Should the next TES Game have Complex moral choices like; Is violence an exceptionable means to do good, instead of bland black and white choices that most Rpg's give us.
In short Is innovation in Bethesda's games good?

Definitely, I actually want the MAIN conflict in the game to be a TWO SIDED conflict at least, I don't want a "good side" and a "evil side", I actually want BOTH sides to have good reason for why there is conflict, I want to actually have to THINK about which side I want to support, I actually want to feel like I made a wrong decision sometimes without getting my nose rubbed into it directly or because it was planned to "you do bad here"...

YES, I want ACTUAL conflict, actual dilemmas, actual decisions, actually having at least two sides that have a legitimate reason for why the conflict exists.

And I really hope that is not asked too much...

Yes. I wish Bethesda would continue to make moral choices more gray like they did with The Pitt.

Yeah they did do well in that didn't they?

I agree 100% with this.

I don't see why it would be a problem, as long as they have writers who are semi-competent.

Quite

I like the detail, but Bethesda seriously lacks innovation. Why can't there be a third conflict I can join? Why don't I have a multitude of choices? Being stuck with two is a little coy.


For example, in the pitt, you can join the raiders in search of a cure for disease, thus forcing the slaves into a life of torment, or free the slaves from torment, and lose all hope for a cure.

Why can't I steal the baby myself, and watch the two maul eachother to death?

Why can't I research the cure myself, and make everyone happy?

Why can't I join the raiders, the kill ashur and become the leader, invite the slaves to join the raiders, and establish a more reasonable approach of finding a cure?

Everything being two sided really lacks replayability. Let there be a bunch of ways to end things.

Last time Bethesda did that, we got the Warp in the West. But I digress. I would certainly enjoy a "shades of gray" dilemma instead of a clear-cut good and evil situation. Preferably, I would want a conflict similar to that in the Iliad. Both the Trojans and Argives had admirable goals, lovable characters, moments of triumph, and moments of defeat. I honestly couldn't pick a side to favor. Do I prefer the raw power and awe of Achilles, or the humane and noble nature of Hector? Honestly, I can't choose. I both exalt and pity both heroes equally. I would greatly enjoy seeing something similar to that in TES V.

I think it is super. Everyone brings their own morals into the equation, including us. If game forces its own morals to me in any number of choices, I feel disgust. I just want to decide whatever gonna happen next myself, realtime without any cutscene or a scripted gate with dialog choices. I certainly don't want this game to turn into a "The Witcher". They just need to add more factions and some inter-faction missions to complete the picture. We can decide whatever we want to do in our style and call it a gray, black or white ourselves. These things are very relative and interchangeable.

I have to say, I would like to see more complex moral dilemmas in the game. Because it seems to me that many RPGs fail to do this. Usually, if you're given a choice at all, it's a choice between either a good solution, or an evil solution, and if you're lucky, you might gert a "neutral" solution (Whatever that means, aside from not getting involved at all, when you've simplied conflicts to the pioint where there's just two sides, absolute good and pure evil, is not clear.) Thus, your choices really come down to a question of whether you want to make a good character, or an evil one. Aside from the writing behind the choices themselves, I think having a good/evil meter can contribute to this effect as well. As when the game rewards one choice with good points and another with evil points, it doesn't leave much room to debate which is the right choice. Even if the writers successfully craft a situation where the right or wrong answer isn't immediately obvious, and you might, after some debate, conclude that a specific option is the right choice, the game could still decide it's the wrong choice, you'll still be evil for doing it, thus, the game essentially tries to impose its own morals upon you. And while if you write your story with the intention of delivering a particular message, you want to make sure people get it (But you don't want to preach it too strongly, as people might end up getting annoyed and ignore it instead.) I don't play RPGs to be educated on right and wrong. I'd rather have choices that will require me to weigh each of my options, and make what seems like the best decision at the time. The right choice shouldn't always be obvious, and yes, I wouldn't mind if sometimes, when I make what seems like the right choice at the time, later revelations will reveal that the choice I made was not the best one. From a role-playing standpoint, your choices would feel more meaningful if there was some debates behind them, instead of just being obvious choices between the good option and the evil path. I want to face situations where all options seem to have their merits, or none of the options are really purely good and I can only choose the lesser evil.

But of course, all that said, before there can be dilemmas, there must first be choices. Which is something I've found lacking in the Elder Scrolls series, or at least Morrowind and Oblivion. Sure, you did occassionally have choices, such as the early quest in Seyda-Neen where you had to investigate the murder of a tax collector, sure, you could chooe to take the murderer's side. But this was a pretty straightforward quest that had little impact on the rest of the game, and the same could be said for most of the other choices, you never really got much choice in things that really mattered. The only major decision you could make that would have great concequences seemed to be the cases where one faction would conflict with another, like the great houses, which was a good idea, but not really enough. We need to have more choices, especially in the important questlines, with noticable concequences. Of course, the right answer should not always be obvious.

I don't necessarily think multiple endings would be a good idea, though, as that causes problems with sequels, and the last time Bethesda dealt with that, they relied on screwing around with time, which would just get silly if they had to do it with every game. Other than that the easiest solution would be to just consider one of the endings canon and say the others did not happen. But that would cause its own problems as there will probably be fans who complain that they should have made a different ending canon, ultimately, the easiest solution is to just remove the choice of multiple endings. But that doesn't mean the main ques can't have multiple paths. You could have many choices along the way which would change the way the main quest as a whole played out, they would just all lead to the same end. For the sake of an example, the player could have a single ultimate goal, say, defeating a specific faction that is somehow a threat, but you need support to achieve this, and in order to gain it, you could approach one of at least two conflicting factions, and ask them for help, before they're willing to do so, though, they would ask for your help, thus you would have to work for them, possibly eventually defeating the other faction, and depending on which of these groups you chose, the main quest could play out quite differently, but at the end, you'd still have to defeat the same enemy. Thus you don't have to worry about questions like say... how Morrowind would have ended if you had chosen to join Dagoth Ur instead of kill him. And depending on how the factions you could join for the main quest are written, the choice of which to support might become a moral dilemma as each faction could act according to its own goals, and players would need to consider their options and decide which seems like the best choice themselves, or which their character sees as the best choice, as the case may be.

Yes i would love to have more decisions but also it would hard to make lore for something that can be different.

Last time Bethesda did that... we got Morrowind, actually. Besides the main quest, which was very linear, every guild quest and side quest had multiple solutions. Pretty much any solution you could think of worked.

Bethesda is more than capable, it's just that they over-script things, now.

Now, every quest path needs a bunch of flashy animations to watch and recorded dialogue to go with it. Each possible choice means a lot more work now just because of how visceral they've made the gameworld, lately.

They've shifted the focus of their games from "doing stuff" to "watching and listening to stuff."

They did a great job on that one. You could side with the slaves OR the raiders, and your karma wouldn't change. The way I see it, the slaves are just as worse as the raiders. Though, at first I thought the slaves were the good guys, but the farther I went in my views changed, not from white to black to black to white, but gray to grey. If we get more quests like that, TES V will turn out great. (P.S. I sided with the raiders and I'm proud of my decision)

I really hope they don't have a "morality system" so to say, I don't want one decision to force me to say "that was good/evil", that has ruined a lot of things before.

And yea on the "the Pit" example, I hope they also think of "taking a third option", not just "you can either do THIS or THAT" but also try to find a work around.

yes.

It's human nature to do what is right as we percieve it at the time. That is why in the face of actual evil, the "black" side of "black and white morality," all the greys tend to unite against it. And even then, there is often a tragic story as to the hows and whys of them becoming evil. So the majority of the conflicts should be grey, with perhaps one truly evil antagonist. That antagonist should have a tragic backstory (for a good example, see Yggdrasiil in Tales of Symphonia or Richter from the sequel), and really not be given too much screen time until near the end.

Also, most conflict should be between people, rather than between groups and/or systems of morality. People with motivations that we can relate to, so when we side with one or the other it feels like we are siding with the right one, not necessarily just against the wrong because that's boring, and even then we should have gnawing doubts.

I want real choices, not pre-made missions... I will try to tell this with an example: If I hear someone is kidnapped by bad people, when I get there I have to kill them and rescue the kidnapped person and complete the mission...Or do nothing and mission remains incomplete... Who gave the mission to me? I just want to decide myself and make my own mission. I mean I want the chance of talking to the people whoever kidnapped the person and perhaps take money to forget about them. Or help them kidnap more people This is the same for all missions. I dont want to be forced to do something to complete the missions. There should also be different choices in factions and even in the main quest which effects game world significantly. e.g. If I wanted to kill martin and sell the amulet of kings to mehrunes dagon, I couldn't do that. bliviongate: Or just betray gray fox, report him and get him caught, or help blackwood company, or be a necromancer... and so on...

And for gosh sakes, why can't I marry a guar!?

The Pitt was great

Fallout 3 did offer some other interesting moral dilemmas. I hope Bethesda continue with this trend

The weird thing is Oblivion barely even had the black & white moral compass, but in Fallout 3 they skipped that and just got it right

This.



Yea i like the choices in Morrowind, like the mages guild quest where you have to collect dues, you could kill the person and take the money off their corpse, convince them to hand it over, or pay it yourself, iirc when you got back you could also either hand the money in or say they had none and you killed them or what not.

This.

Its the sort of "well it seems like the right thing to do but Im not so sure" that makes Heavy Rain such an intense and fantastic experience. For those of you with a PS3 that haven't played it, I strongly recommend it for those who dont want a black and white story line

I want lots of choices... and I think most, if not all the choices should be "grey".

As far as path choices go... "Submit to the three" any one get the quote reference?

If you want a game with difficult moral and extremely gray choices, play The Witcher. In fact, many more games could take notes from that game in terms of choices, consequences, and the problem at hand.

Well fall out 3 did have the Karma system which worked wonders to push players in the right or wrong direction....and I agree with hellmouth the Witcher was kind of a blur at the end and through out the rest of the story,.

I have linked this video so often lately but it just explains such matters perfectly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_KU3lUx3u0

and also fitting with this

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/1974-Enriching-Lives