In Fallout 3 there was the Tenpenny Tower Quest....one of the best things they did in FO3. In NV, there was the Star Bottlecap Quest....which gives you something to think about at the end....and your decision regarding Vault 34. So I'd say Fallout is better than many RPGs when it comes to that.

Boiware for instance. Even if you go full Renegade in Mass Effect....let the Council die so the Alliance can basically usurp Control of Council Space, genocide anywhere from one to three different sentient species, doom a fourth to a lingering demise, and other things that basically prove all the fears the Council Races had about humans to be completely true.....Shepard can still get them to help Earth in ME3. I would think they would be more likely to gang up on the Alliance well before the Reaper attack in ME3....or at least finish them off once the Reapers attack Earth. If Boiware had any sack...they would have made it so if you did enough Renegade moves in the series, you had no possibility of stopping the Reapers whatsoever. They should have stripped out the whole thing with the Invisible Space Brat and have the endgame with the Crucible firing result automatically in an ending based on what you had done across the series. Screw over the aliens at the expense of Earth every chance you got? The Crucible either doesn't work or once the Reapers are gone they turn on the Alliance and conquer or exterminate the remaining humans. Screw over everybody for lulz? It turns out you were Indoctrinated and were the Reaper's chosen tool to bring down resistance to the Harvest all along...your "reward" is being turned into goo to help make the Reaper commissioned to mark their Triumph in the umpteenth Cycle. You want the heroic ending where everybody hangs together and wins against all odds ala Shakespeare's Henry V? Then you had to do the hard work of patiently assembling the markers..across three games...that you will ultimately cash in to bring about the victory that will make your Shepard the greatest Legend in all recorded history.

Or who I would like to be. Personally, I play as Chaotic Good. It is based on the whole Batman vs. Joker dilemma. Joker kills a bunch of people->Batman captures Joker->Joker escapes->Joker kills a bunch of people resulting in an endless cycle. I can understand Batman sending the Joker to Arkham, but after the fifth killing spree, Batman should come to the realization that he is indirectly killing a ton of people by letting the Joker go which can be solved by crippling or killing the Joker.

Same, -ish. I wonder how much Fallout 4 will let me choose the most dikeish dialog options and still let me take the good karma path. I always like being the hero the wasteland needs... but not the hero anyone wants.

Yeah, I think variety is the key here. Not every single choice in the game necessarily needs to break cleanly between good or evil, I should think (not really a big fan of the karma system because of this - kind of undermines the "there is no 'right' answer" moral dilemmas in a game if one or the other option then nets you good karma points.) And not everything needs to be a hard-hitting social commentary that makes you question not only your characters' but your own morality.

But I've also never been a fan of the "arbitrary" morality you often come across in these sort of games. I recall when Fable 2 came out, a big to-do was made about how your choices early on in the game would drastically change your home town. Turned out that during the tutorial fetch-quest you're given the task of tracking down 3 (I can't remember just what it was, some sort of passes or letters or something,) and you'd get a gold piece for each one you returned. Then the mustache-twirling villain comes up to you and offers an "evil" method of completing the task which requires just as much effort and nets you the same reward.

Struck me that then you're just making an arbitrary morality choice. It always seemed to me like the villain should be offering you 2 gold per letter you give to him, or that he'd give you some way to totally bypass the quest with no effort or something. If we're talking writing and characterization in terms of artistic criticism on an academic level, personality traits like "hard-working" and "generous" are more compelling and descriptive (and basically just bring more to the table,) than something as nebulous as "good." Likewise "greedy" or "lazy" are better descriptive traits than just plain "evil."

That's why in Fallout 3 the Megaton quest sort of irked me along the same lines. You're given a pretty world-changing task very early on in the game, but there's not a ton of incentive to blow up Megaton beyond "just because I want to." There is a reward for following through on the task, but it's not really more than a token amount. Even during my first playthrough I had a pretty good idea that my reward for going in the opposite direction would be about equal, all things considered. And then there's not much of a middle ground there, either. You can choose to just leave the thing alone (which ought to make the Followers happy,) but you can't really "choose" to do so - there's no dialog choices where you're choosing to maintain the status quo or side with the Followers, though they lay the groundwork for it, thematically at least.

Ideally-speaking, I'd (like others in this thread) like to see some quests where choosing what is clearly the "good" path takes some sacrifice or means giving up significant monetary gains or something like that. To take Star Wars for instance, the classic view of "Light Side" vs "Dark Side" of the Force is that being good takes longer and requires more effort while the seduction of the Dark Side is that it offers more immediate and noticeable gains. (Join the Light Side and you have to make your own lightsaber while carrying Yoda around on your back; come to the Dark Side and they probably teach you Force Lightning during orientation.)

I wouldn't mind seeing some quests, even, where picking the "good" choice doesn't even show you any significant rewards or effects until the end credits roll; whereas the "evil" side would get you immediate rewards and effects that you'd be able to see right away (though to counter my own previous point about Megaton it's actually a fair example of this - choose to disarm the bomb and you don't really see how that changes things until the credits; blow up Megaton and... well, watching an entire settlement destroyed in a nuclear mushroom cloud as good an illustration of "immediate effects" as I can think of...)

Didn't spot this at first, but a couple of posts have been deleted.

It is specifically against the forum rules to discuss child killing - please stay away from that topic.

This is the best post I've ever seen in this forum. Seriously.

I nearly always play a Paragon in any rpg I play for the first time

Ie I always refuse rewards for doing something

I let someone else take the credit my work etc etc.

For me it lets me .. 'feel' out the game to see what I might want to do on a replay different.

I think Dave above has it spot on. I dont think its particuarly hard enough to play the Good Guy in Fallout. Perhaps there SHOULD be more penalties.

I’ve always enjoyed the idea of morality in games as exhibited in the first Bioshock game. You could ‘harvest’ the little sisters for a quick boost in Adam, or you could ‘save’ them and get nothing immediately but would earn you significantly more Adam in the long run. You would even receive tonics (passive upgrades that altered your abilities), money and ammo.

It’s not a perfect system but it’s one of the things that separate good and bad; convince vs patience. Getting paid tangible goods i.e. money, caps, resources etc. is for more convenient than the hope that your actions will have a lasting impact on the community at large, resulting in more opportunity to do good in the future, hence the expression ‘a good deed is its own reward.’

yeah i love moral decision on games, Mass effect decision where cool, and some on Fallout 3 were too, like the Slaver town that u can choose to sell ppl there, that was fun.

It would be nice to be rewarded for good behavior I must admit, I tend to play the good guy no matter what the game whether it be a RPG like the ES series or a Fallout game, I consider it RP'ing to an extent! But like you I never really have felt that my good behavior has been rewarded accordingly!

Maybe it's just my martyr complex kicking in, but I almost prefer it if I do the Right Thing and get screwed over for it, or receive lesser / no reward.

I don't even care if people know that I did this magnanimous thing (although, truth be told, I secretly DO want them to know, and know that I did not 'want' them to know, so I feel even better about myself when they realize I did not 'want' the praise. ).

In Bioshock, I never even considered harvesting the ADAM, regardless of how useful it might have been. I gladly accepted the 'harder' path of good. That kind of decision is relatively easy to make. What gets me are the moral dilemmas where you don't have the whole picture or realize the potential implications. Like, the vault in New Vegas that is partially flooded and its reactor is poisoning the local water supply that the NCR farmers use. On the one hand, the NCR farmers are trying to eek out a living and provide necessary food for civilization.... on the other hand, a group of Vault residents would DIE if I helped the farmers (as I recall the choices).

I usually chose to spare the vault dwellers by rationalizing that the NCR farmers could farm elsewhere and ~were~ growing food most of the time (it was a sporadic radiation spike, I think). Sort of lesser of two evils. But what if the vault dwellers were bad people? Or lying?

Ooh, or the Tenpenny Tower mission with Roy the ghoul --- on the one hand, it's GOOD to try to give the civilized ghouls a nice place to live so they don't have to skulk in the sewer with the ferals.... and the Tenpenny humans are SUCH arrogant, privileged a-holes that making them SHARE with the ghouls seemed like not so much a burden. But then your good decision results in tragedy which totally blindsided me the first time it happened.

Knowing what ~would~ happen, of course, on a later game I took out the three civilized ghouls and saved countless more human lives, and yet Three Dog chastises me for being a monster. Granted, without knowledge of the future, it would ~seem~ evil to just kill the poor, poor ghouls who already have a sorry life. Luckily, I found a mod that re-writes the story a bit (in a logical fashion) where you can get a vibe from some of the things Roy says and take out ~just~ Roy and thereby save EVERYONE else. And let's be honest, Roy is a good-for-nothing opportunist jerk.