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.
Battlefield 1.
There’s two instances where this happened for me. The first was in the opening mission when you boot up the game for the first time. There’s a portion where you play as a gunner in a tank, a WW1 landship at that. You’re gunning down enemy soldiers, and then you see a singular enemy soldier sitting behind cover, clutching his head in both of his arms, just sitting there shellshocked.
I couldn’t bring myself to shoot him.
The other instance is the first real mission in the game, there’s a portion where you have to infiltrate an enemy village to steal spark plugs for your tank. I found a sniper rifle and was about to gun down some soldiers guarding a tank to get the plugs, but just as I was about to pull the trigger, the soldier starts talking to his comrade about how he forgot to write a letter to his mom for her birthday, and will do so as soon as his guard shift is done.
Again, I couldn’t shoot him after he said that. I ended up finding a way around him and got the plug without alerting or killing anyone.
In the intro mission you can also spot a german soldier with his head down just aimlessly wandering the battlefield while his comrades retreat.
That one really stood out to me, it didn’t even look like he knew where he was/what was happening, just utterly traumatized.
In the third (?) Mission you Need to infiltrate in some trench and i was going to kill a guy, then i Heard him talking about a book he Will write for children to his comrade, i searched the plot of the book and It exist.
I think Battlefield 1 was a damn good game. Multiplayer was fun even to a casual like me, and I enjoyed the campaigns a lot. The piecemeal “war stories” format allowed them to cover the war from different angles, and having several of them end with the protagonist dead felt appropriate given the horrifying human toll of the conflict. And the intro sequence, where you play brief flashes of a bunch of soldiers’ last moments before you die and the screen shows your name, DOB and date of death was an inspired choice.
It might be my favorite PS4 first-person shooter.