Aestu wrote:
Games like Fallout *snip* And I think that greatness is diminished, not heightened, by gratuitous violence and blood and gore. What makes those games great is the depth of character development, the story, the gameplay, the adventure, the dialogue; the violence is merely a superficial addition to pander to the lowest common denominator, and I think that's unnecessary and it holds the genre back.
What if I wanted to make a RPG that tells a story about a desolate post apocalyptic wasteland, where people are barely making it and tribes fo violent raiders run rampant. I want this game to be wonderfully atmospheric and really draw players in, so there would have to be a lot of violence, and oppression against many of the peaceful people to give that sense of gritty realism I'm striving for. I want to tell the story of a wanderer in this wasteland, who has to somehow overcome all this. Should there be no violence? Should the wanderer only talk his way out of every bad situation, and spread flowers and love wherever he goes? I'd say that breaks the atmosphere.
In the case of a game like Fallout, I think the violence is quite warranted, really. Bags of gore, skulls and charred bones everywhere, lots of shooting.. all builds the atmosphere of this world. I think its really central to the story in fallout, honestly. Granted, sometimes it goes over the top when you get a critical strike and your target blows into a million meat chunks, and you could make the argument that something like that should be toned down... but the violence is a central theme to this world, and removing it would completely destroy Fallout.
