Uh-uh...not all of us spend our time slaughtering innocent people in those worlds when there's a ton of story campaign that does plenty else and never just makes your entire existence one as a killer only out to target innocents for score. The trailer for this game makes that the only point. So, for those that only really like to do the whole mass-murder thing in open world games that offer choices and expensive content dedicated to not doing that, you might possibly have had an agreeable statement.
You're using the term 'innocent' as a way of pretending that what most action games don't make you do is extract pleasure from killing people (or simulations of them). What determines the difference between an innocent and someone you and the game collude in deciding deserves to die? Generally only a character skin, plus a few lines of dialogue. In the real world, a life is a life, a complex and rich thing which should never be extinguished in anything but the rarest and most extreme circumstances. In games, extinguishing lives is often the fundamental reason for a title's existence, using the flimsiest excuses ('satire'/'bad guys') to let the player pretend that the people they're slaughtering en masse are deserving, whereas a small number of others, distinguished only by different clothing or the game's instructions, are granted mercy, or often killed anyway as an way to justify the slaughter of others. Taken objectively, the morality of games (particularly when it comes to torture IMO, but that's another rant altogether) is absolutely horrendous and most protagonists are the most bloodthirsty people in them, with their carnage decided only a scarily simplistic basis of some people being delineated as 'innocent' and others as 'worthy of death' by aesthetics alone.
Question: if in the midst of a slaughter of 'soldiers' and 'guards', a static NPC in civilian clothes appeared only once, whom you knew you could kill for a desirable weapon, a bonus or an achievement that could not be acquired anywhere else, would you do so? Let's not all pretend we don't know the honest answer to this, or what it says about the meaninglessness and callousness of how games and gamers delineate between who is 'innocent' and who needs to be killed.
My point is not to say there's anything wrong with games that revolve around killing. I play and enjoy many such games (I continue to enjoy finding inventive ways of killing scientists in GoldenEye 007). I'm just not going to act faux-outraged by this when it's exactly the same stuff countless other games have had me to, only with the blinkers off.
(To be fair to Rockstar, whom I mentioned earlier for unabashedly relishing the worst aspects of gaming morality and used it for attention and sales, the original Manhunt was sort of making the same point as I am, albeit embracing the 'taking lives in unpleasant ways for fun' mentality simultaneous to calling it out)
EDIT: And to oni-link, who makes the point about enemies and innocents being delineated by those who shoot back. A nice idea, but vulnerable to the fact stated above that the most bloodthirsty people in games is almost always the protagonist. At most, 'enemy' soldiers won't have been seen killing more than one or two people (usually in scripted sequences) whereas the player kills hundreds, if not thousands, just because they're told to. So even if you have never, at any point, taken the initiative to kill an enemy character before they've taken the first shot - which I doubt, but you never know - the only way in most circumstances that you can call an enemy character the 'bad guy' is if you forget that, in terms of lives taken, the so-called protagonist, aka you, is almost certainly way, way out in front. Hell, even Mario (murder of goombas, koopas, monty moles, most local wildlife) is at least as bad as Bowser (kidnapping, invasion of soverign state albeit with no visible casualties, theft of stars and other artefacts/power sources) when it comes down to it.
And MattyG344, I've never played Hardline Miami so can't answer that.
