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Calladuty for wussy babies
The question came up in the Undertale thread of how you'd have an FPS similar to Undertale in terms of promoting nonviolence. I got some ideas.
First off, obviously it doesn't, and in my opinion shouldn't, have to be be an Undertale clone, where you're supposed to never hurt anybody and just talk to enemies and they all have quirky personalities. There are other ways to be anti-violence, and dialogue trees works more for an RPG.
Second, it depends on what your goal is. There are several different directions you could go with this.
One is objecting to the gameplay itself, pointing at targets and clicking a button once you're aligned. Not a lot you can do with this while still being an FPS, obviously. But there are possibilities. E.g., you could be in a war zone but far underarmed, so you spend most of your time avoiding being shot at by superior forces. Still an action game, still gun'sbrasting.
Two is objecting to killing people. You can do stuff there. You can play some not-intended-for-this FPSs this way. For example, in Killing Floor, I play as a medic a fair amount. The way a medic works is that you can heal people by shooting darts at them, or by throwing grenades that, instead of exploding, release a healing gas. Yes, it's not particularly realistic, but FPSs aren't anyway. (in cod you can get a stun grenade that works through walls.) Shooting at people but ain't killing them. It's actually harder than shooting at the enemies, in large part, because zombees move slowly and usually predictably.
You can imagine other shooting-without-killing modes. You could even do something a bit like Undertale where the enemies have real guns and you have paintballs or something, and you just splatter them until they get frustrated and ask why you haven't killed em yet.
Or you can go even more unreal. Nobody dies in Splatoon. Or paintball, unless you really fuck up. Neither of those have a particular anti-violence message, of course, but one could be worked in, e.g. by making actual firearms available and having characters react with horror as you kill them. Stuff.
Thirdly you can object to violence as it is in FPSs - usually a wartime sort of thing. There are commercial games that do this, taking an Apocalypse Now sort of approach. Or, like, Haze. Not a great game, apparently, but did try to engage the "wow, you're really killing a lot of people, what's up with that" aspect of the genre.
Hallucination would work pretty well, really, at least for a while before it got cliché, like, oh, you thought you were shooting at aliens, but actually you were an escaped super-soldier rampaging randomly. Oh dearie me!
Maintaining an actual war environment there are plenty of possibilities for anti-war plots. Imagine a game where you play as a trench soldier trying to negotiate an illegal Christmas truce. Some stealth shit crossing the no-man's-land. Iunno. Imagine, maaaaan.
Best of all would probably be abandoning the linear progression of old FPSs. In Pathologic you can get guns but not use them much; both because you are generally short on ammunition, and because you exist in a town full of people and murder usually has consequences.
First off, obviously it doesn't, and in my opinion shouldn't, have to be be an Undertale clone, where you're supposed to never hurt anybody and just talk to enemies and they all have quirky personalities. There are other ways to be anti-violence, and dialogue trees works more for an RPG.
Second, it depends on what your goal is. There are several different directions you could go with this.
One is objecting to the gameplay itself, pointing at targets and clicking a button once you're aligned. Not a lot you can do with this while still being an FPS, obviously. But there are possibilities. E.g., you could be in a war zone but far underarmed, so you spend most of your time avoiding being shot at by superior forces. Still an action game, still gun'sbrasting.
Two is objecting to killing people. You can do stuff there. You can play some not-intended-for-this FPSs this way. For example, in Killing Floor, I play as a medic a fair amount. The way a medic works is that you can heal people by shooting darts at them, or by throwing grenades that, instead of exploding, release a healing gas. Yes, it's not particularly realistic, but FPSs aren't anyway. (in cod you can get a stun grenade that works through walls.) Shooting at people but ain't killing them. It's actually harder than shooting at the enemies, in large part, because zombees move slowly and usually predictably.
You can imagine other shooting-without-killing modes. You could even do something a bit like Undertale where the enemies have real guns and you have paintballs or something, and you just splatter them until they get frustrated and ask why you haven't killed em yet.
Or you can go even more unreal. Nobody dies in Splatoon. Or paintball, unless you really fuck up. Neither of those have a particular anti-violence message, of course, but one could be worked in, e.g. by making actual firearms available and having characters react with horror as you kill them. Stuff.
Thirdly you can object to violence as it is in FPSs - usually a wartime sort of thing. There are commercial games that do this, taking an Apocalypse Now sort of approach. Or, like, Haze. Not a great game, apparently, but did try to engage the "wow, you're really killing a lot of people, what's up with that" aspect of the genre.
Hallucination would work pretty well, really, at least for a while before it got cliché, like, oh, you thought you were shooting at aliens, but actually you were an escaped super-soldier rampaging randomly. Oh dearie me!
Maintaining an actual war environment there are plenty of possibilities for anti-war plots. Imagine a game where you play as a trench soldier trying to negotiate an illegal Christmas truce. Some stealth shit crossing the no-man's-land. Iunno. Imagine, maaaaan.
Best of all would probably be abandoning the linear progression of old FPSs. In Pathologic you can get guns but not use them much; both because you are generally short on ammunition, and because you exist in a town full of people and murder usually has consequences.
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Comments
i do appreciate that yeah, there's a lot you can do in an FPS to mix things up.
But i guess what i was saying about Undertale is, the aspect that's most interesting to me about that game's approach to pacifism is the part where you have to understand the enemies personalities and persuade them to quit fighting
to me that's the part that makes pacifism in that game interesting in itself, because it makes Undertale pacifism *more* interesting to me than playing the game like a standard RPG, and it also gives you a reason to care about the characters more than you do your usual video game enemies
that's the part i'm saying i don't see how you could do it in an action game, not without breaking the immersion
like you can make it that you just don't shoot anyone, or you can swap out the guns for less lethal weapons, or you can make it so that killing things is just really dark and unpleasant, ok, the actual CoD series has experimented with the latter, to an extent
Pathologic sounds closest to what i had in mind, though, and i think perhaps is realistically the closest you can get to it
it's another game that abandons the traditional linear FPS model
genocide is the only option in metroid games, though
not no mercy, but like, actual genocide, that's an objective Samus has
e: to clarify, i'm not saying the metroid games are bad games, in case i gave that impression
Undertale is so abstracted with dialogue trees that it's easy to do in that format, but that doesn't mean it's impossible in an FPS. You could do something like Deus Ex where you have haxx0r powers, but no firearms, and you have to dig through the boss's email while they're shooting at you; then a base way to end the fight would be the email having a password for the boss's power armor or whatever, but there are other possibilities.
Also resolving hostage situations correctly.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Still, as you say, the JRPG's dialogue tree format makes it relatively easy to implement.
:p
regardless, a lot of creatures have to die before you get to the end
Metroids are themselves stated to be intelligent, though how intelligent isn't clear.
Monster Hunter does have some kind of understanding of ecology, ast least in the promotional videos I've seen. How much that plays into gameplay, I don't know.
Really, having enemies you can just observe for a while would be a big step for non-mindless FPSs. And not like just silly banter stuff.
At one point, he gets attacked by a mountain lion, and then the MC's brother shoots the mountain lion, and the dad yells at him for not waiting for a better shot rather than leave a wounded animal alive.
Feel regret for your words and deeds.
Portal only qualifies as a shooter in *the* absolute most basic reductionist sense.
In that case, Mirror's Edge is probably the closest thing to this ideal that I have any familiarity with; while it doesn't really penalize you for using guns and requires at least a few uses of force, the bulk of the gameplay (and what it was acclaimed for) is largely based on the player's skill in traversing the environment.
The fact that the second one is set to remove gunplay entirely is, as C.C. mentioned, a welcome change.
arguing about ethics in metroid . . . journalism?
It is indeed an FPS. Just not one where you aim your gun to kill humanoids or other animals.
It also doesn't deliver a rebuke of FPS violence either.
The closest thing I can think if is Spec Ops: the Line, and I am very, very surprised it has not been discussed more in this thread.