Bit of an explanation as to what prompted me to make this post: I recently played through Sniper Ghost Warrior: Contracts 1 and 2 and I just felt off. I've slaughtered hundreds of innocents for my amusement in games like Fallout and TES, I play through No Russian with a grin, but for some reason, I refrain from killing bad guys in SGW? The first one has you hunt down Russian oligarchs and war criminals, while the second one is about Middle Eastern terrorists and this is the game where I feel bad about killing? There's just something about the soldiers talking about their daily problems like making no money, uncomfortable boots and sweating too much, or showing eachother pictures of their dogs, not to mention the absolute horror when you've got a knife against their throat or when they find a body. I hope this isn't weird, but I've never experienced remorse for killing a video game enemy, and I've played a lot of different games. I'd like to hear about your experiences, and which games do a good job humanising common enemies, the concept intrigues me.
Occasionally in Cyberpunk 2077, you'll end up scooping up datashards from the gangoons you've just mowed down. Sometimes, this validates what you'd done, especially scavs and Maelstrom.
But sometimes you just get a bit of squabbling between a guy and his girl who is fussing at him for letting his friend drag him into trouble because she's worried he won't be around for their kid or a guy and his elderly grandfather who's had an accident and is pleading for his grandson to come home because he doesn't want anyone to see him like that.
And then you look down at the chunky meat salsa that the shotgun created and feel awful.
I don’t normally voluntarily kill in that game, except for scavs and vdbs… but I was playing a mission to retrieve a BD from a scav den and I found the father/son editor team, and as I walked up, they were commenting back and forth about how good one of their edits was. Then you find out they edit so many videos of little kids getting killed that they don’t even know which BD I’m talking about… once they told me where the BD was and they were telling me to just leave, I popped em both in the head. Felt very content with that one.
I killed all the scavs who augmented the two monks and they got really upset with me about it. I actually felt pretty bad about that one.
Cyberpunk does a really impressive job of making you walk the thin line of morality.
The ones that augment the monk and protect the BD editors are Maelstrom not Scavengers.
Oh, then they really dead. Fuck them guys.