More Blood & Gore In Future Updates?

So I’m fully digging the desolate and ominous vibe portrayed by the visuals and the music. Just seconds after entering Fort Freiheit and the tone is set perfectly into gruesome detail. Blood smeers and splatters over the ground. I love it. It really fits the Lovecraftian / the Thing like aliens as well.

But, I’d love to see this go a bit further. As of now, you see hardly to no blood or gore when a soldier or enemy gets shot and especially when killed. Yes, there is a bleeding animation for when one of the body parts is actually bleeding.

(side note, and I’m sorry to say this, but I don’t particulary like the look of an entire limb / body part becoming fully bloodied in such cases. For instance, the soldier torso, it just looks weird; it’s too much blood - yes I’m aware of the irony of me saying that in a topic labeled “more blood & gore”, but there’s a place for everything. Your entire torso just doesn’t magically become covered with blood due to a bleeding effect. On top of that, what makes it even less believable is when the torso is healed which causes the blood to magically dissapear. I’d love to see this changed).

But let’s get back to more blood & gore. Some of you might have played Ninja Gaiden 2? The blood & gore was just perfect there. Limb removal, cutting enemies in half, decaptiations. Combine that with some proper blood splatters that can cover both ground and other pieces of environment and you got a killer combination that perfectly compliments the tone that has been set for Phoenix Point.

TLDR:

Look I’m certainly not proposing excessive blood and gore. Because that would also make it laughable and cartoonish. I’m simply suggesting that a fitting amount should be more present, just to add that little extra dash of realism into the mix.

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Its more about strategy then violence. That would increase censors ratings to 18+ or even higher.

I am sure you can always play Mortal Kombat for blood splashes.

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It’s not about the violence, it’s about the tone that it’s setting. Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel had this type of violence which perfectly complemented the feel of the game.

For the record, I don’t like games like Mortal Kombat; the blood and gore there is one of the main selling points. In what I propose, the blood and gore would simply add to the atmosphere of the game. World of difference.

Also, if they really didn’t want that 18+ label, they shouldn’t have tossed in that much blood smeers and splatters to begin with. That already clearly sets an 18+ tone.

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Too much blood and gore might actually distract from the horror theme they want, though. There are several kinds of horror–splatterpunk is one, but PP seems to be going for more Lovecraftian horror. Too much blood could make it seem splatterpunk rather than Lovecraft, so just having limbs bleed might be a good compromise. Also, having limbs fly off could be more work to animate and end up looking silly ;o

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Yeah, too much violence could easily induce a Gorn effect. That is not a reference to Star Trek by the way, but to “Gore Porn.” See TVTropes

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Guys seriously, “too much” ? There’s 0 blood when a soldier or enemy dies. I take it you do know how a biological body works right? When it gets punctured and killed by multiple bullets it’s gonna bleed, badly. If a grenade explodes next to a biological body its going to get mutilated, badly. And for the crabman pincers, just think about a gigantic crab scissor cutting you to pieces. So please don’t tell me that the absence of blood is going to distract from the horror theme as this makes 0 sense. Even worse, it just makes the entire horror concept more laughable.

Again, there are already ample blood smeers and splatters on the ground. They have Lovecraftian - the Thing like aliens and if you ever even watched “the Thing” you’d know that they didn’t remove all blood and gore to help emphasize the horror theme, which again, would make 0 sense. I also fully detest the modern horror trope which revolves around scares through loud noises rather than top notch body horror.

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Hmm, well, maybe “gibbing” might be an option (i.e having explosives completely destroy a body). In Xenonauts that happened with powerful explosives, and actually gave the game tactical depth, because you wanted to be very careful with powerful explosives–on the one hand, they could destroy enemies easily, but on the other hand, “gibbing” aliens destroyed their corpses and equipments, meaning you couldn’t salvage or research them.

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Look I’m certainly not proposing excessive blood and gore. Because that would also make it laughable and cartoonish. I’m simply suggesting that a fitting amount should be more present, just to add that little extra dash of realism into the mix.

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That’s the way I understood what you were saying. I was just voicing my worries that it can easily be taken too far.

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I suppose they could add bleeding to the corpses when a unit dies, like a pool of blood would appear where its body is. Actually…you know, in another thread we were discussing about how it can be very hard to see dropped equipment from corpses. Maybe adding a bloodstain to where dropped items are would both be the extra bit of gore you’re looking for and give a visual indication of where items are located. :mushroom:

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Please take a look at Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood Of Steel, especially with regards to the blood and gore. I’m 37, so maybe it’s a game from before your time, but that game was perfect for that time and it basically has the same grim tone Phoenix Point seems to be going for.

Blood and gore in all the isometric Fallout games (the oldies) was over the top and comedic. We’re talking about exploding body parts, melting under plasma fire, combusting to ashes when hit by a flamethrower.

While i wouldn’t mind a bit more blood and alien juices when biological targets get wasted, I wouldn’t aim for early Fallout style in Phoenix Point.

That said, do we know towards which certification is Phoenix Point aiming? I don’t remember seeing it but then I never really paid attention to that. It could significantly impact the type of violence they’re allowed to show. FiraXcom was PEGI 18 while XCOM 2 is PEGI 16, which apparently impacted on stuff like Chryssalid infestation animation. Maybe @UnstableVoltage knows more about this?

I support this. My thoughts while fighting the queen were: “I blew off her pincers. I would very much like to see at least one of those really blown off.” You know, sort of like her carapace in this picture. Now it does have to happen every time for every body part, but sometimes would be really nice. And sight of a queen with several legs turned into stumps, crawling on the ground towards your soldiers would make for a very pleasant creepy horror experience.
This could obviously not work on your soldiers (getting arm blown off and then repaired by technician would be weird) but I would like to see this implemented for bosses. At least where applicable.

edit: Now I recalled the development demo handled this better. Could not find the original video, but here’s one from @UnstableVoltage here

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This kind of blood for our dying soldiers our aliens would be balanced. But please no blood splashes on each hit.Death animations are good enough.

Actually with regard to soldiers their limbs getting blown off… I would vouch for limbs NOT being able to get healed by the Technician, because first of all, I think the Technician should stick to Vehicle “healing” and second, if a soldier, who’s limb has been blown off, survives the ordeal, they can give him a cyborg limb back at HQ. That would be much cooler imho.

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I wasn’t too hot about healing limbs on the field either. Doing some damage control, reducing will loss or stopping the bleeding are ok, but making the limb usable again sounds too outlandish to me.

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Some violence in Fallout Tactics: BOS was over the top yes. The Plasma weapons melting somebody is more comedic than realistic. The flamer, shouldn’t turn people instantly to ash; on that I agree as well. But conventional weapons such as rifles, shotguns, snipers and grenades portrayed the blood and gore realistically enough imho.

Bodies torn to shreds to a grenade isn’t improbable. More probable than improbable actually. A shotgun at close range completely wrecking a body also is quite realistic. Killing enemies with rifles and snipers was done realistically as well in terms of blood and gore.

So yeah, I would still consider FT: BOS a good point of reference for a suitable amount of blood and gore.