What are we losing by keeping the game PEGI 13+?

[Veprovina.4876]

5 hours ago, Labjax.2465 said:

Idk, there are places in-between 13 and being gratuitous, and "mature" does not have to mean depressing. I think that perception is largely owed to media that basically acts like "if we're gonna go for a not-family-friendly rating, then we might as well go as dark as possible." Tbf, younger rating also doesn't have to mean boring for adults. Some media for kids actually has pretty clever writing (spongebob comes to mind) where it's both entertaining for kids and has stuff that an adult might relate to, but is written in such a way it will go over the kid's head. I think what you can gain (granted, it doesn't always pan out this way, it often seems to lean toward gratuitous in practice) is writing that is more explicitly about adult issues and experiences, without needing to code everything under layers of euphemism and metaphor. In other words, one thing you can gain is writing that more precisely helps adults process things and feel seen.

But I realize some people would not want that and it's prob way late for a major tonal shift, I see this as more of a theoretical convo about it. I'm just saying where value could be in it for some without needing to be gratuitous.

Well sure there doesn't have to be all that for the game to be "mature" but when did that ever happen realistically?
I mean, who makes games for 16 year olds so that the tone is "more mature than 13 but less than 18" as opposed to just R or M rating of 18 or 21+, and then going all in?

 

Also, i fail to see really what topics need to be covered in a GAME, about adults and adult experiences that need to be outright stated in such a way that the game suddenly gets an R rating and can't be normally written for everyone to enjoy. Those who know what it's about will get it, those who don't, will still be able to enjoy the story regardless.

Plus, you get a 2 for 1 there, once those who don't get it grow up and experience what that story was talking about, then they can get back to it with a fresh understanding.

 

Not everything has to be in your face, and honestly, if adults can't deal with their stuff and need a game to feel "seen", are they really adults? That seems to be changing more and more, so whatever you feel the answer to that question is - i feel that GW2 doesn't need to be that game, to give adults moral support or whatever with mature stories.

 

Especially not, like you say, so late in the lifetime. The tonal shift alone would probably kill the game outright.

So, it's not gonna happen.

 

But theoretically, i also think this is not the place for such things anyway.

[Danikat.8537]

I think it's important to remember age ratings on games (and films) are not about the intended audience but purely about who is it not suitable for.

Microsoft Flight Simulator is rated 3+ by PEGI and 'E for everybody' by the ESRB and I assume had similarly low ratings from other boards. It's obviously not intended for young children (Microsoft themselves say the recommended age is 14+) and the main market is adults, but ratings boards don't care about that. They rate it purely on the basis that it has nothing in it which the governments/societies who use their ratings consider inappropriate for children.

By the same logic you could (and someone probably has) made a very simple and easy to control flight game with cutesy cartoon graphics where if you fail you get a graphic image of a bloody, mangled corpse falling out the wreckage of the plane and it would be rated 16+ or 18+.

It's the same with writing. You could write the most infantile drivel imaginable and if you throw in as much swearing as possible and some sex and drug references it will be rated 18+, or you could write a serious and thoughtful narrative exploring different ways to confront emotionally difficult topics and how people come to terms with them over time and get rated 7+ for 'fear'.

[Labjax.2465]

1 hour ago, Danikat.8537 said:

I think that's a limitation of the type of game, not the age rating. The game is designed to be a persistent online world shared with all the other players and where you can keep playing the same character for years. So they can't (permanently) kill off that character, or have any type of 'game over' ending where you made the wrong choices and now the world is destroyed. They can't even reasonably allow different players to make different choices with noticeable effects because it would split the playerbase. If one player chose to kill Aurene when she first hatched because they saw another potential elder dragon as nothing but a threat, or sided with the White Mantle, or let a major reoccurring character die or whatever they'd have to get a different version of every subsequent release, and there would have to be another one for each of those choices.

This is why a lot of single-player games go with the illusion of choice instead of real choices. It turns out relatively few people want to be the bad guy in a game, and very few replay it to see all the different choices, so the logical decision for developers is to offer choices that all lead to the same place rather than waste time building whole sections of a game which very few players will ever see. (I don't like that, because I am one of the people who will play the same game multiple times to see how it's different, but I understand why they'd do that.)

I see where you're coming from (I think) but I'm not so much thinking of player choices as I am the style of writing. One of the reasons I said not all of it applies to this game is because of stuff like the early living world; in that way, actions irrevocably did have consequences. The way in which they did it, as I understand, was not very popular, but that was a form of writing where X leads to Y because Z and there's no undo button.

I think it was an interesting experiment, if nothing else, and maybe it's just not very doable to write in a way where consequences seem real in a video game without doing things like that. But... that being said, though I'm struggling a bit to conjure specific examples at this tired hour for me, what I'm thinking of is partly just this idea of writing where one thing logically follows from another. Kind of like butterfly effect writing you see in some stories about time travel, but less grandiose and absurd. There is a lot of modern writing I see where it's like "they did this and that caused this to happen and then... something something... shocking twist! no one saw that coming!" Except no one could have seen it coming because it wasn't actually explained how we got from point A to point B and if you analyze it after, you realize it doesn't even make sense. That kind of writing I'm not sure fits outside of the adult genre because for one, it's more slow burn and for another, it's more realistic. And writing for kids, teens, etc., I think tends to lean on metaphor and reversible stakes more because it's more about teaching some kind of lesson and being entertaining while doing it.

Idk if I'm making sense, I feel like there's some half-articulated thoughts here, but I tried lol.

[Mungrul.9358]

43 minutes ago, Labjax.2465 said:

I think it was an interesting experiment, if nothing else, and maybe it's just not very doable to write in a way where consequences seem real in a video game without doing things like that.

I miss the choices, and feel they could have explored them some more, but they seem to have completely abandoned the idea of branching storylines post-core.

It's a shame, but it's also incredibly hard and labour-intensive to write a story for a game that remembers and reflects a player's choices.

 

 

I also feel they lost something between the first and second games, when it comes to interesting leveraging of their instancing technology.

I loved going back to zones in GW1 where the monster population would change to reflect how far along in the storyline I was. It was an incredible technological and narrative achievement, but I can understand how it would be very difficult to implement in the more traditional MMO world of GW2.

 

It would be exciting to see someone else explore what could be done with this, but I suspect it would have to be something outside of the Guild Wars franchise now (unless a dev sees my post and feels inspired to see what they can do with the tech of course 😄 ).

[Danikat.8537]

1 hour ago, Mungrul.9358 said:

I miss the choices, and feel they could have explored them some more, but they seem to have completely abandoned the idea of branching storylines post-core.

It's a shame, but it's also incredibly hard and labour-intensive to write a story for a game that remembers and reflects a player's choices.

The personal stories branching was pretty limited. It was well hidden if you only went through it once but most of the choices have no impact at all after the end of the chapter they're part of and the number of available paths is gradually reduced as you go along, so everyone ends up at the same ending no matter what choices they made along the way.
 

1 hour ago, Mungrul.9358 said:

It would be exciting to see someone else explore what could be done with this, but I suspect it would have to be something outside of the Guild Wars franchise now (unless a dev sees my post and feels inspired to see what they can do with the tech of course 😄 ).

Elder Scrolls Online tried something similar. Areas would change based on which quests you'd completed and sometimes your choices within them, for example a town might be under attack when you first arrive, then safe or burned down depending on how the quest played out. They did it through phasing, where there's not only multiple copies of each map like GW2 has but multiple copies of each area within the map, with different appearances and NPCs and which one you were put into depended on your choices in the story.

It was a nice detail for solo players and those who went through everything with the same group, but it made it pretty much impossible to play with anyone unless you went through everything together and always made the same choices, because otherwise you'd keep going into different copies of the map. You could be grouped with someone, cross an invisible area boundary and suddenly they'd disappear - you'd still be in the party and could still talk but couldn't play together because you were in different versions of that area. It could also make the world seem very empty because you'd only ever see players who had made the same choices you did. (Add on the fact that you could only play with people in the same region and the same faction as you - so 1/6 of the players maximum - and it probably contributed to the game seeming empty and unpopular when it first came out.)

They mostly got rid of that system a year or two after the game came out because they decided allowing players to see each other was more important.

Edited September 5, 2022 by Danikat.8537

[Astralporing.1957]

I think you're mistaking it. A lot of things you complain about are not a direct effect of Anet trying to fit within the "Teen" classification. It's just a byproduct of Anet's idea of how the game should look like. SOmeone already brought in a comparison with FF XIV - the armor skins do get way more skimpy (and "adult") than anything in GW2, the story gets way more dark and nuanced in some places than GW2 can ever be - and yet both games have the same rating. It's obviously not the rating that makes the difference there. It's the ideas of narrative and art teams.

Language is indeed moderated in both cases, ,but it's also still below what the rating would allow for.

So, to answer the question, we aren't losing anything meaningful. Unless you consider more gore and explicit adult content to be important in a MMORPG game - i don't.

[ugrakarma.9416]

I think its not always in that way, the personal history and core game are darky, with lots of alcohol apology....

 

The thing got off the rails, something after HoT, probably linked to flood of "shiny" stuff.

[Valisha.8650]

10 hours ago, Veprovina.4876 said:

And what exactly would we be getting by making it "more mature"?

The whole point of the forum thread was to discuss this very question.

10 hours ago, Veprovina.4876 said:

I mean, if you think this game is for kids and it's bothering you, don't play it...

"It's Murica! Love it or leave it!" is not the most productive approach to discussions, you know.

10 hours ago, Veprovina.4876 said:

I fail to see what "juicy combat", and "bad words" would bring to the atmosphere and feel of the game...

You want every other NPC to cuss or something? Cause i don't.

If you want "mature content" play games that have it. There is nothing that would be improved in Tyria by making it bloody with cussing and presumably you want sex scenes in there too to not make the story "disney-ish" or something?

I mean, tis a fair opinion. Just know saying "Nothing would be improved by XYZ" refers to your point of view, not quite some objective truth.

10 hours ago, Veprovina.4876 said:

This is not that kind of game, and thank god this is not that kind of game, i would probably stop playing it years ago if they started making Tyria some depressing "mature" gorey edgelord place.

I mean, you are the one equivocating "mature" with "gory/edgelord/cusses/whatever". Seems like a strawman to me. Out of curiosity though, have you perhaps played Witcher 3? Not the same branch of games, yet most certainly not an "edgelord" one.

10 hours ago, Veprovina.4876 said:

It's perfect as it is. There's enough dark moments in it without needing to make it graphic and explicit.

Nothing in the world is "perfect". Even the best written story could of picked a better word in one dialog line, even the prettiest painting might have included a one or two more tiny details more, etc.

[Teratus.2859]

15 hours ago, Mungo Zen.9364 said:

Parents will buy kids games based solely on the rating it has.

I can't say i've ever met a younger generation parent who has done this

If anything the vast majority of parents these days will buy their kids whatever games they nag for regardless of age ratings just to shut them up and keep them occupied.

Back in my day there may have been some truth to your statement, my parents certainly wouldn't buy me games like Grant Theft Auto and Resident Evil..
But every other 10-15 year old kid on my block had them thus I got to play them long before I was old enough to.

If anything it is even worse today, Call of Duty lobbies full of Kids, GTA online full of kids and on and on it goes for basically any and every popular online 18+ game.

At this point age ratings on any medium of entertainment are there purely for legal reasons and nothing else.
Almost nobody actually cares about them nor do they listen to them, especially when they have a screaming child nagging for that specific game.

Even the amount of parents coming back to stores complaining about a 18+ violent video game that they stupidly bought for their 8 year old kid has diminished significantly in recent years as parents just stopped caring about it.

[Sunchaser.9854]

Considering the more 'suggestive' side is like a snargle goldclaw writing fanfic in a strike zone of all things who looks more in tune with a Winnie the pooh monocle  meme, I'm not sure how much I'd even want a 18+ gw2. What would supposed to be there? L4d2 or doom style gore upon every skritt kill via explosion or gore or some like goldclaw fanfic stuff like witcher or mass effect? 

 

It's been quite a couple years since a dungeon or raid update if they're even supported anymore. I'm not sure the limited development time available as is being used to uh... Create whatever people are thinking of would be a best use of any resources. 

[Teratus.2859]

1 hour ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

It's obviously not the rating that makes the difference there. It's the ideas of narrative and art teams.

Definitely agree with this.

1 hour ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Language is indeed moderated in both cases, ,but it's also still below what the rating would allow for.

Aye, although in an online game the idea of moderated language is a but dumb to me.
Sure you can control what NPC's say but you can never control what players say and even punishing players for "bad words" doesn't change the fact that everyone who saw the word can't un-see it.

Imo there shouldn't be any requirements on this other than the game must have a built in profanity filter, which pretty much every MMO does these days.
Let the individual decide whether they want to see "bad words" or not, and let them take all the responsibility for deciding to turn the filter off.

1 hour ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

So, to answer the question, we aren't losing anything meaningful. Unless you consider more gore and explicit adult content to be important in a MMORPG game - i don't.

Mostly same here.

Never cared for hyper sexualized armour, and i'm glad Gw2 has almost none of them.
Likewise the lack of graphic adult content makes me very happy, I am honestly sick of the amount of nudity and graphic stuff that worms it's way in to most entertainment these days, TC shows.. movies and games.
Personally I find that sort of thing very distasteful and it only makes me question the morals of the people who felt the need to go so far out of their way to include such unnecessary graphic content in their games/shows etc.. it's basically the 4 letter P word half the time..
If I wanted to see stuff like that I'd go to the places that exist for it, so it's bloody annoying when you don't want to see it and people are going out of their way to shove it into everything else..

On the gore though I would prefer if the game had more.
It adds a level of realism that is always noticeably absent when you see a perfectly clean blade being pulled out of a recently stabbed character XD

[HotDelirium.7984]

This is rated pegi 13? With people getting shanked, threats of abortion, pillaging, headshots, blown up, cussing and a ton of sexual innuendos? Interesting.

Edited September 6, 2022 by HotDelirium.7984

[Khisanth.2948]

How is it not already 16+?

Quote

while games of chance, and the use of tobacco, alcohol or illegal drugs can also be present.

All those are present except tobacco.

 If your writing team can't express themselves without swearing that is not a problem with ratings restrictions. That means you need to hire better writers.

It is ironic that the things you desire are often regarded as signs of immaturity. "Look at how adult I am! A drug using, chain smoking alcohol guzzling gambler! Oh and I don't take showers, I just bath in the blood of my enemies."  I don't know your age but it seems you are still a kid at heart.

19 hours ago, Labjax.2465 said:

One of the drawbacks I see in stuff with lower rating is it can reach this point where it feels like "nothing actually matters." Our actions over here had consequences, but then we found the Magic Eight Ball of Grafaldamor and it allowed us to save the world. In fairness, there are some permanent consequences in this game, but there's also a lot of "we'll figure it out with a plot device in the end if we have to." It's also just a trap that fantasy in general can fall into, where special powers fluctuate in their effectiveness depending on what the plot needs. When the hero needs to lose, their powers fail them. When the hero needs to win, they find an extra burst of power from somewhere.

There are degrees of critique within this and not all of it applies to this game, but that's one way I look at it.

 How does increasing a game's rating increase the level of its writers' talents? Does increased rating come with some Tomes of Knowledge?

There are also the issues as well due to being a MMO. LS2 demonstrates this with its changes to parts of maps. Things which has not occurred yet already exist. A solution is to split the playerbase but that comes with its own problems.

15 hours ago, Danikat.8537 said:

They can't even reasonably allow different players to make different choices with noticeable effects because it would split the playerbase. If one player chose to kill Aurene when she first hatched because they saw another potential elder dragon as nothing but a threat, or sided with the White Mantle, or let a major reoccurring character die or whatever they'd have to get a different version of every subsequent release, and there would have to be another one for each of those choices.

Choices are even worse than consequences for developers because that means permanent increase to cost. Just having 2 meaningful choices with 2 different options already quadruples the cost of at least some sections later on.

 

Edited September 5, 2022 by Khisanth.2948

[Khisanth.2948]

3 hours ago, HotDelirium.7984 said:

This is rated pegi 13? With people getting shanked, shot in the head, blown up, cussing and a ton of sexual innuendos? Interesting.

None of those of are done in a particularly graphic manner ... on the other hand we can set things on fire and watch them burn to death while screaming in pain.

[Super Hayes.6890]

I play this game with my 7 and 10 year old and we have a blast 🤷‍♂️ I am against making it more "mature." I am curious how many people are out there playing this game with kids the same age as mine. My guess is not many.  But the game, as is, is in a good place for my family.

[Dawdler.8521]

4 hours ago, HotDelirium.7984 said:

This is rated pegi 13? With people getting shanked, shot in the head, blown up, cussing and a ton of sexual innuendos? Interesting.

Not even rated PEGI 13, GW2 and all expansions are rated PEGI 12 which makes the thread even more confusing.

[Khisanth.2948]

18 minutes ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

Not even rated PEGI 13, GW2 and all expansions are rated PEGI 12 which makes the thread even more confusing.

There is ESRB Teen which is 13 and GW2 does have ESRB Teen rating. OP is crossing the streams. 😛

[Gibson.4036]

2 hours ago, Super Hayes.6890 said:

I play this game with my 7 and 10 year old and we have a blast 🤷‍♂️ I am against making it more "mature." I am curious how many people are out there playing this game with kids the same age as mine. My guess is not many.  But the game, as is, is in a good place for my family.

My kids started at about that age, though my eight year old stayed in the major cities for several years. We also avoided the zombie areas until they got older.

[Mistwraithe.3106]

I also played a bit with my kids when they were younger (7-10). It didn't last that long but we've now picked it up again as a family with the kids around 13-16 and this time it's stuck (apart from everyone being grumpy at the Character Achievement Guide throwing out gazillions of XP and overlevelling us for the zones we want to explore! We so want to turn that thing off!).

It's probably not a big moneyspinner but I wouldn't be surprised if at least 5%, maybe 10%, of sales of the expansions etc are coming from families like us.

[DaFishBob.6518]

Looking at something like Civilization, a game where I can decide to send troops into the largest city on the planet and have them displace and/or kill the entire population for any reason I deem necessary, rated E10+ by ESRB. You don't need the most restrictive rating to make a game that lets you deal with the most serious issues.

Dumb confused face, it means an E10+ game which is a lower rating than GW2 can deal with the consequences of full blown genocide and you can even be the initiator of it.

Edited September 6, 2022 by DaFishBob.6518

[firedragon.8953]

GW2 doesn't need to be a gory game. Personally, I'm glad it's not.
As far as writing, unfortunately, I'd say a lot of the issues don't actually have to do with the age-rating restrictions. Let's just consider it a "stylistic choice" and leave it at that.

[Dawdler.8521]

2 hours ago, DaFishBob.6518 said:

Looking at something like Civilization, a game where I can decide to send troops into the largest city on the planet and have them displace and/or kill the entire population for any reason I deem necessary, rated E10+ by ESRB. You don't need the most restrictive rating to make a game that lets you deal with the most serious issues.

Dumb confused face, it means an E10+ game which is a lower rating than GW2 can deal with the consequences of full blown genocide and you can even be the initiator of it.

A genocide that has about as much emotion to it as tipping over a pawn on a chessboard.

[Astralporing.1957]

13 hours ago, Khisanth.2948 said:

Choices are even worse than consequences for developers because that means permanent increase to cost. Just having 2 meaningful choices with 2 different options already quadruples the cost of at least some sections later on.

That's why what is usually used is the illusion of choice. You are being given a choice that is a statement on your stance in a certain situation, but what had to happen happens anyway, just through a slightly different method. To give a GW2 example: the IBS bunker grenade scene.

In general, players are often fine with events not going their way if only they can say that they tried to prevent it from happening in the first place. It's when players are made to think they are being responsible for story going the way they dislike that they get really unhappy.

[HotDelirium.7984]

14 hours ago, Khisanth.2948 said:

How is it not already 16+?

All those are present except tobacco.

 If your writing team can't express themselves without swearing that is not a problem with ratings restrictions. That means you need to hire better writers.

It is ironic that the things you desire are often regarded as signs of immaturity. "Look at how adult I am! A drug using, chain smoking alcohol guzzling gambler! Oh and I don't take showers, I just bath in the blood of my enemies."  I don't know your age but it seems you are still a kid at heart.

 How does increasing a game's rating increase the level of its writers' talents? Does increased rating come with some Tomes of Knowledge?

There are also the issues as well due to being a MMO. LS2 demonstrates this with its changes to parts of maps. Things which has not occurred yet already exist. A solution is to split the playerbase but that comes with its own problems.

Choices are even worse than consequences for developers because that means permanent increase to cost. Just having 2 meaningful choices with 2 different options already quadruples the cost of at least some sections later on.

 

*coughs in tobacco*

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mystic_Smoking_Pipe

[mercury ranique.2170]

I am an elder gamer (still in my 40's though).  profanity filters and language filters are not done for minors, but for their parents.  It doesn't fit in their values and what they feel comfortable to get their kids in contact with. 

In my opinion the profanity filter on the forum does not exist to uphold a pegi 13 rating, but cause it keeps things civilised. We are all people from around the world, from different countries, cultures and ages. Having the decenty to abide to some rules, help to keep the game nice for everyone. The pegi 13 rating has nothing to do with that in my opinion.

Two examples:

1: I'm form the netherlands and my wife is Scottish. When she speaks in english she swears alot, just as her mom did, and her scottish family does. This doesnt mean she does the same in dutch. She knows that it is a difference culture, but the load of these words are even different between those two countries.

2: I was reprimanded once to use a word that describes the feces of a male cow. To me this is a very normal word. But what I did not know was that it is percieved much more violent and epxressive by people from other cultures.

So in sort, keep it civilised makes it happy for everyone. An important note as well is that guilds are allowed to govern themself. If your guild(s) allow it, feel free to express yourself in any way you want. Do not hold back and be yourself, as you are with friends and not with strangers. abide to the rules fo the guild management, but thats it.