Fallout 4

[Art Blade]

I felt the same. My main character is righteous and a good guy and in the end found peace with everyone but the Institute (well, in that respect the game requires you to finish off one of those factions) and it was always a good feeling thinking to have done the right thing. I too was surprised at how moral and ethics touched me and made me think what to do, as in how to do it right.

Then again, and that matches your "it's a video game, I can kill 'em all" kind of mentality, I wanted to see what would happen if I purposely chose the wrong options. Which is why I created Damascene Blade, and boy was it fun playing with her really nasty attitude

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[BinnZ]

 

[Art Blade]

I fondly recall interactions with kids, few as there were. It was high praise for Damascene when they said, "you can't leave me here," and, "I hate you!" Like, after selling them to slave traders and then killing the traders so I could take the kid back in order to cash in a ransom from their parents.. Lovely.

[fragger]

Definitely agree BinnZ and Art, I always seem to go for the moral high ground as a matter of course. It's simply not in my nature to be a bad guy, not even in a game. Whenever I see, read or hear about any kind of social injustice or inequity in the real world it gets my back up, and with a game like FO4 it can't help but colour my choices.

I know it's just a game, but I often can't bring myself to commit the "wrong" actions or even choose the snarky dialogue options. It just rubs me the wrong way. That was also why I was never crazy about the SP story in GTA V. I'm not a fan of anti-heroes and I resented like being forced into the role of criminal - or in this case, three criminals. I knew what the game was about going in, but it still didn't sit well with me at all. I just wanted to experience the game world, which really was fantastic, and if I could have skipped the entire story altogether and gone straight to the post-game free-roam, I would have.

[spoiler text=i always face the same dilemma with the little walled community of covenant]
I hate bumping off the people there but because I like to obtain it as a settlement, I have to. I temper my decision with the knowledge that those people are so maniacally obsessed with eliminating synths that they have probably killed a substantial number of real people in their fanatical zeal, so I tell myself that I am actually doing the world a favour by removing them from it
[/spoiler]

So yeah, I always seem to choose the "right" thing to do. In a similar vein, as a lover of animals I was never crazy about killing animals in games either, especially dogs. I don't mind bumping off the horribly mutated wild specimens in FO4 because they look so wretched that I feel like I'm doing them a favour But occasionally you have to kill a normal, he@lthy guard dog, and being a dog-owner myself, that yelp they make when they get shot never fails to break my heart a little - even though I'm well aware they're just bunches of ones and zeroes.

Back in, I think, 2009, there was a public stink when the CoD game Modern Warfare 2 came out and was found to contain a mission where you played the part of a CIA operative who had infiltrated a Russian terrorist cell, and to maintain your cover you had to take part in a horrific massacre of innocent people in a Moscow airport. You and a few other guys ran through the airport terminal gunning down everyone in sight (your character got double-crossed and killed at the end of it - obviously it was a one-off mission). Even though you could fudge things by deliberately missing everyone (you had to fire your weapon or the bad guys would become suspicious), you could also gun people down with abandon if you were so inclined, and what freaked the critics out was the depiction of innocent men and women being indiscriminately slaughtered in a video game that kids might play, and in a fashion that struck a little too close to home in this day and age (no children were shown being gunned down in the game, at least).

I'm not the moral crusader type and I don't believe that violent games encourage violent behaviour in reality (although they probably don't help, either), but I found that MW2 mission to be extremely distasteful and unnecessary. I felt quite dirty afterwards, even though I didn't shoot anybody. At the start of the game an option would pop up telling you that there would be a mission which may offend or disturb some players, so did you want to omit this mission when it came up, yes or no? But with absolutely no hint as to what the nature of the disturbing material was, unless you had prior knowledge of what would be depicted (which I didn't), how could you know whether it would disturb you or not? Curiosity wins out and you pick no, you don't want to skip it. You want to see what it is that might be considered disturbing.

I also hate it when they pull that stunt on televised news. If the producers believe that some footage could disturb viewers - why show it? (Rhetorical - for the sake of sensationalism).

[Art Blade]

as far as I remember, that option in your game to choose whether or not to play that scene was patched in after the negative publicity the scene got. Like, "we don't understand all the ruckus so we leave that scene in but here, have a switch, if you don't want to see it." Which I don't think made it any better, and indeed, curiosity kills the cat.

[fragger]

To this day I don't know why they created that mission. I thought it was in very bad taste, if not somewhat sick, and I thought maybe they did it to deliberately stir up controversy. World at War had come out before that one and didn't do very well (because it was a lousy game) so maybe they decided to rile people up with their next title according to the principle "there is no such thing as bad publicity" (which is incorrect anyway).

I never played the game a second time - not because of that mission, but because the CoD franchise had just gotten so flipping old. Haven't played a CoD game since.


Back to FO4, and earlier tonight I was walking down a street in Cambridge at night when I saw a party of about half a dozen figures coming towards me. They were tramping along in an orderly fashion so I assumed they were Raiders or Rust Devils or something. But when they got closer, I saw they were feral Ghouls. I don't think I've seen a group of them marching along in such a purposeful manner before.

So I couldn't help but conclude that it was a "ghouls' night out", nyuk nyuk nyuk

[Art Blade]

 

I would have been willing to pave their way to happiness with half a dozen land mines.

[LowPolyOWG]

 

Nah, pull a FO76, nuke them from your bunker  Oh wait, the nuke would glitch and crash the game.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Usually in games if the game isn't effected in any way, I'll take the "good" choice. Playing the bad guy never interested me too much. So that's why I ended FO4 with the peaceful ending, with the three factions still alive, but that still forces you to destroy the institute. A true peaceful ending with all four still active would have been more interesting.

But if the game changes somewhat, because of a choice I make, then I'll take the one that gives me an advantage. One thing that comes to mind is the FO3 mission in the grove or whatever it's called, with the tree that used to be a person. He wants you to kill him because he's had enough of being a tree, and the other people there also have agendas of their own. One being leaving the tree so it can grow and spread and eventually make the wasteland green and growing again with plant life. If I was a role player type with a "good" character I would have chosen that ending, even though you don't ever see green stuff growing after that if you do, it's just a hypothetical ending. I forget what the other person wanted, but the third choice was to kill the tree and get a bonus armor perk from it, as that's what I did, as that was an advantage to me in the rest of the game.

Same goes for Nuka World, I played that to give me the best advantage, loot and perks, not how I would have otherwise, which would probably have been to just wipe out the three gangs at the start and free the slaves.

[mandru]

..."ghouls' night out"...

...i always face the same dilemma with the little walled community of coventry...

fragger I find it highly interesting that you would say Coventry instead of Covenant (that settlement's actual name) in the context of choosing difficult moral decisions in gaming or in real life.

At a point in WWII when the Axis Powers' Enigma code machine had been cracked a message was intercepted that Coventry a city in England was going to be the target of an intensive bombing raid.  If the city was evacuated it would tip the Allied Forces hand that they had penetrated Enigma and the hard decision was made.

You can't save a person's life with a heart transplant without cutting their chest open.

Many innocents lost their lives in the Blitz to keep that secret from being revealed which in the long run saved many thousands more on both sides.

[Art Blade]

 

[fragger]

That's a good observation, mandru

Heh, I didn't even realize I'd used the wrong name, but it doesn't surprise me - I keep thinking "Coventry" even when I'm playing

I fixed it in my post.

[fragger]

I made the key save and I'm now exploring different story resolutions. I went with the Brotherhood of Steel first. I had to see Liberty Prime in action at least once. It was worth it, he was pretty cool

I don't know if all of you guys have tried a BoS resolution to the story, so I'll put it all in this spoiler.

Spoiler

Liberty Prime heads downtown for some serious urban redevelopment.

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Ostensibly you and a few other BoS troops are supposed to run along with LP and "protect" him as he makes his way towards C.I.T.,
but since he can throw tactical nukes at those he doesn't like and has a super-duper eye laser, he doesn't really need a lot of help.
I didn't get a screenie of it, but he picked up a Behemoth at one point and rag-dolled it

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He keeps spouting patriotic slogans and other star-spangled bombastry as he goes,
which is kind of ironic given that he's stamping along through a nuclear-devastated Boston...

It's all happening here at (what's left of) the Cambridge Institute of Technology.

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None of that Minutemanesque sneaking-in type stuff for this guy - he likes the direct approach,
which is blow a dirty big hole in the ground for us all to drop straight into the Institute through.
Elder Maxson went in with us and it was kind of cool to see him in action.

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LP doesn't come into the Institute with you of course, he's way too big to fit. After giving you access, his w0#k is done and he makes his way back to the airport, where he wanders about for - well, ever, I guess. Once inside the Institute, it's largely the same procedure as per the Minutemen - fight your way to the reactor, plant a charge in it, beam out to the roof of Mass Fusion and blow the place to atoms.

Siding with the BoS means the elimination of two factions, the Institute and the Railroad. I felt like a first-class bastard going in and slaughtering all my former Railroad buddies - Desdemona, Tinker Tom, Drummer Boy, Deacon (who had transferred himself from the settlement I'd had him at) and especially Glory, who really appealed to me as a character. Not so much Carrington, he always was an unlikable cuss. P.A.M. was reprogrammed and sent back to the Prydwen to keep Quinlan company (you can destroy her if you want to, but it's better to reprogram her for the BoS because she can give you quests again later). As with the Minutemen, you get the option to save Shaun (the boy), who turns up aboard the Prydwen later instead of the Castle - which figures - but when I caught up with him, I sent him on to Sanctuary.

After the BoS ending, there is a new radiant quest series available from Ingram. P.A.M., now aboard the Prydwen, will sometimes offer radiants (so I've read). Quinlan's and Neriah's radiant quests and respective goodie retrieval rewards remain valid also.

Part of the BoS ending means not only destroying the Railroad, but also turning against Acadia in Far Harbor (if you've already made contact with it). The Acadia part is unavoidable because you have to complete the mission Tactical Thinking (which entails wiping out the Railroad) as part of the road to the BoS ending, and if you've already been involved with the Acadia crowd, you can't get Tactical Thinking from Kells without first dobbing them in. However, the assault on Acadia is a separate mission to Tactical Thinking and I haven't been up there to do it yet, even though I've resolved the story (The Acadia mission can be left until after the story ending). Apparently there's an exploit where you can go to Far Harbor to meet the BoS assault team but then simply ignore them, in which case Acadia gets left alone and intact. I've yet to verify that claim.

[mandru]

fragger I think I need to apologize to you for my last post.  I wasn't trying to correct you or make fun of that error on the name of Covenant.  I saw it as something akin to an enlightening and appropriate Freudian Slip for the tough choices of conscience that need to be made in that part of the story line.  It makes me wonder if the game developers had that in mind when they created that part of the game and selected that settlement's name.

I wasn't trying to jog your elbow into making a correction so I'm sorry if my post came across that way.


Thanks for putting all of that together for the BoS ending fragger.  While interesting (and good to know) I don't think I'll be playing through that arc of the possible story lines.  The Railroad at least is only scrambling to survive, relocate and integrate any escaped synths who so choose into normal lives outside of the Commonwealth.

I see the self centered mindset of the BoS as being the flip side of the same coin as the Institute (in that for both factions) all of their efforts and decisions are intended solely to draw power to themselves at the cost of all else and all others.  A world being dominated by either militarized brute force or the adverse of intellectual/technical tyranny of self appointed experts would be grim.

Neither of those two factions have any foreseeable plan to restore the world to meaningful civilization.  Both are equally evil and deserving of being knocked down to square one so they have to go out into the world and face the reality of the common citizenry of their post-holocaust age.

[Art Blade]

fragger I think I need to apologize to you for my last post.  I wasn't trying to correct you or make fun of that error on the name of Covenant.  I saw it as something akin to an enlightening and appropriate Freudian Slip

I hope you don't mind me commenting on that, however, I want to Without mandru's comment I wouldn't have noticed that typo, maybe because I always had trouble remembering that settlemen's name, like "con.. what?" So, I too thought of a Freudian Slip and it made me chuckle. Not at fragger's expense I might add, just because it simply was funny.

Now to fragger's BoS post: apart from the "all peace" ending, I played the BoS and the Institute endings. I should try the Railroad ending some time. Neither the BoS nor the Institute endings sat well with me which is why I returned to the savegame with the all peace ending.