Dragon Age did this well.
In the dwarf section of the questline you had to choose between two kings.
When the game was finished the epilogue however revealed the consequences of your choice.
If you choose the 'good and decent' king, he turned out to be weak-willed and stuck in the past. Under his rule the dwarves kept being stuck in past glory and sank further into obscurity, unable to adapt.
If you choose the 'evil and ruthless' king, he turned out to be a great reformer. Despite having to rule with a hard hand, he took the dwarves into the future.

But, yes please.
No more disney morality as in Oblivion. It was jarring, at times laughable and very, well, lame.
In real life, evil is not defeated by good. Evil is usually defeated by a more organised kind of evil.

That annoyed the heck out of me. It was like the game was teaching you some hamfisted lesson on doing the right thing can end up wrong. It's like having a quest where you have to get a cure for someone, and then the game goes, "Ha ha! Turns out the cure was actually poison and you killed him! Bet you didn't see that coming!

EXACTLY. That is what good morality is about. Thats why I enjoyed Dragon Age Origin's morality more than any other fantasy game before it. DAO's morality = choices ------> consequences. Loved it.

That doesn't really have anything to do with morality at all, because you never find out the result until the end of the game. I think Garrus' loyalty mission in ME2 is a much better example- it's an opportunity to let you do what you think is the right thing, and doesn't punish you with some secret twist.

Thats my point. There is no clearly laid out morality in DAO. There are only choices and consequences, and mind you not all of those consequences are pushed to the end of the game. There are some small scale decisions you can make in the game where the consequences are immediately seen, or a little later in the game.

I prefer a morality where your choices affect the in game world, not some good/evil Karma meter. I like how your actions determine how the world perceives and responds to you. Yeah, there are sometimes where your intended outcome doesn't come true, but thats how life is. Its more realistic. I'm not saying that every outcome should svck. I'm just saying that there should be times where things don't go your way. -shrugs-

Without knowing the result of your action's, it's a pretty black-and-white choice, especially if you were a Dwarf Noble. The result didn't really seem realistic to me, because it felt like some kind of twist ending from an episode of the Outer Limits.

The end result was really realistic to me.
It is unrealistic that the 'evil bad guy' always only takes the kingdom to ruins.
Maybe sometimes a ruthless leader is what is needed for survival.

When I first played the game I was very surprised, because disney morality is such a staple that I really expected the 'good' king to lead the dwarves into a better age.
But the more I thought about it the more I realised that given the personalities of the two kings, it all made sense.
The 'good' guy was stuck in the past. A past that had led to an opressive and navel-gazing society.
The 'bad' guy knew that in order to make an omelette, you have to break some eggs.

I think it is much more realistic to judge the effects of a certain ruler on his kingdom by his actions and policies than by a fairytale concept of morality.

There needs to be a good balance of it all in my opinion, too much of one side makes things dull. There needs to be decent smattering of grey and otherwise strange or questionable morality around, perhaps as a 50 - 70% range. When true black and white is found, amidst all the grey, it can make it that much more of an impact when you see it..as long as it is written well. In day to day life even, it is not unusual to just look and call someone a bad or good person, but it takes a special kind of individual, a special kind of act to earn them the label of hero or monster.

As in real life, choices we make in the game should not always give the results we expect, for good or for worse. Letting a notorious killer go can come back to slap you in the face, but it could also end in the person's reform, or somewhere in between. If they are going to pull surprise twists in the end, we should...after the fact, be able to trace it and see that it was coming, and not something tossed in at random to make things different...like seeing a movie with a twist or otherwise surprising ending on a second viewing, and seeing the subtle hints and clues leading to it.

From Fallout 3 at least, the main example I see from there being the Tenpenny tower quest, which ended rather realistically..but in a way that was unexpected and not entirely out of nowhere considering the nature and flaws in real people.

The last things I'd expect a tyrant to do are be progressive and give people more rights.

Say what?

How is that any less "black and white" than what's being criticized here? The only difference is (Surprise!) what you thought was black is white and what you thought was white is black!

Hell... I'd rather have plain old black and white than that preciously post-modern swill.

No offense meant....

Well, thats why its realistic, because life does that to you sometimes.

Well, to me it was less black and white because, as Ive just explained, I thought it was more than just an unexpected twist.
I thought it fit the society of the dwarves and the personality of the rulers.
Someone who is really not a nice person, yet is the best choice for the kingdom, instead of the really nice person, well, that is far enough away from disney morality to be surprising and original.
Its not that was black was white and that white was black.
It was that it was all grey.
You chose what was good for the kingdom, despite it meaning following a less honourable path to get there, as opposed to doing the right thing and having the kingdom fall in ruins.

I want both. Too much black and white is unrealistic, but too much grey feels forced and illogical. One of the things I noticed in NV. Some of the story paths took illogical turns just to keep certain characters/factions "morally grey".

Have to agree. The game paints the NCR, at least the troopers on the ground, as 'the good guys', then it's as though the designers thought, oh no, too black and white, let's make them get rid of the Brotherhood and the followers. IF that game offered any true freeddom, my choice would have been, yeah, i'll support you, if you leave these guys alone. Unfortunately that would have been pandering to anyone who chose to be 'good', so wasn't an option.

Felt the same about the legion. Obvious bad guys, but choose them and you get arguably the "good" ending.

Yes, this is the Dark Brotherhood in Daggerfall and Morrowind. They are a group of stealthy Mercenaries. They are labeled as "evil" by the legion, because they're illegal.

I completely agree with the OP. And I want to be made to think about situations. That DLC in Fallout 3 was a great example.

Dragon Age did it horribly. Your choices often ended up being:

1) Twirl-my-mustache evil
2) svcky
3) Apparently good, but turns out to be bad (an option M. Night Shamalama would be proud of)

There is no such thing as evil unless you're a psycho or something, it's selfishness. I agree completely, there should be corruption in most factions, and it'd be easy to make some in the Mages guild - there could be mages secretly attending Necromancers for assistance and so on.

Xarnac! We get to agree on this! Finally, we've reached a point where we -do- agree on something.


I think you are -exactly- right here. Especially using New Vegas as an example. Many of the plot points made in New Vegas were obvious departures from the logical path which the player had been previously following. Characters need to feel like individuals... and their actions should reflect their own personalities... not the pre-conceived morality assigned to them based on a statistic.

This guy doesn't like this other guy, so he hires you to rob this other guy's house while he's out. Well... the other guy is -home- at the time... and he catches you preparing to burn down his house. So he says to you: "Look... I'll pay you whatever that other guy's paying you, doubled, if you go over there and take off his head."

That's a pretty black choice... but it's a believable escalation.

Every decision made should be believable. Choices should be presented not based on MORALITY... but viability... and the morality ought to be sorted out later. But there needs to be a balance! It can't feel forced, or you're just wasting your time trying to create an illusion of morality to begin with.

I like this idea.
Would love to see it. (perhaps with different endings depending on who you do quests for)

As an aside, I would for once want to see the outcome be different for this exchange:

"How do I know I can trust you?"

"You will have to take my word for it/take your chances etc."

Historically, whenever someone says that second line or a variation of it...they almost never betray or otherwise screw you.

People liked the imo over the top "hail sithis" crap? I dont mind the sithis stuff.. i just mind how open they are about it. No mystery behind him.

I agree.

Yes, I wish there was more grey but I like some black and white too. Yes the real world is mostly grey, but this is a fantasy game, and in fantasy there tends to be a lot of black and whites Lord of the Rings had plenty of black and white, and it is one of the best fantasy works of all time.

Huh .. the Bortherhood was evil? If I had only known ... :sadvaultboy:

To me they just were a bunch of crazy Mofos ... and I loved it. ^^
Especially this sick stuff Lachance or this big ork guy were telling me. :celebration:

I will just give a big thumbs up to the OP on that one. I never completed the thieves guild questline in Oblivion. I found it completely dumb to be honest. A bunch of "good" thieves. Apparently in the capital city of all the empire there are no people of questionable moral integrity. Fighters guilds are generally stocked with mercenaries who will fight and do anything for coin... if they had a moral component to their personalities they probably would have joined the guards or army. Maybe the mages guild might possibly be a "good" organization, because I honestly can't imagine too many powerful "evil" mage personalities wanting to stay confined to rules. Once they learned the basics from the guild, they could simply leave and go build their power on their own elsewhere.