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Tedd Video Game Opinions - 039 - HD (Patreon)

Published:
2021-08-10 03:34:39
Imported:
2021-08

Content

Morality Abilities

At egscomics 

Commentary

A few people have said they tell Sarah and Diane apart based on attitude and NOT pointiness, so for the record, this is Sarah. She is just sassy Sarah today.

And she's likely going to wear hairbands a lot in the future. That, or Diane's going to start wearing them as I give in to the desire to cause chaos.

Has this ever been a controversial point among players? I know the people making games have liked including such things, but I don't think I've ever heard a player say "I LOVE being locked out of abilities based on moral choices!"

Being locked out of quest rewards can be annoying, too, but let's face it. If you're playing an RPG, NPC A probably has a different reward for you than NPC B, and if you go full chaos and destroy both of them, you might not get ANY reward! Rude.

Expect for this one time, at Fallout 3 camp, where you could help one person, get the reward, then betray them to someone else, get a DIFFERENT reward, then immediately turn on the those guys before they could hurt that guy you betrayed, thereby technically NOT betraying them while still getting both rewards. YAY!

Files

Comments

Chordat

KotOR handled this point well, I think: You can pick any force powers you want, but they become more efficient based on your morality. For example, Force Lightning gets cheaper to use as you become more Dark Side, and more expensive as you get more Light Side, and vice-versa for LS powers like healing and party buffs. Some powers were "neutral" as well, which just meant their cost didn't increase or decrease with alignment.

AstroChaos

Of all the video game opinions we've gone over so far, this one might be the one I agree with the most. You want to lock things out by race or class? I'm fine with it, just give me a in-game reason why. Hell, there are likely legit cases where locked out by gender actually does make sense. But in 99 percent of the time, trying to do so in a Good vs Evil fashion just comes off ham-handed and irritating.

Warren (Stephen) Rose

I think Anakin killed the younglings at the Jedi Temple to max his dark side points quickly, so he could invest them in the dark side healing/fate-twisting power Palpatine promised? I think he went in there Lawful Evil, acting on a 'rational' decision to gain Evil experience points, and left there Chaotic Evil, blindingly lashing out at everyone. Being reborn as Darth Vader apparently helped him reach equilibrium and shift his alignment back from Chaotic to his preferred alignment of Lawful? So, yes. Much better to design a points system where acquiring them doesn't cause derangements - unless you're, y'know, openly building it for people, such as the Call of Cthulhu player base, who are interested in exploring the theme ;)

Thisguy

Powers should not be linked to morality. Because having good people with ‘bad’ powers and bad people with ‘good’ powers is often much more interesting. A good person healer who spends most of the time healing their allies is far more boring a character than the sadistic healer who beats her enemies to a pulp, only to heal them up and do it again. The good guy who is afraid to use his powers of destruction is usually a better character than the bad guy who just wrecks everything.

Kkat

I absolutely agree with Sarah. Also, I am amused to note that in the last game* I played with morality-locked powers, lightning was only available if you were good. It was Good Lightning. *(Biomutant)

Foradain

If I recall SW:TOR (as opposed to Knights of, mentioned by Chordat) the bad lightning was locked behind the Faction Wall and you had to play a Sith to get it, but the equivalent Jedi ability (reskinned so that it wasn't Bad Lightning, which was apparently a Dark Side ability (but wasn't Healing also a Dark Side ability in the movies? Whatever.), but more like using Move Object (see the WotC tabletop RPG for the terminology) to throw debris at the target) was functionally equivalent. Sometimes it seemed that game had only four classes, held on either side of a mirror...

Kaz Redclaw

Infamous 2 gave me kind of the opposite thing. Had played Good the entire game, but when it came time to pick up the second elemental ability, I wanted fire instead of ice, since almost all of the enemies in the game used Ice. It instantly tanked my morality meter from full good to slight evil, and the cutscene was a drastic tonal shift from the entire rest of the story. You don't do anything bad, you just pick the evil character to extract the power from, and that somehow makes you evil, at least until you wander around town saving a bunch of people with your electric healing and slowly drag your morality back positive.

M.

I think this sort of thing only works if good and evil are a functional part of how the magic (or whatever) works. In D&D, good and evil are fundamental forces of the universe, not just moral or philosophical ideas - it's possible for a creature to be literally made of evil, so it makes sense that someone who's good-aligned couldn't use evil magic. Lots of people mentioned Star Wars, which works for similar reasons - the light and dark sides of the Force are meant to be in opposition. But if there's nothing like this, then I agree that the powers you get shouldn't be limited by who your character is as a person.

Anonymous

This one bugged me in the 1st Infamous, I did an 'evil' play through first and the real twist I learned on a 2nd run as a good character is that all the evil powers were all worse then the good path upgrades

Latency

Biomutant has this. But the morality system ends up being sort of pointless because you can max both evil and light rather trivially with little repercussions for your actions. Still don't have some abilities because pointless or not I don't like doing bad things.