Wednesday 23 September, 2009

Got done playing again, and I'm already bored of the game. I heard the games weren't bad, and my brother had been telling me that they were pretty good. Unfortunately, I honestly can't get into it. The sandbox environment is really cool, and I like the whole concept of it.

Unfortunately, the fact that I can literally walk up to anyone and proceed to beat the snot out of them until they are left dead is discerning. It's not at all satisfying to me to be able to do this, much less not be penalized for it. In other games, you kill people but they're usually categorized as "the enemy." In this game, innocent people are fair game. I wouldn't be so put off by it if it didn't sound like the people were literally dying.

I understand why they did it, I don't understand why it is necessary. On top of that, I've gotten chased away by pizza men, put graffiti on top of other graffiti (two wrongs, in fact, do not make a right it seems), knocked over at least 35 street light poles with my horrible driving.

It's hard to keep myself playing this game, cause it's gotten pretty boring.

You think GTA is boring? Thats pretty sad.

You know, at no point in GTA are you ever required to kill innocent people. Are you suggesting that they should remove pedestrians out of the game? Would that make the game better or worse? What if other games like lets say Halo had innocent people that are not the enemies in it, if you could attack them, would that make the game worse?

I don't see how not liking a game is sad, unfortunately.

I see what you are saying, and I agree to an extent. Yes, there is no specific mission that states "Kill X amount of civilians." The fact is, however, that there isn't really any penalty for doing such an action. The penalty is that your "wanted" rating goes up, which is what some players will strive to do in the first place, so they can feel like it's "me vs the entire city".

So that means the penalty for doing such an action, i.e. murdering a civilian, is that you get more difficult NPCs to fight against, and then subsequently kill.

To answer your Halo question, I don't like Halo much as it is. To have the option to kill innocent people for no reason whatsoever would be a pointless feature. In fact, it would just bring up the question "Why even do this in the first place?"

you know, I was playing Okami and was interested in the fact that, there are NPC's in the game and you can attack them. But they react by shouting like "Hey what are you doing?" and if you keep doing it, a message appears from your moral guidance saying "these people haven't done anything wrong, dont attack them"... of course if you keep attacking, nothing bad happens, no NPC's die, no blood, no gore. In a way, this is the way most games handle players attacking innocent NPC's, they just kind of ignore the fact that the player is being violent towards innocent NPC's.

What if GTA did that same thing? Made it that you can run over pedestrians but they just stand back up like nothing happened. Or if you shoot them, they dont ever die. Would this make GTA a better game? I think what it would do, would take out the realism factor from the game. It would piss off some gamers too. Like back to the Okami analogy, it pisses me off that I cant kill NPC's, it takes away the realism from the game, also it restricts the gameplaying experience. Why is it that I can harm 'enemies' but not NPC's? In essence, I think Okami would be a better game if you could attack NPC's, but then that would change the storyline and have to make the game open-ended, maybe even implement a karma system or something... but then that would take Okami away from its roots which is to have a compelling storyline where you play a good character. So in the end, having the open-endedness in Okami would make Okami a worse game because the whole point to play Okami is the storyline which this would change. But in GTA, it does not affect the storyline and it makes it more realistic, so I think being able to kill pedestrians in GTA is a good thing because it makes it more realistic without ruining the game.

The problem is that everything is based on the precedence that I think this game is good in the first place. I mentioned it before, I did not enjoy playing this game. I thought it was boring and not very enjoyable.

I agree with you in that taking out the "killing civilians" wouldn't make much sense in the game, but that's not the issue for me in the first place. The issue for me is that it exists in the first place.

This is not my sole reason for disliking this game. As I mentioned, I think it's boring, I don't like the racism (whether it's intended or not, it exists), and it's just not fun for me. The "killing innocent people" issue is just something that irks me.