10 Awesome Video Game Mechanics The Industry Abandoned
5. Enemies Have Families, Too - Alpha Protocol
Alpha Protocol was a great game - on paper. Sure it has its share of bugs, and was poorly executed - but the spirit was there. One very interesting thing the game did - and really did nothing with - was that when you went lethal, it caused a stat in your mission end totals to rise. What stat? 'Orphans Created'.
That's right, at the end of every mission you got a count of how many children you just orphaned. The numbers seemed to be somewhat random based on the person - you can kill an American CIA agent and create two orphans or a random Afghani mercenary and create thirteen. Yes it feels like there's racism involved in those numbers, but thankfully it doesn't go further than numerics.
More recently, Sniper Elite 4 has some info tags on your enemies - one of the first soldiers you come across is labelled "Husband to Karoline, father of two children", and you can find touching 'letters home' on dead bodies.
How interesting would that stat be in Call of Duty, Battlefield, Tenchu, or Uncharted - the last of which is famous for its ludonarrative dissonance debate? You're not just shooting nameless cogs in a death machine, but killing people in a greater, more immersive world.