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"Moral" decisions in RPGs...
Meridion
Member UncommonPosts: 1,495
Well, so after completing The Witcher 2 for some of the Roche's endings I ran across a copy of DA:O-Ultimate yesterday and decided to grab it. I used to play it back in 2009 and gave it somewhere around 7,5/10 on my personal fun-scale, mainly because I thought the story was pretty predictable and standard fantasy...
Well this time I picked it up just to play with the moral choices a bit and see where it would take me. So I created this bada** hook-nosed wizard with beady eyes and a fake smile on his face just to see how 'evil' you can actually get.
So as I usually play the convention-hating freedom-fighter type, this time I really put thought into how to actually play an 'evil' character. you know, when I ran across my first moral choices I figured that you can't. Everything you do turns out to be 'for the greater good'. And even if you choose to be downright stupidly dissocial, like telling a little boy 'your mama died, hahaha', it doesn't change a thing. In DA:O the main quest stays the same, no matter how much dissocial personality disordered your character might be.
So I looked at Witcher and Witcher 2, which are - most people would agree - a lot more in-depth when it comes to actual consequence of your choices. Still, you can't be evil. You can't really betray the people you know for power or wealth or both, send them to the gallow or leave them to suffer for your profit. Even if you choose the most evil dialogue options, which are usually also abysmally stupid if you're opportunistic, there's always a safety net that justifies your actions in a way.
You can't even play a coward, you always do something, you can never decide to sit idle, to flee or surrender...
Choosing downright 'good' paths however is a lot easier and a lot more rewarding. You get your usual downer when people don't get what they deserve. But you can help out an awful lot of people, save your girl AND the guy you allied with, smash the proclaimed evil-doer into the ground and be the hero of the day.
Why do you think that is? Because developers want to teach you the lesson of 'evil doesn't pay off'? Or because the majority of players _want_ to follow the hero path?
M
Comments
Probably "hero path" (though there are different types of hero archetypes).
It would probably take a lot of development to develope two fully different paths.
Even in games like Morrowind and Oblivion, where freedom is touted, you still can't truly be evil.
Oh, you can go into a city and murder all the inhabitants but you can also pay off that debt really easily and if you wait long enough no one will remember the murderer who came in and murdered everybody.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Bioware RPGs are all about the chars/plot/cinematic exp. These features runs counter to the free-form gameplay.
While having total freedom with various plot-branches might sound good, the cost/benefit ratio just isn't there.
I rather have 2 RPGs with the usual Bioware stuff than 1 RPG with lots of branches.
In saying that I'm around 5 hours into The Witcher2. My god does it look beautiful!
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
In EVE there is a lot more opportunity to be evil to real people. Between scamming, pirating, excluding people, tricking people, lying to people, stealing from the people that trust you, and verbally abusing them, I'm sure you can satiate your need to feel evil. It's a game where you can build a truly bastardly reputation and be remembered for it.
Although, I generally agree with you that single player RPG moral choices are still pretty weak. Maybe someday they'll develop a better system for moral choice, but right now it's a little too labor intensive for game developers.
There is a line in EVE that even the biggest 'douche-bag' won't cross.
He was asked by a russian alliance to disclose the real-life address of a pilot that flys a titan. One of their associates will go to that house and deliberately cut the power so they can kill his titan.
He did not cross that line and later said even he had limits.
EVE's meta-gaming is facinating but I can see how the bad can become really bad.
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
In Fable II you can't really deviate from the main storyline...you eventually kill the big bad guy no matter what (if you take the quest), but your reasons for doing so are up to you. You can do it all for power and wealth, or for the greater good.
If you decide to start killing guards or towns people, giving alcohol to alcoholics, the world changes to reflect your decisions. Towns people run away from you screaming, guards will try to attack you on sight, the economy of the towns change, etc. The world really does reflect the choices you make. I'm not sure how well this works out in Fable III as I've never seen it. I didn't even play Fable II, but I did watch one 'evil' player and one 'good' player go through the game. I thought it was interesting how different the worlds were for each player.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
OP got it all wrong. Witcher 2 is all about evil choices, even the least evil of the options is evil. Witcher 2 wins out in terms of moral dilemmas out of any Bioware's RPGs. Whereas Commander Shepard runs into a handful of ethical conundrums that force you to pause the game and seriously consider your next course of action, Geralt has droves. The utter ambiguity of The Witcher 2’s world forces players to frequently choose between the lesser of two evils as opposed to simply deciding whether you want to be “right” or “wrong.” DAO and MA2 are utterly fantastic games, but they still suffer from a mild case of “donate to the orphanage or burn the fucker to the ground” syndrome.
Geralt’s world is a mire of fear, poverty, racial inequality, political maneuvering and religious fanaticism. Tensions between humans, mages and “nonhumans” - elves and dwarves - are always high. Most NPCs look dirty and malnourished (with some even showing scars and other disfigurements). Geralt is no knight in shining armor, either. His help always comes at a price and you’re rarely given the option to simply aid someone out of the kindness of your heart.
Gaming has come a very long way in terms of interactive narratives and the medium has several works to be proud of. But as impressive as your Mass Effects and Dragon Ages are, the complete moral polarization of the choices presented in these games has become almost comical. In layman’s terms, choosing between Christ-like benevolence and jet-black satanic tyranny has gotten pretty old. The Witcher 2 sidesteps this cliché by creating a gray, ambiguous world that abandons right and wrong for a much more complex focus on choices and consequences. From the very first chapter, the game bombards you with a series of confrontations that will give you pause as to how to proceed.
Witcher and Witcher 2 are really going a long way to offer you actual consequence, as far as providing an almost completely different second act.
Still, and heres
SPOILER IF ANYONE CARES
, in the end you face Letho, some deserving magi die, you mess a little with politics, the empire is evil, triss is saved and you leave town into sunset with one of your new found trusty friends at your side.
It's right, there _are_ moral choices, but they can't be downright evil. And I'm not talking about crashing the plot. I'm talking about _clever_ evil choices. Like blackmailing Loredo to give you a ship to sail to vergen with mercenaries. Or executing iorweth publicly to get the townsfolk to give you money to sail on your own. Or to go double agent in vergen, promising help to that virgin dragon _AND_ to Henselt just to see them killed in an accident you arranged. OR to meet letho in act 3 and side with him to burn the whole conference to the ground and enable nilfgaard to invade right away.
There are one million possibilities I can imagine where Geralt could do something a _lot_ more opportunistic and evil than he actually does.
M
It used to be that if you were a jerk, that you couldn't start/finish quests; NPC's would either tell you to go screw yourself, and/or you'd end up killing them. And in doing that, your whole game becomes a slaughterfest where you have no idea what the point in everything is.
I remember in Fallout 2, there were the 3 families that controlled New Reno, and they had quite the hair trigger between reluctantly talking to you, and going hostile, particularly if they find you in a place where you don't belong. My first playthrough I ended up missing most of that content as they'd go red and ALL come after me, after which I barely escaped with my life.
Developers these days feel that they absolutely WANT you to experience ALL of the content, so they make it nearly impossible for a situation like that to occur. The most notable example is DA2, where even your hostile answers are you being a bit of a dick, but going along with the NPC, anyway.
I'm imagining a video game adaptation where you could kill any of the major characters. Imagine coding for that. Frodo backstabs Gandalf and decides to keep the ring. Then what? He tries to take over the Shire, and is resisted. He kills everyone in his path.
Is a developer to waste their time coding all that, knowing that most players will never make that choice?
Even when their are truly evil options, such as in the Jedi Knight games, very little about the gameplay is effected. In that case, cutscenes changed, but the missions were pretty much the same. But with that in mind, what would a player want more? One long playthrough with alternative cutscenes? Or two much shorter playthroughs?
Now, on the Witcher... I suspect the moral bit is tempered by the fact that this guy is a fleshed out main character in an IP. The character would not rain destruction down on innocent townsfolk, UNLESS not doing so would bring consequences far worse. On the other hand, his "good" decisions aren't particularly "knight in shining armor" fare, either.
*sigh* I really respect Bioware and their innovation to the industry, but I am sick and tired of the moral decision stuff. Fable does it good because the decisions don't take you on a total different path. I don't like having to keep two versions of saved games going on so that I don't miss out on content and can keep a good and evil character at the same time. I know I'm not the only one that does that.
its because they don't want to make two completely different games within one game
in witcher 2 you know why you cant be evil?
you are roleplaying geralt not yourself.
there were obvious lines of geralts character in books.
so every choice you have is literally what geralt might do.
whatever YOU think isnt exactly important. lol
this ofcourse shouldnt be the case in dragon age where your character is literally some random guy with a little bit of luck to become gay warden.
No s***!? You can create a bearded dwarf and make a gay pride campaign to rid the lands of evil? I think I just decided to replay the game, just for shits and giggles ... I didn't know that, I always thought you could only get the opposite sex to marry/love you, whatever. I never even tried... Well, wait a minute, does that mean you can create a hot elven chick and get her to lez out with the female french bard? ...
Don't mind me, I'm just having a testosterone fit......
M
All of the choices in Witcher 2 are evil in some way. Whether or not they could be evil-er matters little, especially when you compare it to DAO where everything appears to be fine and dandy.
The only game where I got to be a 'coward' and/or 'evil' was NWN and NWN2 (particularly in the expansion). I've never really played through an evil person though...I start killing off nice people or smothering children with pillows and I reset the game and go back to being nice because I feel guilty v-v Yes, they're just pixels I know, but I still can't do it.
That aside, I'm still amused it was an option to begin with, and I'd like to see that incorporated into more games. The problem is this; a game is a phenomenal undertaking. In order to keep up with the Joneses, developers spend just as much if not more time on making the game 'pretty' as they do making the content for those pretty things to exist in. The amount of time it takes to make numerous fully developed moral paths is more often than not, instead spent on making the game show better so it stands out against the competition.
People don't have a chance to see the faults in storyline or long-term gameplay until the game is actually released, but until then all people have to go on are shows like E3 and demos, and THAT'S where devs are trying to make their money, on the hype. In order to get that hype, the game needs to look good. Doesn't actually have to BE good, just look it, cuz once you buy it they've got your money and your thoughts on it afterward, are irrelevant.
Unfortunately no one is going to care about it if it's the most amazing, in-depth game but looks like the polygonal mess that was gaming from 10-15 years ago.
I think this is why the most successful games lately haven't been from larger, well-known companies, but from smaller ones and indie developers that haven't had to feed into all that publicity nonsense.
"Forums aren't for intelligent discussion; they're for blow-hards with unwavering opinions."
I also think it should not be about your actions, more your reputation. What I mean is, if no one sees you steal something, you won't be disliked any more than before unless they do think you stole it. If you start killing people in the streets of a town, the enemy town would not hate you for that, even if it was cold blooded killing. I kind of like Fallout: New Vegas in this sense. It has a way of people not hating you if your neutral or liked by there faction. Granted thats a little too far, if your a bloodthirsty murderer, helping the military won't make me want to be around you much more. I hope that a middle ground can be found in this aspect.
Newb= Newly Enrolled Wannabe Badass.
Lets see. Take loot from part A or take loot and different story from part b. DYNAMIC STORY ARC!
If you want depth in a story, read a book.
When did you start playing "old school" MMO's. World Of Warcraft?
Hmm, I think games should have equal rights as books as far as having dynamic stories.
You're not the only. Actually, many do that, which is one of the many reasons that branching trees aren't in most MMO quest systems.
And is that avatar of yours a white UO GM robe or Asheron's Raiments from AC?
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
I never considered you could role play anything in those solo rpg game. Yes they are role playing game, but it doesn't mean they offer you the ability to role play. They just use the common role playing game setting as a reference and source, but thats it.
Naturally you will always find some people arguing they really let you rp. The argumentation is like this: as any other game they have a rule set, and you must follow a rule set in any rpg game. As such you can't role play an astronaute in d&d setting for exemple.
But the fact is, those solo rpg games have such a tighten mold, they really give you so few choice that i personally can't say i'm role playing in them. I'm not. Yet i enjoy a good solo game rpg style, if you follow me.
This is where multiplayer games, and the MUDs first shatered this aspect, in fact it totally shifted and many gamer just didn't and could not understand this shift. Since always morality in rpg games, solo computer game, but also pen&paper game, the morality is set by the game mechanisms and the GM who represent those mechanisms.
But in myltpiplayer games, slowly the morality was less and less a mechanism but was in the hand of other players. This clearly leaded to pking, random pking, greifing and so on. Those were the real bad guys, and no more those having an evil title bought ingame by a game mechanism. For exemple in Uo both the pk and the anit pk were red character, this mean were evil for the mechanism. I think in the beta a lot of people asked to get rid of the morality system for that exact reason, but i guess even for RG it was hard to understand. A lot of people stil don't understand and don't want to accept that shift, they just plain refuse that change even today.
Neverwinter nights had the best open ended moral choice system i thought,...
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