The more realistic video games get, the less interest I have in games like GTA 6.
And I don’t mean in terms of graphics. A game that looks that realistic but when you smack some random passerby they launch into the air team rocket style? I’d play the shit out of that. But when instead they’ll respond like an actual person being hurt, and they look more and more like an actual person, the more I am just uncomfortable with the game.
I like violent games. I find them cathartic. But an important part of that is feeling like I’m doing nothing wrong, and the more realistic the violence, the more it makes me viscerally uncomfortable
a game where you do lots of violence that doesn’t want you to feel like you’re role-playing a psychopath needs to offer you some kind of fig leaf, e.g.
- your [melee attack from behind / gun] that makes people stop moving is Non-Lethal and they’ll be fine later, promise
- they want to kill you for no reason and it is Self Defense
- they’re [bad people / people who work for a bad person] and you’re doing a Revenge or a Justice
normally the Assassin’s Creed games do at least two of these. in Valhalla I wasn’t avenging a damned thing, I was just an invader, fucking up monasteries because I kinda needed the money. I couldn’t even stealth-takedown, so everybody just died. it felt shitty! it felt shitty, and I guess “realistic” in that real history had a lot of shitty people, and to this day I don’t understand what they were going for.
one of the best parts of saints row (2022) was using nerf guns and because “everyone in the city is in on the LARP” they all respect you “killing” them by “dying” in the most dramatic ways possible while. more violent games should go the way of saints row
bonus for having an entire LARP assassination side quest and you resolve the argument by continuously beating them with your LARP guns while calling them lame for being OP and a bad friend, rather than doing any actual murder violence like you might expect