Fable II

[Morfiend]

I'm taking a short break playing Fallout, so I figure I'll be rich when I play again. :)

Without being spoilery, I'm at a point in the main quest where the next step is to catch a boat at the docks. Will I be cutting off side quest options if I do that quest now, or am I not as far in to the main quest as I think I am?

You should absolutely do as many side quests as you can.

[MrHat]

I don't like the way the side quest system is set up though.

"Help BanditX raid the Farm"

OR

"Help the Farm defend against BanditX"

Binary decisions!  I'm too morally grey! 

[schild]

I don't like the way the side quest system is set up though.

"Help BanditX raid the Farm"

OR

"Help the Farm defend against BanditX"

Binary decisions!  I'm too morally grey! 

This is my exact major gameplay complaint in my review over at GR. Scratch that, it was a complaint, it seems I might've taken it out.

Also, Fallout 3 does this.

[RUiN 427]

I'm taking a short break playing Fallout, so I figure I'll be rich when I play again. :)

Without being spoilery, I'm at a point in the main quest where the next step is to catch a boat at the docks. Will I be cutting off side quest options if I do that quest now, or am I not as far in to the main quest as I think I am?

You should absolutely do as many side quests as you can.

but don't stress about saving slaves and bounty hunter quests cause they are the ones that are repeatable, very handy for co-op.

[Bunk]

Ok, that helps, as those are the main ones I haven't done. I've just encountered a lot of locked off areas that seem like they might have quests, and was trying to figure out if I needed to advance the main plot to get to some of them.

[Litigator]

Ok, that helps, as those are the main ones I haven't done. I've just encountered a lot of locked off areas that seem like they might have quests, and was trying to figure out if I needed to advance the main plot to get to some of them.

When you roll into a zone, the available quests will show up in your quest log, and you can set the quest to active, and it will turn your trail of breadcrumbs toward the quest giver.  As far as I know, quests are not hidden. 

[RUiN 427]

Ok, that helps, as those are the main ones I haven't done. I've just encountered a lot of locked off areas that seem like they might have quests, and was trying to figure out if I needed to advance the main plot to get to some of them.

When you roll into a zone, the available quests will show up in your quest log, and you can set the quest to active, and it will turn your trail of breadcrumbs toward the quest giver.  As far as I know, quests are not hidden. 

but he does need to get on that boat to advance the world story and move on to the other content... trying to be vague and spoiler free

[Velorath]

Binary decisions!  I'm too morally grey! 

Morally grey only works if your character has an alignment system that's more complex than just good and evil.  Besides that, what would be a compelling morally grey alternative to saving or destroying a village?

[Hindenburg]

Besides that, what would be a compelling morally grey alternative to saving or destroying a village?

Not getting directly involved, just watching the events unfold, even though you're perfectly capable of preventing the village from being destroyed, simply because they refused to pay you for your job.

Or saving with the sole intent of exploiting the village financially, or even saving to enslave the population.

[Murgos]

Not getting directly involved, just watching the events unfold, even though you're perfectly capable of preventing the village from being destroyed, simply because they refused to pay you for your job.

Gah.  Do nothing?  There is an excellent game mechanic for you.

"Why are you just sitting and staring at the screen?"
"I'm being morally ambiguous."

I'm sure it will sell like hotcakes.  As far as the game determining your intent?  Well, probably not.

[Bunk]

I agree with that new kid. I'd like to be able to play these types of games with a more sutble approach. Fine, I won't do the bad thing that kills off you town - but now you owe me bitches.

[Sky]

Just save ze women! 

[Hindenburg]

Gah.  Do nothing?  There is an excellent game mechanic for you.

"Why are you just sitting and staring at the screen?"
"I'm being morally ambiguous."

I'm sure it will sell like hotcakes.  As far as the game determining your intent?  Well, probably not.

It's not a wild and crazy concept. The options tree would be as follows:
1. Save them out of the good of your heart.
2. Save them, but all their houses will belong to you.
3. Save and enslave everyone.
4. Kill all the men and bandits, harvest the women and children, build a harem.
5. Kill everyone and join the bandits.
6. Kill everyone, including bandits.
7. Not my problem, i'll just go somewhere else, do a different sidequest, and come back later to see what's left of the town.

Doing nothing is the same as doing something else, time limit.

Fallout allowed most of these choices, usually.

Beats having to do 1 good, 1 bad, 1 good, 1 bad, to remain neutral.
----
And yes, it is completely unreasonable to expect such a degree of choice in all quests in a game. 2-3 quests would be fine, though.

[Khaldun]

Yes, I think you can allow for morally ambiguous but "active" solutions, but think about it this way. If you make a charcoal drawing with just two tones in it--black and white--you can create some grey where they overlap or intercept. Fable II strikes me as already having a bit of that going on. I kill bandits? I am reminded that bandits have families. If that reminder was a bit more game-mechanically "real" (e.g., maybe killing bandits gives you +1 on the 'good' scale, but to really get a 'good' bonus, I have to go donate some money to the orphans of bandits, or raise a bandit's child, or carefully bury a bandit's corpse and say prayers over it, or donate all the bandit's money to a good cause), that 'grey' from the overlap of black and white would register more.

When you make a drawing with three or more tones in it, then all the tones are changed. So if you actually added a "neutral" or "ambiguous" rating as a *separate measure* from good/evil, corrupt/pure, and you tried to create game-mechanical reactions that were distinct for the ambiguous character, then that changes the meaning of good and evil pretty radically in turn.

Think of it in terms of fantasy archetypes. Elric, for example, is a "morally ambiguous" character but his ambiguousness is created: 1) by a simple mixture of black and white overlapping, e.g., he does some really evil things and he does some relatively selfless or good things; and 2) by the fact that the backdrop of his adventures is largely 'black', e.g., evil. So Elric looks a lot better than Theleb Ka'arna even though both of them do some fairly nasty stuff.

Conan, on the other hand, is morally ambiguous because he's basically looking out for #1. But that's also because the RAH setting is more or less set to the same default, e.g., there really is a third setting of "grey" that governs most of Conan's world. There's a few really evil characters who are motivated to do awful things for the sheer evil of them, and a few relatively 'good' characters who are much more selfless than Conan. But most other people are also out for #1, and the drama comes from where their self-centeredness overlaps and where it diverges. The "greyness" of RAH's world makes the few genuinely evil characters look kind of weird in the purity of their evil, and the few relatively good characters tend to look like freakish eunuchs.

Achieving moral ambiguity in a game just with the two tones of good and evil isn't that hard--you just need to add a bit about the potentially evil consequences of good acts, or even the oddly good consequences of evil acts. Achieving it by adding a genuine "game mechanical" setting for "grey" or ambiguity is actually harder because it tends to make the entire world into a grey one. Imagine what happens to Lord of the Rings if for even one minute Aragorn stops to have a heart-to-heart with an orc and hears that he has a little orc baby and that he has orc feelings of doubt about whether what he's doing is right and that he's been raised with orcish values, etc.  *Everything* changes the moment that happens, the moment that an orc isn't just an object but a morally aware agent. The whole story becomes way more "grey" even if that's the only moment where that kind of ambiguity happens.

[Murgos]

Doing nothing is the same as doing something else, time limit.

I said nothing about not having moral ambiguity.  I said specifically that doing nothing is a bad design.

[Murgos]

Yes, I think you can allow for morally ambiguous but "active" solutions, but think about it this way.

Great.  I said you shouldn't have ambiguity through inaction.  Glad to we are on the same page.

[Velorath]

Besides that, what would be a compelling morally grey alternative to saving or destroying a village?

Or saving with the sole intent of exploiting the village financially, or even saving to enslave the population.

The first one is possible in Fable II (for that matter you can kill all the people in a village and they'll respawn eventually anyway) in that you can buy their property and then jack up the prices.  Enslaving the population isn't morally grey.  It's just a different option for evil.

[Velorath]

Fine, I won't do the bad thing that kills off you town - but now you owe me bitches.

The problem with that kind of morally grey area is that now you are taking the same actions that a good character would, with the only difference being that you're rewarded more (in which case you have to figure out an alternate means of rewarding good characters, otherwise the grey option becomes the best one in all situations).  "I'll save the village" and "I'll save the village for 250 gold" aren't going to be any different as far as the gameplay goes.

[Sky]

The problem with that kind of morally grey area is that now you are taking the same actions that a good character would, with the only difference being that you're rewarded more (in which case you have to figure out an alternate means of rewarding good characters, otherwise the grey option becomes the best one in all situations).  "I'll save the village" and "I'll save the village for 250 gold" aren't going to be any different as far as the gameplay goes.

That's the point. Being good is often it's own reward. And usually in games, you can charge 250gp for your assistance, but if you just help out, an npc will find 250gp under his mattress to give you for being so selfless. The evil paths should always have the better short-term rewards, but then end up with long-term consequences, to follow the formula. But that is a difficult thing to put into a quest-based game, I imagine.

[Hindenburg]

Enslaving the population isn't morally grey.  It's just a different option for evil.

You saved the population, i'd say that slavery is a viable, neither good or evil choice, at the very least. It's not like I'm saying that their offspring will also be slaves or something.

But hey, fine, and what if I save the population, but have them work the fields for me for little money, also forcing them to buy things at my store, which just so happens to have ludicrous prices like all the other stores in town, since they all belong to me, thus making them incur huge debts with the local loan shark (me) to be able to afford buying shit at my stores, and I also stop them from leaving the fields before clearing any debt they incurred?

They're free to go, provided they worked their 6 month period at the fields and have no debts left.

I'd say that my conditions are better than death, even if the townsfolk are reduced to a condition analogous to slavery. Would that be morally gray enough?

There's actually a bit of a rumorous anecdote about fallout and interplay, you had a town with a casino owner and a sheriff, and you could choose which side you'd support. The casino owner was shown as a greedy prick, and the sheriff as a law abiding man. If you supported the casino, after the game ended, it would show the town as a prosperous trading hub, and if you supported the sheriff, grats, the town is now under a totalitarian regime.
The rumor ends with Interplay changing the quest because it was too morally ambiguous. Kinda hard to believe, since that game allowed you to murder children.

Any kind of morally gray area can be seen a sort of evil. Even the absence of action.

[Velorath]

But that is a difficult thing to put into a quest-based game, I imagine.

Exactly.  Being good is supposed to be its own reward, but in games with a heavy focus on optionial sub-quests, you take on these quests with being rewarded in some way in mind.  People playing good characters wouldn't have incentive to go out of their way to do quests if their only reward was being good.

Also, going back to Fable 2 (and other similar games), you can still be morally grey even if individual quests don't have a morally grey option.  I can go around stealing stuff from peoples' houses, have a wife and kids in every town, and buy up all the property to price gouge, but also avoid being a cold blooded murderer.  Hell, I could then take my ill-gotten money and donate it to the Temple of Light.  I think this kind of flexibility should be a lot more appealing to people who want to rp a morally ambiguous character than just giving them another option to click on when doing quests.

[Velorath]

You saved the population, i'd say that slavery is a viable, neither good or evil choice, at the very least.

I find your sense of morality somewhat worrisome.

[NiX]

You saved the population, i'd say that slavery is a viable, neither good or evil choice, at the very least.

I find your sense of morality somewhat worrisome.

I was thinking the same thing. As much as I like more choices then "Bad or Good?", cause I'm usually VERY conflicted, but I could see anything more being a terrible mess and not to mention every time you had to make a decision it would be bogged down by 6-10 of them. How droll.

[Ingmar]

I would argue the difference between RAH's Conan "grey" and Moorcock's Elric "grey" is actually just more that RAH was a much better writer. Moorcock is kind of a hack.

[Sky]

Being good is supposed to be its own reward, but in games with a heavy focus on optionial sub-quests, you take on these quests with being rewarded in some way in mind.  People playing good characters wouldn't have incentive to go out of their way to do quests if their only reward was being good.

I do quests more for the story, rewards are nice but not necessary. If I have the option of breaking character and being evil just to get a nice piece of loot, I don't do it. Actually I think it's better that way, it tests whether your character is really good at heart or a moral relativist just waiting for good loot.

[Khaldun]

Let's just say RAH is clearer about what it is that he's doing. But it's also that Elric and Conan get points on the emo/non-emo scale. Elric was like a JRPG character before his time.  The main thing is that there is a big difference between purely good/evil worlds in which there is occasional ambiguity where those stark opposites overlap, and worlds that are designed to have many shades of grey. If you're doing the second, you have to pretty much go all the way.

(This by the way is one of many reasons I thought the fellatio that people were giving Age of Conan's first 20 levels was just fucking wrong, because even in the first 20 levels, only the destiny quest and a few side quests actually seem to understand that RAH made a morally grey world. The rest of the fucking side quests were your usual pussy-o-matic "My cat is stuck in a tree, or I need some fish from the harbor" kind of thing, which Conan or almost any other moral actor in the Conan world would have grinned at like a wolf before backhanding the dumb cunt who asked him to fetch him some ordinary bullshit for virtually no reward.

[NowhereMan]

Frankly I think KoTOR II, despite being a horribly unfinished game they should have been ashamed to actually release, had the greatest approach to RPG morality of any game I've played. Kreia did a perfect job of highlighting shades of grey in your actions. Help a beggar by giving him 100 credits when he asked for 10? Poor guy gets killed for his money by the next thug to walk along.

Morally ambiguous is possible, what I'd like to see more of is requiring a player to actually consider his choices with vaguely believable consequences. Laying it out with: Do you a) Give this man money
b) Say no
c) Kill him and take his woman as your trophy!
Does not make for morally interesting choices, it gives me the opportunity to choose one of probably two endings and does not make for immersive storytelling (except with KoTOR, I'll let them off with that just for actually giving you some repercussions for going evil that you probably cared about).

[Velorath]

Frankly I think KoTOR II, despite being a horribly unfinished game they should have been ashamed to actually release, had the greatest approach to RPG morality of any game I've played. Kreia did a perfect job of highlighting shades of grey in your actions. Help a beggar by giving him 100 credits when he asked for 10? Poor guy gets killed for his money by the next thug to walk along.

Again, that's not an example of shades of grey.  It's a nice twist, no doubt, but there's nothing morally ambiguous about it.  One character is being really good and some NPC is being really evil.

[justdave]

Frankly I think KoTOR II,
...SNIP...
Help a beggar by giving him 100 credits when he asked for 10? Poor guy gets killed for his money by the next thug to walk along.

Again, that's not an example of shades of grey.  It's a nice twist, no doubt, but there's nothing morally ambiguous about it.  One character is being really good and some NPC is being really evil.

Okay, not, perhaps, shades of grey. But that was one of the bits that explored unintended consequences. None of the choices in the game were -really- morally ambiguous, but a few of them set you up.

[schild]

I'm trying to think of a game not made with the Infinity Engine back in the day (BG1, 2, IW 1, 2, and Planescape) that has actual shades of grey and isn't really just binary choices. As in, More Evil and Less Evil are still Evil, and more good and less good are still good - but some grey ok, this could be good or evil inbetween, maybe even bordering neutral but not quite.

I can't.

Games these days are pretty unimaginative.

[Yoru]

Deus Ex? 

[schild]

Deus Ex? 

Deus Ex was pretty binary also. I don't think I've ever praised it for walking any sort of moral line. In fact, arguably, you could say there were no real good guys in Deus Ex and it was all just shades of black (or red, whatever). There were, obviously MORE evil than regular evil, but for the most part it was a world with a whole mess of groups looking out mostly for how they felt things should play out. Selflessness being largely nonexistant. Man, I want to play through Deus Ex again.

[Velorath]

Just to clear things up, here are some examples of what I personally think of as shades of grey:

1)  The "victimless crime".  Think of the crew from Firefly as an example.  They break the law, but not in ways that one would consider evil.

2)  Doing evil for the greater good.  Political assassinations with the intention of removing someone evil from power, sacrificing an innocent in some ritual to gain enough power to defeat an even greater evil, etc...

3) The "would you murder a child if you knew he was going to grow up to be the next Hitler" question.  Murder a child, or thousands of people die due to your inaction?

4) The "save Rachael or save Harvey Dent" question (or alternately save the person you love, or save multiple other people).  Do you commit the good act that helps the most people or do you commit the "lesser" good but extremely selfish act?

5) Vigilante justice.  Harder to make work in an RPG since you can generally go around murdering bad guys, completely bypassing any sort of judicial system, and not get in any trouble for it.

6) Letting someone die because you'd put yourself at too much risk trying to save them (for instance, if you're undercover).

[fantasturbation]

There is seriously no fucking excuse for the item management to be as poor as it is.
You can't even map items to the D-pad anymore, for rapid crunchy chick/celery consumption. Le sigh.

[Koyasha]

One thing Jade Empire touched on (and then ignored for most of the game) was that the reason for an action is key, not just the action itself.  Unfortunately, the only way I can see to take the reasons for actions into account in a game is to constantly pester the player with 'why did you do that?' questions.  I don't see this as a popular game mechanic.

The reward system is also a problem when going at this.  As noted, doing good is supposed to be its own reward, but most games try to reward good and evil equally, and many give more of a reward for being good than for being evil.  Alternately, evil often gains the greater monetary reward, while gaining a proportionately lesser exp/skill/whatever reward...in games where exp and abilities tend to be vastly more important than money. 

One thing I'm glad I see far less often these days is the idea that wanting to be paid for your services equals evil.  It may not be selflessly good to demand payment from the village that's about to be massacred or what have you, but it's not evil either (unless you're also causing the problem you're offering to save people from).

I see the good/evil system in Fable 2 as very simplistic, but for now it's still fun.