"That action did not warrant those evil points!"

[Souplex]

Spoiler: Space Wizards 2 spoilers

On Legion's loyalty mission you have the option of messing with free will (risking lives if the heretics come back to their original conclusion. The Geth might just want to destroy some organics anyways with their bolstered numbers) or blowing up the heretics (Killing them, but not taking all the risks mentioned above, and not tampering with free will) for some reason blowing them up was the renegade option.

 

[Erana]

Plenty of games have moral choice systems nowadays and in some ways it's a good thing for storytelling, especially in RPG games. It helps to have some kind of marker telling you whether you are a saint or satan depending on how you behave in the game and for the most part it's fair... if you rescue orphans from a burning house then you are good but if you laugh and roast marshmellows on their smoking corpses then you are clearly evil.

But there are those times, when we get positive or negative points where we feel like either:
A. The point alignment depending on the action should have been the other way
B. It shouldn't have effected your morality alignment whatsoever.

I'll give an example of what I mean.

In Mass Effect 2 my Shepard was having a conversation with Tali, at one point she casually drops in a potential interest in Shepard and my Shepard was still being faithful to Ashley, her picture still prominently sitting on his desk, and as a result politely turned Tali down.
Suddenly I'm staring at 2 renegade points earned for apparently not having feelings for Tali. I honestly don't see why this had to effect my alignment at all, I told Jack and Miranda similarly that I wasn't interested and it didn't give me bad points then, only with Tali. If anything I should have gotten positive points for not being swayed into being unfaithful.
In any case it wasn't a very renegade way to turn someone down, the real renegade way to say I wasn't interested would have been to laugh at the thought and walk away insulting her surely. Not just politley saying I don't have feelings.

True it's not that big of a deal and true, two renegade points isn't so bad but I just think that it was moral alignment effecting.

Mass Effect had a lot of those moments; I'm still mad that I got renegade points for telling one of the people on my giant space boat that I'm loyal to my party members, and that I don't appreciate their being a xenophobic jerk.

I thought part of being the good guy was to be loyal and to protect people! D:

 

[JPH330]

I had a huge problem with that in Fallout 3. All the time they would give you good or evil karma for completely stupid reasons. Like donating to the Church of Atom. They make it pretty obvious that the Church is just some stupid cult, how do I know that my caps are going toward a brighter cause? How do I know that the priest at Megaton isn't going to spend that money on Jet to shoot himself up with?

It also makes it incredibly easy to go from very evil to very good, all you have to do is donate like 2000 caps to the Church to go from being the Devil to the Messiah. Oh, I wasn't aware that the Church is able to reverse the effects of murdering entire towns of people, using 2000 measly caps. My character had over 50,000 caps by the end of the game, hell, with that kind of money the Church could probably reverse the entire nuclear Holocaust!

 

[Jandau]

Prototype: Splattering thousands of innocent New Yorkers with a tank? no-one cares. Splattering 3 military personnel with said tank? They will try and kill you ass (and ultimately fail miserably).

Considering that the military in that game has no problem shooting into crowds of civilians and are only there to contain the threat, it's not all that odd.

 

[Dr. Danger]

Thank you for making this thread as I have been needing to complain about Bioshock 2 for this exact reason....

Spoiler

You meet a man named Gilbert Alexander who is so maddened by an ADAM related experiment that he's blatantly off his bloody rocker. You learn through a series of audiovogs that Gil would prefer that I kill the abomination that he now is to end suffering and such after I get what I need. You go here and there collecting and finally you get to choose whether to kill him or let him live. Basically, the game considers "saving" him as walking away and not killing him. But killing him would be what Gil wanted (even the abomination pleads with you to end it's life after awhile) and would such be a mercy kill. So I played through the game a second time trying to get the Savior achievement only to have to do it all over again because the game has a (what I believe to be) flawed sense of moral choice in that particular segment. Consequently, I played the game first trying to be bad but since I thought it would be mean to let Gil live as a monster when he wanted me to kill him, I didn't get to see the baddest ending either! It was a mess of a misunderstanding.

 

[Xhumed]

Mass Effect 2:

How does punting a guy out a window give me renegade points if I just slaughtered dozens of his comrades on the way in? What makes him so special?

EDIT: Woo! New page! That's good luck!

His comrades were armed and shooting at you. You killed them in a fire-fight. That's not the same as taking someone prisoner and then killing them while they are defenceless.
Besides, Renegade isn't the same as evil, per se.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

In Fallout 3 I only did good deeds.

I was nice to people, gave away free water, did nice deeds (missions) and was generally a good person.
But still I had very bad karma.
Why? Becauyse whenever I saw bottlecaps, weapons or ammo I would steal it.

And voila, I was the scourge of humanity.

Seems strange, to say the least.

i remember hating that i that game, it seemed so broken that for every little thing you stole you would get raped in karma, which i did the EXACT same as you.

 

[mornal]

Another example is... well at least to Allistair from dragon age,

Spoiler

letting loghain live.Simply get him to kill the archdemeon once he joins the grey wardens. There's no downside! We get our revenge, archdemeon dies, darkspawn defeated and none of us gets sacrificed!

I take Allistair's opinion of that as being you don't actually get revenge.

Spoiler

In his eyes Loghain killed Cailain, you let him live and then make him a hero by allowing him to end the darkspawn threat. Even if he dies he's still a hero, not a traitor as Allistair sees him.

 

[Carlston]

I chalk these things up to the programer never role playing but trying to make a system of good and evil.

Problem is, there is a lot of grey... FO3 taught me, it's ok to let racist ghouls into tenpenny tower to murder everyone is ok, but if you try and stop that slaughter your bad.

Something about ghoul=better than everyone elses life. Why couldn't the ugly bastard just live peacefully...why when I pop him before his people can slaughter the normies I'm the bad guy?

 

[Silva]

It's rare for this to happen to me, but I know that when it does happen, it's because of a difference of philosophy between myself and the games' developer. Profiteering might be seen as selfish if it disadvantages others in an economics game, while for objectivists, it would be seen as a fundamentally virtuous action, since they view selfishness as a virtue. (I definitely fall into the former category, which is sort of ethical vanilla by game designer's standards, unlike the objectivists in the example.)

The other way this can happen is when there is a complicated set of circumstances in the context of the action that the developer couldn't program into their game's morality system. Say, if character X is running, with the full intent to kill, into a room full of ten character Ys, and you want to save the most lives, so you kill character X. Character X might just be a good guy in the on/off morality toggle of the game, or in the story, but in the context of the gameplay, he needs to be stopped. Developers miss this sort of stuff all the time, especially if they don't test a game extensively enough before release, and allow team killing.

Killing Moriarty in Fallout 3. That guy is a bastard, pure and simple. Karma loss for killing him is ridiculous.

Hmm, I wouldn't quite call that unambiguously good as actions go. While he's certainly slimy, and holds a lot of people in a cycle of debt, he doesn't really go around killing people. Only murderer characters like Raiders really get you good karma in that game, suggesting that the only good action is one that ultimately saves more lives than it takes.

I didn't say you should get good karma for killing Moriarty. I said it should not give you bad karma for killing him.

I wouldn't call it neutral either. But like I said, different philosophies, different morality.

 

[Kanodin0]

Moira brown, doc church, lucas simms and the restaurant says hi. Someone could've easily taken over the saloon anyway.

But he's the only one with more than a modicum of sense about him regarding the outside world, and how to deal with it.

Well, him and Jericho. Lucas Simms? Maybe a little, but the Regulators are about as useful as a transparent umbrella in the desert.

And Nova takes over the saloon when Moriarty dies.

Funny you should mention the Regulators, one time I chose to roleplay as one. Their philosophy of killing all evil people and accepting no surrender from any lawbreakers made me a merciless upholder of order in a place where just surviving might require breaking the law. Sure I shut down the slaver stronghold in Paradise Falls but I also went out and murdered the reformed slaver turned shopkeep in Rivet City for his past. The incongrous part is that this self appointed sheriff of unsolicitied death probably killed more people then the raiders could even dream of, and yet was still considered very good to basically being called a messiah.

 

[Straz]

In mass effect 1 I agreed with vergil that, yes, his choices were reasonable and I got plus 2 renegade for it. -.-

 

[Uncanny Doom]

In mass effect 2 i like to be a pargaon. So during the...

Spoiler

mission in the collector ship I was pretty darn angry at what the illusive man did. (Long story short: knew we were going into a trap and didn't tell us.) I told my allies to not worry right now and focus on the mission. However once the mission ended I was given renegade points for telling the illusive man that I knew he'd do something like this.

It basically went like this:
Me: Why the hell would you do this? You could've at least warned us.
IM: Yes, but we got valuable info on the collectors!

If he had warned us we still would've gotten the info!

Mass Effect is not really about being good or bad. It's not what you do, it's about HOW you react to events. Paragon or Renegade is really just handling the situation calmly or a little more recklessly, it doesn't make you good or bad. They lean towards good and bad but are not very clear-cut like most other games with moral choices. That's why I like to just play games like Mass Effect with whatever my initial reaction is to the events to drive my character instead of just deciding beforehand to be "good" or "evil."

Anyway, the examples given about Fable are what came to my mind first. Especially being able to donate (more like bribe?) to the Temple of Light for good points.

 

[Mr.Caine]

This is a really good thread so far. Very interesting opinions. My gripe is Mass effect 2, but as others have stated it's not really "evil" or Good" it's how the mission is completed. It seems like Renegade options are more for people trying to be like Specters; the mission always comes 1st.

 

[Signa]

Killing droids in Jedi Knight to earn dark side points was stupid, especially when they get in your way. There was so many times in that game where I wanted to shoot a droid but I wasn't allowed to. It wasn't like I earned light-side points for NOT killing them. At least I don't think so.

And I remember some angel dude in Planescape: Torment that was being a dick and I had to try to stop him. He was supposed to teleport a way and I decided to try to kill him before that happened. I went from good to neutral from that one action.

 

[SyphonX]

I think a few people got it right when they said that, the various Karma systems are not your character's "Good/Evil" tendencies, but more or less on how the public perceives your actions, and how it affects them 'directly'.

Like when someone said that the public sees Moriarty as the lifeblood of Megaton, regardless that he's basically just a vindictive and manipulative piece of trash, he still supplies the settlement with it's raw needs. So, sure, on the level.. it's good he's dead and it frankly doesn't deserve any negative karma, but Megaton suffers to an arguably greater degree, as someone now has to pick up Moriarty's rather challenging responsibility. It's not like his competition, the drug-addicts with burning holes in their pockets are going to pick up the slack, catch my drift?

So the public, for better or for worse, suffers, on the terms of the wasteland.

Tenpenny, abuses the entire wasteland, and the only public that would suffer to his loss is the residents of the tower. Who happen to be just like him. It can be argued, that it could fall in the same lines of Moriarty's karma hit, but virtually everyone outside of Tenpenny Tower in the burnt-out District of Columbia hates that fucking place and everyone in it. They're the equivalent of a Machiavellian secret-society in our present time, who weave schemes of destruction for their personal gain.

With Red Dead Redemption, it's also not good or evil. It's just "Honor", and that's a damn loose term in the wild west. It's basically all about shooting who deserves it, and who doesn't. If they draw on you, and you waste 'em, it's considered honorable. It's a big, big.. Big sandbox game world.. so you're going to run into situations where honor is subtracted or added wrongly, it's not like the system can be perfect. You wanna talk about hard work... it would be virtually impossible to make every single thing you do factor the way it should. Go ahead and try it, if you think it can be done.

RDR just uses Fame and Honor. Fame is for anything, it's androgynous basically.. so you can be a famous lawman or a bandit, or both. Doesn't matter, people just know who you are. Also, it's not like + or - 100 honor is anything drastic in that game. It can be moved in any direction fairly easily.

 

[lapan]

Shooting my horse on accident counts as being evil.....as if loosing my horse wasn't enough punishment T_T

 

[MiracleOfSound]

It was specifically designed to show the brutality and self righteous bloodlust of the Russians during that particular event in history. They didn't take any prisoners, so why would the game make them?

The Russians most certainly did take prisoners, the wiki article [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Berlin] states that close to half a million prisoners were taken during the Battle for Berlin (though I'm not sure if that includes the 180,000 'men in uniform' rounded up by the Soviets after the surrender. It's still a significant number regardless). Now you could argue for mistreatment and/or death after surrender, as the treatment given to PoWs wasn't great (German ones, anyway. My Hungarian grandfather feels that the Russians got a bad rap, he says he was treated well enough).

The men were clearly unarmed, and were surrendering. So why was my only option to kill them fast, or kill them slow? Why didn't I also have the option of capturing them?

Now as for Reznov, his behaviour was atrocious. From what I remember of his dialogue, Reznov would have just as happy to take it out on the civilian populace as well. Looting, murder and rape was something forbidden by the Soviet authorities (at least in 1944-45) and getting caught would result in being shot on the spot. From what the game presents us of Reznov, he's either very good at not getting caught or the game deliberately played down the human aspect of the conflict to play up the brutality.

And I've probably just answered my own question there.

...and by doing so also more eloquently expressed what I was trying to say. I think the sequence was meant to show that the Nazis weren't the only ones capable of ruthless brutality, and possibly the awful nature of revenge in human hearts?