I don't remember 100% but it might very well be that you find the hints on their dead corpses.

This website claims that you get the quest for the Guarded Compound at the end of the Nalia's Annoying Relatives quest.

I remember that you get some hints relating to Nalia's quest where you can easily tie stuff in with the guarded compound. Don't recall anything that told you directly though, so it takes a bit of detective work (more like jumping to conclusions and guessing). I think it was either the fixpack or tweakpack that added more obvious clues to the game regarding this.

That might explain it, as I cut Nalia loose right after clearing up the family estate problems.