A lot of games play with the idea of guilting the player for their action. Sometimes it’s choice-based games in which your decisions can potentially result in the deaths of companions, like the Mass Effect series, or it’s something like Spec Ops: The Line, which makes you sit with the dire consequences of the war crime you committed. Blurbs, a content creator on YouTube and Twitch who creates mods for games like Red Dead Redemption 2, decided to take this a step further by giving every NPC in Rockstar’s open-world western memories of their own that play out if you kill them.
Blurbs tells Kotaku that the original idea was to make players feel guilty for committing acts of wanton violence against the citizens of Red Dead Redemption 2, but once Twitch chat got involved, it went “off the rails.” Before chat submitted captions, a lot of these memories made your actions tragic by reminding you that these people you slaughtered had rich, full lives that they’ll never get back to, like a man remembering his newborn child, a couple reflecting on their marriage, or a guy hanging out with his dog. Things got silly, however, when viewers submitted text to go along with the scenes, which was put through a text-to-speech service to play over the memories those characters relive in the instant before death after protagonist Arthur Morgan takes them out.
“My favorites were the really absurd ones like explaining Rick & Morty to a baby, the guy barking at his own dog, or the man trying to subconsciously make his baby a Mets fan,” Blurbs said. “I can usually count on my Twitch chat to do a good job coming up with ridiculous voice lines.” The YouTube video about the mod above is the latest in a series in which Blurbs tries to bring mod ideas suggested by his chat to life. Typically, several of these are all put into one video, but Blurbs tells Kotaku this one “warranted its own video” because it was such an involved process. “It could’ve been just a plain textbox with an NPC’s life summary, but my whole mission is overproducing really dumb ideas that no one else would ever think to make,” he said.
Blurbs has gotten his Twitch chat involved in other projects as well, including the “Text-to-Skyrim” mod that lets viewers write dialogue for NPCs in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. He also has upcoming projects based on Arc Raiders and the Grand Theft Auto series.
