Poll: Do you need an established good vs evil in your games?

[AgentNein]

I am of the opinion that morality in the real world tends to be fairly grey. I'd like my games to potentially reflect that. Rarely do they, ESPECIALLY the games that promote a supposed morality system. More often than not it's the choice between being some saint and just being an asshole. There's a lot more to morality than that.

Take the western for instance (and what Red Dead Redemption could've been), the mythical wild west as a setting has a LOT of room for giving us a realistic morality system. Making a character choose between robbing a bank or not doesn't really mean anything, now instead let's say our main character has to eat, needs to pay for clothes and his home? What if money in this game wasn't given to us by the boatload for just any and every mission? What if you could cut your leg and need to pay a doctor huge amounts of money?

Suddenly a bank robbery makes sense. It's not just about being a nice guy versus being an asshole. It may be about survival. Suddenly the 'evil' choice is represented like it is in real life, which is a risky choice, but also possibly a quick way out of a bad situation! What if after you made say, a choice to rob a bank, you had to deal with those consequences? Sure you had money now, but you're also a wanted man. Practically pushed into a future life of crime. Are you going to be the bandit with a heart of gold? Can you even afford to be the bandit with the heart of gold? Do you wound the bounty hunters sent to bring you in, possibly giving them the chance to track you down again? Or do you kill them to send a message to future bounty hunters that you are not to be fucked with? etc...

So many ways a really cool, realistic morality system could be approached and instead for the most part we get dialogue trees and A or B decisions that give us the same basic outcome, but a good ending or a bad ending.

 

[Vault101]

I've seen with a rather odd amount of frequency how people on forums seem to need a obvious "Good v evil" idea in their games. As in you know who's in the right and who's in the wrong.

One of the more popular and frequent examples i see is when people discuss "The Pitt" DLC for fallout 3 where you had to make a choice between 2 grey morality choices, and oddly a lot of people gave the DLC crap for THAT (Ignoring the horrible bugs it spawned with)

Maybe it's just me i dunno but i kind of like having the touch of realism with having no full "right" and no full "wrong" a more up to date example i think would be Dragon age 2 (Spoilers)

Spoiler

You have to choose between the tyrannical and brutal templars or the evil magic using mages, both have their good points, and both have their bad points.

That choice actually made me stop and think of which faction was in the right, and its easy to say their both bad or both good.

What about you, do you need a black vs white morality or do you like shades of grey in your story telling? Give your favorite example for either case.

I dont care so much for good and evil, more a protagonist and can sympathise with or at least understand their cause, or just like them

I mean I hate it when I have to do bad things in a game, like when the protagonist is killing people, even is self defence and all im thinking is (dammit! why cant you jsut stop and explain thing?! you dotn have to kill them! youre just making things worse)

thats why I couldnt play kane and lynch,also why I found god of war a little annoying past the first one

 

[Jodah]

Meh, I just need an enemy I don't feel bad about killing or have a reason to. They can be good or evil, as long as there is a valid reason to be perforating their face with my gun, sword, or gunsword. I usually feel worse about killing animals then I do people in games. I know they are all pixels but the animals just seem to be...more real.

 

[Kotep]

I definitely think there's room for both. While moral ambiguity is certainly realistic, there's no reason why games have to be wholly realistic. I thought one of the downsides of KotOR 2 was that they tried to shoehorn moral ambiguity into a setting that doesn't really work that way.

I mean, in Alpha Protocol, that sort of thing makes sense, but when you're talking about mystic knights in a sci-fi/fantasy setting, there's more of a suspension of disbelief.

Plus, when done well, morality can provide good gameplay. There's one RPG I played where in a certain instance, to take the good choice you have to lose some of your own stats in order to give them to someone else. Or even in Oblivion, where the 'morality' was just situational, and leads to more realistic thinking. If you want to, you can sneak into someone's house and murder them, and as long as you do it quietly without anyone watching, no one will know.

 

[Mallefunction]

I just need a goal, something to work towards. XD

 

[Soviet Heavy]

You don't need good and evil, as long as your story can stand without it. Dragon Age 2's fault isn't that it has no main villain, but that it has no real direction. The plot structure is really disjointed, which brings it down, not the lack of a baddy.

 

[Laser Priest]

Frankly I don't like it. Game writers have a lot of trouble with this.

Heroes generally are good because that's the nice thing to do and villains are generally evil because they either want power for no good reason or for "Fuck it all, let's be evil!"

 

[Kotep]

Black and white? Why can't I make the morally BLUE choice? Your standards are all so low!

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlueAndOrangeMorality

 

[bushwhacker2k]

I generally prefer more a grey area, pure black and white is kind of boring and overall not really realistic IMO(please don't start quoting me and talking about how magic isn't realistic either, it's quite a different thing).

But on the other hand I have had situations where I'm in a situation where I have to make a choice, they make the choices in more of a morally grey area, but the choices are both crap and I could easily see a way around either choice. An example is if I'm forced to choose a side but I'm pretty much an unkillable badass who could destroy either side by myself.

So when I say morally grey, I want freedom of choice, and I want to justify my own choices, I don't want things forced on me.

 

[triggrhappy94]

NO!
Bad for the sake of being bad, or good for the sake of being good kills things for me.
If you're going to have a good vs evil, then you better have motive.

EDIT:
Someone mind helping me find and post that one scene from Donnie Darko?
I'm sure anyone who's seen the movie knows what I'm talking about.

 

[StriderShinryu]

I think it, as in many cases like this, depends on how well it's done. Simple and obvious good/evil sets things up easily and doesn't require much effort or ability in crafting a world/setting/story/etc. When there is too much grey area, or it's just done poorly (and it's very easy to do complex morality poorly), you end up with unlikable and/or bland characters and the player just isn't hooked. All told, I'd rather have pedestrian obvious good/evil than poorly done grey where I don't end up caring about the game at all.

As a side note on likable characters. I don't mean that the characters need to be someone you want to be have tea with, they just need to be interesting and compelling. They need to be a character that you like the design of not necessarily a character you "like."

 

[Frotality]

no, but you need a goal. DA2 is probably the worst example of presenting gray morality in a conflict; sure theyre is no clear-cut "bad guy", because both sides could qualify; theyre both horrible, horrible people and i at least felt nothing choosing either one over the other. it wasnt the lesser of 2 evils, it was one evil against an equal evil, very much bordering on black vs black morality, which is boring. way too much was left to the player to decide which side was 'right', your choice has next to no effect, and it ended up completely undermining the one thing all gray conflicts should have going for them; some degree of sympathy for both sides, not just equal amounts of contempt for them.

having morally gray conflicts is more difficult to pull off than good vs evil, but hardly impossible; all you need to do is make the player work for something more than "they are evil, they must die". in bioware games, that is usually choice; instead of focusing on a clear cut conflict, they focus on your choices and how they effect that conflict. that isnt to say you cant have a linear gray conflict, but choice is the one thing a game can offer that other mediums cant (choose you own adventure books excluded).

all you need is something the player will want to work for, and a big part of that is simple presentation, so its hard to nail down any examples of what else a game could be about besides "kill the bad guys". there is always personal reasons for conflict; take scarface, the motive of the protaganist isnt to defeat anyone, but just to make his way in america. or....conkers bad fur day: the whole game is just you finding ways to make money, simple but effective, and presented in a ridiculous enough way to keep your interest and develop plenty of side conflicts; alot of the conflict you come across is just about as selfish as you, but that is secondary to getting your moolah, so you are free to pick favorites in a way that doesnt impede your goal. that might be a strange example, but hey, its a gray conflict that worked...

 

[ChupathingyX]

I like the way it was in Fallout: New Vegas where all the options were very grey and you decided who to ally with depending on their views.

Although personally I think the independent path is the worst and would result in utter anarchy.

 

[AbsoluteVirtue18]

I make my own morality. I do what I think is right, regardless of which side it puts me with.

 

[Appleshampoo]

Maybe not 'good vs evil' in a direct sense that it needs to be slapped everywhere, but hell yeah I do need a clear enemy to fight. I've nearly finished Dragon age 2 and I still don't know who the hell I'm supposed to be angry at. I just refuse to play the game because simply I don't care.

Starcraft 2 though? That was the last game that had me hooked with the story. There was a clear objective. And was it good vs evil? Well, that's all up to your interpretation really isn't it?

 

[WorldCritic]

I do like a good old fashioned good vs. evil plot, but grey vs. grey usually has more thought put into it and usually makes for better stories. It all comes down to are you really the good guy no matter the choices you make.

 

[Aris Khandr]

I really hope not. The Total War series would be really messed up if they had to shoehorn in "good" and "evil".

 

[infohippie]

Nah, a definite "good" and "evil" is kinda shallow and boring. I want characters with complex motivations, and whose actions have both positive and negative aspects. I want to be unsure whether fighting the big bad really is the best decision in the end. I want to be able to contemplate possibly even joining him, or taking over his role.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

You need a protagonist/antagonist...not the same thing as good/evil.