Bethesda can write good quests qith no clea black/white. The Pitt and Tenpenny Tower are great exemples. They just need to improve on this.

Not everyone plays on PCs....

Sure, but the vanilla game doesn't have consequences that matter. I was wondering which mod he refered to fix it so we might get to try it.

In the original release of fallout 3 at the end of the main quest it just end you couldn't keep playing. The TES fan base reacted badly that they could not play still so Bethesda changed it in the next DLC.

So what were the consequence of the Lone Wanderer fate over the Wasteland ?

Regardless who activate project purity, the result for the region is the same.

About the consequences of using Eden's virus, the consequences aren't really emphasised for the Capital Wasteland and each of its settlements/factions.

meh, I'd really dislike having long lasting effects to how I performed in a seemingly insignificant side quest. I'd hate to have the game constantly pulling the carpet of choice out from under me because I did X instead of Y 10 hours of gameplay ago.

I wish Bethesda would at least remove the essential status after the NPC has no more reason to be essential, it's really stupid for constantly immortal NPCs


Tenpenny ended up being completely black on every level, The Pitt was the opposite both factions ended up being completely good and having the same ambitions.

but it was the methods of reaching those achievements that seperated them morally.

Yes, this.

Skyrim failed utterly in the moral choices department, and largely because they went with the "everybody stinks" approach.

It's often said that true white vs. black morality is rare in real life. But having a virtually identical grey sludge of neutrality is just as ridiculous.

I'd like to see situations similar to what they tried in New Vegas with NCR and Legion, just better thought out.

It seemed for a bit like they were going to make either a plausible decision, but ultimately I found it hard to side with Caesar's Legion. I could side with the NCR, I could side with House, I could side with myself, but I could never really help out Caesar's Legion and believe for a moment that what I was doing would ultimately be good for the Mojave. Maybe it was just me.

I'd like to see situations (as in Witcher 3) where you are presented with a choice with no clear "wrong" or "evil" choice. Granted it's always good to have moments where you know these are the good guys, those are the bad guys, let's kill the bad guys...but it's also fun to have situations wherein you can play the devil's advocate without having to advocate for slavery or genocide.

I'd also like to see things like the Goodsprings or Tenpenny Tower quests impact other areas and other NPCs rather than feeling like isolated decisions. Having some NPCs comment on the destruction of either of those, having some NPCs in other cities who knew the people you killed, having other cities economics be impacted. If the Commonwealth is considerably more built up it might be fun to have something like "Player Character destroys City A" result in City B investing a lot more in protection, locking down the city, armed patrols through the streets, curfews...

Anything that would make playing through that mission again to do something else result in more than just a different ending to that quest. If big decisions create big story changes it's all the better for replay-ability and roleplaying.

IMO

I'd say a little of this sort of thing goes a long way. I like mechanics that encourage paying attention and learning what you can before making a choice, but severe consequences that feel random to the player just promote using strategy guides and looking things up on websites.

I think it would be great if NPCs reacted to your actions in the game on a minor scale as well as on the grand scale.

For example in Skyrim I'll go around Riften and loot all of the salt out of all the barrels in the city for use in crafting. I'd love it if the guards would comment that all the fish and meat in the town has now rotted because some ass went around and stole all the damn salt. That would be fracking awesome for the game to react to what I did like that.

But if you want to kill the guy, why bother doing all his fetch quests and risk your life in the process ?

Yeah, it would be cool if seemingly insignificant choices came into play later on in the game, but not on the level of actually locking you out of content. At the most, change the paths we can take to complete quests, but not potential outcomes.

If the game is going to lock me out of major content for a decision I make (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), that consequence has to be spelled out clearly before I make my decision.

Yeah, I would like to see some more midterm consequences (as opposed to short term immediately and long term end game), for example, one quest that has recently bugged me regarding this after replaying is the quest where you recruit Boone, which you have to lead the only competent person in town to her death - every resident essentially says she is the one that keeps the town together. Perhaps it could have resulted in two choices - leading Jeannie Mae to her death for neutral or positive karma, but shortly afterwards the town goes to hell, due to a power vacuum, leading to chaos, leading to unprepared for raider/ghoul/legion attack, and an alternate choice of framing someone else in town (such as No-Bark) resulting in negative karma but a functioning town (and not doing the quest at all results in an end game slide where crazy with grief, Boone accuses and kills the wrong person, bloodshed starts etc).

This could be incorporated with trader/raider/slaver/designated villain camps or wildlife taking over a settlement or camp if all previous inhabitants were killed after a few game days, giving a purpose to revisit at some point.

This, I've said it before but the power of the atom quest might be one of the worst quests ever in an RPG.
This is largely disguised by everyone drooling at the explosion, rather than people cogitating the motives.
Imagine it was between an option of poisoning the town or not because it's purportedly an eyesore... Remove the "kool boomsplodes" from the equation and it's truly an egregiously written quest.

I wouldn't call Tenpenny Tower a morally ambiguous quest. At least not if you're doing the quest cold. There's no real ambiguity in how the quest is being presented.

Rich folks = Bad

Poor, repressed Ghouls = Good.

That's how the quest presents itself. It's only after the quest has been resolved that the game yanks your chain and reveals that the "good" outcome involves an entire building getting massacred because the "good guys" turned out to be worse than "villains." You aren't ever left to wonder what the best thing to do is until after you've learned the ending because the facts are hidden.

That's not morally ambiguous. That's just misdirecting the player for the sake of a twist.

Similarly, I don't think Point Lookout is "morally ambiguous." You don't know a lot about each person, but there's nothing that ever really made me go "What is the right thing to do?" The Pitt is morally ambiguous, as are the decisions in Fallout New Vegas where you have to decide between punishing a murderer or letting him help poor people, or dooming people to a radiation filled death or ruining the livelihoods of several sharecroppers.

One thing about The Pitt is how late the revelation is revealed to the player, such event should have taken place slowly and evenly paced out to give a chance for the player to suspect the first story he heard may not be full/true story, and not just reveal near the end that you can actually pick a side, and that both are right in their own way.

No comment on Tenpenny, as I forgot how it goes.