Evil for the sake of Being evil

[Vault101]

as the title says I think this is the problem with the morality in some games, and Yahtzee mentions somthing like this in his look at epic mickey

choices in games where its pretty obvious, theres no reason to take the "evil" option other than being evil for the fun of it

though some games take a different look at this, like Mass effect or dragon age your still going to save the day in the end but you choose how to go about it, if youre ruthless or diplomatic, you get results ether way

I think Fallout 3 is guilty of this to some extent, there are many dialogue options and different actions to take in situations but the main problem is that the game is built on "good" and "bad" I supose it works for you follow a "good" path but following an evil path dosnt make much sense for your charachter other than the fact that you are evil, which I supose is fine but pretty shallow

though a very interesting deconstruction of this is the tenpenny tower quest, so theres a tower owned by the eccentric mr tenpenny full of rich crazy people (how they get their caps if all they do is sit around all day I dont know) thease people wont let gouls live in the tower, and there happens to be a certain goul called roy phillips whos causing trouble

so security asks you to kill him, but because you good you go to help the gouls, then roy philips says (rather rudley) that he wants you to help him kill everyone in the tower...ok well thats not going to work, you decide to take the third option! you ask around and convice everyone to allow the ghouls to stay everyones happy! and your still a good person........that is untill you return and roy has killed everyone anyway

the reason I like this quest so much is because you expect its all going to turn out so well because you took the good option, but the game brings you back to reality, I think the moral of this quest was just because the ghouls were being treated unfairly did not mean they couldnt be assholes and somtimes things just dont turn out well. what was obviously the "good choice" turned out to be the worst,I know people were annoyed by this because you had no way of know it was going to heppen but....thats the wasteland. in fact this is almost lampshaded when you proudly proclaim to security "Im going to find a peacful solution to this!" he just smirks and is like "yeah right" unfortunatly there werent many other moments like this, except you could talk about "the pitt" now that was a mess

This is also why I prefer the morality of Fallout New Vegas (No I havnt finished yet) sure its pretty obvious NCR= good Legion=bad but theres more depth to it than that, unlike Fallout3 its not a good thing to follow everyhting the NCR asks you to do because it is far from perfect and then theres mr house who is unlikeable but seems to know what he is doing, who do you side with? even Im still unsure which direction to go, probably why Im putting off making a desicion (please no fallout NV spoilers)

So I should ask which individual choices do you feel where it was pretty shallow? do some agmes avoid this well?

 

[Spy_Guy]

How about inFamous? That's one hell of a shallow system.

Spoiler: Early game spoiler

Hit the Blue button to give everyone food, or hit the Red button to keep it to yourself!

But it even fails when trying to be a bit more gray, yes it's a difficult choice but you'll know that the Blue button would never tell you to do something bad.

Spoiler: Massive late-game spoiler

When your girlfriend is tied up on top of a tall building, rigged to drop after a short while. Then there's six doctors tied up on another building in the same situation.

You can either save your GF or the doctors (not really).

While this may give a player some difficulty, assuming they were engaged in the story and characters, the Blue Button still thinks you should save the doctors, and you get an achievement for listening to the Blue button.

The Blue Button is your friend!

 

[Daystar Clarion]

Mass Effect is the only game where I can stand being 'evil' because the renegade choices aren't really evil, they're just badass. Not many games offer you the chance to be a badass hero.

 

[norwegian-guy]

Is there any game that actually dive into real ethical dillemas? Where both the options are bad, but you have to choose wich of the two are the lesser evil based on your own ethical belief? Or where the best option dosen't feel like the right option? I may be wrong, but wouldn't moral choice-systems be more awsome if it was a real moral choice and not some good/evil-shit.

 

[Pandaman1911]

Mass Effect is the only game where I can stand being 'evil' because the renegade choices aren't really evil, they're just badass. Not many games offer you the chance to be a badass hero.

It's not even really "badass" sometimes, it's just being a dick. Which I'm fine with. In a lot of games, I'm evil just for evil's sake because I think making virtual people's lives miserable is great. I love schadenfreude. So when Shepherd says "You've been working too hard." and shoves a fusion cutter into a mechanic's spinal column, it quite makes my day. Even in games where it's just evil for evil's sake, I still enjoy it. I don't really care if it's shallow or not. I don't really WANT significant moral dilemmas, I get enough of those in day to day life!

 

[Vault101]

Is there any game that actually dive into real ethical dillemas? Where both the options are bad, but you have to choose wich of the two are the lesser evil based on your own ethical belief? Or where the best option dosen't feel like the right option? I may be wrong, but wouldn't moral choice-systems be more awsome if it was a real moral choice and not some good/evil-shit.

An example from ME 1, a greiving husband asks you to find out why they are withholding his wifes body (she was a solder on eden prime) you find out that they are using her for reasearch, not shady reasearch but actualy legitimate research, on one hand you can convince them to give her up to make the husband happy, or you can let them keep her since the reasearch may save lives and while the husband is still sad he understands

 

[Jordi]

I think one of the main reasons why we are not seeing a lot of great moral choices, is that a lot of people think that choice without consequence is meaningless, and that implementing consequences beyond "you gain/lose X morality points/money/gear" is hard and expensive.

 

[RuralGamer]

Mass Effect is the only game where I can stand being 'evil' because the renegade choices aren't really evil, they're just badass. Not many games offer you the chance to be a badass hero.

It's not even really "badass" sometimes, it's just being a dick. Which I'm fine with. In a lot of games, I'm evil just for evil's sake because I think making virtual people's lives miserable is great. I love schadenfreude. So when Shepherd says "You've been working too hard." and shoves a fusion cutter into a mechanic's spinal column, it quite makes my day. Even in games where it's just evil for evil's sake, I still enjoy it. I don't really care if it's shallow or not. I don't really WANT significant moral dilemmas, I get enough of those in day to day life!

Is it just me, or is it when Shepard isn't dealing with jerks, renegade options just make him/her come across as being a total jerk? Renegade options can be fun (i.e. pushing smarmy Eclipse mercs out of windows) but storming a research complex trigger-happy to kill the terrorist and end up slaughtering all the hostages just seems a bit of a dick-move which is unnecessary. I prefer paragon myself, if only because renegade Shepard comes across as too much of an ass for most of the time. Still, dealing with Conrad Verner in Mass Effect 2 as renegade is priceless.

 

[baddude1337]

How about inFamous? That's one hell of a shallow system.

Spoiler: Early game spoiler

Hit the Blue button to give everyone food, or hit the Red button to keep it to yourself!

But it even fails when trying to be a bit more gray, yes it's a difficult choice but you'll know that the Blue button would never tell you to do something bad.

Spoiler: Massive late-game spoiler

When your girlfriend is tied up on top of a tall building, rigged to drop after a short while. Then there's six doctors tied up on another building in the same situation.

You can either save your GF or the doctors (not really).

While this may give a player some difficulty, assuming they were engaged in the story and characters, the Blue Button still thinks you should save the doctors, and you get an achievement for listening to the Blue button.

The Blue Button is your friend!

This really pissed me off about Infamous. For all it's choices it doesn't effect shit. Only if Cole is slightly more moody by end game.

Is there any game that actually dive into real ethical dillemas? Where both the options are bad, but you have to choose wich of the two are the lesser evil based on your own ethical belief? Or where the best option dosen't feel like the right option? I may be wrong, but wouldn't moral choice-systems be more awsome if it was a real moral choice and not some good/evil-shit.

There is one in The Pitt for Fallout 3 I believe, even though I've never played it.

I want The Pitt solely for that reason, I want to know what the choices are.

Yea, the Pitt does actually have a really good moral choice. At the start it appears to be just good and evil, but by the end the good/evil thing is grayed out and none of the choices are really good or evil.

 

[Thedayrecker]

I was just playing some DA:O, and in the begining there's a wounded soldier, who you can bandage up (at no cost), let him bleed out, or kill him youself.... Because why the fuck not?

 

[Jamboxdotcom]

yeah, i felt a lot of the moral choices in Fallout 3 and its dlc were very much shades of grey. Tenpenny Tower was a great example already mentioned, and the moral choice in the Pitt absolutely infuriated me because it was so well done (i actually ended up going with the "evil" option, because the "good guys" were so obviously the worst choice long term). and then there was "Trouble on the Homefront". man... i spent so long on that quest trying every possible option, only to realize that once again, the best long term option was the "evil" one. like Yahtzee said about Fable 3, if the "evil" option is the one that results in everyone living, then i guess that's the option i'm gonna take.

 

[Criquefreak]

Moral systems in games are unlikely to ever feel right unless they're being tailored specifically to individual players' points of view. It's kind of like the sanity bar, if it shows up on the user interface the player breaks from feeling immersed. These aren't exactly quantifiable things and attempting to show them to a player as if they are is absurd.

Rather than telling the player, "This is good." "This is evil." a game should be illustrating the effects of decisions and letting them decide for themselves the moral value of their choices.

I doubt most players try a game in order to have someone reinforcing the idea that they're good or evil by the kind of choices they make in a virtual world. What's more likely is that they want to see the consequences, one of which would be in how the non-player characters view the player character. But even npcs are bound to differ in views (one person's hero is another's monster).

 

[JordanXlord]

....i always loved being evil...for being a badass


Heroes are Zeros


Villians are badasses

i just like being the "Bad Guy"

 

[queenorivers]

[deleted]

 

[hecticpicnic]

I don't like the whole bad(evil) or good,thing it kinda was a gimmic and its kinda like a milestone on the evolution of gaming morality.I think it works in Fallout NV its like a metre.
You can do something which gives you a bad reputation but you know to yourself is the good thing to do, or vise versa.Sometimes its a bad thing like in Fable 3 like in game the city was gonna be attacked by a moster.And you could either use the money you got from taxes to make everyone happy before they die(the good option) or tax them loads and don't give anything back and save up to fight against the monster while making everyones lies miserable in the prosess.(the bad option)now if there was no good or evil it would be a ligimite moral choice.
Mass effect also has this problam rather that you choicing what you want,you choice which ever side you started with.

What im really trying to get to is:Your morality bar shouldn't dictate your choices.Your choices should dictate it.

 

[Netrigan]

I think Fallout 3 is guilty of this to some extent, there are many dialogue options and different actions to take in situations but the main problem is that the game is built on "good" and "bad" I supose it works for you follow a "good" path but following an evil path dosnt make much sense for your charachter other than the fact that you are evil, which I supose is fine but pretty shallow

though a very interesting deconstruction of this is the tenpenny tower quest, so theres a tower owned by the eccentric mr tenpenny full of rich crazy people (how they get their caps if all they do is sit around all day I dont know) thease people wont let gouls live in the tower, and there happens to be a certain goul called roy phillips whos causing trouble

so security asks you to kill him, but because you good you go to help the gouls, then roy philips says (rather rudley) that he wants you to help him kill everyone in the tower...ok well thats not going to work, you decide to take the third option! you ask around and convice everyone to allow the ghouls to stay everyones happy! and your still a good person........that is untill you return and roy has killed everyone anyway

the reason I like this quest so much is because you expect its all going to turn out so well because you took the good option, but the game brings you back to reality, I think the moral of this quest was just because the ghouls were being treated unfairly did not mean they couldnt be assholes and somtimes things just dont turn out well. what was obviously the "good choice" turned out to be the worst,I know people were annoyed by this because you had no way of know it was going to heppen but....thats the wasteland. in fact this is almost lampshaded when you proudly proclaim to security "Im going to find a peacful solution to this!" he just smirks and is like "yeah right" unfortunatly there werent many other moments like this, except you could talk about "the pitt" now that was a mess

Found the Tenpenny Tower thing to be a bit silly. Two sides who want the other side dead... and the "good" decision is bringing them together? Can't see how that would end badly.

The thing that I find funniest about the whole thing is that Three Dog gives you less shit if you help the Ghouls kill all the humans, while he acts like you're the devil incarnate for killing three ghouls who are planning a massacre.

The problem with so many gray moral choices is that there's really only one good choice and that's just walking the fuck away when they try to give you the quest. Such as in Fable II, you're given a quest by a ghost to seduce her ex, then dump him. Well, right off, you're on shady ground... but after farting your way into his heart, the "good" option is to marry the lame-ass. And since I was already married, the game's "good" option is bigamy.

The problem with giving these morally gray problems a good or bad rating is that, by their nature, there is no good or bad option. Do you carry on a well-meaning lie or do you tell a hurtful truth? Do you play the asshole for the greater good or be the well-meaning sap that does nothing to prevent a foreseeable tragedy.

Probably the best way to deal with these sorts of problems is to create problems whose solutions have unexpected consequences further down the line. Telling a person a hurtful truth might lead the character to a better life... or he might spiral downward into suicide. Perpetuating the well-meaning lie might lead to happiness... or you might get an earful when the character learns the truth later on. Toss enough variables into the system so the nice ending might end up causing more pain... unless you do something bad. If you tell someone their husband is dead when he's really a werewolf... but if you don't kill the husband, she learns the truth later on. Or maybe it all works out.

Now what I think would be interesting is if games kept track of your crimes, so it's not a case of good or evil... but of lawful or criminal (and have NPCs react to them as such, such as murderers tend to get disarmed at the gate or receive hostile treatment). And for players who want to change their evil ways, give them one Karmic Get Of Free card. Return to your criminal ways and a permanent penalty is applied. That plus a Faction system would probably work pretty well. Toss in Lawful Good through Chaotic Evil alignments and the character can make choices as to which factions he wants to trade and camp. You can still have morally gray missions in the mix, although I'd prefer if they went gray after taking them and weren't obviously hinky from the jump. Invent the player emotionally with these people's fates, then make them make difficulty decisions.