The Dark Path...

[Sorrow]

For instance: FO1, Shady Sands/Raiders. Good or Evil, the PC still has to talk to and accept the same quests from the same NPCs in order to gain xp and move forward in the game. The only real difference is how polite or insulting you can be.

Actually it's not neccesary - unless one cares about XP, but it's player who wants XP, not the character. You can leave Shady Sands with its trouble (like my characters usually do) or kill Seth and take his Hunting Rifle (like my characters often do).

2) Truly evil people often appear to be good. This is missing from most games.

I agree with that. We could count the original Killian into that kind of evil.

Imagine a Fallout where an evil path would be to join the Children of the Cathedral and then rise in their ranks by subterfuge and treachery and poison and spreading lies until you had enough power within the organization to be making policies and ordering around underlings. You could remake the image of the organization, make nice with a city and it's leaders, and then... take over!

It would require too much work - taking in account that good characters should be able to advance in good organisations too.

 

[Thrawn]

#1. I often play evil characters as it seems to be “the path less traveled”
#2. It always seems to me, right or wrong, that evil characters make more money and good characters get more experience / fringe benefits.

Take “The Den” in fallout 2 for example. A good character can return the bones of the dead chick, bring smithy his meal, and listen to the story of the one chick’s cat. None of these quests bring money, but they do bring karma and XP.

An evil character can join the slavers and make tons of cash.

There are of course lots of other quests either side can take that turn out mostly “neutral” but they don’t really pertain to this thread.

I also find it fairly easy to play an evil character. You just can’t consider things like light side/dark side or Karma reflections of how well you are doing on your quest to be evil or good. You also can’t say to yourself “I did that wrong because I gained karma points.”

Being evil in games is a state of mind. It is going into every situation and thinking “How can I get the most out of this for me?”. When Sulik (spelling?) pisses you off for the 40th time, instead of just using a stimpack and moving on, sell that son of a bitch into slavery.

When an evil character comes across a caravan and sees that they have a weapon he or she wants, he or she kills the caravan. A good character wouldn’t attack a caravan either way.

When an evil character comes across “NCR Rangers fighting remnants of the Masters Army” he waits until the fight is over before stepping in and finishing people off. A good character jumps in and helps the rangers right away.

Games seemed to be geared for good characters with bad characters added as an afterthought. It is pretty tough to be a Vault City citizen without doing some form of good deed or another.

If you stop and think about it, the work that goes into making a fallout system with even a small amount of divergence between good and evil is a huge under taking for a company VS something like a standard adventure game without dialog trees so to even have the option to be somewhat evil is good enough for me.

That being said, I agree with whoever said they wished the system took it further. Like if the Khans could take over shady sands or if you could join the Super Mutants and ravage the country side.

On a final note of this rambling post, I’d like to say my single favorite moment of evil was in KOTOR 1, on the desert planet. I walked into a bar and told some patron to get out of my way, he asked what I was going to do about it so, all in the dialog tree, I forced choked him. Then every time I walked up and talked to him the game said “The patron is ashamed and can not meet your gaze.” I felt so bad ass and so evil it didn’t matter how many dark side points I lost or gained.

 

[Starseeker]

Well.., morality is a difficult concept to portray at any rate.

And since the topic of morality/ethics isn't really settled, it's difficult to set good boundaries that determines "good" and "evil". This is farther complicated by the BG of FO. Survival of self = importance of self interest. A lot of people do things for their own benefit in the interest of survival. Would you condemn that as wrong?

This is also a trap. It's way to simplistic to put labels on things. I am afraid that's how Beth sees FO3. Good quest, evil quest/etc. FO is suppose to be ambiguous in the true sense. The world is Gone. It's OVER. So what would people do to survive? The different compositions of towns is quite interesting. You have VC, NCR, SF, NR and Redding. Of course, that's beside the topic.

Urr..., I need coffee, let's continue later.