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Original fall out Designer Tim Kane, also known for co-directing The outside world Over at Obsidian, they published a video answering a player’s question as to why violence is the “default” path in many big budget RPGs. That’s especially true of RPGs with “AAA” budgets, which nowadays means no AAA. Cain is well aware that there are many RPGs from small groups, “the default way for the player to interact with the world that has passed the paradigm of violence”, and many puzzle games, adventure games and non-violent types.
The answer to the question is not very satisfactory: violence is focused on those production scales because games where scratching, smashing and bloodshed are central sell more copies. If you want that to change, you need to get off your ass and “vote with your dollar.” He does, however, have some interesting reflections on his own experiences as an RPG designer trying to support more creative player approaches. Peaceful or else. Beyond that, the question of why offensive games numbers work is always worth chewing on.
“I’ve always thought of my RPGs as not only not needing violence, but I don’t need you to create a fighting character, but I don’t consider that to be the default path – I don’t think the main path and stealth and stealth combat. Dialogue is optional,” Cain comments in the video. “I’ve always said that this game supports multiple paths – you want to talk your way out, you want to hide your way out, you want to hide your way out, go for it. Even if there’s a fight to be had, usually your allies can do it, or use stealth or talk to avoid it, or reduce it to a relatively easy fight. it will be.
He points out that there are easy modes, and more recently story modes, aside from the beheading of elves and the like, in games that prioritize violence. But the audience for such things is much smaller, he says, than the audience for a murderous act. “There are options out there, but people don’t take that much. People play non-story modes instead of story modes.”
Cain himself likes “rarely chosen paths” in RPGs, be it brutal or violent, and he’s saddened by what he has to offer, and to combat the increasing pressure in big-budget RPGs to simplify everything. “I put dumb dialogue in a lot of my games,” he says. “I like supporting generals or really weird specialties, and these are supported in my games.”
In the year Even the original Fallout, published in 1997, isn’t as violent as the “war never changes” trademark suggests, Cain comments in the video. “You’d think that violence was the default in Fallout, but it really wasn’t. People would often do missions and think that’s not what the player does, it’s not going to be violence in this one.”
Cain shared a few stories from his “Paths Rarely Chosen” game story: being the first person to complete a 1-INT Fallout run, playing Arcanum as a sword with no magic or technology, and surviving an Elemental Evil sanctuary with a party. Half bards. “A lot of games avoid these less common paths and you don’t see any discount in sales, which means you didn’t have enough people who liked those paths,” he observed darkly.
Cain also made some common observations about violent games lending themselves to more trailers, specifically noting why action RPGs, in his experience, outsell casual RPGs and the like. After all, “It’s easy to market games like this when you see a trailer and people actually do things — jump, climb, shoot, punch.”
Cain doesn’t comment on the obvious broader question here: why people are drawn to violence in art and entertainment media in general, from Homeric epics to the latest Netflix horror shows. I have many ideas, most of which are completely empty. One is that depictions of violence involve a subject and an object. Considering violence makes the whole argument meaningless without the question of what or who is attacking whom or what is at stake.
Another idea is that violence in video games is better read as a kinetic, collaborative style, and symbolic performance, not just a desire to harm. I wrote in the past It reminds me of the poetic forms of how turn-based combat systems are a set of cycling rules used to “write” a match. Combat in such games is often character-based: party roles such as tank, dps, or support correspond to specific narrative artifacts and personalities.
In shooters, meanwhile, guns are probably interpreted as ways to adjust the game’s spacetime. The range and size of your shot, whether you’re shooting in a straight line or an arc, the choice of accompanying lighting and sound, the size of the clip – these are all ways of setting the tempo, measuring and determining location. How to design and understand other components. Give me a slow-loading gun and I’ll start the phase with a bunch of blind corners and point-blank rapid draw. I add precise understanding of hand movements, details visible from certain angles, and seconds between enemies looking my way and noticing me. Give me an assault rifle and I tend to see enemies as a fun mowing mass.
Thinking about violence this way makes me bleak about the bloodlust of big-budget games, from RPGs to open-world fanatics. That said, I really enjoy playing a “triple-A” RPG that prioritizes non-aggressive tactics. For example, a big budget video game adaptation of Alfred Valley’s pen and paper RPG He lay on his handswho spends those triple megabucks on the premise of being a traveling healer. It may still involve violence—there can be no healing without violence, perhaps—but healing as a universal calling is focused on dialogue, community interaction, and the battlefield. In the meantime, there’s brandy. The story of being a pacifist medicine in Foxhole.
