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

[drbarno]

Here's what I'd like to see. The established villian of the game being the good guy.

A scenario.
Let's say someone kills the heros parents. so the hero decides to go ahead and kill him for revenge. as the hero travels over the land, you find out the person who did it was a king and you see an area where his people are suffering, which the hero thinks that defeating this king will help them, and leaves. eventually, once you defeat the king, you find out that the death of the heros parent was a genuine accident (possibly research on something to help the kings people that went horribly wrong) and that the king was actually a genuinely good person that always helped out his people, but that the hero was too narrow minded to notice the kings effects.

that's what I'd like for a game.

 

[Lordpils]

I prefer a game that doesn't judge your actions, but does show you the likely consequences. I.E. kill the orcs to the last of them and you're seen as a genocidal maniac and the orcs are seen as the victims and in retaliation orc-blooded citizens rise up and destroy your home city or the orcs rise to a glorious new empire and crush many cities beneath their heel. Either way you're a dick.
That morally grey area wasn't exactly perfect, but I feel I made my point even if I forgot what it was.

 

[Fragged_Templar]

Mostly this

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

With a nice slice of death to the things I don't like!

 

[iamthelizardqueen88]

hell no i dont need a designated good or evil. in Tales of the Abyss it could go either way if youre the bad guy or if the guys youre fighting are evil and in my opinion that game has possibly the best RPG story of all time. i mean yeah sure they try to kill you but once you find out their grand "evil" scheme and actually take 2 seconds to think about what theyre trying to do its at most only slightly evil and you guys are the monsters for trying to stop them. (if i remember correctly there are a few moments when even your party acknowledges this)

 

[Grunt_Man11]

For the moral choice system to get out of the stagnant pool it seems to have fallen into it needs to do a few things.

1) Get away from the pure "good and evil" choices, (more gray areas).
2) Get rid of the morality meters. How good or bad something is usually pretty subjective with only a few exceptions.
3) Base how positively, negative, or neutrally your choices are perceived on a more individual basis.

Scenario:

Your female character is at the bar of a tavern, and some guy comes in and starts hitting on her in a very ungentlemanly manner. You are given four options for your character's response:

Choice 1 - Show interest. (Have your character show some possible interest. This can be lead to an actual relationship with the putz, or you can just be stringing him along just so you can shoot him down later.)
Choice 2 - Not interested. (Your character just attempts to politely tell him she's not interested, duh.)
Choice 3 - Slap him. (Again, it obvious. Your character gives the typical slap across the face.)
Choice 4 - Face to bar. (Your character grabs the guy's head and slams it into the bar, hard.)

Say you pick choice number 4. Your character's, or your, action has the following consequences for the other NPCs in the tavern.

A couple of waitresses laugh at the schmuck's misfortune at your hands. (He was a bit of a sleaze.)
One guy at a table literally cheers. (Highlight of his day.)
The person sitting at the other end of the bar gets scared and quickly leaves.
Another female patron is disgusted you would be so brutish.
The bartender is pissed that you dented his bar and got blood on it.
And the jerk you owned is in a lot of pain and no longer attracted to your character.

I know that's complicated, but so is morality. The only way the moral choice in game can be truly, 100%, meaningful is if it can reflect the complexity of real morality.

 

[GrizzlerBorno]

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.

Same Here. New Vegas did it very well, indeed.

I think story-driven RPG's should have Grey morality because it can add great Depth to the plot and decisions. In less story-driven games, I couldn't care less.

 

[Shanecooper]

"Good vs. Evil" is alright, but I prefer "Them vs. Us". The problem is, more often than not, morality comes down to "Stupid vs. Slightly eviler stupid".

 

[Jandau]

I think both are valid and can be enjoyed on their own merits. They both serve as different storytelling tools and I don't see one inherently superior to the other. Also, it's not one or the other, there's a lot of middle ground between them.