PixlBit

Have you played the 999 games (one on the DS and 3DS), they have violence but are story driven puzzle games. No real combat but just enough bloog and guts.

most games don't need combat but violence is almost unavoidable.

999 is on my wish list. I have no issue with violence in games, like I said, it would just be nice to have more choices available.

true enough, I usually prefer the non violent options in Mass Effect hell in most games really, for some reason situation that have a more confrontational option seems tacked on.

I like how in MGS or Mark of the Ninja, there's non-leathal options

An RPG that levels up with puzzles isn't a bad idea either

I got the same issue yesterday to, and in my opinion in most rpgs im more interested in the towns and npcs then the actual gameplay and as far as combat being nessesary just look at River King a wonderful Journey a blog I posted not long ago, theres no combat in this game at all and its a great game in my opinion, but it just goes to show you dont have to be leveling up and slaughtering tons of monsters to have a good game.

I'm going to have to go find that blog and read it.

Yeah, I hear what you're saying, I'm kind of annoyed at the waves of enemies in Spec Ops: The Line, even though it's a shooter.  I guess it all depends.  

All I know is you can take my turn-based battles away from my cold dead hands!  

Turn-based battles are the only ones I like, lol.

me too, I wish COD was turn based, I'd play it.  

I thought that about the Tom Clancy games and then they did one in Tom Clancy Ghost Recon Shadow Wars for 3DS. Man, I have to pick that up soon. It's by the guys who did the original X-Com.

I've played that, it's pretty cool!

Awesome! I can't wait to pick it up. 

I share your hatred for combat in RPGs, especially. I've never liked turn-based or randomized encounters, or grinding.

I'd love to see one where you simply solved puzzles to advance.

I wouldn't mind playing a game without combat, as long as its objectives were still fun to complete. Just don't make it a sanbox game where the whole point is exploring. I can't stand no having objectives, no matter how beautiful or open an environment, I'll feel like I'm just wandering around aimlessly. This is why I can't just roam around in GTA.

I don't mind turn-based battles in my rpgs nearly as much as I mind action-rpg combat. I'm also not much into sandbox games without objectives, either. That was one of the things that impressed me about Journey - no obvious objective to tell you where to go next, but they made excellent use of human psychology to get you there.

I'm the opposite, I enjoy action RPG combat, but can not stand turn-based. Oh well, to each their own.

Human Psychology, you say? Sounds interesting.

Puzzle Quest has you doing a match-three puzzle game in the battles... but I guess that's still combat. 

Tough question. I admit I tend to like games with combat in them but I don't mind if that combat is occasionally turn-based strategy as opposed to the usual "Pew Pew/Stab Stab/Die Die" action nonsense. lol. All depends on my mood, I guess.

My problem with Game Informer is that the text is too small.  I used to read video game magazines all the time.  Surely my eyes haven't gotten THAT bad since then.

Yeah a lot of the games I like don't focus on combat at all, like Animal Crossing.  And if there is combat, it's very light and silly.  However, there ARE some games that need combat.  RPGs need to have battles, as long as they are fun, for instance.

Fighting games also need to have combat, because, you know, they're fighting games.  Except I hate it when you have to 'kill' people in fighting games.  I don't want to kill Taki and Xianghua and Ivy and Nightmare in Soul Calibur.  They're too cool!  I wish you could just fight them with squeaky hammers and pillows until they gave up and became friends with you.

I bet a lot of people are glad that I'm NOT designing games!

Game Informer has ridiculously tiny font and whoever made that decision should be tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail. So no, it's not your eyes.

I love the idea of fighting games with squeaky hammers and pillows for weapons. I might actually play one then, lol.

Yea, totally too small. Instead of adding pages, they just made the text smaller. Probably to save on printing. I noticed this right around the time they started to move to digital. I could only read the thing in really strong light so I just gave up on it. I wasn't interested in the online version so I haven't read GI since they went digital.

Been running into this issue in Tomb Raider. Some areas become like a scene from Gears Of War. Is that much combat needed for Lara to prove she's a badass? Not really,they just add it to sell to a wider group of gamers. Journey proves that you can make a very good game without all the bloodshed. Just realized that my son knows an awful lot about guns. Types,calibers,ammo,stocks,silencers,you name it. He's an expert. He gained this knowledge from video games. Is it really that necessary?

Jason knows an awful lot about guns, too, and he learned it in the stacks in the library. That's not really the point I was trying to make, though. I was wondering why devs can't come up with something better than just shooting the billy bejeesus out of everything. I like the concept of being able to deal with conflict in story telling in a way that doesn't make you have to do battle every 15 seconds or so. I also have my moments where I do want to blow crap up and shoot so many holes in things that they resemble swiss cheese.

It's a pretty expansive topic on the whole.

Since they first hit the market, most video games have been competitive in nature rather than creative or constructive.  Pong and Desert Combat Bro Shooter Du Jour are far apart on the gaming's family tree, but both are still Player 1 vs Player 2 types of games.  The only things that have changed (other than the obvious leaps in technology between their respective creations) are game genres and how the players' avatars appear.

What I think is most interesting about this discussion is how combat games - first-person shooters being the most representative of the genre - are most popular with Americans.  Japan doesn't really make many shooters or combat games, with the exceptions of light gun games and Konami's Metal Gear Solid series, the latter of which is perhaps more popular for its stories, characters, and stealth gameplay than for its gritty depiction of war.  But American shooters like CoD don't really gain a lot of ground there, and I'm willing to bet not in many other countries/regions, either.

(As an interesting counter-example: consider the Czech-made Arma series, which has a rather large international following and fan community.  Unlike its twitch-style brethern, this franchise relies more heavily on realistic tactics and teamwork.)

And of course, consider that there's also a big cultural component at work here, as well.  I highly recommend this article from the New York Times about the militarization of American society.  The author mentions how popular military FPS games have become, and I feel it supplements Game Informer's OP-ED very well.  We've been at war for over a decade now and jingoism, wartime uncertainty, and troop-worshiping (if not outright fetishization of the military) have effected so much of our day-to-day culture.  It's art imitating life--I just hope this trend ends as soon as the wars themselves do.

I think your comment was better than my blog. Good article, thank you for linking it. I hadn't really done a whole lot of thinking about it from that perspective, but it does make things go "click" in my head. I am just old enough to remember the last year or two of Vietnam in the news and friends of my parents and uncles coming back. It seems like we were less gung-ho about Vietnam than we are about the current "war on terror". Thanks for giving me something to mull over.

Different times, different wars, really.  I know that the 1980s was a "healing time" in this country in regards to how we looked at Vietnam and the men who fought it, and I think ever since then we as a society have come to hold a special reverence for our uniformed men and women.  I know I do.  Now, if our society is overdoing it, or being respectful to a fault...well, it can be hard to argue otherwise.

I'd like to see less combat in some games, but it depends on the situation. I think Spec Ops: The Line would be a much better game with about 40% less combat, while letting the remaining 60% be against less enemies but making those enemies feel like real people. Alan Wake also could benefit from a good 40-50% less shooting dudes.

I haven't played the new Tomb Raider yet but from reviews I've read I can already tell that I'd prefer to have less combat and more survival mechanics in there. I want Lara to still have problems killing people after that first one. My dream scenario with the next game would be to have her dealing with PTSD from her time on the island and having that come out in some interesting ways. Maybe she starts to enjoy the killing because it empowers her and keeps the memories of being helpless away.

I have high hopes for The Last of Us, because Naughty Dog keeps saying that a group of three enemies will be a "holy crap" moment, and very dangerous to the player.

I think Caesar really made some excellent points. Especially the part about the popularity of military FPS games in America. Perhaps they are a form of propaganda for the military. I remember at one point the Army made it's own Call Of Duty style game. Think it was Full Spectrum Warrior. They put on these silly competitions at shopping malls. All in an effort to recruit young people into the service. Maybe the abundance of games of this type in America says something about us. That we need to condition the young to be ready for war. It's very insidious that the Army tried to use games as a tool like that.

The Army has supported two games I know of off the top of my head: America's Army, a shooter series, and Full Spectrum Warrior, a tactical game.

Those are the closest things to propaganda, because they have an actual "blessing" from the military.  CoD and some other shooters, not so much.  If you look at some of that series' plots (THE GENERAL IS THE BAD GUY, DUN DUN), it'd be terrible propaganda: the Army needs men, but doesn't want soldiers who either refuse or are too paranoid to take orders.

Direct answer: Of course not. 

I think with the growing ability to render facial expressions acurately we'll get deeper more meaningful games. I mean, shooting things is like the simpliest thing you can do in a game. Conveying emotions, now that's hard.

  You are so right about that. Only recently have companies been using facial expressions to make characters seem more human. The stuff being done with motion capture is amazing. It allows players to connect with the story in ways they have never done before. I like that sort of thing a lot.

I got all weepy over this ex-slave girl you have to pacify in Mass Effect 1. I think it was less about facial capture than voice work, but it suggested the kind of emersion and emotional connection I usually get from movies, now starting to be possible in games. I'm a little afraid of the depths games will take me in the next generation. I've been unnerved by games before such as in Max Payne which litterally made my hands shake after twenty minutes of hearing that baby cry in the first dream sequence.

Heavy Rain was the first one that came to my mind. Great story and the game mostly had no real combat. There was killing, but not necessarily by the main character. Of course, there's other games like say Tetris with no combat.

You take the combat out of alot of games and you have nothing else. No combat in Uncharted leaves you with trivial puzzles and platforming that might as well not be in the game for how unchallenging or interesting they are.  I only played the demo of Journey, but it seemed pointless. I didn't see much worth finding, so exploration isn't there. Didn't seem to be much game there at all.

For RPGs, Obsidian is the only developer I can think of that can pull off minimal combat,  on the strength of their writers (see Planescape:Torment).  I've been told that you can get through New Vegas without killing anyone.  There is always the adventure genre.  Amnesia: The Dark Descent requires avoidance instead of confrontation, as do many others.  But I do like combat in my RPGs and adventure games. Volence is inherent in heroic adventure. I can't think of any good adventure ever told where someone didn't die or have to fight.

I was actually thinking about this the other day. 

I have a challenge. 

Excluding boss battles. Go through any Super Mario Bros. game without killing anything. It's actually fun, and on certain titles raises the challenge level.

I think developers can always make a game fun without combat. I think certain games kind of require it. I like my RPGs to have battles, and I think without some kind of combat there I wouldn't play.

Portal shows that an FPS game doesn't necessarily have to be about gun-battles and war. It can be humourous and loaded with puzzles.

They don't need to, but they do because that's where the money is. Stuff like The Room is example of good design without the need for violence.

There are good games that can be done without conflict. It's generally possible to play through Metal Gear Solid games entirely on stealth, supposedly Fallout: New Vegas, and there have been good puzzle and adventure games that were completely without the player having to kill enemies.

I love combat, but I totally agree with you about Uncharted.  It's a great example of a game with too much unnecessary fighting.  It dragged the whole game down.  It would of been a much better game with exploration and puzzles to solve.  

I played a bit of Uncharted last night when I got home. Just as I started having fun another flurry of bullets started raining down on me. It's crazy how much gunplay they put in! Another title that was superb without having tons of violent areas was Ico.

Dang! Can't believe I missed this post on Saturday.

I really like the fact that folks are starting look around and question the necessity of heavy combat-focused game elements. And like most people have already said here, I'm not saying that combating enemies should be completely wiped out. But I can't help but to notice that more and more so-called "Triple-A" titles (and some not-so-triple-A) require you to beat your enemies to a bloody pulp, toss 'em off a cliff, and take a dump on their mangled body to finally kill them and move on.

Sure, the industry says that its what gamers want. But handed really just want good games. There are other things that can make game awesome and fun besides just fighting, fighting, and more fighting.

short answer - yes

long answer - is axcxtually coming soon in a future blog, if I gain the courage to post it. It's rather dark and could be seen as scary. it was orignally meant for 1up.com's "why I play games" question not long ago but decided nto to post it for fear of it getting flagged and my account shut down for offenseive content.