Quote:
Originally Posted by Prince Charon
I think Bloodlust is meant to simulate/represent fictional characters who act that way, rather than any real psychological condition or combination of defined conditions.
|
I generally think of Bloodlust as representing the way I used to play a lot of video games when I was younger. Good examples are
Thief 2: The Metal Age and
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. In both cases, typically anytime there were hostiles nearby, I'd make it a point to kill all of them, even if it wasn't necessary - although in cases where you were penalized for killing foes (such as the first level of
Thief 2, where killing anybody was an instant Game Over), I would simply make due with knocking everyone out. For
Thief 2, this often meant that with patrols of multiple foes, I would typically knock out the first few and backstab the last (knocking someone out with a blackjack was silent, but backstabbing with a sword wasn't), then either hack away at each unconscious body until it turned into a corpse or kill them in some other way (such as throwing them into sufficiently-deep water; unconscious foes will drown if you do so). For
Metal Gear Solid 2, this would often mean that with foes I tranquilized or knocked out some other way, I'd shoot them in the head or heart (if I had a silenced lethal weapon and didn't need to worry about conserving ammunition) or I'd purposefully wake them up (by continuously picking them up and setting them back down initially, spraying them in the face with coolant later once I had that item) just so I could get them into a neck lock and snap their neck. I couldn't tell you
why I felt compelled to always kill foes (I would simply knock out civilians in cases where it was risky to leave them running around to warn guards and the like), but I did. Playing games where one is penalized in some way for killing foes (the city basically decaying in
Dishonored, getting less XP for lethal takedowns in
Deus Ex: Human Revolution, etc) has pretty much broken me of that, even for games where killing instead of knocking out
isn't penalized (like
Cyberpunk 2077) although I do still find myself compelled to at least render all foes unconscious (I'll also typically go out of my way to kill foes that the lore indicates are absolutely horrible people).