AW8
Arcane
Agreed, Carrie. At the end of New Vegas, Ron Perlman could have said "due to your bloody slaughter of countless people, life in the Wasteland is never gonna be the same" and it would make sense since killing is mostly (technically entirely, but it's very hard) a choice.I don't think it's bad thing in itself to try to add some sort of moral weight to killing, but it seems pretty ridiculous if the games doing it are cover shooters where by default you murder raiders and whatnot by the hundreds. If you're making a game, whatever moral weight there could possibly be is rendered meaningless if the player has no choice in the first place. If the only way to proceed in your corridor is to murder a character, all of it is one the developer and none on the player, since the only winning move is not to play. Your character can feel bad about something, of course, but don't expect much of a reaction from the player.
Whereas Ron Perlman could have talked about a new paradise on earth if you didn't kill anyone (except Benny, whose corpse is rotting on a cross of course) and that would have felt very rewarding since you actively avoided killing during the game.