I’m just getting frostpunk child labor memes whenever i think about this.
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No, that was a cinematic trailer which had no player interaction. It was also a propaganda video. Its assumed that children are in danger. No need to focus on it. That’s bad form, lazy writing imo.
I don’t really remember that many. There was one with Withers who had her go her own journey. Didn’t care for that either.
Blocked that out too. Now that i think about it, i stopped playing after that situation with the kid and withers resolved
And that’s about as far as i let it go.
This major order was a bridge too far:
Either save the children and lose a potential stratagem, or get a stratagem and condemn them to death.
Edit: is better when a child has their own plot/journey, of course. But using children as a McGuffin is weak. Could those children have been substituted by anything else? Absolutely.
My headcannon is that the imperium forces female soldiers to take male hormones so they can increase their physical capabilities basically transitioning them. It fits the setting well and gives a reason why all the female models and faces look so masculine.
I assume it’s something along the lines of anabolic steroids. Especially if you can force mandatory stimm usage.
However idk how expensive stuff like that is to produce, and it might be reserved either for a per regiment basis, or only for elite portions of the military.
Basic guard rations might not have them, because they’re not worth anything more than another person to hold a gun and a 0.1 second roadblock.
Isn’t 40k humanity like 80% genetic engineering anyway?
Just have them automatically produce combat steroids in stress conditions lmao
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For the basic Guard? Absolutely not. Maybe it’s dependent on planets or individual cities but it’s certainly not the norm. Afaik the only base humans that undergo such treatment are Tempestus Scions.
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Based on the fact that even the air is full of stim in the hives I’m sure there would a be some massproduced in a cheap way.
Imperium is already very good at balancing vitamin supplements on their close to unlivable worlds anyway.
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I was thinking specifically about the twiggy arms and near-beer gut on the dudes tbh. Not very “heroic-scale.”
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I could not roll my eyes any harder if i tried.
It’s a satire inspired from things like Starship Troopers and Robocop, one of the running themes in Starship Troopers especially is that by the end of the movie the new recruits were getting younger and younger where by the time Rico gets a command they are sending literal kids to the front line.
Deeper introspection reveals how silly it is to be mad at something like this. Like why did they just decide to put a children’s hospital on the edge of Automaton space on a planet named after Vernon Wells, who had arguebly one of his most most famous roles be that dude who kidnapped Arnold’s Daughter in Commando? The deep cut is unreal.
Like would it have been better if it was the centre for sick puppies and goldfish instead?
This isn’t even getting into the amount of dark stuff you see in 40k.
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There is also the many famous examples in Fallout 1 and 2.
You can just straight up give a kid a gun to play with in that game and when you come back later they are just dead.
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I don’t know if you forgot what 40k is or something.
Anyways its silly satire and its not like we are forever locked out of getting that stratagem in the future.
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It doesn’t qualify as a MacGuffin for story purposes. Otherwise anyone and everything in the Helldivers universe is just unimportant things whose only purpose is to move the plot forward. And arguably, what plot or characters?
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I was unaware that children even existed in 40k. My knowledge is limited to DT, Battlesector, Inquisitor, Spacehulk: Deathwing, Gladius, Vermintide 1 + 2, Total War, and Chaosgate.
The war is the plot afaik.
Only watched the first movie.
Never said I was mad. I just find it distasteful and not my cup of tea. It’s not something I agree with and there’s no point in getting mad over something you have no control over.
Or, perhaps, just a hospital planet could work.
When I see it in the course of my time gaming, I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.
To elaborate a bit more, this is the intro to the universe written on the first page of 40k core rulebooks for decades:
It is the 41st Millennium. For more than a hundred centuries The Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.
Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the Warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.
It doesn’t pull many punches.
Pretty much all the lore around the Imperium’s most elite and most renowned forces, from Space Marines to Stormtroopers and Sisters of Battle, Catachans, Death Korps, Cadians, etc all talk about how they’re raised from very young ages and subjected to intense and brutal training and selection, and the more elite the force the more darwinian the training and selection of recruit candidates becomes. For every new Space Marine, there are untold numbers of dead failed aspirants who never made it to adulthood. That’s not even getting into the antagonists The less said about the Daemonculaba of the Iron Warriors on Medrengard, the better.
Hence why it’s a little silly throwing shade at HD2 for this sort of stuff on a web forum for a 40k game.
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If you think the kids are nothing but plot dressing so is everything on the war map. The bugs, the bots, the citizens, the scientists, the hell divers themselves. Just bit players you could rename to “group a” and “character 3” and it wouldn’t affect “the plot”. I would fail to see how saving the kids is any different from saving the scientists.
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I never played WH40k TTRPGs.
I heard about this, but I thought it was just psykers.
Yes, but children aren’t the focus of the game (as of yet) or part of any mission. I would’ve never known unless it was shown to me. It may be silly to some. But there’s a difference between pretext in describing the world in which your head canon can apply what it likes as it doesn’t explicitly mention the sacrifice of children.
All in all, I think too much focus is being placed on trying to find an inconsistency within my tastes for when the use of children to tell a story is or is not appropriate. The point is, a choice was given to the players and children were actively part of the equation. Power - or children? There’s really only one choice here.
Immersion. I might be more inclined to take the stratagem over a bunch of egg-heads who knew the risks and took those risks in their job and are better able to take care of themselves/defend themselves (theoretically)