I think it makes game better! Having art like this, is part of the game, after all it is consequences of your own actions, it's nice to see that

You can't use real life logic for game design. The game needs to be fun. Its not real life simulated. In games annoying things are left out. Same with the emotional appeal of the game. If your goal is to have a game like: This war of mine ( which i stopped playing because its horrifying to me ) is a game that wants you to feel that shit. But i dont see why it has to be in a strategy game like  this. Saying that war veteran need new work is enough. Talking about their loses is just a social and political lecture or an attempt to convey a negativ emotion. 

If i get a bad event its enough to make me register that my people have lost something. But i dont wan't to feel sadness, a real emotion of loss or be remembered of something negative that happens in the real world. The game needs to take my mind of reality not remember me of it. 

The events need to evoke emotions imo, including negative ones. It makes the world feel more real and immersive. If I'm playing an empire management game, I want to feel things about my people and be emotionally connected to the story, even the bad parts. Not to mention a lot of people are very avid about the game showing the bad parts of history thoroughly, as a lot of threads on the forum can attest to. And tbh, the event is just a soldier with bandaged wounds and a lore blurb. It's very tastefully done. Not the equivalent of showing burnt corpses after a nuke.

I like seeing the horrors of war depicted by the game. It makes it feel more real and gives your actions conisquences. I think it is really cool that the game is willing to show the damage done by throwing thosands, if not millions in later eras, of lives away for some territory.

monkeystador wrote:

Sure go ahead to fandom above war horros. you don't even know what it means in real. You probably have no real emotional basis to feel the horrors of war. What you feel is just a shallow feeling numbed by TV templates. Go ahead and watch the war movies that depict it realisticly, the ones that make you wanne puke about ever seeing war horror again. Maybe start with with decaptiation of the hostage. But be careful thats nothing anyone wants to see. Risking serious horror dreams is no joke. 

I agree that this is probably nothing a healthy person would really wish for. The question is however how close a game or any piece of art wants to be to a "realistic" experience. I would argue that to a certain level it is good to confront players with negative topics as well.

It all depends on the tone you want for your art. But a movie about war which makes you puke is no way comperable to a sad drawing and some text talking about how the war took its toll on your soldiers.

And I personally want to face the conisquences of my actions as the guide of my civilation, at least to some extent. I'm not talking about paragraphs of torture porn or something, just "sad game events" to show the downsides of my actions. Constant wars should give you events about how soldiers and injured and dont want to fight. A nationalist, traditionalist culture should give you events about how minorities are getting repressed in your country. Because otherwise everything you do feels surface level and meaningless and it can do some pretty harmful white-washing to terrible actions.

monkeystador wrote:

Sure go ahead to fandom above war horros. you don't even know what it means in real. You probably have no real emotional basis to feel the horrors of war. What you feel is just a shallow feeling numbed by TV templates. Go ahead and watch the war movies that depict it realisticly, the ones that make you wanne puke about ever seeing war horror again. Maybe start with with decaptiation of the hostage. But be careful thats nothing anyone wants to see. Risking serious horror dreams is no joke. 

Listen, it's not being advocated that we see the horrors in detail. No one is asking to see a child soldier get their guts ripped out by grapeshot like in Culloden or similar movies. But there's a difference between extremely graphic depictions of war and human suffering like in the sad soldier event. There we've got a pretty non descriptive, if somewhat emotional text accompanied by a very clean image that depicts a soldier whose injuries are all bandaged up. No guts, no gore, no nothing and it's gone in an instant.

There is a big middleground between gorey war porn and a completely sanitized version of human history that only highlights the good bits.

Ehh.

Nuking is fine in civ but seeing some 2D art about a bandaged soldier gets you distressed? I implore you, some perspective please. You wouldn't watch a horror movie and criticize it about making you scared.

This is a strategy game that attempts to depict mankinds actual history and from all that we've seen, it is already extremely sanitized. No blood in 3D battles, no gorey deaths, no painstakingly accurate images and descriptions of festering boils of sick people, no detailed accounts of human trafficking in its most degenerate forms, no cutscenes of medieval impalement and so on.

If anything, I'd agrue the game is too tame as is. But I get it, Amplitude has to cater to wider audience and that means no burnt nuke corpses. We humans have always been a violent, conquering species. Our history is full of conflicts with empires rising and falling and we're not looking at world peace anytime soon.

Creating a sugarcoated revision of world history in a game like this is in conflict with itself. As I see it, HK should strive for a realistic, neutral approach to our collective history with both its ups and downs.

Nothing in this game comes across as paticuallry miserable. Civ 6 is a good example of a game that completly sanitises the history its meant to represent any time a cavalry unit is killed the horse always survives and escapes. Razed cities conviniently disappear off the map leaving no ruins or any other trace that people once lived there.

So far this game actually seems a bit brighter than its predecessor Endless Legend in which your world is litteraly DYING where every advance you make is soured by the fact that it is doing nothing to stop the increasingly severe winters and every attempt to save the planet fails leaving the only option to survive to escape into the cold unknown of space which only one of the many races actually manages to do so.

MasterofMobius wrote:

Nothing in this game comes across as paticuallry miserable. Civ 6 is a good example of a game that completly sanitises the history its meant to represent any time a cavalry unit is killed the horse always survives and escapes. Razed cities conviniently disappear off the map leaving no ruins or any other trace that people once lived there.

So far this game actually seems a bit brighter than its predecessor Endless Legend in which your world is litteraly DYING where every advance you make is soured by the fact that it is doing nothing to stop the increasingly severe winters and every attempt to save the planet fails leaving the only option to survive to escape into the cold unknown of space which only one of the many races actually manages to do so.

Im still upset that the vaulters were the ones that were allowed to succeed. So many options and they picked the humans ;-;

They couldn't go otherwise, as this is what was established in the lore of ES1 even before EL came out. Also I doubt they are the only one to escape Auriga, we simply aren't shown the fate of other factions.

Games are an art form, like books, painting and movies.

Art can express many situation and emotions, including negative ones.

I think it's good that games can show the negative consequences of actions, in fact games are the perfect medium to show consequences.

Also a historical game should not whitewash history and/or glorify war.

Look you want a different type of game and that fine. I'd argue what you're describing is pretty much what the civ franchise offers, and that's great. It's possible Humankind is going in a different direction in that regard and I think that's great, it differentiates the two even more. But please, don't make a weird value judgement about people who are looking for games that show an ever so slightly more nuanced version of the consequences of your actions in the game.

Also this War of Mine is wonderful, just not for everyone and that's fine.