Examples of good grey choices

- Raiders lay siege to the settlement. Any conflict is going to cost a lot on both sides. The raiders want something from that settlement. Example 1 would be Ammunition (so that they can blow up a different settlement) and as payment they'll release prisoners they've captured. Example 2 could be that they want a specific person in the settlement (either a prisoner they want back, a rival who wronged them, or someone who's left them) . If you give them the person (morally questionable) they leave the settlement alone.

- A reasonable conflict between two groups.

- Raiders who came to be such out of necessity, not because they're psychotic. How do you deal with that?

- Child raiders. Or, well, young raiders (lets say a 16 14 year old.) Can you bring yourself to kill a kid who was raised into that kind of life, even though you just saw them kill an innocent. They're probably addicted to drugs too.

- blocking the exits of a building full of raiders and setting it on fire/blowing it up, even though you think there's an innocent or two stuck in there.

- Killing a problematic (but not evil) member of a group to ease up on resources/decision making.

- Ignoring hostages (or even shooting through them) to kill someone. The hostages might not be great,or the taker might do considerably more damage if left to escape.

- Sending a person into a lethal zone (likely radiation whilst short on radaway) to do something important.

- leaving someone behind to fend of/feed the enemy so others can escape. Bonus points of you cripple their legs. If you don't; more might die.

- Your companion does something evil. you've got the choice to do something about it.

- Your companion wants you to do something bad, conceited or very moral (which might not help you)

- Finding a dying person and choosing what to do with them. Heal them, Heal them and take their stuff, Take their stuff and leave them (you need it, they're screwed) Killing them and taking their stuff

- Letting corruption slide for one reason or another. The Law might be [censored]. The law-officer might need the bribe to support his family. etc

- Slavery. It's a complex issue. The cons of it are obvious, but the cons for getting rid of it include disrupting the economy, a violent revolt, a violent crackdown, the slave actually having a master that cares for them where they would otherwise die in the wastes.

- Tampering with equipment so that it causes undesirable effects (guns explode in faces, power armour breaks it's occupants, medicine poisons and so on)

- Encouraging advltery.

- Necessary cannibalism

- Encouraging, Discouraging or allowing a suicide.

- terror tactics like corpse totems or human forests. Why is this grey? Because it keeps things away, and therefore makes areas safer.

- Torture for vital information (I know a lot of people don't like this. But a lot of people don't like a lot on these lists. Of course you can avoid it)

- Helping a faction. Any faction. The Enclave, the Chinese, A band of supermutants, the brotherhood of steel... Whatever.

- Holding others for ransom. They might be good, bad, the cause might be more important.

- Waltzing away from a conflict because you don't want to get involved, or see it as more advantageous to see which way the wind will blow.

Examples of fun black/white morality

-A village is in desperate need of help. You can volunteer, or you can kill them all whilst they're weak and take what they have left.

-Pointing Raiders to a settlement (or to a rival gang,or the base of a powerful militant faction, )

-Pointing Prospectors into Minefields/Raider camps/Deathclaw territory

-Removing helpful signs. (such as "Danger, High voltage")

-Framing people or even entire groups for murder/blowing [censored] up. Start wars.

-Replacing all of a hospital's meds with fakes/dangerous alternatives.

-Telling foolish people you're a prophet, and starting your own cult (rules dictated by you. You could genuinely help people with this)

-Setting booby traps in the homes of people.

-Sharing suicidal misinformation (yep, deathclaws are weak to garlic)

-Irradiating people's stuff.

-Seducing your relatives.

-Needless cannibalism (or commercializing human flesh. D'you want me to cook you a rare steak?)

-Encouraging addictions.

- Human shields

- Comical villain acts, Like suspending someone over acid, or tying them to a bench with a laser/saw set to go through the middle.

- mind game evil acts. 'kill the man next to you and I'll let your grandmother live' type things.

Anyhow. Arbitrary rules for morality (these guys drop ears, those drop fingers) just don't cut it. We're roll playing, and many of us need a believable world for that. At the same time, this is a game about freedom (and with numerous drug-fueled psychopaths, a setting of bigotry,the unreasonable and conflict, a post apocalyptic world) So sometimes, a little altruism or crazy fits right in.

You know, that a lot (not all) of those gray choices of yours, aren't all that gray.

I think wanting morally grey choices from Bethesda is asking a bit too much but since Howard said they're putting much more thought into choices and things like that I hope they prove me wrong.

What Ed said.

the child raider one isint gray most raiders are born into it i beleve and hes 16 thats more than old enough to be held accountable

I wouldn't mind grey choices in games so long as they somehow managed to avoid the problems that literally every other game with them does in that

A. All real consequences are shoved into post ending slideshows that mean nothing

B. What little does happen in game is the exact same thing as if you had picked the other option

C. All options are portrayed as being so terribly that you are left not wanting to pick either

However, since no company has ever managed this, I don't think its possible period.

Because of which, I would prefer the often times silly and unrealistic black/white morality choices because they can manage those things more often then not.

id prefer an attempt at serious not silly stuff, in a post apocalyptic world, over the easy but shallow route of Black/White storytelling any day.

That said I agree with the shortcomings you listed Possum, I just don't think that they should give up on quality story telling because it is mor difficult to pull off than Help the Orphan/Stab the Orphan and leave her to die story telling.

There can be a place for black/white and shades of gray, all the shades. From one side is a little sketchy but basically good to they're both good so it's too bad they can't coexist to they're both total bastards and I want them all to die.

Witcher 3 I'm looking at you, looking and waiting for a "No Essentials" mod

I personally just gain no enjoyment out of grey morality in games.

Grey morality IRL is interesting because its just the result of people's actions, its just stuff that happens. There is no real design to it, its just the result of the chaotic universe.

In games however, its just an artificially contrived situation designed to have no right answer. Its like the ending to movies like Inception, I still don't understand why people honestly debated for ages if the top fell or not, or if he was still in a dream or not. It literally didn't matter because there was no answer by design. Its just a pointless debate over something that is quite literally nothing and nonexistent.

I don't see why people find so much enjoyment in debating something that is unanswerable by DESIGN rather then nature, it just seems so pretentious and armchairy to me.

I would rather just have fun, blow up a town or two, and have the game mess with me for it then try to act like something that has no intelligence to it, aka great morality situations in games, does.

I'm fine with gray morality, and I think Bethesda is more than capable of delivering. Whether it actually will or not for Fallout 4 remains to be seen.

Well nowadays to many games that do focus on morality go way to much black and white. Most then tend to give us megaton like situations were it is obvious which is the good and which the bad choice. I sort of like the Jade empires explanation on the two paths, were one would mean you aid a person in need, while the other said you did not because you wanted that person to be able to fend for himself, rather then settle for being weak and getting it all given to him. Neither option was particulary good or bad.

Unfortuetly little of that remained once the game got underway, with good and evil being verry obviously defined in that game despite its premise otherwise. I would not mind Fallout 4 giving me more morality choices that have a midway to choose instead of blow or not blow up megaton.

I amended a few for you, but which ones?

There's nothing wrong with wanting definitive answers, but there's also nothing wrong with wanting open ended questions or rhetorical ones.

I don't like to be, or to feel to be, guided through a game. To me having good and bad clearly defined means I have to pla Paragon of Virtue, Godless Heathen, or Multiple Personality Phillip. Having grey areas means I can follow more complicated moral schemes. I might be an anarchist, or an Objectivist, or a Fascist, or a Liberal. Might even be a bleeding heart or a cold logical person.

There's room for that when options are more than be a cool dude or a total ahole. NV had Sneering Imperialist and Fight The Power and you could actually build a character around those ideas. I did too, Sneering Imperialist is a real jerk.

Well some of them depend on context, but as an example:

"- Raiders who came to be such out of necessity, not because they're psychotic. How do you deal with that?"

It really doesn't matter why someone becomes a raider, the simple fact is that raiders will attack, kill and loot the corpses. "I became a raider to feed my starving family" even if it is true, doesn't carry much weight when they spend all their time killing farmers, settlers and townspeople to take their stuff. There is only two viable responses to the "starving family" excuse. "Murder and Pillage? You sound like my kind of people!" (Bad Karma response) or you can respond with "You are murdering scum." (Good Karma response). To throw anything else in there like, "I am sorry to hear about the condition of your family. Please excuse my interruption and continue providing for your family" would just be a Stupid Karma response.

The only possible gray area in the whole scenario is if you later stumble across the "starving family of a dead raider". Do you murder them and put them out of their misery, or do you just let them slowly starve to death.

Gray choices work if you have to select one out of two factions like the civil war in Skyrim, it had changes, yes it was mostly new jarl and new uniforms on guards but the war was about who controlled the towns anyway.

Most gray area decisions boil down to choice of Bad Outcome 1, Bad Outcome 2, Bad Outcome 3 and Bad Outcome 4. There is no good outcome so you are stuck with figuring out the least damaging bad outcome.

that is part of the reason why I hate most grey morality games.

And part of the reason I liked The Pitt, as it managed to put a fairly positive spin on both sides.

I don't see the problem between choices and grey morality... And they can do it if they really want. The Pitt was a good exemple.

I was mainly referring to how black and white vanilla FO3 is, never played any of the DLC's so I can't comment on those. I have heard good things about The Pitt though.

As far as Bethesda's track record goes, FO3 is the odd one out.

The vast majority of them. Seriously, if these come off as morally grey to you, your moral compass probably points to Candle Butter.

The whole problem with moral grey, is that it depends on Your moral compass. For each one of us, what is right or wrong can differ greatly. Some may find murder under some circumstances to be acceptable, while others find anny murder, indifferent of the reason why, to be unacceptable. What we find moraly correct is thus mutable/different for each of us.

A guy could be screaming in favor of freedom of speech or democracy, is her right??? maybe. On the other hand a dictator could honestly believe that what he does is for the best of his country and people. The freedom ofspeech guy might see the dictator as evil, but to the dictator that guy is evil. In the end i thus comes to your point of view wether you feel it is evil or not.

Partially depends on your moral compass.

The four options for determining the fate of New Vegas all had their good points, but they all had their bad points, also. They all had a potential for disaster in addition to their bad points.

I was predisposed to an Independent New Vegas, on the surface you are just accepting a certain amount of lawlessness along with self determination, but that is always the bargain you make for freedom. The REAL downside with the Independent New Vegas isn't the lawlessness you have to accept, the problem is Yes Man. Your control is over the Securitrons is based on your control over Yes Man. And at the end of the game, he has basically just gotten done telling you that he has found some new a**hole subroutines and when gets done incorporating them into his OS he won't be quite so eager to please. For all intents and purposes you are betting the future of the Mohave on one throw of the dice (which seems appropriate considering where you are).

I'm so glad I'm an existential and moral nihilist. Makes everything so easy

Grey isn't particularly hard to write in. You just need your "bad" characters and factions to have motives for their actions that aren't like totally evil.

For instance in Fallout 3, President Eden could have just wanted to rebuild the country under authoritarian lines without the genocide. New Vegas had much more grey, but then the Legion were a bit over the top depraved.

Skyrim had a decent balance between Nord and Imperial, but you don't have to pick either one to support, so you're not forced into making a difficult choice.

I think there will be plenty of Grey, but we'll probably always be able to informed choices. What I'm not so sure of is unintended consequences. This would be a much bolder move by Bethesda, as many players might not enjoy it.

What if sometimes you don't get to find out who's in the right or wrong (or whatever in between) until you've already acted on it?

What if some of those people who (for no good reason) ask you to do something are completely lying to you?

Or even more harrowing, what if you eventually discover that your loyal companion was using you all along and made you do something terrible?

This could even be a new way to use intelligence and charisma. To help you see through lies and propaganda or get people to give away more information than they would like. So a stupid character could actually cause the player make stupid decisions. I seriously doubt that will happen though.