As much as I like the game there is one thing I don't understand: Why are there no children in this world? Their explanation was - if I remember correctly - that they didn't want players to be able to kill children.
That's the least concern. Making them invincible is an easy and quick solution. Unrealistic but fine, at first glance. After all, invincibility is in the game already, so it is a feature, and setting it to all kids would be done in matter of seconds.
The major concerns were different
a)
Extra visual assets -> extra work, not enough resources
Kids are not just scaled down humans. The have different proportions. That necessitates different skeletons, and different set of animations. It would be a limited set compared to adults, but still. They would have to be colthed. Clothes scaling is already done to some degree, but again the scaling demanded by the tiny children bodies is too much. Therefore kids would need their own set of clothing items.
Not enough artists time.
b)
Extra base behaviors -> extra work, not enough resources
We would simply have to devise a separate set of behavior the kids would be doing all day long. That's not just aextra content to be developed, but also maintained, tested and debugged.
Not enough scripters time.
c)
Extra simulations and reactive behaviors -> unclear solutions, extra work, not enough resources
When you consider the core design principles of our game, where you can kill almost anybody, and everybody must somehow react to not just this but also a wide variety of other impulses (crime, stealth, trespass etc.), it becomes clear that some systems would have to be much wider (to consider kids), some systems would require new reaction scripts specific to kids.
What should we do with kids whose parents were killed? Should they live on their own in an empty house until the parents respawn after, what, 2 weeks?
What should a kid do when they witness a crime? Go report it? 'Of course' you might say. Conflicting design principle is that people really do carry crime info with them and they deliver it to guards. If you manage to kill the witness, the guards will never know. How do you do that when kids must be invincible? So they shouldn't report crimes? Isn't that weird? They don't care you butchering their mommy right in front of them?
There's a popular Czech phrase "past vedle pasti (pičo)" which roughly translates to "traps all around (ffs)". That's exactly what invincible kids are in terms of game desing in KCD.
d)
Extra NPCs in the scene -> not enough performance
We most probably wouldn't cut the number of adults. In most places there are 2 per house anyway. If there were 2-5 kids per house (as historical realism would require), not only would we need extra beds in the houses, we would also hit the limit for max 50 NPCs in player's proximity much much faster. Rattay would be nigh impossible to make and we would probably end with New Vegas-like zoning solution. That's a hard nope.
We didn't even know this was an issue back then. We would run into this problem way way late into development. Thank God we didn't even start developing them kiddos. We would have wasted a lot of work otherwise.
e)
Historical accuracy vs. game conventions and game language
This is not a massive issue but it is a philosophical one. If we wanted to be accurate (and we would) there would be more kids than civilian adults. Having 60% of your NPCs invincible and weirdly limited in reactivity would imho break immersion more than the current state where we pretend that kids are... yeah, they just left, the are... err... behind the house. They just left to go pick up strawberries... in the forest.
Some more specific context:
Let's pretend we had the resources, performance wouldn't be an issue, and we knew all the solutions. It took us a whole year to develop the dog from ground up. That's new skeleton, 1 new model with 4(?) skins, movement AI, movement animation set, idle animation set. The doggo has limited combat capabilities and thus not too many combat animations. Moreover he's invisible to NPCs so they don't react to him, and he only reacts to enemies and POI proximity. 2 extra major features - point and send at target; inclusion of doggo in inventory. 2 minor features - dialog with doggo, which required some extension to existing dialog system; K-9's underlying RPG and you ability do influence it aka dog training. Interior avoidance, teleportations, and calling are basically copied from the horse - some extra work but not too much. That's just the stuff I could think off the top of my head. Point being the dog is pretty basic. 1 year of work. Kids would be several times more complex.
Just to have some invincible extras.
Comparison to other games:
So.... it is much easier and much more safe to add kids to Witcher 3 where you can't attack civilians and they don't react to anything ever. Like, really, the guards are the only people who react to you stealing shit. Civilians are just scenery, a Potemkin village (not that I mind, it's just a different design approach).
It is extremely hard and costly to add them to a game like KCD. I mean, add them in any meaningful way.
Now, I'm not saying the current state brings me any joy or that all this, despite undeniably understandable, is some ultimate excuse for us to safe a lot of work and let us focus on more substantial aspects of the game. No. I'm pretty sad about it. I mentioned several times that, for me, kids are among the top missing features in the game. And not just for immersion's sake. It also limits the kind of stories we would love to tell. And I kinda understand people who kinda bitch about 'teh sexizm' or 'trahdyshunal famuhleee' wet dream of a game for conservatives or whatnot. It is really really nigh impossible to sell why the medieval society was the way it was when you can't show that:
- women were either kids, almost ever-pregnant young adults tending to 4+ kids, or 'old' grannies since age of 40 helping the younger generation in raising their kids
- childbirth was extremely risky with high maternal mortality
- half the kids didn't survive childhood, so death was ever-present and you had to have more kids to sustain the society (refer to previous 2 points)
- anybody could can gravely sick at any time
So, kids? Fuck yea! But damn are they costly!
