What's the saddest moment you ever experienced in gaming?

[Zed Clampet]

This probably won't sound sad when I write it, but I created a map for Timberborn where the residences would be built up the sides of a mini-mountain. Now playing the map, I had plotted out where I wanted everything built and then went off to do something else.

Some time later I went back to the residential section and saw that a child had been trapped by the construction and was starving/dying of thirst. The children run around and play in various places, and he was in the wrong spot when the last house was built. In real life, there is nothing I love more than children, and I couldn't help but to think of my own children when I saw him there. I really, really wanted to save this child.

I plotted his exit and all it would take would be for one set of stairs to be built. I plopped the plans down and set the stairs to the highest priority for builders. Then I went ahead and created a path for him to follow. That's when I noticed a drought was about to hit.

To build stairs, you need planks. We were fresh out due to all the construction, and you can't make planks during a drought because you need power supplied by water mills. I sighed and sped up time to try to get past the drought, and then I just watched him rock back and forth as the drought ravaged everything. When midnight hit, the boy turned 8-years-old. It was his birthday.

He didn't make it to morning, and suddenly my bright and happy game about beavers wasn't so bright and happy anymore.

 

[Pifanjr]

This probably won't sound sad when I write it

Wrong. This is now my saddest moment in gaming as well, as I can't think of anything that would come even close.

 

[Brian Boru]

Not the individual-style event of Zed's, but I found Ravenholm in Half Life 2 pretty haunting and disturbing. "We don't go to Ravenholm anymore" had been teased a few times beforehand, so clearly Valve had something setup there.

Ravenholm had been a Resistance—ie goodie—town, but the baddies had found a way to convert all the inhabitants into zombies. So the encounter was with former allies.

It may or may not be the best shooter level ever made, but it sure is an all-time classic. The zombies had some indefinable tragic aspect to their nature—encapsulated by the wonderful sound design—rather than just the usual cannon fodder—while you had to kill 'em, and you were putting 'em out of their misery, it still felt… sad.

There was the added element of local Father Grigori who was 'tending' to his flock—ie dispatching as many souls as he could with his shotgun.

 

[McStabStab]

He didn't make it to morning, and suddenly my bright and happy game about beavers wasn't so bright and happy anymore.

Jesus CHRIST dude. This got real dark.

I try to think of a moment in any game that has made me cry, but I struggle to think of one. As a dad anything involving kids dying always gets to me. The infamous cut scene from Spec Ops: The Line comes to mind as well as

Spoiler: AC: Odyssey

the death of Phoibe.

All made me upset but games don't have the same dramatic effect on me that movies do. I cry like a baby watching movies.

 

[Zloth]

I've got two - tough call to decide which hurt the most.

Spoiler: Final Fantasy 7 (slow burn)

The infamous death of Aerith. I was too busy being stunned to be sad at first. Aerith was the alternate love interest, not the wizard that needed to be killed half-way through so the hero could shine! It wasn't even a "sacrifice myself to save the team" kind of thing. It was just Sephiroth murdering her out of the blue!

But, over time it did get sad. Aerith's great theme probably helped that feeling through, along with how the story plays out - particularly the ending. Then I replayed the game and that hit even harder! Watching Aerith and Cloud start falling in love again, knowing how it ends... that gets me.

Spoiler: Planetfall (hard gut-punch)

Long, long ago, in the days of Infocom's 'infinite graphics of the mind' (i.e. all text) days, there was a game called Planetfall. It's similar to Zork, but more humorous. A lot of that humor comes from a companion robot you find named Floyd. So, I went through the game, solving puzzles and laughing with Floyd until near the end. At that point, I needed a circuit card to get through a puzzle to keep going - a card that Floyd had, but it was critical to Floyd functioning. He offered it, but I refused and went back through the rooms of the game to find another card.

There wasn't one. I searched through every single room to try and find another card, but there wasn't one to find. I would have checked on the Internet, but this was the early 80's, so I couldn't even get on a BBS to ask about the game. The only way through was to pull the plug on Floyd. So, I did it. (According to the Wiki, the player sings him a song as the lights in his eyes go out.) OUCH!!

But it was pretty near the end of the game, anyway. Once you finish, you restore your ship's crew, and somebody fixes Floyd - but I sure didn't know that when I was playing!

 

[Smellincoffee]

RDR2's chapter 6, but especially the part where you-know-who dies.

 

[Frag Maniac]

Maybe that's why they made the NPCs beavers in Timberborn, because they knew most players would fail to keep their colonies thriving sevral times until they figured out how to play it, and if the NPCs were human, that would make for many depressing tragedies.

Don't get me wrong, I love beavers and think they are incredible, not to mention vital to the food chain, but humans are obviously more relatable.

Anyway, the saddest thing I can think of in a game, I actually saw via previewing the gameplay of the first few minutes of The Last of Us Part II, which I've not played yet. It's the part where...

Spoiler

...the daughter of the father whom Joel killed in Part I, the doctor trying to make a cure from Ellie's antibodies, comes for revenge and brutally beats him to death via several strikes to the head with a golf club.

 

[mjs warlord]

I have to go back about 40 years for my sad memory , a game came out called Transylvania Towers , the game was absolutely trashed by the games magazines one of the reasons the press went for him was because he claimed it was written in machine code to run faster but if you crashed it you could see it was typed in basic and the negative comments effected the author so much that he drove to a motorway flyover , tied a rope around his neck and jumped.

R.I.P. Richard Shephard

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28N3BSAKN3Y

 

[McStabStab]

I have to go back about 40 years for my sad memory , a game came out called Transylvania Towers , the game was absolutely trashed by the games magazines one of the reasons the press went for him was because he claimed it was written in machine code to run faster but if you crashed it you could see it was typed in basic and the negative comments effected the author so much that he drove to a motorway flyover , tied a rope around his neck and jumped.

R.I.P. Richard Shephard

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28N3BSAKN3Y

Holy cow, that is tragic.

 

[Colif]

Journey

Both happy and sad moments... all related to the people I met during game. I think saddest was when I got to almost end with one person and they just logged off before the final part...

 

[DXCHASE]

Honestly, it was getting scammed out of some csgo cases/skins not too long ago. Sure i didnt lose much, but i still lost stuff but thats not the point really, i shouldve known what i was doing and had a lapse in judgement so it makes me sad im usually really good at finding that stuff

 

[Iriiiiinaaaa]

The moment when Ghost was killed in Modern Warfare 2 was heartbreaking for me.

 

[Smellincoffee]

"I'm afraid."

 

[neogunhero]

There have been many sad moments in games such as the ending of RDR2 and playing Heavy Rain on PS3 back when it was still new, but perhaps the saddest moments are the friendships that have came and went during my gaming career.

Saddest among these were a group of kids I played with on the FPS milsim Squad. That game is brutal and takes a lot of communication and logistics, so we were the ragtag group of misfits looking to fight the war our own way. I thought at the time that we were very reminiscence of Bad Company from Battlefield Bad Company. The way we role played our soldiers were like we did not want to be there, and hoping that this mission would be our last. We were cast aside from the main military and operated almost on our own terms. We would run special missions trying to sneak and infiltrate enemies bases and slaughter them all before getting caught and eventually dying ourselves. We would steal Humvees and drive along the outskirts of the map trying to ambush a group of enemies from behind. It was a lot of fun until one day it just started to crumble and fade away, particularity due to differing schedules in real life. These are some of my fondest gaming moments and it makes me sad to think I may never experience that ever again.

The same goes for all my roleplaying friends I’ve met on Elder Scrolls Online and GTAV RP. These friendships you make ingame feel so real and attached, even when you are actively roleplaying a character, not just being yourself as a player of the game. I don’t want to do it anymore, for a variety of reasons but mostly not wanting to blur that line of fiction and reality as I’ve gotten so close to doing before. But I still reminisce and think back to how much fun I had on those games pretending to be a character and acting out their lives.

 

[mjs warlord]

Another one from me ..... what Aloy does after the last battle in horizon zero dawn .... just in case somebody using it not finished it i wont say what it is.

 

[Zloth]

Another one from me ..... what Aloy does after the last battle in horizon zero dawn .... just in case somebody using it not finished it i wont say what it is.

When she stopped putting any braids in her hair, allowing each individual strand to fly free, melting our video cards and causing our motherboards to catch on fire? That made me cry, too.

No, really, she went to her mother's grave and gave a really good little speech. I recorded that one. (Spoiler tags are worth learning!)

 

[Zimbaly]

Since this post about saddest moment is more about about sorrow then instead of something like man this ending was sad/sucked then I'll stick on the theme of sorrow.

Shelter is the game and it's not a game to play with kids unless ya want to recreate the classic old yeller/death of optimus effect of killing your childs soul a bit.

Great game, but man I played it with my kid and the first time something happened he just about burst into crying. It was heart breaking and he just stopped playing. The look on his face was just of pure sadness. Made me feel so horrible.

 

[McStabStab]

Since this post about saddest moment is more about about sorrow then instead of something like man this ending was sad/sucked then I'll stick on the theme of sorrow.

Shelter is the game and it's not a game to play with kids unless ya want to recreate the classic old yeller/death of optimus effect of killing your childs soul a bit.

Great game, but man I played it with my kid and the first time something happened he just about burst into crying. It was heart breaking and he just stopped playing. The look on his face was just of pure sadness. Made me feel so horrible.

Oh man, I can imagine. How old is your kid? I haven't played Shelter but hopefully he isn't too traumatized. Animal deaths always hit hard, kids and adults alike.

 

[Alm]

Honestly, it was getting scammed out of some csgo cases/skins not too long ago. Sure i didnt lose much, but i still lost stuff but thats not the point really, i shouldve known what i was doing and had a lapse in judgement so it makes me sad im usually really good at finding that stuff

My saddest moment is more like this, in that, the introduction of loot boxes and intrusive DLC mean that games don't feel the same as they used to. I find it very immersion breaking and detracting from the overall experience.

Plus I also got burned on CSGO loot boxes many years ago. I realised that they are never worth it in any game, so the in-game stores just irk me now.

 

[Zimbaly]

@McStabStab he would of been 7 at the time lol