Having us kill civilians in Oriath Square is tasteless.

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Fruz wrote:

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Fluffy_Puppies wrote:

Stop virtue signaling. A true sense of morality is deeply personal and doesn't have to be shared with anonymous people on the internet.

Do you understand what this section of the forum is for ?

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Pyrokar wrote:

Run through area? No quest to kill anything there.

So, because the game does not realistically (yeah, expecting players to use single target skills past a1 or 2 ....) allow you to save civilians (that nothing would lead us to think that they are guilty, enough to deserve being slaughtered), you should see them (or know that they are going to) be masscred even though you obviously have the power level to do something about it ?

and .... for what ? (because that is the premise here, this serves no actual purpose)

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007Bistromath wrote:

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gibbousmoon wrote:

Posts like this, you mean?

Posts like this.

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A thematic defense only works if there is narrative coherence throughout the campaign regarding your character's moral ambiguity in the first place, so if that was your contribution, then yeah, I probably didn't find it a particularly compelling comment.

There is such coherence. Moral ambiguity is stacked to the rafters in this game if you actually pay any attention at all to the plot of the campaign and its place in the history of the setting. It's not GGG's fault almost nobody does. This game has commentary on religion as maintext, and the nature of the gods within it form an allegory for class war.

Edit: I swear, half the reason Ebert said videogames aren't art is that it seems like anyone who isn't extremely well-versed in this medium is totally incapable of fully examining the context of what they do in the game. If there's not pages of conventional exposition detailing everything about a setting and its characters, you think that information just isn't there and the devs weren't trying.

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Pyrokar wrote:

So what are you saying? You want to be able to kill the karui slaves instead? Anyway i just stated that there is a reasonable way to 100% avoid killing anything in that area.

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gibbousmoon wrote:

Yep, I know that there are (much) greater problems with the game than this in 2019.

Yep, I know that some of the less thoughtful denizens of this forum will ridicule this very topic being brought up. ("STFU, SJW!")

But I have to say it: It just feels gross.

I know that killing innocents in video games is a thing. I actually don't necessarily object to it. In some cases it drives a narrative forward, or is even done to try and force new perspectives upon the players. It's never easy to do well, but it does have a potentially legitimate role in narrative design.

But we all know that PoE doesn't have such narrative aspirations. In the absence of the above, having the hero of the story kill "frightened citizens" (as they are labeled), just because they are also being targeted by the rebels who are against the civilians' government, doesn't feel edgy nor impactful. It feels repulsive. Not everyone wants to play a villain, so why virtually force it upon us by flagging these NPCs as enemies?

Easy fix: Keep their behavior, and make them untargetable.

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Fruz wrote:

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Pyrokar wrote:

So what are you saying? You want to be able to kill the karui slaves instead? Anyway i just stated that there is a reasonable way to 100% avoid killing anything in that area.

Karui slaves are not relevant here.

Witnessing cold murder and just ignoring it are not the same and 'only' witnessing it (when you could do something about it) might not be considered as bad as murdering, but it's not that far from it.
Especially given how much power the main character has.

And again, the issue is that there's not point, no reason for it to be like that.
To some existent - as somebody mentioned earlier - it is immersion breaking.

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gibbousmoon wrote:

It is the absence of adequate context that I criticize.

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007Bistromath wrote:

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gibbousmoon wrote:

It is the absence of adequate context that I criticize.

That critique is rubbish, since the context is there. I'm not going to itemize it for you. If somebody wanted to censor Huckleberry Finn for having the n-word in it, and claimed that the novel's setting wasn't sufficient context to justify it, would you feel it was worth your time to explain it in detail to them?

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gibbousmoon wrote:

Sociopathy is never a compellingly represented aspect of your character until the Oriath Square.

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Pyrokar wrote:

Ok so you are saying that if you leave them and run through the area it is as good as murdering them since they die from the karui slaves and you do not wanna kill them yourself but the solution is not to make the karui slaves killable so that you can save them?