I have a strong memory of being 12 years old, lying awake at night with the melancholic feeling this article describes, with the realisation that those beasts never did anything to me and I was essentially going out of my way to trick and slaughter them.
No other game has invoked that feeling in me since. It's a very special game. It remains one of my favourites and a stellar example of what the medium can achieve.
Ikaruga and Journey should be mentioned in the same conversation. More recently, Undertale and Death Stranding, pick up similar conceptual throughlines ("choice" and "connection", respectively), albeit in less elegant ways, owing to their expanded scope.
These are two distinct techniques and I feel the latter almost always failed to impress me much, while the first one is where I feel caught, even shocked by myself and the cold-bloodiness to (virtually) follow any suggestion to kill.
I appreciate the honesty of recognizing that you commented without reading the article, but could you not? Your experience could have added so much more had you placed it in context with the rest of the article.
Besides the questionable morality of kill=experience=progress in typical hack'n'slash or roguelike, what started to irritate me in there as I grew older as well, was the stupid mechanics where crowds of enemies described as intelligent humanoids (i.e. not animals or robots) facing clearly overpowered high-level PC (famous, even) never surrendered, almost never tried to flee, attacked one-by-one, and shoved no sign of tactical thinking or self-preservation instinct. Despite being armed and (by description) organised, PC could enter a narrow corridor, defeat dozen of them without taking any damage, yet there will be a waiting line eager for demise by a single hit -- even actively advancing towards it. No attempt to regroup, to take advantage of the number superiority, wait in open space, ambush from all directions, or anything like that. Same applies to most FPS: there is a Doomguy running around at unprecedented pace, slaughtering everything that moves, but we will all keep our scattered positions. (This led me to a thought, whether it would be possible to rearrange enemies in canonical Doom map so that all would attack at once at some appropriate spot and whether it would guarantee their victory or not.)
Many things are unnatural in games: you don't instantly recover from a beating by eating one apple in real life, but we're ok with it in games because it makes the gameplay fun.
The original Gothic for example. When you were high level, other low level NPC would rather run.
I also thought hard about the concept, how to make FPS games still fun, but a bit more realistic. The thing is, in most settings this means reducing lots of enemies - as realistic would be, once you start shooting, they all come for you. Not 3. And then maybe another 2. And so on.. and then you would not have a chance, unless you get special powers (or quick save and quick load part of the mechanics)
Chasing enemies is much more annoying than them coming to you, so that would be a punishment to the player.
Players don't like when you punish them in that way, they want to kill the monsters they don't want an upgrade that makes you more powerful make it harder to kill monsters since now they start running.
I see somebody in another comment complaining that enemies who get frightened rob the player of the fun of battles. So it depends what it's all about.
That said, this is a common thing in articles about e.g. video games - "I wish they mentioned X". I too wish that but at the same time, one needs limits.
The "good ending" depends on your behavior in the three open areas of the game.
You can still kill "monsters" (mutated humans, animals, cannibals, bandits) without impact, but you should minimize killing other humans, such as slaves, or even hostile but "misguided" NPCs (people that just want you to stay out of their settlement, that you are required to traverse, and who will shoot you on sight).
This is something you can actually achieve pretty easily, just by using stealth.
But reading older posts on this game, many people found this difficult, as the game made easy and satisfying to kill from the shadows.
The article uses the word "dilemma" exactly once in the introduction, mostly because that's not really what the article is about. Instead it's a reflection of the melancholy of playing a game where, justified as your actions may be, the entire act of killing is surrounded in sadness.
In Dark Souls specifically (mild spoilers) your character is fighting to prevent essentially the end of a world that's falling into decay. Yes, you kill enemies, but the enemies themselves are corrupted creatures who went mad and you only kill them to prevent the corruption to spread even more. Your end may be justified, but that doesn't mean you can't be sad about having to kill them to begin with.
It's highly debatable whether players actually feel melancholy when fighting monsters in Dark Souls. Putting aside the fact that the story is notoriously cryptic and reliant on player speculation, yes, the lore of Dark Souls is tragic. However, this is the sadness of the 'lore,' not an emotion driven by the 'gameplay.' The problem is that this tragedy must be pieced together by reading flavor text. Does the game actually communicate this naturally during play? Not really. The player is simply thrown into a brutally hostile world and left to suffer. In reality, players hunt these monsters to buy gear or level up, not out of melancholy.
Shadow of the Colossus portrays tragedy brilliantly in this regard because you actively track down and stab peacefully existing creatures. But I strongly question whether Dark Souls and Spec Ops: The Line belong in that same category. Spec Ops: The Line forces you to commit atrocities just to emphasize a protagonist going mad, and in Dark Souls, every monster is inherently hostile toward you. I find it hard to believe a player would feel genuine melancholy from this kind of deceptive design, where the game fixes your choices entirely on a linear track just to force a tragic point.
Normally, when an enemy is that hostile, your only thought is, 'I just need to kill this bastard.' The sadness in Dark Souls is a retroactive feeling you get from piecing together flavor text. While I appreciate the depth of that narrative, it's very hard to put it on the same level as making unprovoked attacks on peaceful monsters (Shadow of the Colossus) or actually having the mechanical choice to spare them (Undertale).
Pacifist is more like a puzzle game, and I didn’t find it all that challenging at all.
If you go the “kill only some people” route, I don’t think you would ever really be strong enough for this to be fun due to not levelling up enough to keep up with later stage enemies. So you’re going to be heavily incentivized to go full pacifist to bypass levelling entirely or genocide to get enough levels. Then of course you’ll hit the wall at the end…
There also are plenty of cute-animal mobs that weren't going to bother you unless you started something. An example that still stands out for me is the first set of sleeping bears in LOTRO.
EDIT: it does, I just had to google "Ebrietas latin" (and got https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ebrietas), otherwise it only returned references to the monster.
Taking shots on animals living their life in the forest and on the fields imposes a moral/ethical question, especially if you are not being attacked or would otherwise starve to death.
Assuming the deer were in such a social structure to begin with, they'll be alone for maybe a day before another stag steps up. Deer do not exist in a gender ratio of 6:1.
This is more correlated with modern games. Modern games, at the least non-Indie games, dumbed down the gameplay. I am not saying such games are awful per se, but they are often very simplified to the 1990s era in many ways.
Many old RPG games are quite complex; or told as a story. The old Betrayal at Krondor was kind of like a novel - unsurprisingly since Feist wrote most of the content (save various adjustments made to the gameplay itself). Yes, graphics are bad, options are too few, but storyline-wise this was my favourite RPG. Another example would be "Realms of Arcania" (in german the three DSA games). Again, graphics today are not great, and playing it in english versus german is actually worse (one of the few games where german was better than english, by the way), but the gameplay options in the second part were nice. Part 3 was a bit different, and people critisized it, but I still liked that you would explore a "real" city while still having tons of options available. Other RPGs such as Baldur's Gate 2 are a bit different - DnD itself is IMO a very bad system for RPGs (takes too long to explain now, but just look at static alignment systems - that makes zero sense) and most of it was focused on hack-and-slay for power and items, so it has the same problems. But with mods you can kind of extend the story and add more storylines, thus having more options. So BG2 is not the best example here, compared to the other two; even before that, if you remember the old Ultima series, the NPCs kind of had a regular life, worked at specific times, went to work leaving their homes (and you could then pillage that) and so forth. A lot of the "why do I want to slay the cute monster", is driven by the underlying design. These games often try to dumb down everything. I noticed this first with World of Warcraft. To me these games never were interesting, as it seems to have been deliberately dumbed down. Many of those games today are more like a movie with a bit interaction in between. That's imo not quite a game anymore. There are some exceptions though; I liked little nightmares, but this is also a simplified, mostly linear gameplay. This problem keeps on coming back again and again. For some reason modern games hate complexity. Either humans became dumber, or designers wanted to simplify things.
Those mechanisms ideally also represent some fictional world, so there's something approximately similar to a story to be found there, but that's plenty enough story already. The rest is the player actually having adventures, spontaneously. There's some use for a story in providing a goal and an ending, but beyond that it's likely to put the game on rails, like a movie or a novel.
I mean, a linear game has a charm of its own. I also enjoy point-and-clicks. There are different genres of game. But I think an interactive organic open world is the true one.
2. you're comparing unfairly (looking at the most complex examples from the past and comparing them to modern average). There were LOTS of very simplistic games in the past. You just don't think about most of them. Some genres went extinct because of how simplistic they were (see the dungeon crawlers where there was no dialogue or story whatsoever - just moving at 90 degree and hitting monsters) - it's the "old music was better" fallacy - you don't remember the old music that sucked.
If you compare most complex modern games they blow out of the water anything from the past. Let's say Baldur's Gate 3 or Dwarf Fortress or Minecraft compared to let's say Elite or Betrayal at Krondor.
I didn't see it like that. Atreus thinks he and his father are normal humans, even if he saw his father perform incredible feats of strength such as carrying a huge tree trunk. Atreus has no idea what his father is capable of, and he himself has been mostly sick and frail. The boy is scared. Nowhere does that scene read as "That looks humanoid, I don't think we should kill it". Draugrs are more humanoid and they've been killing some on the way. The troll is incredibly fierce and the largest opponent they faced until now. That's a completely natural reaction from the boy with no moral implications.
It's actually a little later in the game when they're assaulted by Reavers (actual living humans talking about eating them) that Atreus kills one in self defense and remains shocked by the experience. Kratos shows empathy and care when he comforts him and says "Close your heart to it". [1]
There's a deep thread about humanity and the right or need to kill in self defense in the game, and Atreus goes through a rebellious phase where he thinks godhood gives him the right to do anything. But the troll scene? That's reading too much into it.
1. https://youtu.be/_oOZG5-tqpA?si=w6-PyJXjTZ-qSv2q&t=4173
I may have missed or forgotten the explanation behind that though. I suppose he was always stuck in the safe area around their house?
That aside, the new God of War games are great, and the whole franchise is a good example of how they took a fairly straightforward character - savage, angery fellow - and evolved his story and character over a long span of time, subverting itself etc.
(The Valhalla DLC is where Kratos goes to therapy lolol)
"Don't go there - there are mines there" is what my mother would say occasionally back when we were living in Kuwait in the mid 90s.
I guess it's a similar situation.