Are you good or evil?

[Night Ω Wolfe]

You know I find it interesting how people play games differently... Fallout 3 is the perfect game to use as an example. Have any of you ever played that one?

The game has a 'karma' meter in it and different actions you choose will either give you + or - Karma. For instance if you give a thirsty beggar a bottle of water (health) you get + Karma or if you kill a non-aggressive towns person you get - Karma. There are also a ton of quests within this game where you can choose how you end the quest and that choice will effect your Karma as well. So if you are really bad eventually the scale will say 'evil', if you go the other way you are deemed 'good' or if you fall somewhere in the middle you can remain at 'neutral'. Heck you even get titles to go with it... Savior of the Damned, +1000 karma points or Demon Spawn, -1000 karma points are the very highest and very lowest titles.

So anyway, back to my point... do you like to play as a 'good' player or an 'evil' player when given the option?


I always prefer to be one of the good guys myself. In Fallout that can be really hard though and while I usually don't make it to extreme evil I get pretty close...

See I am a major looter, the chance of leaving behind good loot that could get me money or even worse a really good and/or unique item (only a single one can be found in the entire game) just kills me. In Fallout a large amount of this loot and yes even the unique items are found in peoples' houses and looting in even an abandoned house often is considered stealing which gets you bad Karma. That is just lame! LOL

There is also one big thing that gets me bad Karma... You have the ability to get a house in this game where you can store your loot, craft stuff, sleep for bonuses and decorate. I just love displaying all the unique loot I find! Unlike the Elder Scrolls games (made by the same people) which have many houses you can purchase, you only get two options. There is a dark, dank shack in the first main town you come across or there is a much nicer, brighter, cleaner apartment you can get. The way it works is there is a guy that shows up in the main town and tells you how this ugly town is ruining the view from his penthouse suite so he wants the whole thing blown up. You can tell him to get lost and then later purchase the ugly shack in town or you can take the job and blow up the town in which case if gives you a suite at his apartment building. I like the suite so I always end up blowing up the town after I've finished all the quests there.... very bad Karma!

My husband on the other hand plays very differently from me. He will go into each town in the game and complete all the quests that are located there... then he proceeds to kill off every single towns person in sight. He plays as a truly evil character!

So which are you? Feel free to tell about any other games that allow you to be good or evil.... Fable is another good example.

[Belix]

I played Fallout 3. Ah, Wolfe, you did mean Fallout 3 didn't you? I think Fallout 4 hasn't been released yet.

In games where a good/bad system isn't a major highlight, I lean towards good by default when unexpected events come up where I might need to make a decision in a game that otherwise has few.

In games where that is a major feature, I tend to play good first, so later if I replay it, it is easier to appreciate being evil when you can see the differences in people's reactions, and possibly the way different events unfold.

I think most games don't handle the good/evil thing very well. It always seems to be some sort of cliche where you have to choose between being Mother Teresa or eating babies. And most games don't seem to do much about your choices other than modify some silly good/bad meter that doesn't influence the game much. There are some exceptions though, and I've heard of some particularly good games where you can change how things unfold based on your choices recently, but I haven't had time to play them yet.

Another reason I play good by default, is that so far in my experience most of the games that feature the good/bad mechanic seem to set it up so that being evil simply involves killing more people and things than you otherwise would; and since most games see you killing things as the majority of the gameplay, I don't find an appeal to it unless it was done cleverly with 'how' you are evil and how people react. The Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic series had some entertaining things in that regard. I remember walking into a bar as an evil character with two characters, a good guy and a bad guy, and some tension arose between us and some fellows at a table. The ensuing dialogue between our characters was hilariously humiliating for the guys, and they quickly resorted to violence to try to solve the problem!

In real life, I would consider myself a "Good" person that would harm no other, might even hesitate in self defense, so that may also have something to do with it.

p.s. Wolfe, I'm with you on the looting - there were some games I played a lot back in the day where every single coin you had was precious, and it has made me habitually a major looting packrat even today in some games where the economic system is far more lenient!

[Night Ω Wolfe]

I don't know what you are talking about Hehe, just kidding... fixed my typo so now it reads Fallout 3.

Yeah that is really silly that pretty much the only thing that changes is a meter.

One of the games that seems to have a bigger effect is Fable.. and the sequels to it. It has been a while since I played so I may not be remember all the details. But being good or evil effects how people react to you to a certain degree and the biggest thing is how you look. If you are good you look pretty/handsome, healthy and eventually get a glowing halo over your head. Or in Fable 3 you get glowing white angel wings, but those are lame cause you only see them when your preform a special move. I liked the halo better. But when you are bad you look sickly, basically like a vampire and eventually get large red glowing horns on your head (they start small and get bigger and bigger if I remember correctly) or in Fable 3 black demon wings, again dumb. Also if you have tattoos on your character they glow blue if you are good or red if you are bad. Just the cool visual appearance changes made me want to play the game twice so I could do it once as good and then again as evil.

I know right! Funny I start out games desperate for gold but because I just can't help the unnecessary looting by the time I beat the game I have such a crazy amount of gold that I could replay the whole game and never need to sell another item or loot anything and I would still have gold left over when I reached the end.