Every time I sit down to play an RPG where I get to interact with NPCs and choose what my character should say, I always end with the feeling that my character has to be a good person, in order for me to explore as much as possible on my first play through. This annoys me as I, in a way, don't really get to choose exactly how my character should be within the game, and that to me is one of the most important parts in a RPG game.
A few days ago I sat down and created my human rogue in Dragon Age: Origins, so I could get started on writing about my play through, which can be found here. To make a long story short then my first character in DA:O was good, so I was getting bored of being good and wanted to try out evil, but then it struck me, that if I wanted to be evil then I wouldn't be able to see the all of the game content available. I could of course just have chosen to be evil anyway, and simply just miss out on some content I could explore on some other character but I was treating my rogue as my first character to play through the game with, so I would aim to explore as much as possible before moving on a to a new character.
Dragon Age is probably one of the best games I've encountered where being evil can make sense, if we for example take a game like Fable II, then being an evil character doesn't change the game much. If you are evil people in the various towns fear you and are moving out of the way, but will that stop you from marring a citizen? No, it just requires a few more gifts and that you spam the emotion they like a few times more. I didn't encounter that by being evil I would have to pay more gold for items, nor did I encounter the houses being more expensive or that I couldn't earn as much on them, by being evil. The only major thing I remember was that the oracle or whatever, that talks to you through the whole game, started talking with a sad undertone. But after playing the game for a while I didn't really notice much of what she was saying anyway, as she was just repeating that my actions had consequences for people in the said area. So to me Fable II's attempt at making a difference between being evil and being good, as I tried being good as well, only to discover it didn't matter the tiniest bit, failed.
It's probably slightly confusing that first I state that I want to be evil without losing possible game content, and then I state that when I'm playing a game that allows me to do that, it's not good enough. So let me explain, Fable II was good in the way it allowed me to be evil without losing game content, but how I became evil and what my character being evil really affected was disappointing, as it didn't really affect anything much different from being good. So the problem in Fable II is that there's no difference, there's no cons and pros behind being evil or good. That is of course roughly put, as there is minor differences, but it didn't seem to me that they were worth much anyway.
Dragon Age: Origins, got a less desirable effect if you choose to be evil, you get less rewards, less experience, and things gets harder. And what do you get out of it then? Well, it seems like you're mostly just getting more gold as the “evil” options I can pick are mostly stuff like “What's my reward” and “Give me more money”. So there's close to no benefit in being evil, as you're mostly just making things harder for yourself. Which to me seems rather stupid, as isn't the point in being “evil”, to make things easier for yourself and gain more than by being good?
But maybe one of the reasons behind the whole, “you wont get rewarded for being evil” thing, is that the game wants to teach us that we should be not be evil, and there's more benefits in being good, which is, in my experience, only a half truth in the real world.
Another reason might also be that game developers don't want to be sued and blamed for someone robbing, murdering or raping people because he played their game. And if that's the case then we can't really blame the game developers for not making more “realistic” games, instead we should blame the parents who wont realize that it's their own fault, and not the game developers fault, that their kid becomes a criminal.
One can only hope that this one day will change.
Sorry for late update, been a busy weekend.
This is why I always liked Fable, and of course good old Black and White. Where how you acted ended up impacting the game.
ReplyDeleteI think it might be a bit harder in MMO's as the world around you is more of a constant, but I read something about guild wars implementing it. Maybe we can hope for something shiny in that direction someday as well