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Original post by Mercury Quote: Original post by slowmike Quote: Original post by sanch3x I'm telling you I thought it was rather difficult sometimes to take the "bad" decision and hurt someone. Whoa! Whatever you do, don't play the hit GTA series!! :-) Well GTA is different because the people are just mindless things to be killed. In KOTOR it's completely different because you can talk to the people and they seem almost innocent. You can slight them and sometimes even kill them and it's just hard to laugh at it. I went through half the game as evil then restarted it as good and played through that because I felt so bad. [smile]

Your comment has a lot of interesting implications. Considering your feelings as an gamer average then it means that when the game AI and interaction has a good level then then the player will feel more and more influenced (it gets more 'personal') and it will be harder to make the usual game life/death decisions, while the less you interact with the local then its easier to kill them... maybe its not the interaction but the mood of the game.

Maybe you remember games like 'Legacy of Kain' where you play a vampire and you go to towns and feed from the villagers. The setting makes you more comfortable with the idea.

When you play the average Fantasy RPG then its common to go, get a mission (like kill the thiefs that are attacking local caravans) and return when accomplished. Have you noticed RPG games never ask for returning the bad guys to justice? Its always kill them. Players like to do that and they get no 'bad' feeling. Does this mean that the life of those we consider 'the bad guys' is less important?

On games like HalfLife and Farcry you kill people by dozens. But they are the oppressors so no problem. Doom3 presents demons so anything goes.

In real life, its usual for human beings to disregard human life if they are alien to our culture. The more close and 'like us' they are, the more value you give to them. And worse yet the fear of thinking that those aliens are thinking in the exact the same way makes both partys wary. Thats the origin of war and prejudice. So you are ready to kill the 'bad guys' in order to defend your people... that is 'the good guys'.

In the case of KOTOR. Which game element cause players to stop playing the dark side and go for the light side?

Luck!
Guimo

I've felt bad about doing something mean/violent in a game, but I think even more often I've felt bad about doing something stupid in a game. I don't mean I screwed up, I mean according to the story my character wimps out and lets the bad guys escape, or walks into an obvious trap, or yells at one of the other characters for a dumb reason, and that sort of thing.

I've always liked it when a game gives me a choice... for example in Chrono Trigger when you can choose to have Frog kill Magus or let him live. I've had a few games give me that choice and I've always given them a second chance.

I also liked the character creation in Ogre Battle where you're asked questions with no real "right" answer. These questions were compiled and decided your stats (I think they did anyways). Questions like:

Your house is on fire and you can only save one person. Who do you save:
Your child
Your wife
Your mother

I love the fact that there are multiple answers and none of those answers insult your intelligence.

And about GTA, I always thought that game played out more like a movie then anything else. The attachment I've felt to the main character was nothing more then how I felt towards Al Pacino in Scarface.

So it's always better to have multiple answers that aren't always black and white.

Nope it was pretty cool to play Malcolm in Legend of Kyrandia III ;-)

too bad they don't make adventure games like that anymore.

The only game to ever make me feel bad about playing an evil character was the original Kotor. To me, that's pretty impressive.

I often "feel bad about being bad" in RPGs, however part of that is due to the poorly defined elements of choice in those games. Knights of the Old Republic was a prime example of this; too many of the "evil" options were there purely as an exercise in being evil, and were not a sensible option to take in any circumstances.

To take an example, there was this bit in KoTOR where you could either find these slum dwellers their map to a fabled lost sanctuary, or sell it to a sleazy merchant for a measly few hundred credits (which was next to nothing in the game). I just couldn't sell the map just for the sake of being evil. I'd have prefered it greatly if there was the sensible option of just gutting the merchant for the cash rather than having to traipse all over the area searching for the map.

I guess that was symptomatic of my main gripe with that game; if your PC was evil, they could shake down the poor, irrelevant weaklings that were scattered around the universe, but once they met, for example, some gatekeeper who wanted them do to some stupid pointless fetch task for him to open the gate, there wasn't the option of just choking the guy and asking him to "reconsider" opening the gate for free. More often than not, making the "evil" choice left the PC in a worse position than if he were "good". Also, there wasn't really the option of pretending to be good purely to win people over to your side, but I suppose that might have been a little bit too subtle.

However, I do like playing games that are purely about being villains. I loved the Thief series (Garrett is probably my favourite game anti-hero), and Dungeon Keeper and Evil Genius were good too. As long as the game is either presented in a cartoonish fashion (like Dunegon keeper) or with a sensible main character (like in Thief), I think playing the villain or an anti-hero would be fine in a game.

I felt a little guilty at times playing Fallout and Fallout 2. Selling your wife into prostitution and so on - it's hard not to feel a little guilty unless you're completely detached and disinterested in what's happening in the game. I'd have probably felt a little more guilty if she hadn't been completely useless, forced upon me, and taking up a party spot, but the principle still counts. Those games were a bit more harsh than anything I've played or read of in recent years though.

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I felt a little guilty at times playing Fallout and Fallout 2. Selling your wife into prostitution and so on - it's hard not to feel a little guilty unless you're completely detached and disinterested in what's happening in the game.

You should!! I've played both games several times and I never even realized that was an option.

I always feel bad playing as evil, even when it made no difference, or could provide a different game experience. For instance, Might and Magic VII allowed you to choose between two warring parties, neither of which were more evil than the other (human empire vs. elven empire), and then allowed you to choose Light magic vs. Dark magic. I've played siding with the humans and siding with the elves more than once (and once doing both quests before returning to collect my reward), but I've never played siding with the Necromancers, even though there's a different ending and different quests, because I don't like being evil. I actually downloaded a utility to extract the other ending movie so I could watch it, but I wasn't willing to play through the game to see it.

One of the only games I've ever played as evil was Jedi Academy (it only takes just a bit longer than a day to play through, so I've played it through many times). In Bard's Tale, I reloaded before choosing the final dialogue option so I could see what the evil ending was (hilarious, of course).

I don't even like playing as Zerg or Undead in Starcraft or Warcraft.

KOTOR had an incredibly rushed moral system.
You could become light through very neuteral acts and you basicly had to kill every one in sight to become dark...

It was a piss poor system... you could not play an evil coniving SoB to be a sith.. you had to be a psychotic sociopath with the subtlety of a kick in the balls.

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Original post by Crazy_Vasey I felt a little guilty at times playing Fallout and Fallout 2. Selling your wife into prostitution and so on

Off topic: How do you do that? I never found how, even though it said you could on the box. I didn't try overly hard, but tried the options I thought reasonable.

Also, I find it hard to beleive nobody's mentioned Deus Ex. There's virtually no gameplay difference between lethal/nonlethal play (lethal is denied one clip of ammo, which isn't really significant, but the lethal path is often faster, easier, and to the point). However, the dialogue makes you feel bad for killing. It was surprisingly effective.