[Suggestion] New load screens: Executions and torture, really? Alternative here.

If anyone cares, I'm the OP and I put in my time. Bosnia and GW1. I find these new load screens offensive because they show war crimes and dishonorable behavior. As others have posted they don't demonstrate the spirit of the game that they should.

It would be simple to just remove the single soldier who is being executed from these images and it would still look fine. It would also be preferable to show some actual combat scenes rather than this 7 on 1 stuff.

I still think my proposal to allow for a personal folder for personal load screens is a good one.

Here's some examples of good load screens:

My thoughts exactly!

Yes, because using plasma-based weaponry to burn someone to death who will then be rebuild with every memory of that event in his head is absolutely OK.

Seriously, it's a game, treat it like one. These loading screens also only show executions, but I haven't seen torture yet (in fact those ways to die would be considered friendly in auraxian terms). Besides that, executing prisoners is the worst stupid idea you could do on Auraxis. If you kill them they respawn, if you somehow keep them from redeploying and keep them prisoner you've just taken one enemy soldier out of the fight entirely.

Oh, and "offensive and inappropriate"? You must be really easily ********.

Personally, I'd rather see epic battle scenes than what looks like prisoners being murdered in cold blood.

And yeah, the loading screens matter, because I have to sit through them every time I boot up the game, log into and out of a character, swap continents, or travel too far when respawning.

Coming late to all this...

Note, the art is done by Ranulf Busby, as it shows in each of the pictures.

This could be his interpretation of the factions based off the game.

But let us be honest about something in this game.

There are no Prisoners of War. A game where people die and come back again to fight. Even in the ORIGINAL Storyline about Planetside, the Terran Republic literally executed a person on Auraxis, finding him 'alive' somewhere else prior to the Wormhole closing and trapping the expedition on Auraxis.

The concept of 'Prisoner' is no longer a thing. If anything, the planets are a literal 'living hell' for the expedition, each trying to promote their own agenda.

The fact that even in combat, we revive dead soldiers and have them soldier on, or coming out of a 'spawn tube' at some other location is more of the fact that we are fighting a 'Forever War' with little end in sight because of the 'infinite' means to produce men and material to fight it.

Also, when you look in the game... Do we even TAKE prisoners? No... When a base is taken, players literally kill any remaining players there then push on to the next base. If anything, the load screens accurately depict EXACTLY what the sides are doing.

Now while the nice little pictures shown a few responses back, the Halo, Star Wars and one genre I don't know, don't forget... The story behind them is NOT the same story we have for Planetside or Planetside 2... A fight between three factions with the ability to bring material and manpower easily.

Halo is set where it is a war, but people don't come back.

Star Wars is set where there is a war, but again, people don't come back.

Planetside is a fight where people do come back and keep coming back for more.

The games Halo and Star Wars Battlefront just cannot emulate the sheer epicness of their genre with players not just because of player limitation, but the fact that as a game, it would be nothing more than a large Counterstrike and those of us who know we die easily, it isn't fun if you are taken out early and have to just sit there for HOURS while there is a large battle going on, because once you are 'dead'... You should be 'dead' like it is in the genre... But game wise, not so much fun.

They are still more dignified than how players actually treat each other

If some people enjoy and are confortable with the fact of seeing executions, torture and unfair fights multiple times during their game session, we're happy (?) for them.
Fortunately, some (most ?) people dislike this kind of stuff.
The "Yeah, but it's the lore thing" is not a valid argument. Will a new player know about the lore the 1rst time he'll log in ? No. He'll see the screens multiple times. Same thing for very young people playing the game. Do a long time PS2 player have to look at this kind of stuff during the next 3 years ? No, thanks.

The community asked for new splash screens. Devs choosed to reward a talented graphic designer. And its cool from them.
The artist is talented, but its content is a bit too much. What about promoting friendship, teamplay, fair fights, fair play, empathy ? Why choosing to only promote executions, unfair fights and torture.

Seriously? First of all in a scenario where dead people respawn it makes NO tactical sense to execute anyone. You would send them into a permanent coma instead so they stay alive and can't respawn nor commit suicide. So whatever people try to sell here as a logical result of respawning is just very ehm...unintelligent...to be friendly,
Their idea would create a situation where no side CAN win and living(not death) makes no sense at all. Why should anyone even want to respawn then if it's just to rush to the front line and die a gruesome death again?

That people claim "You are at war!" is pretty disturbing to me as well. I imagine them sitting in front of their screens in their pyjamas and seriously believing to be at war. Come on, what kind of delusional BS are you trying to tell me here(I hope it's BS...cause elseway you should check out the local psychiatrist)? You are into execution scenes? Okay, then just say so, but do not claim it's because we are "at war". That has zero to do with it. We are PLAYING a GAME.

Yes, we as players "kill" our opponents without mercy. We outnumber them and "slaughter" them, But those are players, pixels and the rules of the game...I do not see any of that as realistic. And nothing of all that compares to the scenes you see on those loading screens. We do not disarm anyone...our opponent is never defenseless...we do not shoot people laying on the ground in the back of their heads. And most important: We got no other option(cause capturing them and keeping them in a vault eternally would make up for a very bad gameplay experience for the captured player. And frankly, if we could ruin the game for other players like that, we would rather do that than shooting them and having them respawn. ;-)).

Those loading screens are pretty realistic...and the humans there are just humans. My first thought seeing those pictures was not "great pictures, Just showing pixels/players. Auraxium, They will respawn soon.". Non-psychopathic brains work with empathy and emotions...and not that abstract.

Those are no real humans. Those are pixels. Fine. You know what? A picture of a real execution is no real execution either. It's just a picture...consisting of...yeah...pixels. If you are at a real execution...you do not see the execution...you only see the light reflecting from the execution. Wanna go on? Where to stop?
And if it's just about pictures...why don't we have stick figures executing each other? Why does it have to be that realistic? What is the intention of that?

You can always say "It's just a game and it doesn't matter"...and that is right. But why do we NEED that kind of stuff (and why do people feel the need to defend that kind of stuff)? There is no reason for it. It's neither a scene from the game nor a realistic situation(as explained above). And if it makes a bunch of players feel very uncomfortable....why not choose different pics?

No problem here. It's just loading screens. I have seen worse.
I do however second custom loading screens or ingame screenshots of massive fights screened with the observer cam.
That'd be awesome you know

So... slaughtering thousands of people in game is A-Ok for you.
Fan made picture of portrayal of execution by the faction that is communist ***** is triggering your "Navy Seal" feelings and offends you to the bone.

You are no better than any other hypocrite SJW.

If you don't like the thing that there is actually war happening, not paintball game, I guess you need to review the games you play... or your attitude towards them.

As what, a REMF?

Because it sure as **** wasn't 11B

There is no crying in Planetside....

I have no problem with the pictures as they are, but nevertheless I support both the proposal for user customised images AND adding altogether more variety to the loading screens!

Both of those suggestions follow the old adages of "More is better" and "Let the customer decide", and who am I to argue against time proven marketing proverbs.

**** it!

Lets just go back to old one where NC was slaughtering VS and TR, apparently that was more acceptable

Sad but true.

I like the idea of user defined loading screens, though honestly, there are more important things to work on with PS2.

Actually, there is a sense in it, you are just unwilling to see something that is inherent in human nature and in the fact, in the game itself...

In all the wars humanity has had, and even in the last week where people put a crap stink about Obama going to Hiroshima and giving his speech about war... What was the first thing a bunch of people put up?

"WTF is Obama apologizing for the Bombing of Hiroshima to the Japanese?"

"Japanese deserved it for Pearl Harbor! No Apology for the bomb!"

Etc...

This crap, came from people who didn't read about what his speech was about... One group said Obama said the US was evil for dropping the bomb on Hiroshima... And NO WHERE was that stated in his speech.

This is TYPICAL HUMAN NATURE. When we feel wronged, we want revenge.

ISIS is another example of human nature... A group of people using Religion the same way many other HUMAN RUN RELIGIONS have done to promote their belief. The Christians had the Inquisition and the Crusades as well as the Americans had Manifest Destiny to justify their actions. The Japanese had Imperialism to justify their actions in South East Asia... The Germans had their anger over World War I and the belief the Jewish were corrupting their nation to justify their actions towards them.

To foolishly believe that we are enlightened people when, to this day, we still have bigotry and saying that no one would do these things...

I will point you to an Episode of Deep Space 9, a Star Trek show where, while fictional, they show two groups at each others throats to the point where they KNOWINGLY can't kill each other... But they still go at it, and resort to the most inefficient way to 'kill' people because they WANT their enemies to suffer.

THIS IS HUMAN NATURE. No matter HOW much we want to believe we won't do something, look at our movies. Do we not CHEER when we see the demise of a bad guy. Did we not LAUGH when Loki got thrashed around like rag doll by the Hulk in the Avengers? Did you not WISH the bad guy got his come uppance in some form or manner, preferably in a cruel way?

If you say NO to any of that... I call you either a real alien or a person who is lying to themselves. Because our history has shown, time and time again, we do horrible things to each other to justify our reasons.

And this comes from a person whose grandparents and parents were Interned by the US government, simply because they were Japanese in background, yet Italians and Germans were NOT the concerns of the US government to be 'likely' to be a 5th column attacker within the US. Despite the fact that there were US born Germans who fought against Allied forces in Europe.

While I am no political... Check the news every once in a while... You will see we are still not an enlightened culture that you want us to believe we are... And to think a picture will change this, is foolish.

I get where you're coming from, but the fact remains, at least the TR and VS had guns in their hands and were fighting back...

Again, it's great art, but I don't think it fits the style or tone PS2 is going for. Is it dramatic? Sure, it would be great for a single player PS2 campaign where the focus is on the grittiness of a war where people die, revive, die, revive, etc. an infinite amount of times. Frankly, that would screw with your head pretty well. But the fact remains that practically, that bit of lore is just an excuse to get players back into the gameplay.

As a multiplayer game where witty banter between the two (three, occasionally) opposing sides is normal, dying and reviving is just a tool to keep you playing, and the emphasis is not on excessive realism, I still don't think the new screens work. Heck, like somebody else suggested, just photoshop out the party about to be executed, and there's no problem.

P.S. For everyone suggesting that there's no difference between a game about shooting other players and depictions, even artistic ones, of executions, think about it this way. In PS2, you always have a gun/knife/grenade/landmine. You can fight back. And we're all "in" on the idea that none of this is real and it's all a game, etc. However, the new loading screens, perhaps by virtue of the fact that we are not participating in them, are more "real" because we aren't controlling the characters, and they aren't "in" on this mechanic of dying and reviving.

Sorry, I tried to explain my thoughts there and I think I may have just muddied the waters. In any case, it ultimately breaks down to what fits with how DBG wants to portray the game and what the community thinks of the game. Let's not forget the recent fiascos Blizzard dealt with surrounding Overwatch's style; sometimes developers make miscalculations and have to tweak things.

This SJW stuff is really really pathetic.

We have access to the sum of human knowledge, at the cost of giving idiots a soapbox to stand on. That's the internet for you.

Quite the remarkably accurate summary of the World Wide Web...

Having said that, as someone who strongly dislikes the SJW mentality, I still don't think the new screens fit with the Planetside that either is, or that DBG has otherwise been trying to market.