do you think there will be more karmic options in fallout 4?

Soapstone

Soapstone

It Wandered In From the Wastes
i love fallout 3 and NV, but after playing a bit of Fallout 2, i love all the possible karmic options available to be a total jerk, douche, etc. or be an all around good guy.

i remember todd howard mentionioning they did a LOT with fallout 4, i hope the karmic choices is one of the additions.
 
Nope. I expect good, neutral and bad being your only choices. And I bet "bad" will be cartoonishly evil with a hint of a smug asshat, while good will be a heroic caped patriot helping ones in need. That's the level of writing I expect from Bethesda. If the can even manage that.
 
Don't forget player-friendlyness - as in, who wants to drag around tons of quests in order to establish wether you are good or bad? Much better put that choice in the very beginning, I know - let the player choose to kill or not kill the dog you're instantaneously introduced to!
 
Remember kids: you can rebalance blowing up a small town or killing a pregnant lady by also killing a bunch of raiders! Good game design!
 
Well, we will have to see if Karma is even in the game at all in this one.
Otherwise it will probably be like in 3 and New Vegas, with a karmic title for each alignment (Good, neutral, evil) and it changes depending on your level. I rather see Reputation returning and being improved, but I doubt they will.
 
And when a fella comes running towards you with a machete in one hand and a grenade in the other, shooting him means you are a good person. If you're evil, you'll let him blow/chop you up!
 
They failed it in Fallout 3, they handled it badly in New Vegas.

And anything Todd says... is bound to be half-assed lie.
 
i honestly loved how the first town you get to in fallout 2, you got the option to help smiley out of the cave to free the tribal, or you can buy the tribal. then following up that quest, to save vic you need $1000 caps, and you can either collect and trade, or decide to sell your tribal to the slaver for the money to save vic, and as of yet i dont have the science/repair needed to fix the radio myself, but i know that is an option for completing the quest as well as letting vic handle it. and of course if you dig up any graves in the den you get the title of grave digger, and once you get that tattoo to become a slaver you can kiss talking to tribals goodbye.

so much karma options!

i thought that fallout 3/NV had a reputation screen of sorts? it has been a while since i played so dont quote me on it, i dont remember much of the pipboy menu stuff
 
Walpknut said:
Well, we will have to see if Karma is even in the game at all in this one.
Otherwise it will probably be like in 3 and New Vegas, with a karmic title for each alignment (Good, neutral, evil) and it changes depending on your level. I rather see Reputation returning and being improved, but I doubt they will.
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Heh, I am sure they won't dissapoint us and offer something that is as much of a cluster fuck like blowing up Megaton, for the lulz, of course. And to show how evil the character is. Earning a title in the process that is as meaningless like as it is useless to the player because you can get it away in 5 min. and becoming the saviour of the wasteland.
 
I think "objective morality" in a roleplaying game really only makes sense when it's somewhat reinforced by the setting's metaphysics (e.g. "the benevolent deity wants us to do this, so that's good.") If you're trying to ground your game in some sort of reality (even if it's with your tongue firmly in cheek) you're better off contextualizing your morality meter in terms of "this person/these people likes or dislikes what you did" or something else that's more about one's reputation rather than the morality of their actions.

Something like Mass Effect's idealism/expediency dichotomy makes a lot more sense than good/evil.

But for the most part I don't really get the appeal of being a jerk for no reason in games.
 
What games very often seem to lack is proper motivation that goes further than phat loot, new Vegas was a fresh approach here. Some of the story parts and characters have been the most enjoyable ones in years, like Benny or House.

Though this is not only true for games but also many movies. It is simply very difficult to write a good villain without making him simply a psycho. And creating villainous options for the player that make sense is even more of a challange. Doing good things is always obvious, considering the rewards you get. But from a logical point, actually evil choices should grant you the highest rewards because ultimately evil or moraly questionable decisions are the way of least resistance. The best villains are usually those that actually have a reason for their actions. Something that you can relate to. I think the Master from Fallout 1 or the Villain from Planescape are both great examples for such characters, as they have believable motivations and goals.
 
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Crni Vuk said:
What games very often seem to lack is proper motivation. Though this is not only true for games but also many movies. It is simply very difficult to write a good villain without making him simply a psycho. And creating villainous options for the player that make sense is even more of a challange. Doing good things is always obvious, considering the rewards you get. But from a logical point, actually evil choices should grant you the highest rewards because ultimately evil or moraly questionable decisions are the way of least resistance. The best villains are usually those that actually have a reason for their actions. Something that you can relate to. I think the Master from Fallout 1 or the Villain from Planescape are both great examples for such characters, as they have believable motivations and goals.
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I very much agree with this. I think the key point about "evil" choices in games is that it's important not only to make them the things with the greatest short-term rewards, but they should also be defensible or small steps. "Betray the people who trusted you in exchange for money" makes sense when you're talking about a seemingly small betrayal (leaving a door unlocked, or sharing some seemingly innocuous information). These sorts of choices can cascade for the player so that they end up wholly naturally a terrible person, and that would work well. The problem video games often have in letting the player be "evil" is that they tend to jump into the deep end of the pool right away, so what you do is awful and what you get is pitiful (i.e. blowing up Megaton for 500 caps.) You can have the player join a gang of slavers, or burn down an orphanage with the doors locked, but that should be towards the end of one's descent into villainy, not an introduction to it.

The point to keep in mind is that a player's choice to do an evil thing in a roleplaying game should be based on self-interest, short-term thinking, or some weird values that the PC has. You should not ask, or expect a character to do something evil for the sake of doing something evil. People very rarely knowingly choose to do evil, they simply rationalize whatever act it is in order to believe that it is not evil. So when your karma meter says "you did an evil thing" in response to an act that the player has entirely rationalized from the perspective of the character, you're introducing some dissonance.
 
for me, i have mischievous traits, and so when i play games like fable, dragon age and fallout i want to try doing the bad thing. point in case, in fable when i played it yrs ago on the xbox, during the intro i gave the teddy to the bully which then proceeded to rip the head off of the bear, this was one of those times i felt like a total douche for being evil! then there was the eating of the crunchy chicks... :P i liked how you could either be a total villain or total hero or somewhere in the middle in fable.

as for dragon age, origins has some subtle choices which may not seem too bad at the time, but can have long term consequences. in dragon age 2 i was able to be totally evil though... after having romanced and gained isabella's loyalty i proceeded to give her to the qunari. my friend happened to be over when i did if and she punched me in the arm hard doing such a douchebag move.

i love games that allow for moral choices like this.
 
PossibleCabbage said:
The point to keep in mind is that a player's choice to do an evil thing in a roleplaying game should be based on self-interest, short-term thinking, or some weird values that the PC has.
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This, imo, is key to it. While I'm not trying to say stuff like Breaking Bad or Spec Ops: The Line are game-changers, highly original etc but the big appeal in the moral devolution is always a series of small bad decisions and big mistakes that eventually meet each other half way, where the protagonist becomes the antagonist through becoming desensitised to the horrible things they do and, as a byproduct of rationalising their mistakes they begin to rationalise their direct intentions, too, sometimes to the point of simply not caring about their victims in the end. I know I'm kinda just repeating what you said but it's something developers (and writers in general) really don't seem to grasp.

I liken it to, say, a sanity meter in a first-person horror game. All it does is tell you how scared you are according to the game's arbitrary whim, and the direct effect is just as immersion and fear-breaking as the wobbly screen insanity gives you *cough*amnesia*cough* is.
 
Yeah, there's hardly ever a good reason to be evil in games because the designers often put very little thought into it.

I mean, take Bioshock for example, there your only real method of exhibiting how evil you are is eating little girls.

Now, if there was supposed to be some sort of boon to eating all the Little Sisters, somebody fell asleep at the switch because there wasn't.

Instead, you just got a little extra ADAM.

Whereas the good decision to save the Little Sisters rewarded you with slightly less initial ADAM, but far more in the long run from the care packages along with the exclusive plasmids and tonics.

You can't make binary choices and claim they're equal when they're not!
 
There's also the weird killing method in Bioshock. Like asides from Jack likely being traumatised and potentially thinking it'd be better to put them out of their misery (frankly I don't buy the 'miracle cure' plasmid as it screams of a plot element 'ported in from The Convenience Dimension), he literally cuts their belly open rather than snapping the neck for a quick, less painful death. It's always Hitler or Jesus. Outside of what I discuss below, the best moral choice games are ones where you're forced to be 'bad' in order to save yourself and those you care for. There's self interest in a place like Rapture naturally coming first but resources are never scarce enough to really justify going down the evil route, and compared to most AAA FPS's, Bioshock is fairly unforgiving on that front.

I'm becoming increasingly interested in the sort of 'moral choice' games, books, films that just make you feel like a total bastard for being entertained by what happens/what you do. But even they fly over people's heads. Not always the best formula and damn hard to pull off but when done well it really stays with me.
 
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"Evil" choices are dumb anyway, they are usually only evil for the sake of evil, and the alternative is always just not being a psychopath. Like in Mass Effect for example, playing a 100% "paragon" Shepar results in a consistent character, playing "Renegade" Shepard results in an inconsistent, petty and sometimes even outright Stupid Shepard who does things just for the Evulz. In the first game there are points were your only "Renegade" options are to be racist for no reason, you can't even be a pragmatic asshole, you have to be as unuanced as it gets. Later games "fixed" it by making the Glowy Options do the exact same thing, just that Paragon does it with rousing speeches and Renegade does it with mean words.
 
Remember how Bioware hyped up the Paragade system as being two ways to get the same goal?

I don't think shooting someone in the head who isn't posing a current or future threat to me helps me in any way.
 
Well technically there is one instance when leaving someone alive instead of taking the Psychopath route results in some smaller numbers in ME3.... but the ME3 system had it's own set of problems.
 
Ah yes, the War Effort in 3.

"Gamers like numbers, especially vague meaningless numbers that don't accomplish anything."

"Uh, are you sure? I don't think that's quite how it works"

"Of course I know what gamers want, I'm a 40 year old white guy with lots of money who's never played a video game in my life! Now start putting numbers everywhere!"

"Right away Mr. EA."

"That's Mr. John EA to you!"

My rich and vivid imagination is more entertaining than how that probably actually happened anyway.
 
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