In many games, like GTA, Saints Row, Fallout, Skyrim, etc, an interesting feature is that you can kill almost anyone you see. Is this feature really important, fun, or necessary? How do you go about it? Is it worth it to code every NPC as kill-able or not? Discuss =]
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Consequence free killing is boring (like in GTA and Saints-Row).
It’s more interesting in games like fallout, because there are consequences. You can kill main quest givers and lose access to content, people will come after you etc etc. It makes killing a NPC a more serious matter.
Killing people for teh lolz is boring and kinda weird.
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If you create consequences to actions in the game, then it might add something to the game. A character that kills innocents becomes a criminal and is chased by the authorities and must live on the edge, always running. That might be fun. Letting them do it with no consequences other than losing access to content is to me, worthless. It not only makes the rest of the game more frustrating (less access so less content) but it makes no sense in the context of the game.
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It’s a punishment. It’s the opposite to a lot of games that reward you for killing.
It can lead to a lot of interesting situations. Quest X requires you to kill Y, but if you do it, that npc is then dead forever (and whatever content came with him) and that village he was living in will come after you.
You can then approach that dillema from multiple perspectives, roleplaying (my character is ethical! I refuse to do killing), min maxing (which quest gives me the best reward), or which character of those do I like best etc etc.
It’s more fun than kill and get X points, then the police arrive and you kill them for X points! POINTS ALL AROUND.
It is not a punishment. 
A punishment would be if the player who killed is hung as sunset in the town square. Consequences are the natural result of doing something that isn’t acceptable in a given culture/game.
If you want a game where you only reward for killing, you would of course, not care if you kill innocents or not since the entire point of the game is to kill. If that were true of all games, the OP’s question would be mute. But of course, it is not true for all games.
Your idea of the village coming after you is the same as mine. lol The authorities can be anything in game, from the local NPC law, a player-led posse in an MMO, or the irate villagers. I did not mean the developers/etc. when I used the word authorities. I mean the local authorities such as in-game police, sheriff, king’s guard, etc.
Well, originally, I said “lose access to content, people will come after you”, bundling those two ideas together. Then you replied like I was suggesting only the first idea on its own, proposing the second idea as an alternative, then I expanded on what I meant.
So… Yeah, whatever, I think we agree. 
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I like to kill to survive in games, I’m never actually mean to anything, not even ambient wildlife in games. I guess it takes all kinds.
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To be fair, most of the NPC’s I kill probably deserve it in some fashion, it just wouldn’t hold up well in court. “I’m sorry that I can’t explain Judge, but if Lautrec hadn’t somehow slipped off that cliff, he would have done something pretty dickish. And Patches… well he’s just an asshole so whatever.”
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You know, it is not a bad thing to kill NPCs in games. 
They are just a bunch of polygons after all. The OP asked if it were fun, important, or necessary, not whether it was moral. lol
I am imagining that if you like to kill stuff in games, you want that action of yours to actually DO something in game. Maybe in a multiplayer game keeping others from getting quests from dead noncombat NPCs is enough for you to have fun. But I would imagine, that for most people, it is not that much fun.
PvP is fun because you have to actually work to kill the other player. Killing combative NPCs is fun I guess because they fight back. But not sure what is fun if they just stand there and let you kill them. In all my years of playing online games, I have to say that I never did get why killing the shopkeeper was fun, other than ruining game play for others. In a single player game, I guess it is something to do…don’t know…seems weird.
So…most of us just make innocents and quest givers invulnerable to death or we have attacking them trigger the guards to run out of nowhere. Now the player can have fun fighting the guards! In Morrowind I remember killing someone or stealing something and having the local law treat me like a criminal. It was a shock to me as I had never had that happen in a game before. Kind of cool…although frustrating. lol I think I started over and was much more careful the second time.
So…what is fun to players? Killing something that doesn’t fight back? Do they hate having consequences for their behavior? Isn’t getting a bit frustrated a part of the entire game cycle? Frustration, then resolution equals fun?
My view is pretty much the same as above.
If the game is set up for it, you can role play a villain, and this may at some point involve killing innocent NPCs. If the game is done well, this can bring a refreshing change in story, goals, and game mechanisms.
While there isn’t much challenge involved for players to kill innocent bystander type NPCs, when one is in the role of villain this action can be a way to trigger more challenging confrontations. So in design I wouldn’t lean on bystander killing very heavily - I’d use it very sparingly - and I’d put more effort into the other aspects of villain play, which would hopefully involve more challenging strategies and other traditional game rewards.
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The more important question to ask is WHY would you want to kill an NPC that is “innocent.” The issue is that innocence is situational. If there are NPC’s who otherwise won’t attack you but will raise alarms, I would imagine most players will want to take them out in some form.
It’s important to understand what the point of an NPC is. If they are there just to be information dispensers then it makes sense to not have them be killable. If NPC’s are there to improve play though, it could be possibly beneficial to be able to kill everyone in sight.
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Nope.
I find it boring, but good if I have a bad day at work.
Killing annoying NPCs maybe fun to a point.
How lucky you are to be so easily entertained! 
Killing cops is fun in gta sometimes, not always.
I don’t think cops count as innocents, at least in GTA. They are the targets.
Wow…can’t believe I typed that. Very sad.
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You could evade them, but thats a game playing preference anyways. Technically they are innocents, they get in the way easily :p. But lets not change the topic of the thread.
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Lots of interesting views, guys 8)
Well let’s rephrase “innocent” to “not hostile”. Maybe that will help somewhat?
When I look at it… I guess humans are really jerks at heart. Let’s be honest, how many of you guys have went on a massacre just because you could and then reloaded your last save? I tend to play the goody-two-shoes in games, though I will admit I’ve done my fair share of massacring. And there’s nothing wrong with that imo, as video game characters aren’t real =P
I was just wondering about things on the technical side of view, and whether it’d be worth it to go through the trouble of flagging every NPC as killable or not.
And I think the consensus was: If you do nothing interesting mechanically with that, there’s no point in just flagging every NPC as killable, just for the sake of it.
(Side note: In Skyrim I played through the whole Dark Brotherhood quest line. SPOILER: One of the last missions make you assassinate the Emperor. The mission itself was okay, but I felt a bit let down, that the only change I saw in the world was, a guard said something like “I heard the emperor was killed”, I was expecting something to happen. That’s when I gave up on Skyrim as well)
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I would tend toward not flagging them as killable, because I don’t want them to interfere with targeting. In my game I want it to be easy to target the actual enemies. I will probably have the innocents still get affected by physics effects, though, as I think it would add to the drama, but they won’t take damage. They’ll run away.
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Alright thanks I’ll keep that in mind
And I felt the exact same way haha! I was disappointed by that too. And another thing that disappointed me (SPOILER ALERT) is how easy he was to get to and kill. I was expecting more of a challenge