Did Conquest Scrap A Plan To Able To Spare Or Kill Your Opponents?

[Hawkwing]

When playing through Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest for the first time a few months ago, I, like many others, rolled my eyes and said "Suuuure" whenever the game insisted that Corrin's army did not kill anyone, despite being about a war and having the majority of weapons be sharp and pointy instead of blunt. The games persistence at repeating this point, however, stopped coming off as a joke about how Corrin could do no wrong and instead seemed like there was something larger the writers were trying to get at. Along with Hans slaughter of soldiers you "spared" reminding me of a writing trick I've seen in a few stealth games to explain/excuse why there are no enemies in an area you are revisiting even if you avoided conflict previously, and how Fates as a whole has several interesting ideas that aren't as fleshed out as they should have been, got me wondering: "Did this Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest originally plan for you to be able to spare or kill your opponents, but scrapped the idea during development?"

 

Considering how well thought-out the maps, objectives, enemy placement, etc. are in Conquest, it appears that on the gameplay side of things, the decision to scrap non-lethal weapons was probably made very early on in development. There are several reasons for why this could be the case. Perhaps they couldn't find a good way to balance non-lethal options so that their advantages and disadvantages would make them a viable option without also invalidating the other weapons. Maybe they thought that the player already had enough things to keep track of, and having to account for the bonuses and drawbacks of non-lethal weapons would have simply added more complexity to the game instead of substance. It could be that they couldn't think of a mechanic that was affected by sparing your opponents that, again, didn't invalidate lethal options.  It's possible that they decided they already had enough weapons in the game, and that they didn't have the time, resources, and budget to add any more. Regardless of the reason, it seems that the developers may have found it to be an intriguing idea, but they cut their losses early on when they couldn't get it to work.

 

The main reason I bring this up is because of how this idea would have, and currently does, affect the story. It is very odd, for a game series all about war and is unafraid to show characters dying on both sides of the conflict, to suddenly bring up that none of the enemy soldiers were actually killed. That is, unless the player was originally given the ability to spare or kill their opponents, and whatever path they took would affect certain moments of the story. Currently, Hans slaughters the soldiers that Corrin supposedly "spared" coming as a shock to them. Perhaps if the player killed all the enemy units, Hans would instead praise the player for how efficiently they dealt with the opposition, while mentioning they wished they had a piece of the action, or if the player decided to spare some of the soldiers while killing the rest, Hans would show up after the battle "dealing with the stranglers". Either of these would serve the same purpose shocking Corrin and showing how evil Hans is.

Similarly, Xandar and the rest of the siblings mention that they don't always follow Garon's orders to kill in their missions. If Corrin both spares and kills their opponents, they could comfort their adopted sibling by saying that they too try to save as many people as they can in their missions, but they also have to face the truth that that is not always possible and sometimes, they need to take a life. If Corrin kills most of their enemies, then their siblings could comfort them instead by discussing that war is hell and that you can't always save everyone, but that fighting to bring peace is a noble goal and they shouldn't let the horrors of war blind them to the value of kindness and mercy. There are several other ideas that could use this concept that didn't appear in the game. For instance in one map, you may have to deal with an elite force of soldiers. If you spared most of the opposition, then they were brought in because the Hoshidan army finds Corrin to be a giant nuisance and want them dealt with, and the elites are only there because they happened to be in the area. If you instead killed most of the enemy soldiers up to that point, then the elite squadron instead came on their own accord to avenge their fallen comrades. There are numerous other ideas I can think of, but these examples should be enough.

As for why they decided to go with the "Corrin spares everyone" route in the game proper, I can think of several reasons. One of the largest is something that plagues Fates as a whole: Overwriting. This is a game that is already biting off more than it can chew with writing three separate stories in the span it takes to write one, and that's before taking into account writing the context for why you are fighting in every level and making sure that you get units at a proper time for balancing reasons that still make sense in the story, and so on. After writing a crap ton of supports and dialogue for characters to say both in and out of battle, and I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Fates lack of depth and worldbuilding is partially the result of the writers simply not having the time or resources to focus on those aspects. Much less writing three different ways a single scene can play out, and that's excluding other moments where killing or sparing opponents could affect areas of the story in gameplay.

Another reason is similar to why Garon is a slime monster despite the real Garon making for a more interesting story or why Mikoto died early on even though her surviving could have given some extra intrigue to either choice; IS already dedicated themselves to a certain plotline, and if they decided later on that they wanted to do something else, then they may not have been able to. Scenes that were currently being worked worked on or custscenes already completed may not have worked with the story changes, but they kept them as is anyway because they didn't have the time or resources to simply throw that work away. The writers may have already written sections of the story that accounted for if the player spared or killed their opponents, realized that they couldn't go through with the idea but also couldn't erase what they had completed, and decided to focus upon the route where Corrin spares his enemies.

A third reason for why the "Corrin spares everyone" route was the one that ended up in the final product may have been because the developers thought that without player choice, the neutral and "kill everyone" routes would have come off as a blaming the railroaded player situation, which they wanted to avoid. What could be shocking and thought-provoking moments that cause the player to ponder whether or not they really needed to kill most of the enemy units, or if taking a neutral route is better than killing everyone or if it's the worst of both worlds, would instead come off as the game blatantly criticizing the player for something they had no control over (note that I'm specifying the player here. A character deciding to spare or kill someone and having to face the consequences later on is a different discussion). As silly as the game saying that you aren't killing any enemy soldiers is, IS would probably rather get complaints about that than ones from a players angry at the game for criticizing its audience for something they couldn't actually affect.

 

This could be me overanaylzing an aspect of the game that's there because Fates writing is wacky, or I could be onto one of several ideas that Fates had but wasn't able to go through with. I'm curious if anyone else has had similar thoughts or observation..

[AnonymousSpeed]

10 hours ago, Hawkwing said:

This could be me overanaylzing an aspect of the game that's there because Fates writing is wacky, or I could be onto one of several ideas that Fates had but wasn't able to go through with. I'm curious if anyone else has had similar thoughts or observation..

To be fair, Fates is such an absurd hunk of flaming garbage, the wacky and off the wall interpretations are a lot more interesting than the ones that actually line up with the story. I once read an article about how the route split is supposed to be a City of Man vs. City of God dichotomy, where we either stay in the sin hole with the people we've always known or we jump ship to a blatantly more moral country.

I don't know enough about the development of Fates to say if this is a likely hypothesis, but it sounds like a pretty interesting mechanic, with the way you handle a map producing different reactions in people. It might be cool if a Thracia remake did something like that for capturing.

As for this:

10 hours ago, Hawkwing said:

A third reason for why the "Corrin spares everyone" route was the one that ended up in the final product may have been because the developers thought that without player choice, the neutral and "kill everyone" routes would have come off as a blaming the railroaded player situation, which they wanted to avoid.

...

As silly as the game saying that you aren't killing any enemy soldiers is, IS would probably rather get complaints about that than ones from a players angry at the game for criticizing its audience for something they couldn't actually affect.

It would have better if IS addressed this issue by going more with the "siblings tell you that you can't save everyone" side. It's less silly and less obnoxious praising of Corrin, but wouldn't be condemnatory either. Who knows, though? Maybe you should feel bad about sticking with the City of Man.

[Eltosian Kadath]

I will add a little bit of evidence to this theory that having the choice of sparing or killing may have been a feature that was cut. The entire scene where you have the choice to spare or kill Shura. Not only does having choice feel out of place, but the kind of Corrin that would kill Shura feels almost antithetical to the way he act just before and after that scene. It may well be a leftover artifact of this abandoned plan, where if you didn't kill him you recruit him, and they didn't want to change that despite the move away from the feature.

[Jotari]

Nah. I think it's just Conquest's floundering writing at work. If they wanted to implement something like that, then it wouldn't be difficult. In fact, it's in the game already. It's called Capture. Though for some reason on Niles and Orochi can do it. Once could say that's more proof that it was originally planned, but I highly doubt they would have cut down a significant feature of the game so much like that. It being a rather late add on seems more likely to me.

[Etrurian emperor]

On 12/10/2019 at 11:20 AM, Jotari said:

It's called Capture. Though for some reason on Niles and Orochi can do it.

For Niles its pretty simple. He can't NOT be into bondage so if one unit is going to tie up enemies and bring them to Corrin's torture dungeon its going to be Niles. Though Orochi is definitely a weird one. Perhaps Hinata would have worked better since Oboro said he tied up guards instead of killing them. 

[Jotari]

12 minutes ago, Etrurian emperor said:

For Niles its pretty simple. He can't NOT be into bondage so if one unit is going to tie up enemies and bring them to Corrin's torture dungeon its going to be Niles. Though Orochi is definitely a weird one. Perhaps Hinata would have worked better since Oboro said he tied up guards instead of killing them. 

Here's another crazy idea. Let anyone do it. Your limited by the size of your jail size with how many enemy units you can capture anyway irc. Having it on just one available unit (essentially) is really just unnecessary hassle.

Edited December 12, 2019 by Jotari