I just read a poll about differing gameplay of "Good" and "Evil" in videogames.
So I was wondering, how do you think about when a game says: "Decide freely if you want to be good or bad!" On the Box!
How do you think about games that give you "Freedom to do what ever you want" and at the same time try to tell a story
IMO good and evil are only very rarely portrait in a good way!
The concept of good and evil is basically that there is some evil entity that does or threatens to do something moraly wrong. An example would be the Combine in the Half-Life series. They are very powerfull and mighty due to there superior technology and instead of beeing the Picard, they enslave humanity! This motivates the player to fight for freedom and against the bad guys. If you remember the first level of Half-Life 2, it had a really a strong atmosphere, and you knew, without anyone telling you:"Thats the bad guys!"
Now in games like MassEffect, Fallout or Fable, wich on the surface seem to give you the freedom of beeing both good or evil, your real options are beeing a super-nice tree-hugging moron (hoping to get the gold and XP for doing fetchquests for every NPC there is and wasting your medkids and clean water for good carma points on random people you just met in the desert) or the duche-in-duty (getting often even more XP and gold for going into town killing everyone and then looting there corpses).
And to add to this, most games that let you "choose" if you want to be the good or the bad guy, make you kill the evil emperor at the end anyway!
I think, when a game really wants to tell a story, then there should be more to it then a very linear "carma-bar" wich in the end decides if either you destroy the death-star or drive it home to your garage!
It always pulls me out that when I do something in a game, that is either good or bad, I immediately tells me:
"Bling! -2 Carma, you're an asshole!"
Of course I can see the trouble for a developer, who is supposed to make a game telling a certain story and then asked to give the player the freedom to literally do anything.
The Problem is obvious: What if the player tries to brake the bounderies of the story, by e.g. killing a character who is important for the stories progress.
When i played FarCry 2 i was hoping for such freedom. When the game told me: "Your only goal is to find that weapon dealer and kill him." I was hoping that, I could actually just by exploring the "free 50 km² gameworld" find him and end my quest!
IMO a big missed opportunity.
Then again I was playing Minecraft the other day, wich of course has neither storytelling nor moral choices bigger then being a vegetarian or not. But it gave me a lot of freedom, a big world to explore, and even without ever calling out a goal for me, it let me have quite some adventures!!
So I came up with this!
I wish for a game that has a story with multiple endings but that doesn't yell at me every time I'm at the end of a quest/chapter: "Go this way now and your a good guy - go that way and your a bad guy!"
And I wish for a game, that lets me tackle a quest or the hole story in any way i want, and by letting me loose and letting me make the decisions my self, to in the end or later on the way tell me: "Hey look, this is what you've done and how it effects your overall game and its world!"
So I was wondering, how do you think about when a game says: "Decide freely if you want to be good or bad!" On the Box!
How do you think about games that give you "Freedom to do what ever you want" and at the same time try to tell a story
IMO good and evil are only very rarely portrait in a good way!
The concept of good and evil is basically that there is some evil entity that does or threatens to do something moraly wrong. An example would be the Combine in the Half-Life series. They are very powerfull and mighty due to there superior technology and instead of beeing the Picard, they enslave humanity! This motivates the player to fight for freedom and against the bad guys. If you remember the first level of Half-Life 2, it had a really a strong atmosphere, and you knew, without anyone telling you:"Thats the bad guys!"
Now in games like MassEffect, Fallout or Fable, wich on the surface seem to give you the freedom of beeing both good or evil, your real options are beeing a super-nice tree-hugging moron (hoping to get the gold and XP for doing fetchquests for every NPC there is and wasting your medkids and clean water for good carma points on random people you just met in the desert) or the duche-in-duty (getting often even more XP and gold for going into town killing everyone and then looting there corpses).
And to add to this, most games that let you "choose" if you want to be the good or the bad guy, make you kill the evil emperor at the end anyway!
I think, when a game really wants to tell a story, then there should be more to it then a very linear "carma-bar" wich in the end decides if either you destroy the death-star or drive it home to your garage!
It always pulls me out that when I do something in a game, that is either good or bad, I immediately tells me:
"Bling! -2 Carma, you're an asshole!"
Of course I can see the trouble for a developer, who is supposed to make a game telling a certain story and then asked to give the player the freedom to literally do anything.
The Problem is obvious: What if the player tries to brake the bounderies of the story, by e.g. killing a character who is important for the stories progress.
When i played FarCry 2 i was hoping for such freedom. When the game told me: "Your only goal is to find that weapon dealer and kill him." I was hoping that, I could actually just by exploring the "free 50 km² gameworld" find him and end my quest!
IMO a big missed opportunity.
Then again I was playing Minecraft the other day, wich of course has neither storytelling nor moral choices bigger then being a vegetarian or not. But it gave me a lot of freedom, a big world to explore, and even without ever calling out a goal for me, it let me have quite some adventures!!
So I came up with this!
I wish for a game that has a story with multiple endings but that doesn't yell at me every time I'm at the end of a quest/chapter: "Go this way now and your a good guy - go that way and your a bad guy!"
And I wish for a game, that lets me tackle a quest or the hole story in any way i want, and by letting me loose and letting me make the decisions my self, to in the end or later on the way tell me: "Hey look, this is what you've done and how it effects your overall game and its world!"
