Read: our finest words
- The Season Of The Witch
- Retro: Where Time Stood Still
- In Holy Murloctrimony
- World Of Goo Piracy Rate: “82%”
- Our Man In Northrend
- RPS Wireless Show Ep6: Erik Wolpaw Speak-O-Chat
- RPS Exclusive: Left 4 Dead’s Dead Air Campaign
- Ninth Art Meets Tenth Art: Games To Comics
- And more of our finest words...
Revisit: a random post
Atmosphir
Respond: to our gibberish
- Frosty840 : “No DLC? That would be a no-sale. Well done, Rockstar!” on GTA IV Gets Cinematic
- Quater : “Nihilanth wasn't [i]hard[/i], it was just a [i]fucking awful[/i] piece of shitty game design. A boss whose attacks teleport you into a separate room full ...” on Spare A Dollar For G-Man?
- dhex : “That is quite possibly the most tragic thing I have read in months. I feel sad now. imagine how i feel. someone made my wife ...” on IF Comp 2008: Violet
- manintheshack : “No Xander77, you're missing something is this thread...” on Left 4 Dead RPS Review Face-Off
- cyrenic : “Never finished Planescape or Dues Ex. In fact I never even finished the first level of Dues Ex. Yup.” on Spare A Dollar For G-Man?
Play: indie, mods and webgames
Browse: the mighty RPS archive
Morality Tales - BioWare Versus The Issues
Written by John Walker on August 26, 2008 at 11:03 am.
I’ve been playing lots of Mass Effect recently, because as a leading games critic it’s essential I stay ahead of the curve and keep my finger on the pulse. A mere nine months after buying it on 360 and then never playing it, and then blagging a PC version only three months after its second release, I’m on the case.
It would probably be controversial to say that BioWare’s three most recent RPGs, Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, and Mass Effect, are all exactly the same game in a different setting. Because Mass Effect’s setting is quite similar to KotOR’s. But what’s rather fortunate is that they change the combat style in each, so there’s always something unique to complain about on a forum. What’s also important to note is that they’re all three flipping ace, and I love them. They just… they just tend to do this one really silly thing.
One thing I really want to do is go and sit down with Dr and Dr BioWare, and be having a regular chat, probably asking questions about Dragon Age or something journalistic like that, and then suddenly in the middle of it all I’d shout, “MY SISTER WANTS TO GET AN ABORTION! WHAT SHOULD SHE DO?”
When they look scared and ask what I’m talking about, I’d only offer them the very slightest pieces of information about the situation, probably saying that the unborn baby might have some sort of horrible disability and she doesn’t want it to be born to suffer, but her husband is currently away at sea and unreachable (because it’s happening in the past or in space or somewhere where radio signals don’t work) and won’t be able to have his say. I’d only give them two possible answers, and their stuttering, unprepared response would decide the fate of this unfortunate foetus. And then I’d ask them about how the Sonic license first caught their attention.
I’m not sure, but I don’t know if RPGs are quite the place to try and resolve the most controversial and devisive subjects of our day. Well no, that’s not true at all. They could be, but perhaps in a setting slightly more dignifiied than as a result of overhearing a conversation on a street, and then immediately being given life or death decisions to make for complete strangers.
It just happened to me in Mass Effect. I’m back in Space City One (I don’t pay much attention to names - if you ask me, I’ll tell you what all the companion characters are called in my head) and trundling about the confusing bridges, popping in to see people who need to know about the contents of crates on distant planets, and I pass an arguing couple. Being a paragon of virtue (seriously, you should see my Paragon status. I haven’t quite matched my immediately being a glowy angel like in KoTOR, but my goodness-o-meter is almost full) I of course stop and ask them what’s up. Oddly they don’t tell me to fuck off, but rather immediately adopt me into their family and confidence, and explain the skeletal nature of their dilemma. They’re brother and sister-in-law, and her kid might have some illness. But she’s heard on the news that the treatment for it is potentially dangerous, and doesn’t want to risk losing her child treating him for a disease he might not have. Her husband just died, and the brother says she’s acting out of grief, and that she should just take the treatment.
So we’ve got ourselves a cipher for the MMR debate. You find out the stats, and the chances of having the illness are reasonably high, and the chances of the treatment causing problems are 1 in 300. But she’s heard this news story, and she says what if her kid is the 1 in 300? DECIDE THE CHILD’S FATE!
So, as anyone with a modicum of scientific reason knows, there’s no evidence that the MMR vaccine causes harm. Utterly none. But that’s hard to keep relevant when you’re a mother of a baby, and you have to make this decision without any expertise of your own about whether the evidence is correct and there’s definitely no chance of your kid getting autism… Good grief, this suddenly got a bit heavy. Which would somewhat be my point. This is a completely inappropriate subject to appear in this jokey, silly post. And it’s far too big of a subject to decide on the bridge of a scifi game for a couple of strangers, before I carry on looking for that last bloody Keeper to scan that I cannot find anywhere despite combing the entire place three times.
I really love that BioWare include these tough choices, but I wish they’d include them in a slightly more dignified way. I wish they’d be part of a larger story, a continued struggle of conscience where decisions are made based on multiple conversations, varying expert and inexpert opinion, and a wealth of emotional and emotive situations. I want to be forced to contend my scientific reason against the irrational emotions of those in the throws of a situation. I want to wrestle with the toughest subjects, with data and passion from people on all sides trying to sway me to their way of thinking. I think, in these fleshed out circumstances, an RPG could be the most remarkable place for getting to grips with matters like abortion and euthanasia. I think because they’re the sorts of subjects it’s completely pointless to talk about in the pub, because it inevitably descends into people entrenching themselves in their currently held position and then hurling stones at the other side, that the RPG would be a space in which the emphasis of thought and consideration would be squarely on you.
Bizarrely, I told the bridge couple that it was her child, and her choice, and as a consequence he had the emotional breakthrough of recognising his motivations were not as pure as he had claimed, but rather because he wanted to hold onto this last piece of his brother. But that’s not what I think! I would have gone through the statistics of the situation with her, had her talk with doctors, and encouraged her to go with the scientific odds. But I was given two choices and one cop-out. Side with her, side with him, or leave them to it. Really, I think the right answer in that situation should have been to leave them to it, but dammit I’m playing a videogame and I’m going to see what the consequences of my choosing would be. I’m interested that I went against type and chose her. But that was because the situation was so peculiarly binary that I was really deciding: who has a right to make a choice about a baby, the mother or the uncle. Well, the mother then. That I want to clobber people who ignore science and risk their children’s health because of reading idiots misreporting facts in newspapers was suddenly irrelevant. And more, that I think that wasn’t challenged by the situation. In the end, the encounter oddly cheapened a serious topic.
It is great that BioWare aspire beyond most other developers when creating their games, and I love that the worlds are rich enough to have space for recognising universal subjects. Occasionally it works - the woman who had transfered her love for her dead husband onto her missing droid in KotOR was especially splendid, but mostly because it played out as a quest, rather than a conversation, and the situation was remarkably complex. You could force the droid to stay with her, leaving her in a perpetually futile relationship and the droid trapped against what he knew was best for his master, but her apparently happy. You could free the droid, and in doing so force her to face her grief, potentially destroying her. You could even kill the droid, and then go back to her and tell her it was still alive and she should keep looking for it. Muah ha ha! But it was a droid, and unique to a science fiction world, and it gave you space to discuss and explore the subject. It wasn’t a morally ambiguous situation on which you’re forced to flick a giant fate-deciding switch before you can quicksave, which unfortunately is the more typical.
I can’t wait for Dragon Age. But I do rather fear I’ll be wandering through some remote village, searching for the missing mystic rune of Grogglefanaar, when a local baker’s wife will ask me to decide whether she should allow her sickly husband to die against her doctor’s wishes.
Related Stories:
- That’s A Lot For An Electric Tricycle…
- EA Backs Down From 10-Day Authentication
- Mass Effect: Slips, But Shows Off
Comment on this story — Share/save/Digg this story
Tags: Bioware, feature, knights of the old republic, mass effect, moral maze
__________________
« Star Trek Online: Explore ‘Em Up | GOA Confirms Open Beta, Definitely Lowers Prices »
John Walker says:
Giant Fat Slug Guy, Lizard-Head Guy, Sexy Blue Girl, Facemask Girl, Mr Full-of-himself Guy and Hateful Racist Fundamentalist Girl.
August 26th, 2008 at 11:19 am
ImperialCreed says:
Haha, I ended up calling Hateful Racist Fundamentalist Girl something like Lazy Eyes when I was describing the character to my girlfriend. There’s something about her facial animation that’s slightly off…
Nice to know I wasnt the only one who found Sexy Blue Girl sexy.
August 26th, 2008 at 11:21 am
Rook says:
This sounds like typical Bioware. There’s an obviously good answer, and an obviously bad answer. Bioware don’t ever seem to be able to offer the players a choice that they can’t figure out which side of the coin it’ll land on and the never make the right choice work out the wrong way and I think their games suffer for it. Obsidian are way ahead of Bioware in this camp, and I think CD Project did a good job on the Witcher too.
August 26th, 2008 at 11:28 am
_Nocturnal says:
They are located near Barla Von, the shady guy with connections to the Shadow Broker.
Interestingly, I chose the same thing as John, for the same reasons.
August 26th, 2008 at 11:28 am
James G says:
What I really want is a Bioware RPG that allows me to storm the offices of a certain newspaper (that may or may not rhyme with Daily Heil) and forcibly infect them all with Measles, Mumps and Rubella (at the same time) and ask them whether they think the very real symptoms they are suffering are preferable to their fictitious constructs. I’m too nice to do something like that in real life, but I’d quite happily pick up a few Renegade points to achieve the fictional equivalent. (I was especially spitting with rage recently when I noticed that said newspaper contained an article now attacking the various parents who were, against all scientific evidence, failing to administer the MMR vaccine to their children. What they failed to mention was where these ‘ignorant’ parents could possibly have got their misinformation from.)
August 26th, 2008 at 11:29 am
Schadenfreude says:
Hateful Racist Fundamentalist Girl has the same name as Bruce Campbell’s character in the Evil Dead trilogy which leads me to believe that Bioware originaly wanted to include a time-travelling one-handed chainsaw-weilding zombie slayer but found out after they recorded everyone else’s V.O. that they couldn’t get the rights.
Or am I reading into it too much?
August 26th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Myros says:
The quest you listed and the ‘right to life’ one where you get to decide wether to turn off a life support system for the husband of a crazy spacer woman - both seemed a little odd to me, like Bioware were trying too hard to be relavent (to 21st century earth perceptions). Or as you said, not putting these elements into an ongoing and meaningful context just cheapens the real moral dilemas.
Oh and the MMR shots can cause “harm” just not the kind of serious harm that some media and net sources have been freeking out about. ;p
August 26th, 2008 at 11:34 am
PetitPiteux says:
>”I’m not sure, but I don’t know if RPGs are quite the place to try and resolve the most controversial and devisive subjects of our day.”
Super Columbine Massacre RPG! anyone?
August 26th, 2008 at 11:35 am
Psychopomp says:
That’s *SEXY* Facemask Girl to you!
August 26th, 2008 at 11:35 am
Jacob W says:
So what games offer more sophisticated choices than Demon Hitler/Baby Jesus? Things that come to mind:
Jade Empire claims to be not about a good/evil dichotomy but rather a more nuanced yin/yang thing, but that’s basically a huge lie.
The Witcher has a uniformly grim and amoral system that I found refreshing.
The Fallout series often had more than the usual binary choice, especially if you count the ever-popular Kill Everyone Involved.
I’m sure I’m missing some. Any suggestions?
August 26th, 2008 at 11:36 am
Schadenfreude says:
There’s Bloodlines. The Heather thing in particular.
August 26th, 2008 at 11:40 am
Heliocentric says:
i’d like the option to punch them both in the face. I find that solves most of the issues.
Imagine those 2 people were party members and the effects of that one choice would resonate through the whole game now say you have a dozen of these for each of a half dozen characters, thats about 2^72 possible outcomes assuming all these choices are binary.
August 26th, 2008 at 11:46 am
suchchoices says:
Fallout (2?) had those great bits where you’d walk into a shop and the street kids either side of the door would pillage your pockets and run gleefully back to their keeper with the only decent weapon you had. Oh, what to do, what to do. Lovely way to drop an implicit moral decision into the lap of the unsuspecting player.
August 26th, 2008 at 11:51 am
mrmud says:
I do recall Mass Effect having several choices that were representing either Kant based or ethics or Utilitarianism. A choice that isnt so much about good versus evil but about different ways of percieving good (good for the individual or good for the whole)
August 26th, 2008 at 11:55 am
Diogo Ribeiro says:
It would probably be controversial to say that BioWare’s three most recent RPGs, Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, and Mass Effect, are all exactly the same game in a different setting.
Probably not, unless we’re talking to those scurrying Bioware fanboys. Actually, the similarities in approach and design also stretch back to Neverwinter Nights as well, and many of those moral issues are a throwback to the Baldur’s Gate era as well. They found a formula that works for their target audience and whammo, copy & paste.
August 26th, 2008 at 11:55 am
CakeAddict says:
I found mass effect great to play, but KotOR is still my favoriet bioware game.
Problably because it’s star wars (yay jedi’s) but I also found the choices and ways to approach a problem better done then in Mass Effect.
… To bad that they are making a mmorpg out of it..
August 26th, 2008 at 11:59 am
suchchoices says:
re: Heliocentric
Sadly, for games that tout “over 200 endings” (*cough* Fallout 3 *cough*), I suspect that the decisions leading to the different endings don’t actually interact to any large degree. For example, supposing that fallout 3 has 2^8 = 256 endings. Worst case scenario is that there are only 8 important decisions that influence the ending, and none of these decisions interact with each other (ie ending has 8 components, each one decided by one of your previous decisions), so you’d only need to play the game to completion 16 times to see all the content.
Actually producing content by hand for 2^8 (let alone 2^72) interesting distinct endings would be a nightmare. Of course, if anyone writes a game that manages to procedurally generate interesting and distinct storylines based on one’s choices, now that would be something.
(Self reflection: Oh dear. The topic? forced and limited Grand Moral Choices in games. My response? Mathematics: Cartesian product vs tensor product.)
edit: at least the kotor games cater to my demographic with the inclusion of towers of Hanoi puzzles and the like
August 26th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Optimaximal says:
The Fallout series often had more than the usual binary choice, especially if you count the ever-popular Kill Everyone Involved.
*smiles*
August 26th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Gap Gen says:
This is one of my problems with games pretending to have choices and consequences in general - I read Quintin’s article on Pathologic recently, and I agreed with his comment that Bioshock’s choice concerning children looks a bit shallow and trite, even if there is a genuine point being made.
Deus Ex managed the choice aspect fairly well, I thought, but then it is Deus Ex. In contrast, I thought this was the one of the weakest aspects of Invisible War - in many cases, the choices you could make made no difference at all. The worst one was whether or not to kill your partner after fighting them, which was a yes/no choice that had no consequence afterwards. The characterisation wasn’t even strong enough to make me care about them enough for it to matter. But enough IW bashing…
August 26th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
CdrJameson says:
Hateful Racist Fundamentalist Now Blown Up Girl in my case, I fear. Oh well, she was Hateful and Racist, not to mention Fundamentalist.
Anyway. Bioware! Stop spending all your time on (admittedly lovely) shiny graphics and detailed descriptions of planets you can’t interact with in any way, and put more interesting side quests back in! That’s the way to make longer games, not forcing me to trek back and forth from lab to barracks just to complete a no-choices conversation.
Mass Effect, you’re so pretty, with several lushly different planets to land on, but wait! Why, if the evil space pirates haven’t set up another identical-except-for-the-crate- positions base. Looks like I’ll have to stand in the doorway again until they eventually run at me one at a time. Oh, mustn’t forget to clear the guards from the outside. Won’t take long… after all, I’ve got a tank and they haven’t.
Good thing the main plot missions are interesting. I’m off to Baldur’s Gate 2 after this one I think, just to check that the side-plots did used to be more interesting.
August 26th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
subedii says:
You know, I keep hearing people describe Ashley as a hateful racist type, but I never really saw her that way at all.
Fundamentally (no pun intended) she has issues with Earth being independent and capable of functioning for itself on the galactic stage. In her eyes the sovereign nation state of Earth should not have to depend on a galactic council or other nation states in order to be able to survive. If nothing else it’s an understandable viewpoint, and it’s one that shifts her thought processes appropriately. The reason she doesn’t want aliens on board the Normandy isn’t because she thinks they’re slimy, it’s because the Normandy is an advanced prototype with incredibly sensitive information on board that she feels it best kept secret from other species. She does have some initial aversion to alien species to begin with but that’s about it, and stems more from culture shock than anything else.
By the end of the game if you take her down the paragon path she comes to the realisation that Earth cannot fundamentally survive just on its own, the universe is too big for that, and it’s important to be a part of something bigger in order for everyone to be able to survive.
As a character I found her far more interesting than Liara. To be honest, I thought Liara was just about as shallow as a damp puddle on a hot day, and largely present as a fan-service for the people looking to Captain Kirk it up with a blue alien.
Closer to the topic at hand, I feel that Planescape: Torment usually gave quite a good amount of depth to it’s moral questions. In particular there was usually a lot of information given about the subject beforehand, and your choices were usually far more varied than just binary. Sometimes you were even given the option of taking the same course of action but with different reasonings behind them. That was pretty impressive to me. The whole question of “What can change the nature of a man?” was brought up repeatedly throughout the game and with different contexts. By the end you had pretty thoroughly been taken through the concept and were allowed to say your piece on the matter. That was very well done.
Having said all that, I personally think that John might be reading too much into the specific choice given in the example. Might just be me but I never saw this as a cipher for the MMR debate. I suppose it could have been, but I think that Bioware were just trying to insert something “edgy” and “topical” into the game. I did feel it was fairly out of place though, given the universe saving shenanigans that your character is usually up to.
I thought a good choice sequence was the one with the Rachni (or however you spell that). You’re given a lot of information regarding the history of the situation beforehand, and allowed to draw your own conclusions. Some more diversity in the choices might have been appreciated but I didn’t feel too limited with the “yes / no” scenario as it was presented. What I did object to was the labelling of goody / baddy to the choices (let’s face it, everyone knew which choice would be which there). Anyone making the choice they did wouldn’t be doing so out of spite, but because they felt it was for the best. It’s something I feel a lot of RPG’ fall down on, labelling actions as simple good or bad is always such a relative thing.
August 26th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Reverend Speed says:
Can I ask a question?
Don’t play too many RPGS, but I often find that the limited number of handled choices combined with some rather ambiguous text lables can place me in some odd positions. For example, the Consort.
“I just saved your political position on this here space station, so no I DON’T think this little trinket’s gonna be enough to reimburse meee wwWAAH we’re gonna have sex now? Wait, hang on–”
“Sir, should me and Utterly Boring Biotic Guy just stay in this room and watch?”
“What? WHAT? Why the hell would you–”
*Weird little sex pod chamber thing (how erotic) seals shut, allowing only the occasional panicked squeal and thud to escape*
“I guess that means he’s into it.”
“Awwww yeahh…” *steps closer to pod*
…
I mean, that was just uncomfortable. And unintentionally hilarious.
Isn’t that, on a fairly large scale, awful story design? I mean, the plot can carry on, but what kinda idiot universe is this?
And then there was the (seemingly) unavoidable romantic plotlines that really had nothing to do with the main plot. With no direct connection, it just felt like the designers were going out of their way to offer their audience (who could never possibly have experienced sex in real life) to enjoy SOME SEX! SEXY SEX!
WITH AN ALIEN! FROM A RACE! WHICH WE DESIGNED SPECIFICALLY! SO YOU COULD HAVE SEXY SEX WITH ‘EM!
Which becomes far more appealing when the alternative is Racist Cliché. But then Blue Alien is basically a Wet Blanket.
Worst of all, I couldn’t find a way to turn ‘em both down with style and humour. Instead, I settled on becoming the biggest boor in the galaxy. And STILL I got blue chick.
And you’re left with a fucking montage of Ooh! OH! Ahh… and there’s still no goddamn point to it all. Don’t write a sex scene that’s not plot essential! It’s just a sequence with an inevitable end! Jesus, Story 101…
GRRAAGH!
At least in San Andreas, I’d get a new car…!
Mass Effect’s mostly an insultingly silly waste of time, bar exploratory gubbins which are mostly boring. Mostly. The plot that kicks in during the last quarter is just GREAT and the conclusion is excellent. =)
Also, Bring Down the Sky. Surprisingly good. Lovely knife twist if you save the hostages.
Ahh. I feel purged.
—
CdrJameson: Mass Effect, you’re so pretty, with several lushly different planets to land on, but wait! Why, if the evil space pirates haven’t set up another identical-except-for-the-crate- positions base.
Actually, this coulda been great. If they’d spent more time drawing attention to this, talking about the major suppliers of modular planetary living quarters, that coulda been great. You could have rescued the chairman of that company and demanded greater variety, etc… =) Hang a goddamn lantern on it, wouldja?
Subedii: Sometimes you were even given the option of taking the same course of action but with different reasonings behind them.
Absolutely. Planescape beats out most rpgs for choices and subtlety. Deus Ex hammer’s ‘em for plot, character, humour, setting…
August 26th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Tom says:
I did laugh at that bit. It was like: “Hey! Not to eaves drop or anything but I couldn’t but notice you were talking about a deeply personal matter”.
August 26th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
dartt says:
Great article. I think it’s a common problem in RPGs that the developers have these wonderful ideas for moral choices for the player to agonise over but then forget to weave them in to the strory in a way that introduces them to the player effectively.
August 26th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Gap Gen says:
Stop spending all your time on … detailed descriptions of planets you can’t interact with in any way…
I hate this part of games, where they feel that an extremely detailed backstory is a good thing. Often it is, but only when you don’t have to sit through pages of exposition. If you do, your game is poorly written. HL2 is the perfect example of the opposite approach, and it works far better - I can work out what happened through the hints they gave me, and didn’t have to trawl through pages of dross that has no relevance to anything.
Still, at least they didn’t publish a Mass Effect novel. Please tell me they didn’t publish a Mass Effect novel.
August 26th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Seniath says:
@Gap Gen: I’m afraid they did. Twice.
Edit: Nads, beaten to the punch.
August 26th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Ian says:
I think the whole “talking to random strangers just to see if they’ve got anything to say” thing is a bit odd in RPGs anyway.
August 26th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Naurgul says:
I put this in the same category I put “Look! Racism!” from the Witcher. It’s the evolution of “blood+tits=mature”. It’s like they specifically made it as material for the fanboys to shout how the game has depth and as a bullet-point for the box: Choices & Consequences! Pressing Issues!
Let’s just hope developers think of things like this in a way other than just another selling point.
August 26th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Psychopomp says:
“Probably not, unless we’re talking to those scurrying Bioware fanboys. ”
Hello, have you spent much time on the Bioware boards? We’re *VERY* aware of the flaws in Biowares games…
August 26th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
subedii says:
I think John’s objection wasn’t so much to the issue itself, it’s the fact that he wasn’t allowed to resolve it in the manner that he wanted to. Instead he had to make a choice that he wasn’t happy with. I’d also say it makes a person uncomfortable when having to make a choice that they fundamentally disagree with when it’s the best out of what the player views as worse choices.
It’s an unfortunate limitation with too many RPG’s that they don’t allow you to make a real choice, just a good / bad choice.
August 26th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
suchchoices says:
Subedii: Sometimes you were even given the option of taking the same course of action but with different reasonings behind them.
Torment was a wonderful game.
I think a great example of this separation of action and intention in fictional characters is the movie Memento. You see the characters perform the same actions over and over, but each time the actions are presented in a different context due to the additional information you have seen.
(edit: i think i’m talking about the playoffs between action and context, with intention being part of the context.)
I guess some games do this as well, to a degree - Braid springs to mind. Bioshock along with any other game featuring a ‘grand betrayal’ twist probably count too.
Surely games, as an interactive non-linear medium, offer a far greater potential for exploring these kinds of subtleties than other mediums.
August 26th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Mr. Brand says:
I’m disappointed about the lack of Wrex romance options.
August 26th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Dorian Cornelius Jasper says:
When I think of the awkward treatment of “choices” by Bioware, I’m reminded of this awkwardness:
In BG2, Male characters could romance three characters, all interesting–especially Viconia. Female characters had one, who wasn’t quite as interesting. And he also looked kinda sleazy, which didn’t help.
August 26th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
John Walker says:
subedii - She describes aliens as like a dog you might love, but would let die if human lives were at stake!
That’s just about as racist as you can get.
August 26th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Heliocentric says:
the 2^72 statement was a negative comment. Who is ever going to write meaningfull dialogue for all that. As black and white as it was i liked gal civ’s moral choices. Commit genocide? But they had no relivence but to a variable. For a game to have real choices it has to genuinely escape being linear. Changing a stat or a static npc wont work. As games plots arch ever wider the time on each one would shrink. That is apart from procedural morality, like stalker. Each group represents a point of view.
August 26th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
subedii says:
@ John: I may be reading this incorrectly, but my understanding was that she described it the other way around.
She describes how the council views humans as a Dog. Useful and friendly to them, but ultimately if the issue of survival came down to either them or their dog, it wouldn’t be the dog that survived.
That’s not even racism, that’s just Machiavellian politics. To understand it from her viewpoint, would the council choose to sacrifice the rest of the council races in order for humanity to survive, or would they allow humanity to die in order for the greater whole to survive? It’s a difficult choice, but the practical one is the latter, and the previous history of that universe has showcased them making similar choices with the fates of other species.
If you view things from that basis, it becomes understandable why she views a detachment and independence of Earth from the council and council races as necessary: She believe the only ones that the humans can really rely on when the chips are down are the humans. That’s not to say anything strictly bad about the Council races in themselves, but just that politics of the situation is like that if viewed from a utilitarian perspective.
August 26th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Dinger says:
Can you present a complex moral issue using only a dialogue wheel?
The world you create is, willy nilly, the world you understand, and that includes the implicit moral and ethical rules by which it functions. SimCity, for example, doesn’t give you artificial choices about what your ideal society should look like. It does, however, assume a grid model of urban planning, that people will commute to where they work, and that food and water production are givens. And the easiest way to get a “high score” is to make a city for the rich. But SimCity doesn’t tell you that the “right” city should look like Orinda; it just stacks the deck that way.
A Mind Forever Voyaging, on the other hand, set out to make a statement on similar moral/ethical/political issues. The whole game is wrapped around the developers’ vision.
In other words, the “moral landscape” of a game is the gamespace: the rules and the entities that make up the game. Putting “moral/ethical choice” into the narrative is jarring, superficial and beside the point. If you want ethics to really matter, make it the core of the game, so that “weighty consequences” are truly weighty. Otherwise leave it alone.
In American terms, Dennis Miller sucked as a Monday Night Football commentator not because his references were too obscure, but because they had only a superficial bearing on the action on the field. Without context, there can be no meaning.
August 26th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Requiem says:
“Deus Ex managed the choice aspect fairly well, I thought, but then it is Deus Ex. In contrast, I thought this was the one of the weakest aspects of Invisible War - in many cases, the choices you could make made no difference at all.” I’ve not played IW but I have to laugh at this, Deus Ex had only one choice that made a difference later in the game and it wasn’t much of a difference at that. Everything else was just a tactical choice no different from most other shooters, that only affected the situation there and then.
Trouble with BioWare games is they tend to throw you straight into the deep end of the main plot which makes the side quests stick out like a sore thumb. Mass Effect, oh you’re racing against time to save all organic life in the galaxy, oh please stop and go find these trinklets/bandits/monkeys etc. Jade Empire your master has been kidnapped and taken to a fate unknown, please stop and help this woman find a husband. KotOR is probably the best of the bunch since it’s main story is a search for clues and helping people is in character for a Jedi, making stopping and sticking your nose in and talking to random people fit right in.
Mass Effect would of been so much better if they had held back the main plot and your character becoming a spectre until the last third of the game. This sort of ethical dilema wouldn’t of felt so out of place if you weren’t on a save the galaxy quest or if you’d been able to choose less combat fixated character roles at the start of the game, before becoming a spectre.
August 26th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Okami says:
@Naurgul: Hold on a sec! While racism surely is an issue in The Witcher, it doesn’t feel tacked on. You don’t deal with it in a purely black/white manner. The non humans are neither innocent victims, nor is the order of the flaming rose a collection of ultra racist evil doers. There’s a whole lot of different shades of grey in there.
Also “choices and consequences” in the Witcher were implemented rather well. Especially concerning the whole order vs elves issue. The choices themselves weren’t easy to make and could have very far reaching consequences later on in the game.
If you really need to whack The Witcher, concentrate on the sexy sex with sexy girl. Though I didn’t mind it, this is a feature that was obviously added in order to go all “OMG TEH MATUREZ” about it.
August 26th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
MissingKeeperSpoiler says:
Don’t look at this if you’re heart-set on finding that missing keeper, but I’m willing to bet it’s on the balcony out the back door of the embassy bar.
August 26th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
Gap Gen says:
subedii - She describes aliens as like a dog you might love, but would let die if human lives were at stake!
You could get more xenophobic - you could argue that aliens should be killed even if no human lives were at immediate risk.
In any case, most humans are pretty specieist, and that’s not seen as really that bad a thing. After all, her example of a dog is routinely observed if an animal might harm someone, or indeed if people feel like eating meat or wearing leather. In many sci-fi stories where non-human intelligences are sufficiently different from us, we’re generally at war with them.
August 26th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
CdrJameson says:
I think the whole “talking to random strangers just to see if they’ve got anything to say” thing is a bit odd in RPGs anyway.
Well, in Baldur’s Gate you had to break into their houses to poke your nose into their business…
August 26th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
John Walker says:
Nope Missing, I found that bugger. There’s still yet another.
August 26th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
subedii says:
You might find this map useful:
http://www.dukewebem.com/xbox-360/mass-effect-scan-the-keepers-locations-47/
August 26th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
subedii says:
I spent ages running around the station looking for the last one. Turned out it was in the docking bay just past the Normandy. I never visited there until a little later in the storyline (when you actually need to head down to the Normandy to start off on your Epic Quest), I kept trying to find them everywhere else. So ironically, I only found it when I gave up on trying to find it.
August 26th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Schadenfreude says:
There’s two or three of the buggers in the Council Chambers; the one I was missing was in there.
August 26th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Kevlmess says:
The funny thing about the Renegade path is that it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re truly evil or amoral or anything. You’re practically as goody-doody and heroic as a Paragon but also quite a cunt.
Fortunately that doesn’t steal the joy from solving situations by punching people in the face.
Oh, and every game should let the player get lesbian sex without meaning to.
August 26th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Maximum Fish says:
The problem with morality systems in videogames is that you can’t include one that offers the player different avenues to follow without passing judgement on those decisions. The writer’s conception of the outcomes of those choices, how those choices are presented (the “way of the closed fist”, that sounds good, right? Right?), how other moral archtype characters respond to those decisions, etc., all represent judgements of player decisions.
This all reminds me of the beginning to Neverwinter Nights 2, when the bandit guy tells you if you let him live he’ll hunt you down and kill everyone you know or whatever. I chose the stab him in the throat, quite reasonably i thought, but then the game gave me a handful of evil points, and some handwringing “i don’t know if i support that” whining from my sidekick. At that point i was like, fuck it, i guess i’m going to be evil…
The interesting thing about real life, as opposed to Star Trek or other famous morality plays, is that situations in real life are infinitely more complex, and cheesy moral truisms (violence is always bad, etc) never actually quite work out as they should. Like any complex system, a coneniently simplified equation will never accurately describe it. There is no universal prescription, and when i’m playing a videogame, i like to pretend i’m not playing a videogame, ie imagine all the real world complexities and so forth play a part. It’s only too bad the game doesn’t play along.
For example, in Star Trek, the bandit guy would probably, given a chance, come around and later become a productive citizen, or it would be discovered he has an ailing 8 year old daughter or some shit. In real life he’d show up at your quaint Faerun cottage and gut your quibbling bitch ass with a rusted bread knife, all the while saying “I told you”.
August 26th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Dinger says:
Come to think of it, that was why I never got into Ultima IV. Ultima III was great, especially when you became powerful enough to wipe out a village, so that only the inaccessible shopkeepers were left. You could turn a lively community into a ghost town and get rich off it. Ultima IV had some sort of morality system that effectively made it difficult to be bad.
Sometimes we want to be bad guys, and that’s recognized in game design. So successful game formulas have to leave that option. Then they try to throw in moral choices? Well, they can’t have consequences then, can they?
August 26th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Iain says:
@Requiem: Mass Effect, oh you’re racing against time to save all organic life in the galaxy, oh please stop and go find these trinkets/bandits/monkeys etc.
This is basically my biggest gripe with the post-KotOR BioWare model. OMG, we’re in this big race against time to save the entire galaxy from destriuction, but the world and his droid still want you to sort out every single last problem for them on their behalf, even though they could conceivably just get off their arse and do it for themselves. Let the Big Bad wait. I’m sure he’ll wait for us to get there to foil his plans before he destroys all known civilisation. He’s nice like that…
My second biggest problem is that they give you these moral choices, but then don’t show you the consequences. How are you meant to know if you made the “right” decision or not? All Mass Effect does is pop a few Paragon or Renegade points into your character stats and that’s it. You don’t get to find out if she has a natural birth, or goes for the treatment or not, nor do you find out what ultimately happens to the child either way. So what was the point of getting involved? Other than the stat boost?
This is one of the reasons I really liked The Witcher - you got to make the tough moral choices, and you had to face the consequences later in the game. The whole thing was so far away from being black and white or clear cut that the choices you thought were “right” often turned out to have negative effects later on; choosing the lesser evil still turned out to be evil (a recurrent theme from the original books, I might add).
I see people have been referencing Deus Ex with regards to freedom and choice. Was I the only one person who thought that they missed a trick? Where was the option to stay with UNATCO? I thought the game forced you into jumping ship over to the NSF way too soon. I wanted to be the bad guy, dammit!
And finally: Sexy Blue Girl is *SOOO* dull. Hateful Racist Fundamentalist Girl is far more interesting. And her ass looks terrific in a combat hardsuit…
August 26th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
Chaz says:
Well Ashley may have been a hateful racist, but I didn’t kick her out of bed for it. Oh yeah baby!
August 26th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
dhex says:
the witcher did seem to get inter-cultural conflict well enough - at least enough so that it didn’t stick out like the whole trading cards thing.
August 26th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Maximum Fish says:
@lain
I agree entirely. The rush-rush nonsense was a huge problem in both Mass Effect and Jade Empire. They give you a “what are you waiting for?!” urgent quest to save all of eternity or whatever, and then on the way out the door some poor bastard asks you to look for his friend in bumfuck outer space and fly back to the station if you get word.
Oblivion did the same thing. No Sean Bean, I DON’T want to go to motherfucking Cloud Ruler Temple, so ease the hell off. Seriously. What’s this about Lovecraftian menaces ravaging the countryside? And why is this more important than my nirnroot potions and… or fine, whatever. Save the planet. Save the planet, and then indulge in the anal retentive completist trap you so maliciously laid for me.
August 26th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Sucram says:
When your moral choices are boiled down to a screen with three dialogue options, which you read while sipping a cup of tea and wondering how many XP each will give you, it’s rarely going to be particularly good.
At best you might get a witty comeback which leaves you wondering if the other responses are as witty. Hmm better quickload to check ‘em out.
Either these things need to played out over a longer period, though often that ends up feeling contrived, or the fact that you are making these choices need to be obfuscated.
the most impressive moments are when you act on instinct in a game, only to be told later ‘Hey, do you realise what you did?’. Like when you flee your brothers apartment in Deus Ex.
August 26th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Sum0 says:
Two things that niggled me about Mass Effect:
1) The fact that in these moral dilemmas, everyone folds so quickly when you pull out your Charm or Intimidate or even just talk a bit more. It’s as no one holds any actual opinions. It didn’t feel like I was talking these people round to my viewpoint, more like I was just flicking a big switch to OPTION A or OPTION B.
2) Scans reveal a derelict space station in orbit around the second moon of an enormous gas giant. The Normandy pulls in close, matching its rotation, and docks. The intrepid boarding party enters and discovers mysterious artifact X. Great fun to play, right? Except we don’t get to play it. We just read a little text box. Not even a cinematic?
August 26th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Maximum Fish says:
@Sumo
Yeah, the “you found platinum on this floating wreck” bits were sort of a letdown, but then judging from their planet base interiors, all one of them, and how tired i got of trudging through rocky corridors and shooting biotic krogans or whatever, i’m not sure i wouldn’t have just gotten shit-tired of the spaceship interior too. A cinematic would have been cool probably.
August 26th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Requiem says:
@Iain I’d call it the BioWare model fullstop, you can see it in their progression from BG to ME, KotOR is the odd one out as the model actually fits the Jedi character and the story line isn’t one of imminent doom, well not until you reach the end of the game that is.
The one excuse I’ve seen for the lack of consequences in ME is that it’s the start of a trilogy, but until episode 2 or 3 show my character get court-martialed for punching someone out, leaking info to the press, disobeying orders and stealing the ship, or the effects of releasing the queen bug or destroying the colonists then it’s not much of an rpg. A great adventure game and fun third person shooter, but just not an rpg.
Deus Ex is big on tactical choices but there’s only really one ethical choice, saving your brother, and yeah I spent ages telling him I wasn’t going to destroy the transmitter and trying to arrest him but the damn game just wouldn’t let me stay in UNATCO.
August 26th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Iain says:
@Sucram: The thing with Paul’s apartment in Deus Ex was handled a bit too randomly, though. You could kill all the MIBs, but if you left via the window instead of the front door, Paul would still die.
A better example of a tough (im)moral choice is one from early in The Witcher: a village is persecuting the local witch, Abigail. She’s utterly innocent of the crimes they accuse her of, but they’re intent on blood, because they’re ignorant enough to believe that killing her will solve the real problem (which it won’t, incidentally).
Now, do you let the baying mob tear apart a completely innocent woman, or do you save her, having to slaughter the entire village in the process, on the principle that she’s innocent?
The payoff being either you still get to use all the amenities of the village for the rest of that chapter of the game, but you’ve let an entirely innocent woman be killed, or Abigail helps you later on in the game, but you’ve wiped out an entire village in her defense. They’re two utterly morally untenable decisions. But you still have to make a choice…
I’d like to see more games that reflect shades of grey, rather than blandly predictable right and wrong choices.
August 26th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Maximum Fish says:
I’m still waiting for the Enhanced Edition Witcher, still waiting…
August 26th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Andrew says:
Interestingly, I think Baldur’s Gate II works against the tropes in the article. There’s a lot of typical fantasy, but also a few odd ones which really don’t turn out to be a standard affair. One quest I recall actually has a bad outcome even if you replay it and try ever option. Really interesting that one.
I admit that the two-option response is pretty pathetic. Culling down a situation to a few responses, with no general ability to reason or debate, discuss or act apart from choose one of a few options is rather sad. Oh well, it is progress, just could be written a bit better - but couldn’t everything be a bit better? 
August 26th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Okami says:
Now that was one decision that wasn’t hard to make - kill the village of course. I hated every one of them anyway.
August 26th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Maximum Fish says:
Being that games are increasingly well-defined worlds (in a mechanical sense) with rules and predefined interactions well established, “emergent gameplay” is possible, and creative solutions to developer defined problems are occasionally possible. But in a broader sense, because games are essentially a series of predefined responses to predefined inputs, the prospects of games recognizing player creativity in any meaningful way is extremely slim.
You may be able to board an NPC up in his house so he can’t get outside and activate some quest, but you aren’t going to hear about it from other NPC’s. So i predict a lot more of the “press one for the path of righteousness, 2 for villainy, 3 to speak to an customer service representative” in the near future.
“I see you stacked crates in front of wizard Dorthoks house. Very Clever. He’ll have fun trying to path through that shit…” The closest i ever got was when i shot Anne Navarre in the face on Juan Lebadev’s plane, and got chewed out by Alex Jacobson about it shortly thereafter.
August 26th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
Iain says:
@Okami: Yeah, I murdered them all, too. Bloody inbred ignoramuses.
August 26th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Bananaphone says:
Morals and choice and consequences are all very well, but how about Bioware make team mates who are able to get behind cover and shoot at the enemy, instead of STANDING BEHIND YOU AND SHOOTING THE PLAYER, or at least STAY OUT OF THE WAY WHEN THEY ARE TOLD INSTEAD OF MOVING AND STANDING RIGHT BEHIND YOU AGAIN AND JUST BLASTING THE FUCK OUT OF YOUR OWN SHIELDS.
Sorry.
August 26th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
James says:
Iain: did you have to murder the villagers to save Abigail? If I recall correctly, you can scare them off (even the holy man) and then go fight the ridiculously hard-to-kill demon dog. That sort of deals with both issues. Maybe I’m misremembering.
August 26th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Requiem says:
BGII still falls into the BioWare model of having your friend and companion from the first game get kidnapped at the start. You still have lots and lots of unconnected things you can do if not need to do, for the experience points, before you can find her.
August 26th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Citizen Parker says:
I agree with this completely. It’s mind numbing that there are always two solutions to a problem, one “good” and one “bad.” I want shades of gray, and I want to be done with the stupid morality slider.
I’m also looking at you, Fable.
August 26th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
Iain says:
@James: I wasn’t able to scare them off the first time I played through. Perhaps I hadn’t done enough of the side quests in the village to be able to persuade them. I ended up having to butcher the lot of them. Which was okay. More XP that way, and the vendors were only selling rotten fish…
I might try a different tack when I replay it with the Enhanced Edition.
August 26th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
JonFitt says:
Did anyone else think Carth (or whatever that copy/paste dude in Mass Effect was called) seemed to be hitting on you when you played as a male?
I was thinking “Whoa, Bioware have gone all out and given people *all* the options”. But as it turned out it was just shared Male/Female dialogue which should have been redone for the males.
Also, on the Deus Ex-brother-apartment thing: that amazed me. The first time I tried to fight and got exploded, so I thought “damn this is un-winnable” and ran away. It was only later I read that I could have saved him. It was great that they made it so hard that you probably should flee, but if you stuck it out and beat the enemies it didn’t break the game or they didn’t resort to infinite/unkillable baddies.
August 26th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
maxmcg says:
I just played & finished ME recently too. Super game but for two things.
1. Stupid APC thingy. Where is the Vorsprung Durch Tecnik in the future. Idiots. How did Bioware think that actually worked.
2. Lifts. Stupid lifts are just too damn slow. And there’s too many of them.
August 26th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Schadenfreude says:
@JonFitt: Bioware pretty much gave you all the options in Jade Empire. Lots of bicurious NPCs in that one. You can go Boy/Girl, Boy/Boy, Girl/Girl and Boy/Girl/Girl.
August 26th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
Okami says:
@James: Well, you scare them off, then kill the ridiculously strong dog and then butcher the villagers, because they want to kill you anyway, eventhough you just saved their sorry asses.
August 26th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Nimic says:
“Mr Full-of-himself Guy” is Carth, right? I mean.. Kaidan. I mean..
I found that “choose between Kaidan and Ashley” part really hard. Not because I wanted to keep both, heavens no, but because I couldn’t decide who I wanted to see dead more.
August 26th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Iain says:
I didn’t find the Ashley vs Carth (I’m not even going to pretend that was a mistake) decision very hard, myself. Ashley has all the best lines, therfore Ashley stays, Boring Guy gets nuked…
August 26th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
Requiem says:
Ah the nuke, another missed opportunity, you should of been able to choose between any of your companions at that point, or all of them.
Though one day I hope someone will make a game where I can choose to make a heroic last stand and detonate the bomb myself. As a proper ending with outcomes and credits etc.
August 26th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Jaxtrasi says:
> “With no direct connection, it just felt like the designers were going out of their way to offer their audience (who could never possibly have experienced sex in real life) to enjoy SOME SEX! SEXY SEX!”
I hear it worked on Gillen. He loves the tail.
August 26th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
phil says:
The Drow seem to bring the best out of Bioware’s writers - in both Baldur’s Gate and the last Neverwinter Nights expansion, providing you skipped the slaughter everything moving option and got to the politics, you had a range of nice ethical situations.
To get the ‘best’ solution you had to out evil them, even if you were going for a lawful good playthrough. The dragon’s egg treble cross in BGII and mock seduction, then betrayal in Neverwinter Nights, were really quite satisfying
The open palm/closed fist approach from Jade Empire was a bit disappointing. The open palm hardly ever allowed you to side step the violence whilst closed fist was just crude cackling evil. I suppose it allowed you access to the Zombie Darth Vader character, but frankly he was arse.
August 26th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
Bas says:
I liked Ashley. She’s not racist, just uninformed. So I used my superior intellect to make her see the light, and then sex her up.
August 26th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
matte_k says:
Yeah, bit of a waste of the voice actor in ME, I quite liked Carth in KoToR.
Obsidian have played with this good/bad thing quite a bit in KoToR 2, i’m thinking specifically of the side quest involving the beggar asking for money. Because regardless of what you do, you get a bollocking from Kreia, and a cutscene showing the consequences of your actions. Then, in dialogue with Kreia post-cutscene, you can lose influence by disagreeing with her viewpoint, as she is trying to teach you the lesson that running around helping everyone is not necessarily being the good guy- you can potentially weaken these people by making them dependent on someone else to sort out their problems for them.
Actually, now that I think about it, quite a few of the gang of companions in that game make comments about you helping people all the time…
So looking forward to the Sith Lords Restoration Project being finished- proper endings at last! 
August 26th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
James G says:
I’m waiting for the Sith Lord’s restoration project to be completed before I try KOTORII, its meant to restore some of the content which made the latter parts of the game so disjointed.
August 26th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
phil says:
@Max
I agree the cementary was annoying, trapping you in the least visually interesting section of the game with an Morrowind style list of minor quests to complete.
From memory it also arrived on the heels of the utterly fantastic John Cleese cameo, making it a huge down shift.
August 26th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
tmp says:
Plus, it would be nice if occasionally being neutral didn’t suck, the games always reward being a saint or a total douchebag.
(..)
I’m still mustering up the courage to give KotOR II a try, courage as I have heard some passing comment that the ending is not in all respects as impressive as one might wish…
KotOR 2 is perhaps one game where going the middle route feels the most rewarding. Not in the getting tangible rewards sense, but rather it’s like the story was made with such character in mind, and the ending makes the most sense with it.
August 26th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
So what do you call your companions in your head?
Also, interesting little piece. It’s great to see games trying to grapple with something a bit more highbrow, but even the best of ‘em often make an absolute balls of it. I’m going back to the Citadel to find the couple you’re talking about. I’ve missed them on two playthroughs.
Edit: Come to think of it, a lot of the side quests have the same outcomes - go with one side, or the other, or cop out. Now you’ve pointed it out it all seems a little too transparent for my liking.
August 26th, 2008 at 11:12 am