• sylver_dragon@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    I’d just be happy to see “evil” choices which weren’t cartoonishly silly. So many of these game end up offering you choices like:

    • Kiss the baby, donate all your money to an orphanage.
    • Kill the baby, cook and eat it. in front of the mother.

    There’s never anything like:

    • Kiss the baby, take over the orphanage, run an outward front which looks like a fantastic charitable organization while training the orphans to commit crimes for you.

    Really well done “evil” should be loved by the people, seem outwardly good while using that as cover to do selfish things. But that is much harder than “Press X to murder an innocent for no reason”.

    • mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works
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      3 days ago

      There’s never anything like:

      • Kiss the baby, take over the orphanage, run an outward front which looks like a fantastic charitable organization while training the orphans to commit crimes for you.

      Damn, that’d actually make for a really awesome quest mod in Skyrim

    • redditmademedoit@piefed.zip
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      3 days ago

      Absolutely, I think games should dispense with the good/evil thing all together and, for instance,focus on whether choices are self-serving, “pragmatic”, diplomatic, earnestly attempting to be moral (i.e motivations). Of course, this only gets interesting if the game doesn’t consistently punish you for being amoral by imposing consequences that are harsher than the rewards. This also means not punishing the player with worse and less content for not following the “intended” story arch.

      I haven’t played a lot of Frostpunk 2, but I think that game does a lot with similar concepts.