My Fallout 3 Karma

[Zersy]

Ok now i was playing Fallout 3.. enjoyed it ... while i was playing did the average you know find dog meat diffuse the
bomb kill mr burke
the sheriff dies oo and the useal play around with corpes.

but some how my save file gets deleted so i had to start all over again not much of a problem since i only had about 3 or 4 hours of playing time. but the next time i started to play i was smart i made one "good" file and one "evil" file so i decided to see whats it like being evil and ya i basically blow up megaton kill lots of innocent people and steall lots of stuff and you know What ?????


BEING EVIL IS BORING!!!! seriously when i was playing good it was fun i got lots of stuff and was really immersed but when i played evil it just got more and more boring

i really tried to have fun being evil but it never help anyone else got the same thing ??

i skipped the details on purpose so i can ansewer questions (not sure if that makes much sense though)

 

[Zersy]

well this is going great i can't beleive how much feedback i'm getting

 

[geldonyetich]

So, you're asking, "How can I have fun being evil in Fallout 3?"

It's a loaded question. What one person finds fun will vary from another person. You're asking us to perform mind reading to know what you would find fun.

Besides, who ever said being a social reject was supposed to be fun? It's all very good to bring the fledgling post-apocolyptic society struggling to gain a foothold on the wastes tumbling down to a state of pathetic ruin, but you have to live with the consequences. Blasting society back to the stone age loses its appeal once you get tired of sucking the mold off rocks to survive while being called a royal dickhead by the few people still living on the wasteland.

Personally, I never had much luck being evil in Fallout 3. Blow up Megaton, enslave people, plant grenades in the pockets of innocents... then, you perform 2 mini-quests and bam you're a good guy again.

Some of the choices are a bit morally whacked in terms of karma rewards, too, such as Paradise Lane:

Spoiler

Murdering the 200-year-old on-life-support inhabitants of a virtual reality program is good, but leaving them alive as occasionally tormented yet immortal and blissfully memory-wiped playthings of Dr. Braun is bad? It's sort of a scenario where nothing you could do would really make that much of a difference anyway, but you can get a load of bad karma out of it.

 

[whyarecarrots]

Personally, I never had much luck being evil in Fallout 3. Blow up Megaton, enslave people, plant grenades in the pockets of innocents... then, you perform 2 mini-quests and bam you're a good guy again.

Maybe try stealing anything and everything, even if you drop it again straight after

And on the subject of whether being evil is fun or not...
Well, at the moment, I;m trying to play it as pleasantly as I can, and I actively regret killing in cold blood, or doing something bad (not as a character, but personally).
I;m tempted to have a go at a new playthrough being evil, but creatively so (ie, sneak, pistols and thievery, etc), but I'm not sure how I'll be able to cope removing the limbs of characters that aren;'t actively trying to kill me and are (like Moira), characters I;ve come to know.


edit:

Some of the choices are a bit morally whacked in terms of karma rewards, too, such as Paradise Lane:

Spoiler

Murdering the 200-year-old on-life-support inhabitants of a virtual reality program is good, but leaving them alive as occasionally tormented yet immortal and blissfully memory-wiped playthings of Dr. Braun is bad?

Was thinking exactly the same thing!

 

[Jamash]

I understand the Paradise Lane thing.

Spoiler

Morally it's better to commit euthanasia on the inhabitants then leave them at mercy of a demented torturer.

Never ending, immortal torture, robbed of all control over your destiny is basically Hell & (for all intents & purposes) you're the only chance they have of escaping that, properly die-ing & moving onto a proper afterlife.

Anyway if you do it properly & activate the fail-safe, you're not murdering them, the program is.

Even in our times, it's seen as the morally good choice to switch off the life support of someone who's brain dead, and they're not even suffering a horrendously prolonged life & being tormented on a daily basis by a psychopath.

 

[CoverYourHead]

I found being evil fun, and I ended up rediculously powerful and with enough caps to do whatever I wanted and still have enough to buy New York (sarcasm by the way, there is no way to buy New York that I know of) then again, I hate being good.

 

[geldonyetich]

One of these days I might do another playthrough of Fallout 3 where I'm doing a "screw Karma, I'm doing what's right" run through.

Spoiler

For example, sabotaging Vault 101. It's an evil thought experiment where the inhabitants never leave, even in case society makes a complete recovery. Kill off all the drug dealers (I've never been a proponent of doping yourself up to endure reality), murder the harmless but naive cults (e.g. Rehabilitated Cannibal Vampires, Church of the Atom), ect.

 

[whyarecarrots]

That is actually a very good point Jamash; I hadn't thought of it like that.
I just assumed:

Spoiler

That once you completed the tasks everyone in there would be released. Not sure why I thought that though...

 

[geldonyetich]

I understand the Paradise Lane thing.

Spoiler

Morally it's better to commit euthanasia on the inhabitants then leave them at mercy of a demented torturer.

Never ending, immortal torture, robbed of all control over your destiny is basically Hell & (for all intents & purposes) you're the only chance they have of escaping that, properly die-ing & moving onto a proper afterlife.

Anyway if you do it properly & activate the fail-safe, you're not murdering them, the program is.

Even in our times, it's seen as the morally good choice to switch off the life support of someone who's brain dead, and they're not even suffering a horrendously prolonged life & being tormented on a daily basis by a psychopath.

Spoiler

The first point I can understand, the rest is a matter of debate.

Yes, letting Dr. Braun get away with tormenting these poor souls isn't fair. He's a powermad Psychologist who used his influence in the Vault project to get to play God when the apocolypse came.

These individuals were completely unaware of the torment that befell them, and probably spent the majority of the time plodding around in bliss while Braun built up conditions to be right for a vindictive ending. Saying they're essentially in Hell is like saying you're essentially in Hell because you might get a splinter now and then. These guys can't even remember what happened to them.

Saying activating the failsafe that kills them is the program that does it and not you is like saying pulling the trigger at a gun already pointing at someone's head is having the gun kill them and not you. Setting in motion the actions that kill people, having read ahead of time in the very console that kills them that the failsafe would, should have clarified that you chose to kill them just as wantonly as if you strangled them yourself.

These people aren't brain dead, their brains were very much alive, so that example doesn't work. It's sort of the other way around - it's not their brains that are dead, it's their bodies, which are too old to survive outside the pod anymore. Saying you should kill somebody because their body doesn't allow them to survive in reality is sort of like saying you should kill somebody because they're doomed to age anyway.

If it were a viable option, I'd see about talking Dr. Braun into creating a beneficial scenario. Failing that, disconnect his pod or reprogram the VR or something. Either option provided by Fallout 3's Paradise Lane scenario is not morally perfect by any means.

 

[Jamash]

I understand the Paradise Lane thing.

Spoiler

Morally it's better to commit euthanasia on the inhabitants then leave them at mercy of a demented torturer.

Never ending, immortal torture, robbed of all control over your destiny is basically Hell & (for all intents & purposes) you're the only chance they have of escaping that, properly die-ing & moving onto a proper afterlife.

Anyway if you do it properly & activate the fail-safe, you're not murdering them, the program is.

Even in our times, it's seen as the morally good choice to switch off the life support of someone who's brain dead, and they're not even suffering a horrendously prolonged life & being tormented on a daily basis by a psychopath.

Spoiler

The first point I can understand, the rest is a matter of debate.

Yes, letting Dr. Braun get away with tormenting these poor souls isn't fair. He's a powermad Psychologist who used his influence in the Vault project to get to play God when the apocolypse came.

These individuals were completely unaware of the torment that befell them, and probably spent the majority of the time plodding around in bliss while Braun built up conditions to be right for a vindictive ending. Saying they're essentially in Hell is like saying you're essentially in Hell because you might get a splinter now and then. These guys can't even remember what happened to them.

Saying activating the failsafe that kills them is the program that does it and not you is like saying pointing a gun at someone's head and pulling the trigger is having the gun kill them and not you. Setting in motion the actions that kill people, having read ahead of time in the very console that kills them that the failsafe would, should have clarified that you chose to kill them just as wantonly as if you strangled them yourself.

These people aren't brain dead, their brains were very much alive, so that example doesn't work. It's sort of the other way around - it's not their brains that are dead, it's their bodies, which are too old to survive outside the pod anymore. Saying you should kill somebody because their body doesn't allow them to survive in reality is sort of like saying you should kill somebody because they're doomed to age anyway.

If it were a viable option, I'd see about talking Dr. Braun into creating a beneficial scenario. Failing that, disconnect his pod or reprogram the VR or something. Either option provided by Fallout 3's Paradise Lane scenario is not morally perfect by any means.

I see your point.

It's good how different people have different interpretations to moral decisions in role playing games. For instance in Fable 2

Spoiler

In the ghost quest, I though that the morally correct thing to do would be to help end the ghost's immortal torment, by going along with his plan & breaking Alex's heart, whereas my friend immediately perceived that it was immoral revenge.

I also excerpted there to be more options after you started the quest, like explaining to her what happened, rather than either marry her or cause her death.

More often than not, these types of games have dubious, black or white moral decisions, lacking the finer details and options which we would expect in a real life situation.

I wonder if my decision making in these games is influenced by my understanding of the "Way of the Closed Fist" in 'Jade Empire'?
I quite like Bioware's approach to moral decisions in that game.

 

[GenHellspawn]

The problem is, you're being evil in Fallout 3. You want to have fun being evil? Load up Fallout 2 (and Falche character editor if you don't feel like leveling up and all that jazz) and go over to a town center and kill everybody.

No unkillable characters!

 

[geldonyetich]

No comments on Fable 2 from me, I haven't played that one yet - I'm waiting for the PC version (if any) or for the XBox 360 version to come down in price. (Or, hell, I should just rent it from GameFly.)

I wonder if my decision making in these games is influenced by my understanding of the "Way of the Closed Fist" in 'Jade Empire'?

I quite like Bioware's approach to moral decisions in that game.

The "Way of the Closed Fist" in Jade Empire collected a lot of notice from the Zen folk because Eastern depictions of Good and Evil are not the same. Where here in the West we tend to think of "Evil" as "Wrong" or maybe "Cruel," in the East it's more common to consider "Evil" as "Disharmonious."

Bioware's writers do a lot of summarizing things as "good" or "evil" as they did in KOTOR and Jade Empire, but the tricky business with summarizing is you lose some of the truth in abstraction. Society loves it when you can simply demonize something as being "evil," but what person genuinely considers themselves "evil" or "wrong?" It's merely different perspectives. Jade Empire's handling got a bit of a backlash because in a lot of their games you have to do what's "wrong" to be "evil," and neither make logical sense.

Really, it ties into the whole Fallout 3 Karma thing, really. Under close examination, the "good" or "evil" in games is artificial play good/evil, and I suspect that's how most people would prefer it. Investigating the deep moral ramifications of good or bad will ultimately determine that there's merely the ignorant versus less ignorant approach. Fallout 3's Karma rating is a whole lot of bunk, but so long as it's fun bunk, it does its job.

 

[Zersy]

Me? I loved being evil, the gore, the slaughter, the torture and wanton destruction fuelled my dark side.

we're still talking about Fallout 3 right ??

 

[TheGhostOfSin]

I still wish that one of these games with a morality/karma type thing that doesn't tell you when you gained or lost points, so you have no idea how you are progressing untill the end.

 

[Bling Cat]

Me? I loved being evil, the gore, the slaughter, the torture and wanton destruction fuelled my dark side.

we're still talking about Fallout 3 right ??

Have you used bloody mess? It really makes me want to go and give Bethesda a lesson on anatomy.

 

[Bling Cat]

Me? I loved being evil, the gore, the slaughter, the torture and wanton destruction fuelled my dark side.

we're still talking about Fallout 3 right ??

Oh most definitely. It was the first game to ever truly bring out the killer in me!

Yes. Now put it back in the box.

 

[professorcommie]

Me? I loved being evil, the gore, the slaughter, the torture and wanton destruction fuelled my dark side.

we're still talking about Fallout 3 right ??

Seriously, I haven't had more fun being evil in a game in a long time. Most good/evil games, ten minutes out of the starter area, be it moon base or space base or something, your first big good/evil choice is something small like two thugs picking on a hobo. Do you leap in and help him for the good of it or do you try to extort money afterwards or do you tell him to sod off as it is his own problem?

Meanwhile Fallout 3 puts this moral dilemma to me:
You enter Megaton, a town built round a live atom bomb. The sheriff wants you to disable it for 100 credits, shadowy guy Mr Burke wants you to detonate it from a safe distance for 500 credits. Which would you prefer?

My choice was of course to finish the quests I was given in the town then detonate it. I went back after completing the game to play through with good karma, and disarmed the bomb. Instantly not as satisfying. The house sucks compared to tenpenny tower and saving the town just wasnt as fun or cool.(Nothing quite like seeing a mushroom cloud on the horizon and thinking to yourself, "I did that? Cool."

Perhaps its more a matter of whether or not you like to be evil in games or not. Do your decisions in the game genuinely bother you? Or do you, to paraphrase Michael Caine, just like to watch the virtual world burn?