Video game violence became boring

Once it was Downfall was the greatest villain in video games. The game over the shooting of tons of demons on Mars was a sensation like no other that made the nunkommon genre of the ego shooter genre popular and marked a tectonic shift in the rapidly growing medium. This also made it a goal: according to reports that the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre were enthusiastic fans of the game, the moral panic about whether violent video games were inspired or not, violence in real life achieved a fever place. It was already controversial that they were a game that put a (large) weapon in her hand and Lo-Fi-Heavy Metal in her ears when they mowed demonic hordes, but with shooters in real school shooters that quoted them? Another decade of the cultural war.

Now, Downfall is at least culturally inconspicuous. Born in a 2016 restart with the title ” DownfallThe shooter arrived in an industry that is still often under the microscope in the content, but with more players, critics and developers who are interested in researching violence in terms of merit. Or like the popularity of games like The last of us showed this violence interviewed. This separates the new era of Downfall -Nip with a third entry, the medieval/sci-fi-gore festival Doom: The dark age – Of the previous ones: games are no longer defensive in terms of violence, but more fascinated than before. It is the preferred love language of modern games.

Take into account Doom: The dark age. A forerunner of the 2016 DownfallThe player lives in the slayer from this game and minimally excludes a background story that really doesn't need the meat. You are an unstoppable nature, a blunt instrument in a war between the demons, who is there-na yes, honestly, I don't really know. Everything is nonsense. What matters is that they now give them a sign and that sign changes everything about the game. Where Downfall and his continuation, Doom foreverPrioritized skate-park-like movement that constantly tackled to another from one side of an arena, The dark age wants you to move And Boiler, invited to the heat of things to plant your feet, a combination with what you have in your hands, deliver a combination, and shoot back to safety to do everything from the front. In contrast to the fighter jet of the two previous games, they are a diving bomber.

A big problem for video games as a medium has always been that it is extremely difficult to talk about violence in games that they don't play without sounding like a crazy person. A current interview with the HBOS showrunners The last of us Adaptation, Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, underlines this:

“I asked Druckmann and Mazin about all the violence in the game, and they almost laughed as if I asked a football coach why his players don't just throw the ball. This is how games are played.”

Problem solving is correct. At the enormous speed, in the Downfall The games develop, this can feel like Sudoku puzzle in a roller coaster ride. As opposed to The last of usHowever, Downfall is completely uninterested to ask the importance of this violence – a topic that has become a abbreviation for ripening stories in games, regardless of whether the descriptor is earned or not. Instead, The dark age overwhelmed. While there are more tools to kill demons than earlier games, each of these tools should counteract a certain type of demon, which means that violence is less about problem solutions and lateral thinking than pattern recognition. To be honest, it gets boring, even with the caricaturist heavy metal images of demons, which are highly rolling in the distance Downfall It's fun and not terrible.

Play Doom: The dark age Feel just recursive. Despite its expansion, the new game is still to the 1993 thrill operated by Adrenaline and is not particularly interested in the vocabulary of this violence. Add Punch out!-Style puffilism for the mix is ​​a decision that ultimately feels safer than more interesting. And currently so many interesting things are done with video game violence.

Downfall'S throwback philosophy nothing more against anything. In the nine years since the new start in 2016, “Boomer Shooters” modern-style games in LO-FI-style Downfall – I came and gone, the original DownfallThe mod scene has both official new publications as well as avant-garde experiments such as MyHouse and bright, repulsive indie games such as preserved Cruelty group have tried to attack players with sensory violence in addition to the expected simulated killings. This is the irony of the legacy of the franchise: they tend to stumble into something that the very affordable, slightly available Doom I + II, With its curated selection of surprisingly newer new levels or the search for amateur fan levels than in Doom: The dark ageas sick as it looks.

In other words, video games have never better thought about violence and effectively implemented. The dark ageThen it is named appropriately. Downfall Has never felt so stuck in the past.