Skyrim Modders Create Workaround for Killing Children (in Game)
By David Murphy - PC Magazine
There's trouble brewing in Skyrim, the recently released (and much-anticipated) role-playing game for PCs, the Xbox 360, and the PlayStation 3. But it doesn't involve dragons – the game's chief antagonists – or any other in-game baddie. It involves children.
Digital kids might not sound quite as fearsome as some of the other inhabitants of the Skyrim world, and that's because they aren't. In fact, they've been designed so that they're relatively immune to anything that happens within the world itself. And that's what has left some players feeling a bit miffed: They want to be able to kill kids, and developer Bethesda Game Studios has made that an impossible task in Skyrim.
And thus enters the modding community. While Skyrim's wee ones might be protected in both the game's Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions, the third-party development community has already conjured up a PC modification that, once installed, makes Skyrim children as squishy and mortal as everything else within the gaming environment. Available on the site Skyrim Nexus, the mod requires users to both register an account and unblock adult content on the site before they can grab it.
Bethesda Game Studios has already tipped its hat to controversy by allowing a player's character within the game to marry either male or female non-player characters (NPCs). Beyond that, a gamer is free to do just about anything he or she wants within the gaming world: Brawl, pickpocket, steal from stores, murder, et cetera.
That said, the subject of kid-killing has always been a hands-off affair. And some gamers consider Skyrim incomplete without the, er, feature.
"It's sad that modders are forced to fix a game that's being released as broken," said Twitter user @rap_tram, as reported by Kotaku's Owen Good.
"Because we don't let you kill children. Got it," replied Pete Hines, vice president of PR and marketing at Bethesda Softworks.
It's certainly true that some gamers just want to install the modification and be jerks, channeling their inner Anakin Skywalker to obliterate villages en masse.
For some gamers, however, an open world game that allows you to do just about anything under the sun needs to have ramifications for actions of all kinds – like accidentally tossing a fireball too close to an important figure. Or, removing the player character from the equation, plot-initiated actions like having a dragon obliterate a village. To these gamers, it seems a bit odd that an entire town would be wiped off the map in a fiery blaze save for six-year-old Billy Immortal and his little friends.
That said, if you're waiting for Bethesda to offer up some kind of patch that unlocks the ability to exterminate children at a whim, don't hold your breath – dragon or otherwise.
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Originally Posted by PorkChopSandwiches
(don't want that happening in the first place? don't put kids in the game, like Fable does)
