It's simple. If this game at any point makes players feel bad and not have fun, it's doing a bad job. Games are meant to be fun.
Regardless of how many people might enjoy a certain element, if it has a lot of potential to make players feel guilty or feel bad, they should come up with another solution. You can have fun in other ways. It doesn't have to be killing goblin kids.
I felt bad, and do feel bad each time and have to talk myself into it being okay. Others don't even try to talk themselves into it being okay. They just feel bad.
So, that's not good. They should come up with another solution.
Oh, wait. They did. Not being sarcastic here, but it just came to me. Set the attack to knock out. Then when you 0 the goblin kids, they are unconscious. Not dead.
Ah, but then again, here lies the real life dilemma. What is more cruel? Knock out the kids but kill their entire tribe, or just kill the kids with their families so they don't wake up and discover their all alone?
I suppose you could play total pacifist and kill no one, but that would solve nothing. The goblins are hard core fanatics of the Absolute and just love to kill. They're not going to leave people alone if you let them live.
Hmmm. Yeah. Just remove the kids from the setting and it wouldn't be so bad. End of story. In order to save Halsin, you are confronted with killing kids, and that just presents enough of a conscience dilemma for too many. For the sake of conscience, it should just be removed. It's not fun playing a game that makes you feel guilty. Period. As long as you have a legit choice, that's not a problem, but with the goblin kids, you have to kill them or they bring reinforcements, and knockout is more cruel than death.
I feel like you're being overly reductionist in your view of what games should be. I think that games should always be engaging and entertaining, but that's not the same thing as fun. It's the same with any form of media, from books to movies. I think those things only truly fail in one of two ways; either they fail to make the audience care about what they're depicting, or they inspire a reaction that goes against what they intended to create. Some people are engaged and entertained when they feel bad, when they have to grapple with moral dillema's. If Larian doesn't want to inspire this feeling in players then yeah, they should change something. And honestly I don't think they do want this reaction. The presence of the goblin children aren't framed as them being much different from their older counterparts. When I last played, I don't think I even realized they were children.
Originally Posted by Ragitsu
They're monsters because they're monsters. It really is that simple. As was said before, the more you humanize monsters, the more fun you take out of the escapism; however, you also make them less monstrous in the process.
There's what I like to call "nuance overload", where attempts to inject complexity (genuine or superficial) to a race/species eventually results in a boring homogeneity across the board.
I won't dig into the issues I personally have with the idea of escapism and fun mixed with guiltlessly killing thinking, sapient beings, but I will address your "nuance overload" point. Because if adding nuance makes things boring and homogenous then the problem isn't the nuance itself, it's just bad writing and probably isn't actually nuanced. I fail to see how fleshing out a species that's traditionally labeled as monstrous and giving them depth and personalities could make them homogenous. I'd argue that the idea that "they're monsters because they're monsters" is even more likely to make things boring and homogenous.
