No, in fact I’m ruthless. LOL
Had your own harem going, eh?
Indeed it was.
This is a problem in Shadow of War, where you can brainwash people to run your fortresses and give 'em upgrades and such. I always feel bad when one dies and want them to get promoted, even if they’re just Orcs and Ologs who were trying to kill me half an hour ago. I also feel bad when a longtime teammate dies in XCOM and I try to go back and save them, which explains why I haven’t played it much.
Same, my kids make fun of me for this. I even have lighting activated so the lights on when they’re working, and off when they’re sleeping (except for the red emergency exit lighting).
Side note to the thread - some games reward different morality choices with substantially different endings. I’m not talking about just minor “X is happy / Y is unhappy,” “flag A flies above city B”, etc. I mean MAJOR differences.
The one that always comes up in discussions of this element with my friend is the original SW:KOTOR where (and of course, major spoilers for a quite old game):
If you win with a light-side playthrough, you get a nice medal and some respect (and possibly a romantic success for values of jedi romance). If you win with a dark-side playthrough, you have an endless fleet of nigh-unstoppable war machines at your beck and call and are likely to conquer the known galaxy (and possibly a powerful fallen jedi as your apprentice/lover).
Sure from the POV of us the player, it doesn’t really matter past a cut-scene or two. But if you’re role-playing, you tend to find that the tangible rewards are much better for the evil playthrough. And that’s what makes it more interesting to me at least. If being good and being evil still get you to the same place in the end, it’s harder to justify acting the heel.
ETA - for anyone NOT familiar, I’m referring to the game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (1). Great game, and old enough to be playable on most modern PHONES and tablets. There, no shaming for using abbreviations!
KOTOR is the example I had considered giving for an example of a game that gives a very compelling reason to be evil, and it clearly inspired the SW:TOR game I cited earlier in this thread which was a direct descendant. (Though TOR was not nearly as well-written as KOTOR, which is a certified classic and I maintain has a better story than any Star Wars film or TV series.)
It gives a compelling reason, but still requires you to role play as a petty, psychopathic little punk. I did try and complete a dark jedi game with KOTOR, but some of the dialogue/character choices literally made me wince.
Another fun, imaginative Bioware game from the same era (with basically the same big plot twist, come on Bioware), Jade Empire, should have also had a compelling reason for going “evil”. It had a well-articulated philosophical framework around self-reliance vs altruism. But nope, you still had to act like a petty little punk far too often on the ‘Closed Fist’ path to make it fun for me.
I loved Jade Empire a lot (and wish they’d put out a remastered version for a modern device at some point) but they did do a very awkward job of trying to tie in your martial arts style with morality choices.
You get it with Star Wars. The Force is a mystical thing tied into emotions, and acting on things like fear and passion form a feedback loop that gives you power but corrupts you. Staying calm and “Zen” is the way to handle the power without falling into that trap. That tends to naturally fit with good and evil, though that’s oversimplifying it quite a bit, as good intentions could still lead a person down the Dark Side and you could in theory stay within the Light Side and dispassionately perform acts of evil in a pragmatic way. (Though such things are rarely explored in the most popular Star Wars media.)
Closed Fist = Evil, Open Palm = Good, that’s trying to replicate the Star Wars idea but transporting it to a different genre (Wuxia). It’s not quite as natural and even though I played through the game twice, each time picking a different path, it never quite made sense to me. Still, a really fun game that I have a lot of fond memories of. That was back when BioWare was at its peak of creativity.
Back when the first Bioshock came out, a bunch of the advertising focused on how the game made you make “real ethical choices,” based on whether to save the Little Sisters, or harvest them for their… whatever the resource they used was. Mana, let’s call it. But it’s wasn’t really an ethical test so much as a marshmallow test - harvesting the Little Sisters gave you more mana immediately, but saving them meant an NPC would give you periodic rewards, so that you’d end up with more total mana by saving them than you did by harvesting them.
I always wanted a game where being ethical was a legitimate dilemma, where doing the right thing got you nothing at all, while being corrupt and evil got you more money or resources or power or whatever the goal of the game was. Make doing the right thing actually have a cost, and be a hard choice, as opposed to being both the right and the practical thing to do.
I’ve seen that somewhat in games, where you perform a task for someone (maybe even save their life) and they offer you a reward (usually cash, sometimes an item you can use) and you can be the “good guy” and refuse it, or accept it. There are no negative consequences of any kind for taking it, nor does anything good result except feeling like you did a good deed for a virtual person you’ll never see again. Conversely, if you accept it, you get something useful.
Of course, usually whatever you’re receiving is insignificant; you get offered 50 gold pieces as a reward when you have 350,000 gold pieces jangling in some magical weightless belt pouch. So it ends up being a choice between nothing and practically nothing. Not sure if that’s really a “dilemma” at all.
I don’t think it does, exactly. But then this ties in with my own personal distaste with the Jedi ethos and my feeling that both the Jedi and the Sith follow crappy philosophies. Emotions are just as much good as bad and if your whole philosophy revolves around suppressing them Vulcan-style, you’re fucked in the head (Vulcans also = fucked in the head 
). ‘Gray Jedi’ are about the only ones approaching a reasonable level of morality IMO.
Jedi are, at best, Lawful Neutral. An alignment I’ve always rather disliked 
.
Honestly, “Lawful Neutral” seems a 100% accurate description of the Jedi. Watch the prequel movies about bickering bureaucrats with magic powers sitting on floating chairs. Even the protagonists griped about the Jedi being slaves to dogma and not doing a ton to actually help people. It’s one reason Anakin ended up turning bad in the first place.
I for one like the idea of showing them as being deeply flawed, right down to the core. It makes them less boring to me. The heroes in the stories are the exceptions who break the rules.
Absolutely and I agree. It DOES make for better drama and it is one thing I sorta (subversively) like about the prequels, despite them overall being a modest failure. It’s not text, but if you peel back the layers the mostly blind flailing of even “wise” Jedi like Yoda reveals them to have been fundamentally half-competent at best. This as opposed to the original trilogy (and much of the text of the prequels) that lionizes them.
Which is still better than the Sith long-term, who are just all about a hyper-Darwinian suicide pact by the time of the modern Star Wars era.
On some Star Wars board years ago, I suggested a multi-axis alignment system for Force users:
- Light vs Dark for using the Force without or with emotion.
- Jedi vs Sith for following their doctrines or not.
- Republic vs Empire for political loyalty.
There’s potential for a lot of interesting character interplay among these.
Edited to add: I intentionally left off Good vs Evil as a tired trope.
It also shows what rose-colored lenses the later characters were viewing the world through.
The Galactic Empire rose up, took over the galaxy with an iron fist, oppressed non-humans and robbed everyone of their freedom. Most of the planets who were largely self-governed with their own customs and cultures were forced to submit and conform, with the exception of the planets farther out which had always been hellholes ruled by pirates and other criminals (ignored by the Republic then later ignored by the Empire). So of course they’d tell myths of how wonderful the Jedi were, and if only they were still around everything would be wonderful again. Luke Skywalker bought into those myths, rose up, became a hero, literally threw down the despot enslaving everyone, and managed to defeat and somewhat redeem his own father in the process.
Luke is then later shown to be a bitter old man because the Jedi Order didn’t work out any better the second time around, and he became a hermit just like his old mentor Obi-Wan. Except instead of hiding from an evil Empire, he was hiding from his own failures. Also, the New Republic wasn’t much better than the old one, despite being run by the heroes who helped topple the Empire, and there were enough disaffected people that there were efforts to bring the Empire back.
The prequels and later sequels didn’t have the charm and success of the original trilogy, but I do think that the story is a lot more mature, nuanced, and interesting (to me) with their inclusion. The starry-eyed (ha!) optimism and pure good vs evil of the original movies (which were imitating old space operas from the pulp days and early cinema) is fun but shallow.
So I guess you can see why I don’t generally have a problem with being mean or evil in a video game. I like when there are shades of grey. I really loved how the consequences worked in Witcher 3 and how many of your choices were ambiguous, often choosing between two really bad endings, and even after all is done it’s hard to say which result would have been “better”.
In Civilization, I’ll almost never start a war… but if someone else has a resource I really need, I’ll do my best to encourage them to start a war with me. And I won’t raze a city, but I’ll happily bombard it down to 1 population before taking it, so as to minimize the trouble I’ll have with a post-conquest resistance. In fact, what I will and won’t do is governed almost entirely by what the game mechanics define as “atrocities” and other things that will affect other nations’ opinions of you.
In Fable, at the end of the main game, you can choose to murder your sister and get a really powerful sword, or you can let her live and not get the sword. Though by that point, it’s the end of the game, you’ve already done all the content you’d use the sword for.
And then they made an expansion for it, and decided that some of the stuff in the expansion needed the use of the super-sword. And so if you choose the good option and leave that room, as soon as you step outside, your mentor-figure tells you “Oh, hey, dig right here and you’ll get a special treasure”, and it’s a good-aligned sword. With exactly the same stats as the evil sword. Ugh, what even is the point?
Yeah, Witcher might be the king of this (and the earlier games were as grim as 3, 1 is probably grimmer). I do love that gaming universe. But I still try and be a decentish Geralt, even if sometimes there just isn’t any way out. At such points I just shrug my shoulders and say “whelp, I tried.”
You might like Andor, if you didn’t watch it.
Stardew Valley had an unusual sort of “morality system”. The main quest, to the extent the game had one, was to restore the town’s old, run-down community center. You could bring gifts of various sorts of produce to the woodland spirits, and when you got a certain package of gifts, they’d clean up one of the rooms, and also offer you some other boon, like opening up a new part of the game world. Or… you could buy a membership at the soulless corporation megastore, whereupon they’d buy the old community center and turn it into a warehouse, and there was a “community improvement program” where you could buy all of those same benefits, for cold hard cash.
The cash route probably was easier, because you could just focus on one thing that made the most money, and not have to diversify your production… but if you go that route, you’re probably not enjoying the game much.