I'm Feeling Lazy

So i'm going to copy paste my reply to Tylea002's blog here. Enjoy.

I'm Feeling Lazy

So i'm going to copy paste my reply to Tylea002's blog here. Enjoy.

I'd copy my comment to your comment which is this blog in my blog but that would break the internet or something.

Anyway, nice mini-blog thing, you raise some interesting points. I agree with the whole "you can only be evil/good if you are evil/good" in games, with the Dialogue Trees in Mass Effect and the persuasion options only unlocking if you've truly focused on being wholly good or wholly evil. It's so much more game-y than GTA IV which keeps the consequences very internal.

"People love to praise Mass Effect for the potential it offers to be good or evil - but arguably the most interesting choices can only be made if you already know which path you want to follow; Evil or Good. The neutral grey middle character was boring and often prevented you from finding out information or progressing fluently through the story. You basically had to pick at the beginning whether to be good or evil and then stick to that path throughout the entire experience to reap the benefits that particular element of the game had to offer."

"On the flip-side you have GTA4 which manages to successfully involve moral choices, but the game only gives you bad choices to make. Often your decisions are punished with moral responsibility.

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"Then there is the train of thought - if your actions make no consequence to the world, what's the point of having them?"

I would have to agree with BB with his assessment of The Witcher, it really does play like that. I hope when they bring it to the consoles they're able to keep this level of play and game interaction intact. The story of the Witcher involves politics, racism, love... good stuff and a lot of gray areas.

I voiced my negative opinion about GTA IV, but that was mostly mission structure related. The choices and story were really good, and I think GTA is growing up. The next one should be even better and deeper.

Bioshock was streamlined, nothing to see here. Mass Effect tried hard, but made too small of strides. Here's to the future, let there be ambiguity.

Whenever the concept of morality in games comes up, I also bring up The Witcher every single time, as it's pretty much the only game that has done the concept well. It's a shame no one has played it! Let's hope Rise of the White Wolf changes that.

But yeah I agree with most of what you said Sweep. My big problem with games like Fable and Mass Effect is that it has this utterly ridiculous bar that tracks your moral alignment. That's stupid. Every action has its own consequences, you can't balance out one good deed with one evil deed, it doesn't work like that. It is not a binary thing. And that's where most games get it so very very wrong. If I kill a bunch of people in Bowerstone in Fable 2 but do some good deed halfway across the world, people shouldn't rever me as a saint when I return to Bowerstone, that's just ridiculous.

Another game that did it right, albeit on a smaller scale, was Deus Ex. It was really Mass Effect before there was Mass Effect. You couldn't alter your character as dramatically as in Fable, but you could make JC a ruthless utilitarian (the ends justify the means), a deontologist (the ends don't always justify the means) or something in between. And every decision had its own impact, in its own way. I don't know if you've played it, but it's my favourite computer game ever and dirt cheap, it's on Steam as well I think, it's still awesome.

well, apparently the two games to come close to my unreachable expectations are the 2 that I am yet to play - The Witcher and Dues Ex. One day, perhaps....

Sometimes the industry seems so closed, so hostile and unwilling to sit down and learn from other examples what makes a great game - instead choosing to blunder ahead with and impose their own, often stagnate, style of gameplay. I've said it before and I'll say it again - the computer game industry is scared to evolve into something more than it already is.

While many would disagree, I found both Kotor and Mass Effect(even tho in ME you didn't have a clear good/evil path, you never really were 'evil') regardless of having that kind of alightment, they both all end the same way. You aren't getting some huge difference whether you're an asshole or a saint in the end result. They end very similarly, or pretty much identical regardless. I actually found these games to be very lacking in any kind of meaningful choices for the most part. You had a ton of little ones, but that's really it.

I find something like Nocturne/Lucifer's Call to be a far better game for moral decisions, because it starts you off on the wrong side to begin with, and there are no real destinction from good and evil...pretty much everyone is on the bad side in one way or another, and it comes down to you basically deciding how you want the world to be in the end,  not just "am I'm going to be a dick tot his guy here, or be nice to him?"  ME doesn't even come close to decisions like that.

Also even though I found Kotor and ME to be fairly enjoyable games(and I do like Bioware btw, looking forward to dragon age a ton) they've really forever lowered the standards of western RPGs in my opinon, and I find a hard time forgiving them for that.

I disagree with your comments about Mass Effect. Mass Effect was mostly Good Cop, Bad Cop. It wasn't really good and evil. There were 3 situations in that game where I had to think about what I did. I did not know what I did was right, or wrong. While the game flashed up "Paragon" or "Renegade" in two of these 3 cases, sometimes it would show both, giving an obvious middleground, and when it only showed one, you knew that what you were doing was wrong (or right) in some ways. 

Hardly...the gimmick with games that have moral choices, is giving you a bunch of them, and having them not mean shit in the end. Having the game basically end nearly identical, or exactly identical to how it would've if you chose something else. Even if you're giving a big decision you would have to think of for a bit, it doesn't end up changing anything in the end. No game that's done decision making like that so far has done it correctly and actually made your choices impact anything by the end of it. Especially anything recently.

Pause, I implore you to play The Witcher. Because you're straight-up wrong.

The only game that actually made me pause and think about the consequences of what I was about to do was Deus Ex and, to a lesser extent, The Witcher.

Although that list promises to expand now that I finally patched my Vampire Bloodlines and got Planescape: Torment.

They're still figuring it out, it will get better.  It's better now then it ever has been before, and it will continue to improve.

"Pause, I implore you to play The Witcher. Because you're straight-up wrong."

No, pause. The blog is about moral choices in games, across the board. Sweep gave examples of games that did not execute the concept well, these being Mass Effect/GTA IV/Bioshock. I responded to his blog - though it is technically a response to Tylea002's blog - with The Witcher as an example of moral choices being executed flawlessly. So, yeah, you're still straight-up wrong.

No matter what game I'm playing, I constantly feel like I should be chosing Good and making socially acceptable, moral decisions. Probably because I usually play Marvel, but still. I think it's important that games give you that choice -- to kill the bad guys, or shoot up the good guys. It's not like anyone does that in real life. >_>