Iirc you do actually get a bit less Adam overall for rescuing all the Little Sisters, but you do get other rewards. Also, you wouldn't know that you get any extra reward for rescuing them without prior knowledge since you have to save three to get the first reward.
True but you don't know that unless you Google it. Saving them is presented as the "harder" choice but I don't get how anyone could just consume them, their kids. Regardless of rewards I don't think there's much choice
Bioshock should not reward you for the good choice. The game would be much better if your powers is obtained only if killing the sisters. Reach a harder section, now you will have to choose if you want the easy and evil way.
It's also mind-boggling when a game's moral compass makes no sense. Look at the original Dishonored: killing the bad guys is morally bad, but leaving them alive but horribly disfigured, enslaved, outcast or otherwise ensuring a slow, painful death at someone else's hands is just peachy. Tell me that a quick knife thrust wouldn't have been more merciful for Lady Boyle than giving her to her stalker as a plaything....
You misunderstand the system. In Dishonored the system is meant to be about chaos, not morality. Killing a lot of people is destabilizing (broken families, bodies for the plague rats to feast on, etc), quitely disappearing one person causes less panic than stabbing them and leaving their body in the street. Some of the chaos value that the game assigns to actions are a bit weird, but the core concept is solid.
@@wintermute5974 yeah, but you could quietly disappear Lady Boyle without anyone ever knowing, and you'd somehow sow more chaos than giving her to the stalker. Same with the Lord Regent, you could play the recording across the citywide intercoms and expose him, but if you disappeared him after that it was high chaos.
@@matthaught4707 Yeah, the IDEA of Dishonored's system is interesting (chaos/panic vs calm), but actual execution...? Off. Yes, killing random people would cause more panic than random people disappearing. But the massive humiliation of a major public figure would, ABSOLUTELY, cause more chaos than their death. Using a points system on the Lethal and Non-Lethal Options? Campbell Lethal: 20 Points of Chaos Campbell Non-Lethal: 50 Points of Chaos Pendleton Bros. Lethal: 20 Points of Chaos Pendleton Bros. Non Lethal: 10 Points of Chaos Lady Boyle Lethal: 10-30 Points of Chaos Lady Boyle Spoiler Warning Solution (where they kill Boyle AND the perverted Lord Brisby): 0 Points of Chaos Lady Boyle Non-Lethal: 5 Points of Chaos Burrows Lethal: 25 Points of Chaos Burrows Non-Lethal: 100 Points of Chaos
Vampyr could've easily worked in a Little Nightmare's Hunger mechanic where if you didn't eat anyone after a point you literally go feral, someone random goes away, cue upgrades. Then you can't abstain your way through the humanity checks.
@@Thanatos2k but when it comes to the dark urge you can still get away with not murdering any major characters (the unfortunate bard notwithstanding but she was never a companion anyway.) even when the game says youre going to be forced to kill an ally you can still escape that outcome without killing anyone and the only ill effect is that you dont get your funky cool slayer form. i've never played or watched vampyr but i wouldnt mind it doing a similar thing. your core options are to either drain someone willingly, or go feral and kill someone at random, but if you play the game a certain way and/or get a bit lucky you can resist the hunger and get an Ultra Perfect No One Dies Ending (but in the kind of way where its a non-canonical happy ending because its so hard to achieve. idk)
Or something like after going feral the game locks into a bad ending track, you can't become human-like and the game ends like (read backwards to unspoil) susolloc eht fo wodahs forcing you to engage with the moral dilemma in a reasoned way to get the good ending.
I'm not sure how well that'd work, because for the moral dilemma to really set in, you'd need to actively choose to kill somebody as opposed to the game temporarily taking away control to kill for you. In the latter case, the player might be able to justify the patient's death as the *game* doing the killing and thus absolving themselves of any wrongdoing.
@@glassphoenix9095 You can even avoid the bard if you knock her out nonlethally at the right time, at which point the game spawns in a replacement bard that just exists for you to murder. The reason why you can get away with not murdering anyone as the Durge is because reformist Durge is a major path you can take, which is fine by me, because it's a damn RPG an you're supposed to be able to play it your way. The bard that dies even gets a mention in the end if you play reformist durge, and for me it hit quite hard because it is written as the point that seriously gets you to push against the Durge if you're going for that playthrough. It works really well and if you killed anyone else it would cheapen the playthrough you're doing. The bard's death and your subsequent success at resisting the urge are a well written hero's story. I agree with you and Yatzee though that for Vampyr, avoiding those choices is a big problem because the entire game is built around that supposed dilemma.
I think another way that Banisher's moral dilemma could have worked is by questioning if "The dead must move on" Even is the right choice in the first place. Frame it like a form of religious zealotry, where the only reason "The dead must move on" is because the code of order the banishers follow say that the dead must move on. And then add choices where banishing the ghosts is actually the bad choice. Something like, say, a group of orphans lost in the woods who are dependent on a local spirit who took pity on them. Do that, and you might actually have an interesting plot on your hands.
And/or have the female banisher be on the brink of death, her soul is ripped from her still living body, then the choice is “should you banish her because she’s a ghost or should you try to save her because she’s technically not dead yet” (plus removing the “you must unalive possessed individuals to save her” aspect)
The thing is they do sort of question the whole banishing aspect. For every ghost you have the options of Banish, Ascent, or Blame. Blame is the murder option, while Banish and Ascent seem to functionally do the same thing. However if you Banish someone then you later find them in a place called the void which is not a good place to wind up in for eternity. The thing is I didn't know this because on my playthrough I only did ascents because I thought that was the way for the gooderest ending, and I only found out they showed up there by looking it up.
The choice between "continue to follow my religious indoctrination or do the right thing" might be a moral dilemma for the character, but it doesn't create one for the player because they aren't indoctrinated. Like it's a fine story beat but not a dilemma. To be a dilemma you need a reason why the player would see banishment as the right thing to do, but also have a reason why they wouldn't want to.
@@wyrmh0le yeah, but the player doesn't need to be unambiguously told that it comes down to religious indoctrination, that should just be something they could decide to be the case
How far we've fallen that Fable 3's dilemma of "Make several unpopular choices as king so your kingdom has the necessary resources to fight off an eldritch abomination, or side with your peoples' opinions while understanding it will leave them severely underpowered when said eldritch abomination shows up" now feels like a superior system, mostly because it has the forethought to include the third option of "Milk the real estate market for every penny, then donate your profits to the war cause so you don't have to upset the people."
I think it was Fable 2 that had the stupid three end-o-tron decision at the end where after sacrificing everything, repeatedly, you could either bring everyone except your loved ones back who had died, bring your loved ones back, or get a pile of cash that you really didn't need. I picked bringing my family back and the game was like "wow... so selfish I thought you would have brought everyone else back" and it's like "fuck you they died of the plague or bandits. I sacrificed everything including my family I get *something* for my suffering. Also why would 'bring back all the murdered people' *not* include my family, who was murdered?"
And Fable 3's system has the side benefit of infuriating the kind of person who believes that owning real estate is morally equivilent to ritually murdering small children
Also in the Fable Games, the good options were superior in every way. In Fable 3, you can break the economy so hard, being the good king is the most optimal regardless.
@@flatline42 You bring back the people who died in building the Spire. That's why your family is omitted. But of course with the Knothole Island DLC, you could just bring your dog back to life that way. You never see Rose again anyway so there's no real benefits to choosing family anymore.
@@austemousprime Honestly it really wasn't even a matter of _trying_ to break the economy. I dumped a fortune into the kingdom's coffers and still had way more money than I knew what to do with. The bribes you got for going 'evil' were hilariously irrelevant.
A while ago I saw someone complaining that playing as a good Person in WH40k Rogue Trader is way harder than being an evil dick, and that's exactly how it should work. The evil path SHOULD be the easy way out, it SHOULD be more difficult to find peaceful solutions, that's how being good and evil works, especially in a setting like 40k that pretty much defaults to evil.
Honestly, I feel like that's not quite true. The game barely punishes you for playing a good guy. Most companions get stronger from you resolving their quests in a positive way and the 'evil' path has drastic consequences that massively weaken you in the long run, on top of the benefits of Iconoclast being extremely good while the Heretic path benefits mostly give you psyker stuff that, depending on path, could be useless. Also, the evil path is generally pretty poorly written, it feels like an afterthought, where 80% of all the choices are mustache twirlingly petty sadism and outright *stupidity*, like declaring your loyalty to chaos or whatever in front of a sister of battle or inquisitorial agent while all they do is look at you and go "huh, okay, I don't care" until some arbitrary point in Act 4, well after innumerable atrocities and chaos-strengthening decisions. You can't really *corrupt* most of them, not in any tangible way. At most you get a brief description in the game's epilogue, and that's that. Sorry for rambling, it just really disappointed me, is all.
A tedious but civil debate of an opponent's peaceful surrender/compliance over a nice cup of tea VS the easier _"might makes right"_ overwhelming firepower and winner takes all gambit. I wish a game fully leans into that. I mean wholly. Do you want to engage in a civil discussion through textboxes upon textboxes, in a nice comfortable room, where you sometimes have to tactically take breaks and give them time to let the idea simmer... Or go in Battlefield/Arma 3 style and lead a charge against the enemy fortress and subjugate them through sheer force, perhaps even both. Fully play the game without ever shooting a single bullet or decorate the land in casings. An indie dev would be the right person to make such a niche game like that. It could have lots of ambiguous choices like Yahtzee said, where either choice (or multiple choice) have their good and right, emotional and brutal necessity, subjective and objectively themed answers. They all have their pros and cons, and each choice has ripples across the story. I want every choice to have impact - whether it be macro or micro - I want there to be change. I want the fictional world of this hypothetical game to feel alive. A game that fully delves into both aspects of war, logistics and on the ground. Cause you could make an order to acquire metal due for the war effort, and you have to make a choice to have it come from the citizens or have workers go extra shifts and double the workforce (inevitably leading to more funding need), and on and on. A war game where you can settle an entire war over some tea and biscuits, or join in the war and personally take part in paving the way forward.
That's why everyone has so much trouble replicating the tone of "grimdark", it's not compelling just because the individual characters are evil but because the 40k universe is so profoundly messed up that unending xenophobic zealotry is the only way most planets will even survive another decade instead of being overrun by demons.
I'd forgotten that draining your patients was even an option in Vampyr, because it was so immediately obvious that it was the "wrong" path that I just tuned out any prompts to do it for the rest of the game.
Especially when Yahtzee pointed out there doesn't seem to be any reason why the PC can't just ask people to donate a pint or so to help stave off his blood hunger and allow him to keep stopping other vampires that don't care. "Everybody, I got bit by a vampire and I am able to stave off the bloodlust, but to insure it I might have to ask for you all to donate a pint. I'll even discount your bill for it." -Zis is France. Ve don't 'ave 'ospital bills "Oh yeah."
@@Thanatos2k My counter argument: Having games where being bad is good is bad for our society, actually. We need more comforting experiences that deal with the unbreakable power of the human spirit 😊😊
@@redkingrauri3769 Isn't the game set during WWI? The wartime French government would do a whole lot more than secure some blood donations in order to retain the services of a genuinely incredibly successful doctor.
@@aturchomicz821 This. Being forced to do evil is not engaging. Having the option to do evil, but choosing to do good is a far more meaningful narrative theme than "You are a bad guy because gameplay mechanics force you to be." I think the option to be evil should exist in games alongside the option to do good, with logical consequences for each.
I remember in "Dragon Age", where on my first playthrough as a mage, I sacrificed a child's mother at her request because if she didn't do that, there would be no way to remove the demon from her son and hundreds of innocent people would die--there simply wasn't time to do anything else! It felt like a genuine moral choice with no right or wrong answer. And...then I found out you could just wander off to the mage tower, leaving the demon to do whatever it wanted for weeks on end (but somehow nobody dies), and get them to do the job without killing anyone.
Yeah DA:O is a great game, but stuff like that always made me confused. Like I never seen a game actually let you just stop the current storyline to do another one, and then resume the last one for a better ending.
I had the exact same experience, and since while on my way there I had a random encounter in camp with the 'not zombies'™ and the map changed a bit so I felt justified. only for my friends to tell me months later.
A thing about Vampyr that killed me the most, was that some of the people you needed to save were just generally horrible people. Like at least 3 of them were actual serial killers, and others deaths would cause some NPC's to live a better life. And while it could lead to an interesting "But where would YOU draw the line" it still feels weird how letting the psychos live is still a requirement for the good ending.
That's how it is in real life though. Doctors take an oath to do no harm, and so no matter how despicable the person is, the consensus in the medical community is that it is your duty to help them.
@@jimskywaker4345 Yeah I had to look this up after I beat it. And yeah I guess that makes it an interesting dilemma. But for the average player like me that doesn't really care about that stuff, it kind of defeats the purpose.
A doctor is the least dramatic job a vampire could possibly have. Doctors have the equipment and skills to safely drain someone of some of their blood, and they will recover. All Dr. Vampire need to do is ask politely for someone, anyone, to donate blood, so Dr. Vampire could keep his head on straight. VAMPYR is absolute forced, artificial drama.
Dr Vampire: Oh the hunger! How it gnaws at me! However can I retain my soul?!? Oh nurse, I just remembered, please order another 3 cases of O+ from the blood bank, we're running low.
@@TheStormbringer8751Blood transfusions have existed for a minute pal. Precolonial south american empires did it, I am sure a european doctor from the era of universities could figure something out.
Just in time for lunch, perfect. Also, “Should I compromise my entire moral basis and crux of my life choices, or do what makes sense considering everything I’ve already done.”
In addition to vampyre. It has to be asked (and im pretty sure you said this same thing back in the original review.) Why can't he just feed on the countless enemies that he is actively trying to kill. They have plenty of blood he could drink without compromising his morals.
@@TheUltrahypnotoad It's because they have the Spanish Flu. The hospital and other 'hubs' are uninfected, so the blood is 'pure', while the people on the streets are either monsters or on the way to becoming them.
Feeding on characters becomes more and more beneficial the more you know them. This was a gameplay mechanic, but they could have expanded on that in the narrative. Make it so that this is a core element of being a vampire: the need to form a bond with your victims in order to live and thrive, while feeding on random strangers is barely enough to survive.
That's how VTM: Bloodlines did it. You needed blood for all your cool powers and healing and you *could* carefully lure innocent people into dark alleys and drink them or just get into a fight and crack open a boy with the cold ones. (And if your blood ran out you'd be forced to drink the closest person, which could make so many things worse on you, which is a pain if you're running a stealth build I can tell you)
Replacing the big Scottish guy with a little girl could work if the wife/mother (yeah, I completely forgot their names) works like how Ender Lillies does, where she can act like a sort of stand that attacks the enemies while the girl is just an anchor point. But going back to the characters we do have, I feel like making the Scotsman a hypocrite wouldn't be a bad thing. Like, your wife tells you not do it because it's wrong and you have to banish the half of other couples along the way, but you decide to go through with it and that puts a dent in your relationship. If you want there to be a negative effect to the ressurrection, maybe it brings her back crippled, or it makes your nipples fall off, something. But the human sacrifices make it pretty much a no-no.
The thing is I like being a hero in games. So if a game gives me a choice between being a hero and doing bad things I'm gonna pick hero no matter what penalties are applied. Mistreating characters, even nameless NPCs, is rarely fun for me. The only games that I actively enjoyed being evil in where games based around that from the ground up, like Dungeon Keeper and Overlord, which also didn't take themselves particularly seriously.
I know there is a "good" option in Tyranny, but the game does seem to have the same "being evil from the ground up" design (with the prologue and the way the game explain to you the setting and your background, I am more than happy to be the Fatebinder of the Overlord).
You're far from the only one. I've remembering reading about data from a few games that shows the vast majority of people choose the hero path, especially for a first playthrough. That's exactly why morally ambiguous choices are important, when the right thing to do isn't obvious. Like choosing between protecting a friend and choosing the greater good. Or between killing an enemy vs sparing them, at least if you don't know how either choose will turn out in the end. I think Baldur's Gate 3 does that fairly well, though it is still quite a bit too easy to circumvent the downsides of playing a goody two-shoes.
@@FlyingFox86 Well, the Baldur's Gate series as a whole has a tradition of having a lot of pull toward being evil but a narrative more structured around resisting that pull.
@@FlyingFox86 Specifically Renegade in Mass Effect was a super minority of first time gameplays (looked it up, it was 8%), and even then, Renegade wasn't a "bad" approach. Seeing that, I'm curious if "Moral dilemmas" in games aren't really meant to be dilemmas, but the representation of a dilemma that the player can go "well obviously I'm not picking *that*" and then feel morally superior for seeing a clear choice where the in-narrative story presents ambiguity and difficulty. Some games lean into moral ambiguity with real ambiguity and it's obvious they're trying to present difficult decisions to the player, but the kind of cheap moral decisions I kind of wonder what the intent is.
Best example I can think of for a bad moral choice is in InFAMOUS 2. The setup is this: You need to get a faction of people to join your cause. You have two options: The Hero path is to break into a hospital run by the enemy faction and steal a medical truck that you will deliver to the neutral faction as a token of goodwill. The Villain path is to have a friend dress up as the enemy and start slaughtering innocent civilians, and then let you "stop" her. The evil option here is just stupid. Nobody in their right mind would EVER pick that option in real life.
Another one I can think of is the choice to kill or "save" Trish, from the original InFAMOUS, because no matter what you choose, the ending is literally the same. If you choose to save the doctors (the good choice), then Trish dies after Kessler drops her off a building. If you choose to save Trish (the evil choice), she is suddenly in the group of doctors and dies after Kessler drops them off a building. It's such a stupid moment because the logic of the story literally breaks, making it so that Trish is always on the opposite building, no matter which one you choose to go to.
I think the ONLY interesting dilemma InFAMOUS 2 had was the very last one, where you could either save the island but kill all the super powered people, or evolve humanity at the cost of untold casualities. The caveat to the good guy ending was supposed to be that there was a decent chance that it wouldn't work and it could just kill everyone, making the evil ending the safer bet. The issue is that, of course, the worst won't come to pass no matter what you do up to that point, making the only downside to the good ending that the protagonists die.
Infanous was my first introduction to moral systems in games... It's also the most egregious in its terrible moral system. Am I the only one who felt really conflicted about the "good" ending in Infamous 2? I get where the writers are coming from in a utilitarian sense, but Jesus. This logic could justify genociding the mutants or any "other" group in a fictional story. I'm not sure genocide should be celebrated even in the context of the game. "Every conduit died...but it's OK because humanity lived!!!😊" Even though I'm human, I don't think characters like Magneto or Koba are unjustified. Everyone wants to survive. At some point, I think it's morally neutral to fight for your own survival. It shouldn't be "bad" to want conduits to live, *ESPECIALLY* if you're a conduit yourself. Yet the game frames it like you're Super Hitler Jesus or something. It's sloppy like the rest of the moral system.
@@kamikazelemming1552 Yeah that part of inFamous was especially terrible. I guess you can try and explain it as "oh, well it turns out the guy setting this trap is future Cole, and he knows what Cole will do, so he can always rig the choice so Trish dies" but even with that in mind, it's still really stupid and really unfulfilling for the player. Why even have a choice at all if both choices lead to the same outcome?
There's a line from a webcomic, forever ago now. True pretty much every time. "If you have a choice between two things, you can usually tell which one is the right one. Because it's harder." If you want moral dilemmas in games to matter, it has to be true in the game too.
So I have a choice of sitting at home and watching anime OR I could become a super villian and destroy humanity... Thanks to you I know the right choice now!
@@alfredosaint-jean9660 In the vast majority of choices in your life, which ones end up being the best ones? Between going to work or staying in bed? Between drinking like four more beers or cutting yourself off where you are? If you're socially anxious, between going to that get-together all your friends are having or staying home? Between calling an elected representative to talk about an issue you're concerned about, or just not bothering? Between confronting someone about their behavior, be they friend, family member, or outright enemy, or just leaving it be and trying to work around it? Between confronting and overcoming bad habits of your own, or just keeping them? Between assuming someone's acting in good faith, and writing out an earnest answer to a question that might feel annoying to you? Or assuming the whole thing is a waste of your time? The examples are legion.
@@Pyre Counter excamples are legion as well, but the silly as Sergeek said and the sane. It is not enough to say this option is harder, its the right one, but it can be a useful guide. For excample, which is harder; starting a new career in something you've never done but may be the next up and comign thing, or staying in your own career and ensuring you have a steady income and life over all? The first one ios way harder and far more often is the worse decision, which is why most people stay in thier job areas, even if not spesific work places.
@@PyreNot doing something is not making a choice, quite the opposite. And a definition of good, is the thing that works. When something doesn't work, you have to try harder in order to compensate. That is the punish of bad choices. Making good decisions saves you the hard work, is what makes them good in the first place. Do I fix my floor myself, or do I hire an expert? The wrong decision will be more time consuming, more expensive, and harder.
@@crediblesalamander8056 Eh, the last true "Dad Game" (because TLOU II is a SEQUEL to a dad game that actually...isn't one and It Takes Two is more "husband game" than "dad game") to WIN at the TGAs (GoW 2018) is coming up on six years ago now. It's pretty easy to conclude that a Dad Game WINNING GOTY is a 2010s trend (Walking Dead Season 1, TLOU, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, God of War 2018) that's on ice.
I think that the best moral descisions in games aren’t “be good or be evil” it’s “do the good thing and struggle or do the bad thing and succeed” it’s why I loved papers please so much because the entire game is fundamentally built around the fact that in order to be a good person you need to sacrifice money and potentially get a fine, each good decision has almost like an inbuilt cost associated with it and so you get a tangable dilema of “do I do the right thing for this person and get a fine or do I do the wrong thing so that my family can eat tonight”
When the very first Bioshock was close to release people hyped up the "moral dilemma" of killing the little girls to get Adam (currency to buy abilities) or to cure them and set them free, which is the good boy option and supposedly the harder one gameplay wise because you dont get their Adam. But if you do cure them they occasionally leave you gifts of Adam, dumbing down the choise to whatever you want the good ending or the bad ending.
Harvesting the Little Sisters gives I think 120 ADAM while sparing them gives only 80. But every 3 Little Sisters you spare they leave a present for you containing 30-50 ADAM and some powerful Tonics (player upgrades) that aren't available to get in the Harvest route.
@@southparkkenny2 I think if they just removed the extra ADAM gifts the girls give you but leave in the Plasmid upgrades, it would still make for a much more effective moral choice that actually impacts gameplay. Do you want to get extra ADAM to unlock more powers, or abstain yourself and potentially get upgrades for ones you already have?
Just once, i would like to see a game whith a moral choice system where the only way to get the "good ending" isn't to do all one way or the other, but rather end up somewhere in the middle because the correct thing to do in each situation differs depending on the context
There's a game called Gleaner Heights that tries to be a "darker" Harvest Moon type game, and it tries to offer a moral choice that's POTENTIALLY interesting, but it falls short upon careful examination. Throughout the game, the Mayor offers certain projects that you can fund to make the town a better place (build a playground, stock the library, etc.) as you progress in certain character's stories, you can discover that the owner of the town's hotel has incriminating photos of the Mayor with a young girl (who was also mordored prior to the start of the game) and that he was blackmailing the mayor into implementing those projects that you helped fund. Once you have the photo, you basically have three options. -Give the photo back to the blackmailer, who will pay you for your compliance and continue to blackmail the mayor into, again, basically making the town a better place -Give the photo to the Mayor, essentially allowing him to destroy evidence that he was romantically involved with a minor -Give the photo to literally anybody else in town, exposing the mayor and ending the blackmail. This option leads to the mayor unaliving himself and it gives your character a SIN, which you generally want to avoid to get the game's good ending. So the game kinda makes it seem like the GOOD option is to side with the blackmailer. Doing something immoral to influence the power of a bad person in order to make positive change. But at the same time...WHY are those my only three options? The town has a sheriff. The town has a special agent who is specifically there to investigate what happened to the girl. Why can't I get a different outcome by showing the pic to one of them so they can arrest and investigate the mayor, keeping him in protective custody. Once I started thinking about that, I noticed it wasn't that the game gave me a choice where there's no "good" option. It's that a good option clearly exists, but the game doesn't really let you do it. ...Or I guess you could also just not show the photo to anybody, but then the story doesn't go anywhere.
That's really one of the big problems with moral choices in games. Morality is an inherently personal thing, but the available options in a game must be written in by the designers. If they didn't think of every option available, or at least couldn't put them in, it's incredibly difficult to consider it a true moral choice.
@@UltimaKeyMaster I mean even if someone was the epitome of all evil if my actions led to them killing themselves that would probably live rent free in my mind forever
@@mondoeamon360It also really undermines the potential depth of the decision. There are plenty of options to have negative consequences associated with outing the mayor, even if we stick with the basic idea of him committing suicide: The new mayor isn't as willing to move forward with the town improvement projects without being blackmailed, the new mayor has a different conflict of interests within the town that results in businesses not run by him/his friends struggling, the new mayor charges extra for improvement projects to line his own pockets... There are absolutely options to make it more morally grey than "bad guy dies everyone lives happily ever after" that don't involve slapping an arbitrary penalty on your overall evaluation. That just screams "this is obviously the right thing to do, so we contrived a punishment to attach to it to make the choice harder without having to make any meaningful decisions to effect that," and that's just lazy and disappointing when there are so many better ways to attach significant in-game consequences to your decision to make it more complex.
dontnod games in general always felt like they are just one step away froom being great. like the whole memory editing and combo building in remember me is really cool, but you only get to edit someones memories like 3-4 times across the whole game and the combo building while nice isn't even close to being as good as the one in god hand. it's a game that enters my mind like once a year simply because of how close it was to being great.
The game Clash: Artifacts of Chaos from early 2023 by ACE Team (The Eternal Cylinder, Zeno Clash, Rock of Ages) did a kind of combo building as well, not to the outright extent of God Hand either (though it's still a 3D Fighter/Brawler type adventure) but it does it in a way that provides enough depth. There's a Normal Attack button and a Special Attack button. You can carry any three Special Attacks by assigning them to Neutral Special, Forward Special and Backwards special at a Training Dummy or a Totem where you have to beat a special enemy for a reward to your moveset. In comparison, the normal attack doesn't sound as interesting initially. But here's the thing: You can carry any two *Stances* at a training dummy or totem. And a Stance always consists of - A combo string - An attack from a Jump - An attack from a Hold/Charge - An attack from a Run - An attack from a Forwards Dodge, Sideways Dodge and Backwards Dodge. And if you input a new move at the *moment* your previous attack connects with an enemy, the next one comes out quicker. Just like Special Attacks, you can find Stances at these Totems and their combat challenges, and all of them have wholly unique animations. No overlapping stuff. Things like: - Slash Stance that have quick slashes that hit in a wider range and sideways dodges that return the player character Pseudo to his original position after a quick sidestep - Spear Stance that provides straightforward attacks from a longer range than most other stances and has a sideways hop kick that still provides the extra range, - Mammoth Stance is the slowest most powerful stance with stuff like a stunning drop kick, short-range hard-hitting elbow shoves with the Sideways Dodges, and a double haymaker that can be capitalized on by switchin from a quicker stance like Lightning Stance into the Mammoth Stance at the third button input, and more. Well worth looking into! As said, in comparison to God Hand it's not as deep or complex, but even in comparison --and on its own merits-- it's a very solid game with *fantastic* art direction, music, and a good story to boot.
This has made me think of some of the permanent buffs/debuffs you can get in Baldur's gate 3 and how I played my first whole run through occasionally at disadvantage because I'd let my vampire friend feed on me. I had not realised you could just get a cleric to heal the bloodless condition so each time I did it was an absolute deliberate choice of "can I afford to be debuffed ATM?". It's a shame it was so reversible!
Vampyr made me think of Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume on DS. That also had a system where you could sacrifice party members for power, but unlike Vampyr it was way more tempting because that game was incredibly difficult. The demon you made a deal with who lets you kill others for power can even add super-powered enemies to missions if she gets annoyed at your lack of bloodlust.
The biggest problem for me with Vampyr is that some characters frankly deserved to die, but you still get punished for draining them. There’s one character who is a serial killer whom, if you kill, is not missed and his mom even ends up adopting a street orphan. You better believe I drained him, as well as a few others (the gang leader, for example). And for it, the second purest ending is, in my view, the more satisfying and emotionally fulfilling ending despite it technically being a middling one in terms of morality.
@@Thanatos2kQuestion: is the most “good” ending actually the “true” ending, or is that just an assumption? I’ve only seen a play through (will get around to it myself eventually) where they got that mixed end and yeah it seemed to fit the best with certain characters getting better ends for offing clear villains.
@Thanatos2k You get two achievements for beating Deus Ex Human Revolution without killing anyone* and without raising any alarms. That doesn’t mean that playthrough is canon, especially since you still have to kill the major bosses anyway to proceed.
"Considering the theme of 'the dead must move on'" - For a moment I thought The Dead Must Move On was the name of the game. But I guess having a name without a subtitle is verboten.
Funnily enough I could see Yahtzee or someone saying the title is "a bit on the nose" even if the game didn't fumble its moral "dilemma" again. That or it would still have an unnecessary colon somewhere in the title.
I quite liked the moral dilemmas in SOMA. They gave you pause for thought for what would really be the right thing based entirely on the scenario the main character had found himself in that he was still coming to grips eith every step of the way, and because there was no gameplay incentive you were thinking more about the implications of the choice itself rather than what reward or ending it would give you. They tied in beautifully to the theme of the game.
Soma was amazing and I wish I could stand horror games more instead of just watching the Best Bits. The main character continues to not understand it through the whole game.
Agreed 110%. It actually got me thinking about it way more than any other choice in games with an actual game consequence. And I believe I even changed my mind in the interview at the end, compared with the one you do early on. Soma is without a doubt one of the best games I've ever played.
I swear, every time Yahtzee either praises a mechanic, or in this case, highlights a mechanic that could have been brilliant had it been tweaked slightly, which also happens to have been perfectly executed in Pathologic 2, I grow a few more grey hairs. He has stated multiple times that he will never try to play it again, as his first experience with it was quite negative, which is of course perfectly fair. Pathologic 2 is one of the most brilliant cases of story interwoven into gameplay I can possibly think of, and I wish its brilliance reached more people honestly.
I was immediately reminded of Pathologic when I watched his original Vampyr review lol. Probably a bit too hard for Yahtzee's taste, even if you do not try to do a perfect run.
@@pinkcloudsnightlightbell be ok with failing, go with the flow, do not fear to ''miss out things'', the most important priority of your dude is to get by for the day. Which is pretty fast hard enough.
There's a lesson in there that having actual consequences for your decisions doesn't necessarily lead to a game being enjoyable. Many people play games because they like to build up things (whether it be power, narrative, or their own skill at the game), and having things torn away because you made a mistake can feel terrible.
I gotta say, one of my deepest fears in making a video game or other story is making what I think is a gripping and intricate moral dilemma only to find out I'm the only one who thinks so.
I wonder if a way to make Vampyr more interesting would've been to make fights where the result is other important characters we are supposed to care about are murdered by other vampires if the main character is too weak to defend them. Though, I also think having the game hold to its guns and MAKE you choose is a good option. Forcing players to realize they can't be above it all and if you want to be good overall despite that, you have to think it through and try to do the most good in the story you can.
Apart from forcing the player or making the combat grueling, I feel like the way to tempt the player more than "Oh, here's a flat XP reward" would have been "Oh, here's the actually interesting abilities and combat modifiers and shit. Oh, what's that? You want to use a charge attack? Sure, that one's just over in Little Orphan Jimmy's veins, waiting to be unlocked. Traversal? Well, Mother Theresa over there, who's literally holding this entire convent together, just happens to be pumping a slick, cool dodge roll through her heart..."
I’d personally love the idea of having to give yourself permanent debuffs in order to save NPC’s or accomplish a secondary goal. Giving somebody one of your weapons or PART OF YOUR SOUL or something. Instead of enemies getting harder and harder, they only get a bit harder and you’re either nerfing yourself for the sake of others or breezing through the game. (You should still get buffs and improvements and new weapons and shit, OBVS, but I still think this gameplay sacrifice angle has some weight to it)
Cult of the lamb makes you choose between sacrificing followers and sacrificing health on multiple occasions. The problem is Followers are dime-a-dozen, and health is very limited. I just sold off whoever was old and didnt have much exp. There is one instance you have to sacrifice a named NPC, and they dont let you be a marytr for him. The game early had what you are describing, but the random NPC cultists just failed to endear me. Stop pooping on the floor and maybe I'll stop sacrificing you.
@@aturchomicz821 mate, the game is about running a cult and sacrificing people. I don't know why sacrificing people shocks you. you're the type to get angry people shoot eachother in GTA
The Pitt dlc in Fallout 3 was a fascinating moral choice, in that it asked you to do the right thing overall (free the slaves) by doing something both wrong and personal (kidnap a baby). Even though I knew it would free all the slaves, it was hard to feel it was the right thing when I was standing next to the crib about to kidnap a literal baby.
In addition, the slavers had a proper lab to research the baby's blood, where it was loved and cared for. While the slaves had a shanty shack in a rusty steel mill filled with troglodytes. And you can easily tell the slaves do not give a damn that the cure is a baby and will probably not even try to give it any proper care
It's also a crap dilemma, once you cut through the fluff: Ashur is a self-loathing man with a plan that hates his methods, but understands that they're, at the moment, a total necessity. He does everything for his daughter's future, and gives his "workers" every chance to move up. He's no saint, but he's trying, and consider that he's toiling in what's basically a circle of Hell. Helps that he and his wife are already part-way on a trog-cure. Wernher... Man's a bad Starscream. He just wants Ashur's throne, doesn't actually care about the slaves or the Pitt, seems to have no plan beyond taking over, and clearly doesn't care about the baby beyond it's practical use. He's totally willing to bail if his actions catch up with him, and has no progress on the cure to start. To top it off? If sided with, you pretty much remove the Pitt's army, meaning the trogs will overrun the slaves, and to boot, you free them so they can keep doing what they were doing. I love the Pitt, I do, but the moment you look at it for what it is, there's nothing to debate. Ashur's the good route, Wernher's the bad.
I know bashing Bethesda is popular in the Fallout fandom (and not without reason) but that dilemma is just pure Fallout and might be the best in any game in the series.
Playing Kotr 2 and one of the early moral choices is whether to work with cops to stop a smuggler, or help the smuggler. The dark side option gets far more money and and an extra shop with good gear, whereas the light side option means a vendor gets arrested so you have less money and less options for what to buy. There is an actual punishment for "doing the right thing" that makes it so even a light side character is tempted to stray a bit.
Even as a LS player in KOTOR1, I always killed Bendak Starkiller because you get a sweet blaster out of it. It was too tempting. Of course, the downside of that system is that as long as I was nice otherwise, it was easy enough to wipe clean those few dark side points after not very long.
This may be because I'm inti for Kotor duology, but Kotor 1 and 2 dark side are rather interesting or atleast fun what ifs. Sure going to light side choices for the most part is a no brain despite slighty less resources, however some of the dark side route choices are quite interesting and give you a "it good to play a villain" vibe. That the problem with alot of dark side route in game, the dark side is not a fun or interesting what if or exploration of the characters in a worst case scenario.
So far, the best dilemma I ever got was in Spec Ops: the Line. Riggs is pinned under a semi truck after destroying all the water in Dubai to cover up America's failing in rescuing survivors. The truck is on fire and you have his gun with a single bullet. Do you let him burn because you get one bullet more, or do you shoot him and commit an act of mercy on a man that wants disaster survivors to die so the world doesn't find out about how America fumbled Dubai's evacuation? Doesn't matter what you pick, the water truck won't magically fix themselves. It's genuinely an interesting choice. Also, it's cool that there's different dialogue if you walk away, or watch Riggs burn. It's a nice attention to detail.
God the vampyr discussion is so cathartic to hear. The first hour of that game when I thought I understood how that system was gonna work out absolutely blew my mind. And then immediately the game face-planted as I realised I had absolutely no need to bother with those mechanics.
Right there with you I still play it and while the moral choice system is a pain my biggest issue is if I play it for too long it gets glitchy and I even have to restart it or if I make the mistake of running away from enemies because I'm tired the game freezes and I have to restart it. But I still enjoy it as s fun unwinder.
I quite like how Frostpunk dealt with it's moral dilemmas. Partially because the games hard enough that you do need the options that make immoral laws gives you, but also because as a whole, these laws give you more options, and expand your gameplay choices. Also because doing a bad job meant that people died, there is a corresponding moral counterweight.
I liked Far Cry 2's fairly subtle morality system, where - spoilers for a 16 year old game - if you behave honourably and keep all the other mercenaries alive when you encounter them in the game, towards the end you will be punished for this when they are all told you've betrayed them and they hunt you down to kill you. Thus the easier path is to kill them yourself throughout the game so you don't have to fight them at the end …
Live is Strange pulls of the good vs love motive. It's target audience, teenagers, value love more, the game actually builds up a romantic relationship and the game is a sunk cost phalacy: The inciting incident is saving the loved one and the finale is the realisation of the consequences. As an adult you know what the better choice is, but you can still feel your younger self choosing differently.
I mean... Stripping out the emotional load, it's a choice between one person definitely dying or definite massive property damage (and potential risk of death or injury to the townsfolk if everyone drops the ball).
To add on to what @@RvEijndhoven said, there's also the context that choosing the town feels very much akin to actively killing Chloe, while if you choose Chloe, you know bad things will likely happen to the town, but that it will do so in a way that you can argue you aren't responsible for. Yes, you allowed the tornado to continue through the town, but any deaths/injuries that come from that can be seen as the result of the choices made by the townsfolk (who could have potentially found a safer place to weather the storm). It's effectively a trolley problem. If you pull the handle, a person will die, and if you don't pull the handle, some other people might die. If you give moral weight to the act of pulling the handle (as opposed to passively allowing things to play out as they will) then that can be an interesting part of which decision to make. Ultimately, I think Life is Strange really got the dilemma spot on. The statistics on that final choice are 52% to sacrifice the town, and 48% to sacrifice Chloe. While some people might look at the choice and think the answer is obvious, it's clear that what the "right" thing to do is much more obscure for the general population.
One easy alternative that I think could have fit the narrative better AND avoided the requirement of murdering a town to bring your wife back would have been to change your targets from the living townsfolk to the very ghosts you're dealing with. Rather than making you kill people, require the player to intentionally sabotage the investigations and manipulate the final confrontations in a particular way that then 'fuels' the ritual to resurrect your wife. It could mean damning innocent souls, destroying them entirely, or they could even introduce a third, faustian character who controls the ritual and thus whose instructions you have to follow. The mental separation of "they're already dead" would help disguise the evil you're doing. It would be even more effective if it accelerated as you progressed; the first time is simply hiding a piece of evidence from the townsfolk, later it asks you to condemn an innocent soul or to set a guilty soul free, and then only at the end of the game do you ask the player to finally take a life. Initially display the choice to save her as one of love and dedication with acceptable consequence, then put them in Red's shoes of descending a moral slope and knowing that it was all for nothing if he turned back at the last moment. Hell, that would even allow for additional options about whether you even TELL your wife what you're doing or if you hide it from her and just hope that she can reconcile it once she's alive again.
I remember in Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2, where your choices throughout the game decided whether you got the good or bad endings. Did you kill innocent civilians and pick dark side powers? Then you automatically got the dark side ending where you kill your trusty pilot partner and conquer the galaxy. It's not a particularly great ending and I can't imagine many people actually getting it (the light side powers are significantly more useful - force heal, anyone?), but the fact you don't pick it yourself is what stuck with me - your actions throughout the game decided your fate, not a 'be good or evil' choice at the end. ...this makes the fact that there's a 'be good or evil' choice in Jedi Academy stick out all the more.
That's actually consistent with the themes of Star Wars; that the Dark Side seemingly both by its nature and the kind of people it empowers doesn't let you try to use it for good. Anakin's whole downfall and all; both him and Count Dooku were lied to and led into corruption, and ultimately expendable tools were who were to be disposed of as soon as the next candidate with potential comes along.
Reminds me of _Papers, Please_ where at first I thought this was the case (if you're good enough at the game you can sidestep the money quandaries) but as time as gone on I've realized that it's really not the case; in _Papers, Please_ the better you are at the game the more of a cog you're becoming in the giant authoritarian regime that makes life miserable for everyone. It changes the feeling of being good at the game from "I'm feeding my family, I'm doing okay" to "I'm screwing a lot of people over to feed my family".
Incidentally, the Vampyr review is on my shortlist of favorite ZPs. The jokes are just so good in that one. "Ekons, we made it up." -"I can fuckin tell you did." "Lestat upgrades." "FISH AND CHIPS."
I never liked how the TellTale games could only make your choices appear weighty by always making at least one character complain about what you chose. It made me think of one choice in BG3 that did the opposite. One of my party members was given the choice of eternal servitude to save their family or to be free and presumedly let their family die. I advised the party member to choose the latter, and was pleasantly surprised when no one in my band criticized my character for making that call. The game acknowledged it was a hard decision.
I remember playing the first walking dead season. I liked it as I went on… until I realized that all points led to the same conclusion anyway. It didn’t matter which of two people you saved (when presented with a choice), because the other person was gonna get killed off at the end of that episode or the next anyway. Knowing that, I didn’t bother playing the other seasons. All it had going for it was the story, and your choices didn’t matter. Granted, it probably would be unfeasible to have every decision accounted for throughout the seasons, but they didn’t even matter in a season.
@@mrshmuga9 Yeah, but at least that choice impacted episodes 2 and a bit of 3. Season 3 did it much worse where you're given a similar choice at the end of an episode, but the person that survives dies halfway through the following episode without them doing anything.
I think the Dark Urge from Baldur's Gate 3 is an interesting successor to Vampyr in a way. At the very least, I think that kind of approach, where if a player doesn't choose to commit violence their urges *force* them to in an uncontrolled manner, would've been interesting. Have Vampyr man making under-the-hood checks against his Hunger, and if he hasn't feed in a while... have the Hunger force your hand. You can even tie a few things into that on the combat side: Make some of your real cool vampire powers build a *lot* of Hunger when used. You can definitely *do things* with this concept.
6:26 Raold Amundsen, but to be fair I remember his name because of a game where he fucked up by waking up a sleeping eldritch abomination that was sealed there to prevent it from devouring the Sun
Always wanted to see more Tactics Ogre series discussuon on stuff like this. A series constantly judges everything you do, but mostly just adapts the world to see you differently. In most cases you aren't even really the main character of the story ...the the conflicts are very human, political, and full of subtext that almost no one gets on a first playthrough. Almost everyone is lying to bot only orhers, but often themselves. It's not written to be satisfying, but sensible. Constantly side with one party and get the heir killed...you just get shot, end of stort. Fail to schmooze with the powers that be? "Shame. You're fired, no one cares you killed a God, you're no one." It's so rare to see the series mentioned, but it's really worth examining.
I was so surprised when you were trash talking Vampyre in your interview. When I played it, I had no notion that there was a no-kill option during the tutorial, so I feel like the game had it's complete intended effect for me.
Thinking about Vampyr more, (slight spoilers) in I think the third chapter you are confronted by your first victim, your sister. And if you haven't consumed any of the prior chapter bosses, she gets pissed that you spared them but not her. But we didn't have a choice, the game forced her death, starting the whole more dilemma in the first place. If the game had done that, where if you didn't make a choice, one would be forced on you. That would have been interesting and played more with the 'undeniable' hunger bit. Even more so the love interest is like, ''I can't go on without blood' but we never have any problems and Johnathan even says in the 'good' ending that it can be resisted, so why didn't any of them try? Really not a single vampire before him tries just not drinking blood? Also, the bite attack literally has us drink some of the enemy's blood, so do they not count? Can't we just not drink all of their blood? So many problems come up with these gameplay and narrative choices.
Lies of P has my favorite moral choice system of a recent game. "Lie or Truth" is interesting, because the "best" outcome is nebulous and hard to pin down. It may be kinder to supply a comforting lie, but being truthful might be beneficial in ways you didn't predict. And you may not know which, in your eyes, was the best outcome until much later...if at all.
I did absolutely love Lies of P, but I dunno if it's really a moral choice system. The choices are meant to make you think about the nature of humanity, but in terms of gameplay there's usually one obviously correct option that makes P more human and unlocks more stuff + the true ending.
I enjoyed Vampyr but think Yahtzee's proposed suggestions on how to make it better are solid. It seems stuck in his mind because he views it as a lot of wasted potential that came so close to being brilliant, while for me it sticks as an experience I throughly enjoyed because I engaged in the moral dilemma mechanics throughout but also feel like had it taken just a few more steps it'd been even better. For what it's worth, I also think Banishers is a step backwards in handling the moral complexity Vampyr tried to put forth. I think the big difference is Yahtzee didn't kill anyone because he felt that would lock him out of the good ending while I did kill quite a few people. And you know what? I still got the good ending. The experience was so much better for being granted the moral flexibility but it might've helped the game somewhat if it had made clear going in that you are totally allowed some wiggle room. Kill too many and, yes, I do believe you get a bad ending but that's because you've gone full monster. Kill 3 or 4? Maybe you've just thought long and hard about who deserves it. And indeed killing some NPCs objectively makes the world a better place, such as mercy killing a woman whose been brainwashed by another vampire and is now trapped within her own body and forced to eat rats with no other escape, or killing a woman who abuses her mentally disabled daughter which allows the daughter to live a life free of her. I, personally, played the game with the whole "no kill" mindset until I found a serial killer. Realising there was no other way the game would let me stop him I killed him and was delighted to see the lives of the NPCs around him improved because of it. It encouraged me to engage with the game's moral dilemma mechanic, knowing sometimes I'd get good outcomes and sometimes bad. Would love to see a similar game in the future that leans in harder, maybe making some of the changes Yahtzee suggests in the video to really pull those final disparate pieces together.
There are four endings, based on how many you kill. Getting the best ending does actually require you to not kill anyone. The other good ending gives you some wiggle room.
@@Debatra.Literally the only difference between the "best no kill good ending" and "second best some kill good ending" are if Jonathan and Elizabeth seek a cure for vampirism by travelling the world or staying in the castle. It doesn't feel like one is "better" than the other. People just labelled one "best" because they associate no kill runs as the "good" path.
I think it's a massive oversimplification to say "challenge is what we're here for," when citing that Vampyr makes the game (somewhat) harder if you choose not to kill. A coworker of mine was appalled that I don't play Souls-likes because I don't enjoy the difficulty. His reaction was an incredulous "the difficulty is what makes it fun!" Obviously, given the success and ubiquitous imitation of Dark Souls games, that's true for many people, but Vampyr would have worked for me, because as a PLAYER, I'm there to see things. Characters, narratives, places, special powers, architecture (I do like From Software's architecture, my god), what have you. I don't want to be bored by combat. I want to have to put some effort in, but no, I'm not there for the challenge. I'm there for precisely the same reasons as books, movies, and anything else with a plot and characters. It's just more fun when I'm part of it.
This is why I really like the ending of The Last of Us. Joel always makes that choice regardless of the players. I like that the entire story builds up to that choice instead of an ending where you can choose a preferred outcome
I feel like Banishers' moral dilemma could be interesting if there were pros and cons to both options- not just "banishment is blatantly best for all parties and the only alternative is grisly murder." Off the top of my head- yes, lingering as a ghost is unnatural, with their very presence warping reality and it even hurting the spirit in question to stick around. But some ghosts are perfectly willing to tank that ache and are actively serving as guardian spirits against more malevolent ghosts and even malicious corporeal people, and removing them will not only be sad but will also go against *their* wishes and leave their loved one vulnerable. That would really force you to weigh up the pros and cons of exorcism, and give more weight to the "Is it better for my spouse to linger or leave?" question. (Bonus points if having a ghost partner actively aids in combat and going without is more miserable, but fighting without such a partner nets some other bonus, so the pros and cons weighing bleeds into the gameplay.)
I like your idea for combat: Have Andrea join the girl as a ghost guardian and the longer she sticks around the more murder-y, violent, and unhinged the ghost gets. Eventually, Andrea becomes too erratic to work with her daughter, and the daughter has a choice between exorcising the ghost and learning to survive by herself, or doing a ritual to bind Andrea to her, at the expense of innocents.
The biggest issue with Vampyr's "moral dilemma" was actually something Yahtzee brought up in his review back in the ZP era: Why kill the good people we're attached to when you can feed on every human enemy in the game without killing them? It also hurts the idea of some sort of restriction, why would Vlad (Not gonna bother looking up his name) be blood starved when you can feed on enemies without consequence?
5:27 While this is true for most games, there are a couple that have systems in place that could be considered the “removal of gameplay” that actually work. These are mostly games where the primary gameplay loop revolves around automating resource collection, such as Cookie Clicker, Satisfactory, and Minecraft with the Create mod.
4:33 I don't think Undertale's genocide path is even comparable as a moral dilemma. There's nothing particularly deep about it because it's completely tedious and suboptimal, so the only thing that would drive a player to pursue it is sheer curiosity. The writing only makes you confront your choices by pointing out how disengaged you, the player, must be to have made them. I think it gets too much hype in the moral complexity department, because its only thematic conceit is a metacommentary on your prerequisite lack of investment in the story, which feels kinda hollow at the end of the day. Undertale tends to have more moral dilemmas in the initial neutral playthrough, and the writing shines when you unravel the ways to bypass them in the subsequent pacifist run.
Shakletons voyage and its story may not have been the best dramatic, but the one you most would have wanted to participate yourself. I think it was the greatest adventure despite beeing actually a failure.
Yahtzee’s description of a little girl who needs a spirit’s protection reminds me of Phantom Brave. It wasn’t really interested in the idea of a moral choice, though.
Vampyr is my favorite review from Yatz. The witty humor has layers all weaved and overlapping. All the while giving articulate and informative discussion about the gameplay and story. This review was one of the only reviews that actually prompted me to buy the game he was talking about just to see how cool the game ideas were, failure or success. Really nice to revisit the concept personally.
It's like Bioshock all over again. Not only do you get almost the same amount of Adam for rescuing them, but you also get some really good items for your trouble. That's more true to life though. In real life being an evil dickhead tends to make things harder for you, not easier. We just feel like it's the other way around because the few dickheads who are successful tend to stick out in our memory.
I remember having this thought the other day. It'd be a really interesting idea to see a game that makes it significantly easier to choose the amoral option. As you get better at the game, you could choose more and more heroic options. That would make for a ton of replayability and allow for a great range of difficulty levels, giving players encouragement to test their limits without forcing them to beat their head against a wall for hours.
I was excited for the concept of Vampyr, I was going to try my best to be a good person but then start feeding when the game became too difficult. But it never got too difficult, the difficulty always felt fine and feeding seems like it would have made things too easy. Great concept that needed just a bit of tweaking.
On the topic of Undertale, the popular fangame "Undertale: Yellow" has a facinating level to it's kill/spare mechanics. You play as the yellow "Justice" soul, and are here to judge monsterkind on behalf of the 5 children who fell down here before you. And there's a point to be made for the "Judgement route", wiping the slate and saving the souls of those who came before. You even have a run-in with someone responsible for killing the child with the light blue soul, does he deserve another chance? I would reccommend playing it (or failing that, looking up a playthrough on youtube), as I think it's a great attempt at putting a new spin on the undertale formula. If Portal: Revolution can get a video, Undertale Yellow is well worth time of day. It's free on gamejolt after all.
Yeah I would like to see yatzee thoughts on Undertale yellow. Sure I know he going to be critical of it. I mean I can see take the piss of a certain character in the pacifism route(the character's name start with a C).
This is why I kinda liked the moral choices in the first Dishonoured. Sure you get more combat options and the combat gets easier if you kill people but it's genuinely _fun_ to do a violent route and watch the city turn to apocalyptic shit around you. It felt like your choices were reflected in the world, rather than just the direct plot, there was a kind of dark satisfaction in dragging the city down with you as you made not _bad_ decisions, the outcome was the same, they were just _violent_ decisions.
Honestly the fact that more than a couple of the “spare them” choices are a fate worse than death made them more interesting too. It certainly hammered in the idea that Dishonoured was a game about revenge no matter what way you spun it.
Agreed, I was thinking of Dishonored as well. Its a pity that people think the game punishes the use of powers, when in actuality it just allows you to play the game in different ways. There's no point to using sneaky powers/equipment, if you're just going to murder everything and there's no point to using deadly powers/equipment, if you're just going to sneak around everything. I've not played it, but would imagine that Vampyre could have solved things similarly. If you intend to be a doctor, avoid combat. If you intend to be a vampire, embrace combat.
I’ve always bounced off Dishonored. I simply despise the morality system. The non-lethal route the game narratively incentivizes you to go down is just kinda… boring. ESPECIALLY if the RNG decides to screw you over and not give you the strong-hands charm. All of the most interesting pieces of equipment and abilities are lethal.
I also like the idea of a game that would let you resurrect them with anyone. Sure, this requires a kidnapping mechanic (hopefully mostly done off screen), but you can choose Chuck the baby sniffer.
Roald Amundsen? The south pole station is named Amundsen-Scott, if you remember that it's not too hard to remember. It's like a neat space station, but closer to the ground.
This is why I love Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne. The game doesn't have much of a plot, but it presents you with a bunch of characters that represent perspectives on how life should be. Each one has its positives and negatives. Your job as a player is to decide for yourself which perspective is the better one FOR YOU. There's no real "good guy right answer" at the end, just whatever you think is best after thinking about it.
Granted to me the only real dilemma is that you joined Lucifer(true demon ending) to destroy the cycle or you don't (freedom ending) and just hope stuff like concept doesn't reapprear.
That is one way to look at it, but in all honesty, you're most likely to go either Freedom or True Demon ending on your first play through, as you either try to play everything, or you just play through the main story.
@@Thanatos2k Yeah. Law tends to make you a tyrannical stooge for YHWV while Chaos just makes you the world's biggest asshole. Neutral is both the sanest option for any human being who has touched grass in their lifetime and is often the most fun simply because you get to fight literally everyone worth fighting... and fights are why you're playing in the first place.
Something I feel also came close to an ideal moral dilemma was the Taris levels in Knights of the Old Republic. So your ship came under attack by Sith forces, and your escape pod landed on the planet below. It’s just you and your commander on a planet where the Sith are in charge, and you’ve got to travel into the most treacherous areas to find the Jedi you’re escorting because she’s vital to the war effort. You could be good and help people, but being bad can get you credits or deal with dangerous situations without fighting, because you’re strapped for good gear. There’s bounty targets worth money who’s only crime is pissing off the wrong people. You can agree to side with the bad gang to avoid a confrontation after you’ve worn yourself out fighting to their base. But it’s not quite there yet because several evil choices don’t do much than be a dick for the sake of it. And after fighting into the Black Vulkar base, the guys waiting in the garage aren’t that difficult. The most dangerous foe is a plot mandatory fight no matter what. And exp is more important than credits, which you can get from being good.
I think personally that the best way to do moral choices is tie it to how well certain charecters like you as if we'll written it can genuinely change what the obvious choice is
SuperGiant's Pyre has a similar mechanic to Vampyr's in that if you win the current cycle you get to choose one of your max level team members to permanently save from the jail-like limbo you're all trapped in. So the dilema becomes narrative pay off vs. selfishly keeping your strongest team members in limbo so you keep fighting more effectively
"Could have been cool if you could only fight as the grownup until your power ran out, then th kid has to hide." Sounds like an interesting game mechanic that would make for cool gameplay!
Reminds me of my first playthrough of Knights of the Old Republic 2. Tried to be lightsided, but with some more nuanced choices, then completed ruined my ending by accidentally picking the wrong side in the Civil War planet
Roald Amundsen beat Robert Scott to the South Pole, and made it back alive. But the story goes that, on learning of Scott’s death in the ice, Amundsen blurted out “He’s beaten me!” Scott had achieved immortality through tragedy, and Amundsen’s victory through careful planning and practical decisions was less narratively interesting.
The story in the exploration museum in Oslo is really quite epic, you even get to stand on one of the boats. But yeah - nothing beats tragedy - although both Kon Tiki and Titanic both won Oscars
I've been nursing an idea for a game like Dishonored, where you'd play as a Fantasy thief who tried to steal a magic item, and got possessed by a predatory monster in the process. The plot would revolve around the player-character doing thieving jobs for a wizard, who promised to remove the possessing spirit in due time. However, the spirit would also offer the player-character all sorts of magical powers, similar to the toolkit available in the Dishonored games. The downside - the game's mana equivalent could only be regained by eating fresh meat. Human beings would give the most restoration, though animals would also suffice. This would also be how the player unlocked new abilities. Every piece of fresh meat consumed would provide a semi-random amount of Blood Currency, that could be spent to unlock new abilities. With humans giving way more BC than animals, naturally. So, right away there would be a choice. The player could either stick to mundane thievery, or embrace blood-magic for cool abilities like super-jumps and x-ray vision. They wouldn't even need to commit murder for it, as feeding on animals would be a viable (albeit less lucrative) alternative to maneating. But there would be a second system, of the player-character losing their humanity the more they embraced the spirit's powers. If things got too bad, the spirit would overwhelm the protagonist entirely, and you'd get an ending where the protagonist abandoned civilized life and turned into a monster of urban legend. I imagine this system operating as a slippery slope. The closer the player was to the edge, the greater the impact of every act of predatory violence. The player could go on a maneating spree in the very first level, and get the Monster Ending immediately. I also imagine there being break-points outside of maneating, that would affect how far gone the player-character was. For example, if you actively and directly killed an NPC, that sin would empower the spirit. The more people you killed, and the more often, the more you would fall to monster-dom. But only up to a certain point - if you killed people but never ate them, the fact that you never crossed that line would factor into the story. If the player played completely hands-clean, that would also factor into the story. But if the player did eat people regularly, then they would gain an addiction-meter, where they would start suffering debuffs the longer they went without a meal. This addiction would get worse and worse, the further the player fell into monster-dom. At the highest levels, the player-character might start autonomously moving towards dead bodies to eat them, forcing the player to actively wrangle them back under control. Killing and eating animals would also push the player towards monster-dom, but it would also stop at a certain threshold. This would represent the player-character developing a kind of harmony with the spirit. Feeding it in an ethical way, in return for some (but not all) of its powers. This could factor into the story too, with the protagonist deciding to keep the spirit around after all, forming a symbiotic relationship. Unlocking certain powers could still push the player over the line, however. Anything that made the player-character more directly lethal would do it. X-ray vision has non-lethal applications, the power to devour people on the spot and leave no trace does not. Oh yeah, and the % amount of monstrosity that each act caused would be semi-random, and always hidden from the player. The player would only be able to tell how far gone they were by their visible symptoms. All this would force the player to weigh their moral choices intuitively, rather than numerically. Because they'd never be entirely sure how much wiggle-room they had.
Consume the Little Sisters and get 100 adam.
Or save the Little Sisters and get 90 adam now and 30 adam in ten minutes.
Oh, what to do!
And also some really strong plasmids that you can *only* get if you save them
True, but at that point we are right back at picking the "evil" route just to see the spectacle of what the fuck will happen.@@addammadd
Iirc you do actually get a bit less Adam overall for rescuing all the Little Sisters, but you do get other rewards. Also, you wouldn't know that you get any extra reward for rescuing them without prior knowledge since you have to save three to get the first reward.
True but you don't know that unless you Google it. Saving them is presented as the "harder" choice but I don't get how anyone could just consume them, their kids. Regardless of rewards I don't think there's much choice
Bioshock should not reward you for the good choice. The game would be much better if your powers is obtained only if killing the sisters. Reach a harder section, now you will have to choose if you want the easy and evil way.
It's also mind-boggling when a game's moral compass makes no sense. Look at the original Dishonored: killing the bad guys is morally bad, but leaving them alive but horribly disfigured, enslaved, outcast or otherwise ensuring a slow, painful death at someone else's hands is just peachy. Tell me that a quick knife thrust wouldn't have been more merciful for Lady Boyle than giving her to her stalker as a plaything....
You misunderstand the system. In Dishonored the system is meant to be about chaos, not morality. Killing a lot of people is destabilizing (broken families, bodies for the plague rats to feast on, etc), quitely disappearing one person causes less panic than stabbing them and leaving their body in the street. Some of the chaos value that the game assigns to actions are a bit weird, but the core concept is solid.
@@wintermute5974 yeah, but you could quietly disappear Lady Boyle without anyone ever knowing, and you'd somehow sow more chaos than giving her to the stalker. Same with the Lord Regent, you could play the recording across the citywide intercoms and expose him, but if you disappeared him after that it was high chaos.
@@matthaught4707 Yeah, the IDEA of Dishonored's system is interesting (chaos/panic vs calm), but actual execution...? Off. Yes, killing random people would cause more panic than random people disappearing. But the massive humiliation of a major public figure would, ABSOLUTELY, cause more chaos than their death.
Using a points system on the Lethal and Non-Lethal Options?
Campbell Lethal: 20 Points of Chaos
Campbell Non-Lethal: 50 Points of Chaos
Pendleton Bros. Lethal: 20 Points of Chaos
Pendleton Bros. Non Lethal: 10 Points of Chaos
Lady Boyle Lethal: 10-30 Points of Chaos
Lady Boyle Spoiler Warning Solution (where they kill Boyle AND the perverted Lord Brisby): 0 Points of Chaos
Lady Boyle Non-Lethal: 5 Points of Chaos
Burrows Lethal: 25 Points of Chaos
Burrows Non-Lethal: 100 Points of Chaos
Vampyr could've easily worked in a Little Nightmare's Hunger mechanic where if you didn't eat anyone after a point you literally go feral, someone random goes away, cue upgrades. Then you can't abstain your way through the humanity checks.
@@Thanatos2k dude no kidding! this play through is nuts
@@Thanatos2k but when it comes to the dark urge you can still get away with not murdering any major characters (the unfortunate bard notwithstanding but she was never a companion anyway.) even when the game says youre going to be forced to kill an ally you can still escape that outcome without killing anyone and the only ill effect is that you dont get your funky cool slayer form.
i've never played or watched vampyr but i wouldnt mind it doing a similar thing. your core options are to either drain someone willingly, or go feral and kill someone at random, but if you play the game a certain way and/or get a bit lucky you can resist the hunger and get an Ultra Perfect No One Dies Ending (but in the kind of way where its a non-canonical happy ending because its so hard to achieve. idk)
Or something like after going feral the game locks into a bad ending track, you can't become human-like and the game ends like (read backwards to unspoil) susolloc eht fo wodahs forcing you to engage with the moral dilemma in a reasoned way to get the good ending.
I'm not sure how well that'd work, because for the moral dilemma to really set in, you'd need to actively choose to kill somebody as opposed to the game temporarily taking away control to kill for you. In the latter case, the player might be able to justify the patient's death as the *game* doing the killing and thus absolving themselves of any wrongdoing.
@@glassphoenix9095 You can even avoid the bard if you knock her out nonlethally at the right time, at which point the game spawns in a replacement bard that just exists for you to murder.
The reason why you can get away with not murdering anyone as the Durge is because reformist Durge is a major path you can take, which is fine by me, because it's a damn RPG an you're supposed to be able to play it your way. The bard that dies even gets a mention in the end if you play reformist durge, and for me it hit quite hard because it is written as the point that seriously gets you to push against the Durge if you're going for that playthrough. It works really well and if you killed anyone else it would cheapen the playthrough you're doing. The bard's death and your subsequent success at resisting the urge are a well written hero's story.
I agree with you and Yatzee though that for Vampyr, avoiding those choices is a big problem because the entire game is built around that supposed dilemma.
I think another way that Banisher's moral dilemma could have worked is by questioning if "The dead must move on" Even is the right choice in the first place. Frame it like a form of religious zealotry, where the only reason "The dead must move on" is because the code of order the banishers follow say that the dead must move on. And then add choices where banishing the ghosts is actually the bad choice. Something like, say, a group of orphans lost in the woods who are dependent on a local spirit who took pity on them. Do that, and you might actually have an interesting plot on your hands.
And/or have the female banisher be on the brink of death, her soul is ripped from her still living body, then the choice is “should you banish her because she’s a ghost or should you try to save her because she’s technically not dead yet” (plus removing the “you must unalive possessed individuals to save her” aspect)
The thing is they do sort of question the whole banishing aspect. For every ghost you have the options of Banish, Ascent, or Blame. Blame is the murder option, while Banish and Ascent seem to functionally do the same thing. However if you Banish someone then you later find them in a place called the void which is not a good place to wind up in for eternity. The thing is I didn't know this because on my playthrough I only did ascents because I thought that was the way for the gooderest ending, and I only found out they showed up there by looking it up.
The choice between "continue to follow my religious indoctrination or do the right thing" might be a moral dilemma for the character, but it doesn't create one for the player because they aren't indoctrinated. Like it's a fine story beat but not a dilemma. To be a dilemma you need a reason why the player would see banishment as the right thing to do, but also have a reason why they wouldn't want to.
True, but the ritual murder thing is still kind of a hard sell though
@@wyrmh0le yeah, but the player doesn't need to be unambiguously told that it comes down to religious indoctrination, that should just be something they could decide to be the case
How far we've fallen that Fable 3's dilemma of "Make several unpopular choices as king so your kingdom has the necessary resources to fight off an eldritch abomination, or side with your peoples' opinions while understanding it will leave them severely underpowered when said eldritch abomination shows up" now feels like a superior system, mostly because it has the forethought to include the third option of "Milk the real estate market for every penny, then donate your profits to the war cause so you don't have to upset the people."
I think it was Fable 2 that had the stupid three end-o-tron decision at the end where after sacrificing everything, repeatedly, you could either bring everyone except your loved ones back who had died, bring your loved ones back, or get a pile of cash that you really didn't need.
I picked bringing my family back and the game was like "wow... so selfish I thought you would have brought everyone else back" and it's like "fuck you they died of the plague or bandits. I sacrificed everything including my family I get *something* for my suffering. Also why would 'bring back all the murdered people' *not* include my family, who was murdered?"
And Fable 3's system has the side benefit of infuriating the kind of person who believes that owning real estate is morally equivilent to ritually murdering small children
Also in the Fable Games, the good options were superior in every way. In Fable 3, you can break the economy so hard, being the good king is the most optimal regardless.
@@flatline42 You bring back the people who died in building the Spire. That's why your family is omitted. But of course with the Knothole Island DLC, you could just bring your dog back to life that way. You never see Rose again anyway so there's no real benefits to choosing family anymore.
@@austemousprime Honestly it really wasn't even a matter of _trying_ to break the economy. I dumped a fortune into the kingdom's coffers and still had way more money than I knew what to do with. The bribes you got for going 'evil' were hilariously irrelevant.
"If you remember pogs, consult a doctor because you're old now."
...
Listen here you little...
A while ago I saw someone complaining that playing as a good Person in WH40k Rogue Trader is way harder than being an evil dick, and that's exactly how it should work. The evil path SHOULD be the easy way out, it SHOULD be more difficult to find peaceful solutions, that's how being good and evil works, especially in a setting like 40k that pretty much defaults to evil.
"Is the Dark Side stronger?"
"No. But easier, perhaps."
Honestly, I feel like that's not quite true. The game barely punishes you for playing a good guy. Most companions get stronger from you resolving their quests in a positive way and the 'evil' path has drastic consequences that massively weaken you in the long run, on top of the benefits of Iconoclast being extremely good while the Heretic path benefits mostly give you psyker stuff that, depending on path, could be useless.
Also, the evil path is generally pretty poorly written, it feels like an afterthought, where 80% of all the choices are mustache twirlingly petty sadism and outright *stupidity*, like declaring your loyalty to chaos or whatever in front of a sister of battle or inquisitorial agent while all they do is look at you and go "huh, okay, I don't care" until some arbitrary point in Act 4, well after innumerable atrocities and chaos-strengthening decisions. You can't really *corrupt* most of them, not in any tangible way. At most you get a brief description in the game's epilogue, and that's that.
Sorry for rambling, it just really disappointed me, is all.
A tedious but civil debate of an opponent's peaceful surrender/compliance over a nice cup of tea VS the easier _"might makes right"_ overwhelming firepower and winner takes all gambit.
I wish a game fully leans into that. I mean wholly. Do you want to engage in a civil discussion through textboxes upon textboxes, in a nice comfortable room, where you sometimes have to tactically take breaks and give them time to let the idea simmer... Or go in Battlefield/Arma 3 style and lead a charge against the enemy fortress and subjugate them through sheer force, perhaps even both. Fully play the game without ever shooting a single bullet or decorate the land in casings. An indie dev would be the right person to make such a niche game like that.
It could have lots of ambiguous choices like Yahtzee said, where either choice (or multiple choice) have their good and right, emotional and brutal necessity, subjective and objectively themed answers. They all have their pros and cons, and each choice has ripples across the story. I want every choice to have impact - whether it be macro or micro - I want there to be change. I want the fictional world of this hypothetical game to feel alive. A game that fully delves into both aspects of war, logistics and on the ground. Cause you could make an order to acquire metal due for the war effort, and you have to make a choice to have it come from the citizens or have workers go extra shifts and double the workforce (inevitably leading to more funding need), and on and on.
A war game where you can settle an entire war over some tea and biscuits, or join in the war and personally take part in paving the way forward.
Why tho? If the game is too easy, then it's boring, whether it is a good or evil playthrough.
That's why everyone has so much trouble replicating the tone of "grimdark", it's not compelling just because the individual characters are evil but because the 40k universe is so profoundly messed up that unending xenophobic zealotry is the only way most planets will even survive another decade instead of being overrun by demons.
I'd forgotten that draining your patients was even an option in Vampyr, because it was so immediately obvious that it was the "wrong" path that I just tuned out any prompts to do it for the rest of the game.
Especially when Yahtzee pointed out there doesn't seem to be any reason why the PC can't just ask people to donate a pint or so to help stave off his blood hunger and allow him to keep stopping other vampires that don't care.
"Everybody, I got bit by a vampire and I am able to stave off the bloodlust, but to insure it I might have to ask for you all to donate a pint. I'll even discount your bill for it."
-Zis is France. Ve don't 'ave 'ospital bills
"Oh yeah."
@@Thanatos2k My counter argument: Having games where being bad is good is bad for our society, actually. We need more comforting experiences that deal with the unbreakable power of the human spirit 😊😊
@@Thanatos2k There's nothing to indicate that it's the "true ending" as there's no sequel. I think you meant "happiest ending".
@@redkingrauri3769 Isn't the game set during WWI? The wartime French government would do a whole lot more than secure some blood donations in order to retain the services of a genuinely incredibly successful doctor.
@@aturchomicz821 This. Being forced to do evil is not engaging. Having the option to do evil, but choosing to do good is a far more meaningful narrative theme than "You are a bad guy because gameplay mechanics force you to be."
I think the option to be evil should exist in games alongside the option to do good, with logical consequences for each.
I remember in "Dragon Age", where on my first playthrough as a mage, I sacrificed a child's mother at her request because if she didn't do that, there would be no way to remove the demon from her son and hundreds of innocent people would die--there simply wasn't time to do anything else! It felt like a genuine moral choice with no right or wrong answer.
And...then I found out you could just wander off to the mage tower, leaving the demon to do whatever it wanted for weeks on end (but somehow nobody dies), and get them to do the job without killing anyone.
Yeah DA:O is a great game, but stuff like that always made me confused. Like I never seen a game actually let you just stop the current storyline to do another one, and then resume the last one for a better ending.
I had the exact same experience, and since while on my way there I had a random encounter in camp with the 'not zombies'™ and the map changed a bit so I felt justified. only for my friends to tell me months later.
A thing about Vampyr that killed me the most, was that some of the people you needed to save were just generally horrible people. Like at least 3 of them were actual serial killers, and others deaths would cause some NPC's to live a better life. And while it could lead to an interesting "But where would YOU draw the line" it still feels weird how letting the psychos live is still a requirement for the good ending.
That's how it is in real life though. Doctors take an oath to do no harm, and so no matter how despicable the person is, the consensus in the medical community is that it is your duty to help them.
@@jimskywaker4345 Yeah I had to look this up after I beat it. And yeah I guess that makes it an interesting dilemma. But for the average player like me that doesn't really care about that stuff, it kind of defeats the purpose.
A doctor is the least dramatic job a vampire could possibly have. Doctors have the equipment and skills to safely drain someone of some of their blood, and they will recover. All Dr. Vampire need to do is ask politely for someone, anyone, to donate blood, so Dr. Vampire could keep his head on straight. VAMPYR is absolute forced, artificial drama.
Dr Vampire: Oh the hunger! How it gnaws at me! However can I retain my soul?!? Oh nurse, I just remembered, please order another 3 cases of O+ from the blood bank, we're running low.
You guys realize it's the war torn world of the early 1900's right? It's not 2015 in Sweden.
Equally that's such an obvious solution the characters will definitely have considered it, and since they ruled it out it must not work somehow.
Can't believe they had the chance to use Dr Acula and didn't
@@TheStormbringer8751Blood transfusions have existed for a minute pal. Precolonial south american empires did it, I am sure a european doctor from the era of universities could figure something out.
Just in time for lunch, perfect. Also, “Should I compromise my entire moral basis and crux of my life choices, or do what makes sense considering everything I’ve already done.”
Bro you gotta pace your lunches....
In addition to vampyre. It has to be asked (and im pretty sure you said this same thing back in the original review.) Why can't he just feed on the countless enemies that he is actively trying to kill. They have plenty of blood he could drink without compromising his morals.
Yeah, that was my issue with the game.
"I cannot kill, yet I must..." Dude, you just slaughtered twenty mooks without blinking.
@@TheUltrahypnotoad It's because they have the Spanish Flu. The hospital and other 'hubs' are uninfected, so the blood is 'pure', while the people on the streets are either monsters or on the way to becoming them.
@@TheUltrahypnotoad The term's fallen out of favor due to misuse but this is literally a case of ludonarrative dissonance
Feeding on characters becomes more and more beneficial the more you know them. This was a gameplay mechanic, but they could have expanded on that in the narrative. Make it so that this is a core element of being a vampire: the need to form a bond with your victims in order to live and thrive, while feeding on random strangers is barely enough to survive.
That's how VTM: Bloodlines did it. You needed blood for all your cool powers and healing and you *could* carefully lure innocent people into dark alleys and drink them or just get into a fight and crack open a boy with the cold ones. (And if your blood ran out you'd be forced to drink the closest person, which could make so many things worse on you, which is a pain if you're running a stealth build I can tell you)
Replacing the big Scottish guy with a little girl could work if the wife/mother (yeah, I completely forgot their names) works like how Ender Lillies does, where she can act like a sort of stand that attacks the enemies while the girl is just an anchor point.
But going back to the characters we do have, I feel like making the Scotsman a hypocrite wouldn't be a bad thing. Like, your wife tells you not do it because it's wrong and you have to banish the half of other couples along the way, but you decide to go through with it and that puts a dent in your relationship. If you want there to be a negative effect to the ressurrection, maybe it brings her back crippled, or it makes your nipples fall off, something. But the human sacrifices make it pretty much a no-no.
The thing is I like being a hero in games. So if a game gives me a choice between being a hero and doing bad things I'm gonna pick hero no matter what penalties are applied. Mistreating characters, even nameless NPCs, is rarely fun for me.
The only games that I actively enjoyed being evil in where games based around that from the ground up, like Dungeon Keeper and Overlord, which also didn't take themselves particularly seriously.
I know there is a "good" option in Tyranny, but the game does seem to have the same "being evil from the ground up" design (with the prologue and the way the game explain to you the setting and your background, I am more than happy to be the Fatebinder of the Overlord).
You're far from the only one. I've remembering reading about data from a few games that shows the vast majority of people choose the hero path, especially for a first playthrough.
That's exactly why morally ambiguous choices are important, when the right thing to do isn't obvious. Like choosing between protecting a friend and choosing the greater good. Or between killing an enemy vs sparing them, at least if you don't know how either choose will turn out in the end.
I think Baldur's Gate 3 does that fairly well, though it is still quite a bit too easy to circumvent the downsides of playing a goody two-shoes.
@@FlyingFox86 Well, the Baldur's Gate series as a whole has a tradition of having a lot of pull toward being evil but a narrative more structured around resisting that pull.
@@Drake5607 I tried Tyranny, it was a little too grim for my tastes. I preferred Pillars of Eternity from those guys, especially the second one.
@@FlyingFox86 Specifically Renegade in Mass Effect was a super minority of first time gameplays (looked it up, it was 8%), and even then, Renegade wasn't a "bad" approach.
Seeing that, I'm curious if "Moral dilemmas" in games aren't really meant to be dilemmas, but the representation of a dilemma that the player can go "well obviously I'm not picking *that*" and then feel morally superior for seeing a clear choice where the in-narrative story presents ambiguity and difficulty.
Some games lean into moral ambiguity with real ambiguity and it's obvious they're trying to present difficult decisions to the player, but the kind of cheap moral decisions I kind of wonder what the intent is.
I’m aching for the lawful-chaotic axis to be realised. Let me be a principled bastard or a clumsy saint and everything in between.
Best example I can think of for a bad moral choice is in InFAMOUS 2. The setup is this: You need to get a faction of people to join your cause. You have two options: The Hero path is to break into a hospital run by the enemy faction and steal a medical truck that you will deliver to the neutral faction as a token of goodwill. The Villain path is to have a friend dress up as the enemy and start slaughtering innocent civilians, and then let you "stop" her.
The evil option here is just stupid. Nobody in their right mind would EVER pick that option in real life.
Another one I can think of is the choice to kill or "save" Trish, from the original InFAMOUS, because no matter what you choose, the ending is literally the same.
If you choose to save the doctors (the good choice), then Trish dies after Kessler drops her off a building. If you choose to save Trish (the evil choice), she is suddenly in the group of doctors and dies after Kessler drops them off a building. It's such a stupid moment because the logic of the story literally breaks, making it so that Trish is always on the opposite building, no matter which one you choose to go to.
thats the entire infamous
I think the ONLY interesting dilemma InFAMOUS 2 had was the very last one, where you could either save the island but kill all the super powered people, or evolve humanity at the cost of untold casualities. The caveat to the good guy ending was supposed to be that there was a decent chance that it wouldn't work and it could just kill everyone, making the evil ending the safer bet. The issue is that, of course, the worst won't come to pass no matter what you do up to that point, making the only downside to the good ending that the protagonists die.
Infanous was my first introduction to moral systems in games...
It's also the most egregious in its terrible moral system.
Am I the only one who felt really conflicted about the "good" ending in Infamous 2?
I get where the writers are coming from in a utilitarian sense, but Jesus. This logic could justify genociding the mutants or any "other" group in a fictional story.
I'm not sure genocide should be celebrated even in the context of the game.
"Every conduit died...but it's OK because humanity lived!!!😊"
Even though I'm human, I don't think characters like Magneto or Koba are unjustified. Everyone wants to survive. At some point, I think it's morally neutral to fight for your own survival.
It shouldn't be "bad" to want conduits to live, *ESPECIALLY* if you're a conduit yourself. Yet the game frames it like you're Super Hitler Jesus or something. It's sloppy like the rest of the moral system.
@@kamikazelemming1552 Yeah that part of inFamous was especially terrible. I guess you can try and explain it as "oh, well it turns out the guy setting this trap is future Cole, and he knows what Cole will do, so he can always rig the choice so Trish dies" but even with that in mind, it's still really stupid and really unfulfilling for the player. Why even have a choice at all if both choices lead to the same outcome?
There's a line from a webcomic, forever ago now. True pretty much every time.
"If you have a choice between two things, you can usually tell which one is the right one.
Because it's harder."
If you want moral dilemmas in games to matter, it has to be true in the game too.
So I have a choice of sitting at home and watching anime OR I could become a super villian and destroy humanity... Thanks to you I know the right choice now!
How does that works? How does something being hard is an indicator of being correct?
@@alfredosaint-jean9660 In the vast majority of choices in your life, which ones end up being the best ones?
Between going to work or staying in bed? Between drinking like four more beers or cutting yourself off where you are?
If you're socially anxious, between going to that get-together all your friends are having or staying home? Between calling an elected representative to talk about an issue you're concerned about, or just not bothering?
Between confronting someone about their behavior, be they friend, family member, or outright enemy, or just leaving it be and trying to work around it? Between confronting and overcoming bad habits of your own, or just keeping them?
Between assuming someone's acting in good faith, and writing out an earnest answer to a question that might feel annoying to you? Or assuming the whole thing is a waste of your time?
The examples are legion.
@@Pyre Counter excamples are legion as well, but the silly as Sergeek said and the sane. It is not enough to say this option is harder, its the right one, but it can be a useful guide.
For excample, which is harder; starting a new career in something you've never done but may be the next up and comign thing, or staying in your own career and ensuring you have a steady income and life over all? The first one ios way harder and far more often is the worse decision, which is why most people stay in thier job areas, even if not spesific work places.
@@PyreNot doing something is not making a choice, quite the opposite.
And a definition of good, is the thing that works. When something doesn't work, you have to try harder in order to compensate.
That is the punish of bad choices.
Making good decisions saves you the hard work, is what makes them good in the first place.
Do I fix my floor myself, or do I hire an expert?
The wrong decision will be more time consuming, more expensive, and harder.
3:21 yatzee you are proposing a dad game
exactly. it's guaranteed to win a goty.
@@crediblesalamander8056 Eh, the last true "Dad Game" (because TLOU II is a SEQUEL to a dad game that actually...isn't one and It Takes Two is more "husband game" than "dad game") to WIN at the TGAs (GoW 2018) is coming up on six years ago now. It's pretty easy to conclude that a Dad Game WINNING GOTY is a 2010s trend (Walking Dead Season 1, TLOU, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, God of War 2018) that's on ice.
@@Volvagia1927 Don't forget Bioshock 2
I think that the best moral descisions in games aren’t “be good or be evil” it’s “do the good thing and struggle or do the bad thing and succeed” it’s why I loved papers please so much because the entire game is fundamentally built around the fact that in order to be a good person you need to sacrifice money and potentially get a fine, each good decision has almost like an inbuilt cost associated with it and so you get a tangable dilema of “do I do the right thing for this person and get a fine or do I do the wrong thing so that my family can eat tonight”
When the very first Bioshock was close to release people hyped up the "moral dilemma" of killing the little girls to get Adam (currency to buy abilities) or to cure them and set them free, which is the good boy option and supposedly the harder one gameplay wise because you dont get their Adam. But if you do cure them they occasionally leave you gifts of Adam, dumbing down the choise to whatever you want the good ending or the bad ending.
Harvesting the Little Sisters gives I think 120 ADAM while sparing them gives only 80.
But every 3 Little Sisters you spare they leave a present for you containing 30-50 ADAM and some powerful Tonics (player upgrades) that aren't available to get in the Harvest route.
@@southparkkenny2 I think if they just removed the extra ADAM gifts the girls give you but leave in the Plasmid upgrades, it would still make for a much more effective moral choice that actually impacts gameplay. Do you want to get extra ADAM to unlock more powers, or abstain yourself and potentially get upgrades for ones you already have?
On the harder mode, that difference in Adam does make a difference!
Just once, i would like to see a game whith a moral choice system where the only way to get the "good ending" isn't to do all one way or the other, but rather end up somewhere in the middle because the correct thing to do in each situation differs depending on the context
You could try Pathologic. But I hear it isn’t what people call “fun”
Or hell, maybe the good choice is dependent on the situation
There's a game called Gleaner Heights that tries to be a "darker" Harvest Moon type game, and it tries to offer a moral choice that's POTENTIALLY interesting, but it falls short upon careful examination. Throughout the game, the Mayor offers certain projects that you can fund to make the town a better place (build a playground, stock the library, etc.) as you progress in certain character's stories, you can discover that the owner of the town's hotel has incriminating photos of the Mayor with a young girl (who was also mordored prior to the start of the game) and that he was blackmailing the mayor into implementing those projects that you helped fund. Once you have the photo, you basically have three options.
-Give the photo back to the blackmailer, who will pay you for your compliance and continue to blackmail the mayor into, again, basically making the town a better place
-Give the photo to the Mayor, essentially allowing him to destroy evidence that he was romantically involved with a minor
-Give the photo to literally anybody else in town, exposing the mayor and ending the blackmail. This option leads to the mayor unaliving himself and it gives your character a SIN, which you generally want to avoid to get the game's good ending.
So the game kinda makes it seem like the GOOD option is to side with the blackmailer. Doing something immoral to influence the power of a bad person in order to make positive change.
But at the same time...WHY are those my only three options? The town has a sheriff. The town has a special agent who is specifically there to investigate what happened to the girl. Why can't I get a different outcome by showing the pic to one of them so they can arrest and investigate the mayor, keeping him in protective custody. Once I started thinking about that, I noticed it wasn't that the game gave me a choice where there's no "good" option. It's that a good option clearly exists, but the game doesn't really let you do it.
...Or I guess you could also just not show the photo to anybody, but then the story doesn't go anywhere.
That's really one of the big problems with moral choices in games. Morality is an inherently personal thing, but the available options in a game must be written in by the designers. If they didn't think of every option available, or at least couldn't put them in, it's incredibly difficult to consider it a true moral choice.
The fact you get a sin for the Major reaction to his own actions being exposed, is really ew
@@UltimaKeyMaster I mean even if someone was the epitome of all evil if my actions led to them killing themselves that would probably live rent free in my mind forever
@@mondoeamon360It also really undermines the potential depth of the decision. There are plenty of options to have negative consequences associated with outing the mayor, even if we stick with the basic idea of him committing suicide: The new mayor isn't as willing to move forward with the town improvement projects without being blackmailed, the new mayor has a different conflict of interests within the town that results in businesses not run by him/his friends struggling, the new mayor charges extra for improvement projects to line his own pockets... There are absolutely options to make it more morally grey than "bad guy dies everyone lives happily ever after" that don't involve slapping an arbitrary penalty on your overall evaluation. That just screams "this is obviously the right thing to do, so we contrived a punishment to attach to it to make the choice harder without having to make any meaningful decisions to effect that," and that's just lazy and disappointing when there are so many better ways to attach significant in-game consequences to your decision to make it more complex.
@@dragonicbladex7574 it wasn't your actions. They just didn't want to face the consequences for _their own_ actions.
dontnod games in general always felt like they are just one step away froom being great. like the whole memory editing and combo building in remember me is really cool, but you only get to edit someones memories like 3-4 times across the whole game and the combo building while nice isn't even close to being as good as the one in god hand. it's a game that enters my mind like once a year simply because of how close it was to being great.
The game Clash: Artifacts of Chaos from early 2023 by ACE Team (The Eternal Cylinder, Zeno Clash, Rock of Ages) did a kind of combo building as well, not to the outright extent of God Hand either (though it's still a 3D Fighter/Brawler type adventure) but it does it in a way that provides enough depth.
There's a Normal Attack button and a Special Attack button. You can carry any three Special Attacks by assigning them to Neutral Special, Forward Special and Backwards special at a Training Dummy or a Totem where you have to beat a special enemy for a reward to your moveset.
In comparison, the normal attack doesn't sound as interesting initially. But here's the thing: You can carry any two *Stances* at a training dummy or totem.
And a Stance always consists of
- A combo string
- An attack from a Jump
- An attack from a Hold/Charge
- An attack from a Run
- An attack from a Forwards Dodge, Sideways Dodge and Backwards Dodge.
And if you input a new move at the *moment* your previous attack connects with an enemy, the next one comes out quicker.
Just like Special Attacks, you can find Stances at these Totems and their combat challenges, and all of them have wholly unique animations. No overlapping stuff.
Things like:
- Slash Stance that have quick slashes that hit in a wider range and sideways dodges that return the player character Pseudo to his original position after a quick sidestep
- Spear Stance that provides straightforward attacks from a longer range than most other stances and has a sideways hop kick that still provides the extra range,
- Mammoth Stance is the slowest most powerful stance with stuff like a stunning drop kick, short-range hard-hitting elbow shoves with the Sideways Dodges, and a double haymaker that can be capitalized on by switchin from a quicker stance like Lightning Stance into the Mammoth Stance at the third button input,
and more.
Well worth looking into! As said, in comparison to God Hand it's not as deep or complex, but even in comparison --and on its own merits-- it's a very solid game with *fantastic* art direction, music, and a good story to boot.
Love Life is Strange but yeah that too.
This has made me think of some of the permanent buffs/debuffs you can get in Baldur's gate 3 and how I played my first whole run through occasionally at disadvantage because I'd let my vampire friend feed on me. I had not realised you could just get a cleric to heal the bloodless condition so each time I did it was an absolute deliberate choice of "can I afford to be debuffed ATM?". It's a shame it was so reversible!
It's not just a problem with BG3. Getting any lasting debuff to stick in 5e is damn near impossible.
Which is one of the many reasons why I'm not the biggest fan of BG3 running off of the 5e system even if it makes sense due to it being a DND game.
Vampyr made me think of Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume on DS. That also had a system where you could sacrifice party members for power, but unlike Vampyr it was way more tempting because that game was incredibly difficult. The demon you made a deal with who lets you kill others for power can even add super-powered enemies to missions if she gets annoyed at your lack of bloodlust.
The biggest problem for me with Vampyr is that some characters frankly deserved to die, but you still get punished for draining them. There’s one character who is a serial killer whom, if you kill, is not missed and his mom even ends up adopting a street orphan. You better believe I drained him, as well as a few others (the gang leader, for example). And for it, the second purest ending is, in my view, the more satisfying and emotionally fulfilling ending despite it technically being a middling one in terms of morality.
@@Thanatos2kQuestion: is the most “good” ending actually the “true” ending, or is that just an assumption? I’ve only seen a play through (will get around to it myself eventually) where they got that mixed end and yeah it seemed to fit the best with certain characters getting better ends for offing clear villains.
@Thanatos2k You get two achievements for beating Deus Ex Human Revolution without killing anyone* and without raising any alarms. That doesn’t mean that playthrough is canon, especially since you still have to kill the major bosses anyway to proceed.
"Considering the theme of 'the dead must move on'" - For a moment I thought The Dead Must Move On was the name of the game. But I guess having a name without a subtitle is verboten.
Funnily enough I could see Yahtzee or someone saying the title is "a bit on the nose" even if the game didn't fumble its moral "dilemma" again. That or it would still have an unnecessary colon somewhere in the title.
@@MusicoftheDamnedThe Dead Episode I: Must Move On
I mean that makes for a pretty good subtitle
I quite liked the moral dilemmas in SOMA. They gave you pause for thought for what would really be the right thing based entirely on the scenario the main character had found himself in that he was still coming to grips eith every step of the way, and because there was no gameplay incentive you were thinking more about the implications of the choice itself rather than what reward or ending it would give you. They tied in beautifully to the theme of the game.
Soma was amazing and I wish I could stand horror games more instead of just watching the Best Bits. The main character continues to not understand it through the whole game.
yes! great point. SOMA was so bleak and i love that they committed to that
Agreed 110%. It actually got me thinking about it way more than any other choice in games with an actual game consequence. And I believe I even changed my mind in the interview at the end, compared with the one you do early on. Soma is without a doubt one of the best games I've ever played.
I swear, every time Yahtzee either praises a mechanic, or in this case, highlights a mechanic that could have been brilliant had it been tweaked slightly, which also happens to have been perfectly executed in Pathologic 2, I grow a few more grey hairs. He has stated multiple times that he will never try to play it again, as his first experience with it was quite negative, which is of course perfectly fair. Pathologic 2 is one of the most brilliant cases of story interwoven into gameplay I can possibly think of, and I wish its brilliance reached more people honestly.
I was immediately reminded of Pathologic when I watched his original Vampyr review lol. Probably a bit too hard for Yahtzee's taste, even if you do not try to do a perfect run.
@@pinkcloudsnightlightbell be ok with failing, go with the flow, do not fear to ''miss out things'', the most important priority of your dude is to get by for the day. Which is pretty fast hard enough.
I know right I was thinking the exact same thing, its torture for a Pathologic 2 fan (Which is apropriate since I am a Pathologic 2 fan ...)
There's a lesson in there that having actual consequences for your decisions doesn't necessarily lead to a game being enjoyable. Many people play games because they like to build up things (whether it be power, narrative, or their own skill at the game), and having things torn away because you made a mistake can feel terrible.
I gotta say, one of my deepest fears in making a video game or other story is making what I think is a gripping and intricate moral dilemma only to find out I'm the only one who thinks so.
I wonder if a way to make Vampyr more interesting would've been to make fights where the result is other important characters we are supposed to care about are murdered by other vampires if the main character is too weak to defend them. Though, I also think having the game hold to its guns and MAKE you choose is a good option. Forcing players to realize they can't be above it all and if you want to be good overall despite that, you have to think it through and try to do the most good in the story you can.
Sounds almost like the suspicious beggar questline from Bloodborne.
Choose to feed on someone so you're strong enough to stop the other vamp from feeding on someone at random?
Apart from forcing the player or making the combat grueling, I feel like the way to tempt the player more than "Oh, here's a flat XP reward" would have been "Oh, here's the actually interesting abilities and combat modifiers and shit. Oh, what's that? You want to use a charge attack? Sure, that one's just over in Little Orphan Jimmy's veins, waiting to be unlocked. Traversal? Well, Mother Theresa over there, who's literally holding this entire convent together, just happens to be pumping a slick, cool dodge roll through her heart..."
I’d personally love the idea of having to give yourself permanent debuffs in order to save NPC’s or accomplish a secondary goal. Giving somebody one of your weapons or PART OF YOUR SOUL or something. Instead of enemies getting harder and harder, they only get a bit harder and you’re either nerfing yourself for the sake of others or breezing through the game. (You should still get buffs and improvements and new weapons and shit, OBVS, but I still think this gameplay sacrifice angle has some weight to it)
Cult of the lamb makes you choose between sacrificing followers and sacrificing health on multiple occasions. The problem is Followers are dime-a-dozen, and health is very limited. I just sold off whoever was old and didnt have much exp. There is one instance you have to sacrifice a named NPC, and they dont let you be a marytr for him. The game early had what you are describing, but the random NPC cultists just failed to endear me. Stop pooping on the floor and maybe I'll stop sacrificing you.
You might like LISA.
@@jinjar7453 Easy Empathy Check; Catastrophic failure🙄🙄
@@aturchomicz821 mate, the game is about running a cult and sacrificing people. I don't know why sacrificing people shocks you. you're the type to get angry people shoot eachother in GTA
The Pitt dlc in Fallout 3 was a fascinating moral choice, in that it asked you to do the right thing overall (free the slaves) by doing something both wrong and personal (kidnap a baby). Even though I knew it would free all the slaves, it was hard to feel it was the right thing when I was standing next to the crib about to kidnap a literal baby.
In addition, the slavers had a proper lab to research the baby's blood, where it was loved and cared for.
While the slaves had a shanty shack in a rusty steel mill filled with troglodytes.
And you can easily tell the slaves do not give a damn that the cure is a baby and will probably not even try to give it any proper care
you mean you didn't eat the baby?
@@MrDrury27 That's not even possible without modding the game
It's also a crap dilemma, once you cut through the fluff: Ashur is a self-loathing man with a plan that hates his methods, but understands that they're, at the moment, a total necessity. He does everything for his daughter's future, and gives his "workers" every chance to move up. He's no saint, but he's trying, and consider that he's toiling in what's basically a circle of Hell. Helps that he and his wife are already part-way on a trog-cure.
Wernher... Man's a bad Starscream. He just wants Ashur's throne, doesn't actually care about the slaves or the Pitt, seems to have no plan beyond taking over, and clearly doesn't care about the baby beyond it's practical use. He's totally willing to bail if his actions catch up with him, and has no progress on the cure to start. To top it off? If sided with, you pretty much remove the Pitt's army, meaning the trogs will overrun the slaves, and to boot, you free them so they can keep doing what they were doing.
I love the Pitt, I do, but the moment you look at it for what it is, there's nothing to debate. Ashur's the good route, Wernher's the bad.
I know bashing Bethesda is popular in the Fallout fandom (and not without reason) but that dilemma is just pure Fallout and might be the best in any game in the series.
Playing Kotr 2 and one of the early moral choices is whether to work with cops to stop a smuggler, or help the smuggler. The dark side option gets far more money and and an extra shop with good gear, whereas the light side option means a vendor gets arrested so you have less money and less options for what to buy. There is an actual punishment for "doing the right thing" that makes it so even a light side character is tempted to stray a bit.
Even as a LS player in KOTOR1, I always killed Bendak Starkiller because you get a sweet blaster out of it. It was too tempting. Of course, the downside of that system is that as long as I was nice otherwise, it was easy enough to wipe clean those few dark side points after not very long.
This may be because I'm inti for Kotor duology, but Kotor 1 and 2 dark side are rather interesting or atleast fun what ifs. Sure going to light side choices for the most part is a no brain despite slighty less resources, however some of the dark side route choices are quite interesting and give you a "it good to play a villain" vibe. That the problem with alot of dark side route in game, the dark side is not a fun or interesting what if or exploration of the characters in a worst case scenario.
So far, the best dilemma I ever got was in Spec Ops: the Line. Riggs is pinned under a semi truck after destroying all the water in Dubai to cover up America's failing in rescuing survivors. The truck is on fire and you have his gun with a single bullet. Do you let him burn because you get one bullet more, or do you shoot him and commit an act of mercy on a man that wants disaster survivors to die so the world doesn't find out about how America fumbled Dubai's evacuation? Doesn't matter what you pick, the water truck won't magically fix themselves. It's genuinely an interesting choice.
Also, it's cool that there's different dialogue if you walk away, or watch Riggs burn. It's a nice attention to detail.
Spec Ops The Line...
Until 2019 I never knew just how complex that game was. But I unfortunately never bought it before being dusted from Steam
@@nairocamilo its removal from Steam was a travesty.
@@nairocamilo Glad I got a physical copy for $5.
God the vampyr discussion is so cathartic to hear. The first hour of that game when I thought I understood how that system was gonna work out absolutely blew my mind. And then immediately the game face-planted as I realised I had absolutely no need to bother with those mechanics.
Man, I've wanted Vampyr to get this kind of credit for years and years. You nailed it: it was so close to greatness but just didn't quite make it.
Right there with you I still play it and while the moral choice system is a pain my biggest issue is if I play it for too long it gets glitchy and I even have to restart it or if I make the mistake of running away from enemies because I'm tired the game freezes and I have to restart it. But I still enjoy it as s fun unwinder.
I quite like how Frostpunk dealt with it's moral dilemmas. Partially because the games hard enough that you do need the options that make immoral laws gives you, but also because as a whole, these laws give you more options, and expand your gameplay choices. Also because doing a bad job meant that people died, there is a corresponding moral counterweight.
"The closer to truth a fiction is without being so, the more dangerous it is"
and that danger is what makes a thing alluring or at least exciting
I call this "Fallout 3 morality". When a game tries to be about choices but the only choices are "hero" or "literal psychopath"
I liked Far Cry 2's fairly subtle morality system, where - spoilers for a 16 year old game - if you behave honourably and keep all the other mercenaries alive when you encounter them in the game, towards the end you will be punished for this when they are all told you've betrayed them and they hunt you down to kill you. Thus the easier path is to kill them yourself throughout the game so you don't have to fight them at the end …
@@ashuggtube The problem is it didn't really make sense that literally none of them doubted what they were told, from what I recalled.
@@PhysicsGamerI imagined they were told Extremely Convincingly™
Live is Strange pulls of the good vs love motive. It's target audience, teenagers, value love more, the game actually builds up a romantic relationship and the game is a sunk cost phalacy: The inciting incident is saving the loved one and the finale is the realisation of the consequences. As an adult you know what the better choice is, but you can still feel your younger self choosing differently.
And that was ALSO by Dontnod. It's like their moral choice dillema systems get even worse with time.
I mean... Stripping out the emotional load, it's a choice between one person definitely dying or definite massive property damage (and potential risk of death or injury to the townsfolk if everyone drops the ball).
To add on to what @@RvEijndhoven said, there's also the context that choosing the town feels very much akin to actively killing Chloe, while if you choose Chloe, you know bad things will likely happen to the town, but that it will do so in a way that you can argue you aren't responsible for. Yes, you allowed the tornado to continue through the town, but any deaths/injuries that come from that can be seen as the result of the choices made by the townsfolk (who could have potentially found a safer place to weather the storm). It's effectively a trolley problem. If you pull the handle, a person will die, and if you don't pull the handle, some other people might die. If you give moral weight to the act of pulling the handle (as opposed to passively allowing things to play out as they will) then that can be an interesting part of which decision to make.
Ultimately, I think Life is Strange really got the dilemma spot on. The statistics on that final choice are 52% to sacrifice the town, and 48% to sacrifice Chloe. While some people might look at the choice and think the answer is obvious, it's clear that what the "right" thing to do is much more obscure for the general population.
Um, I think you mean *fallacy… phalacy would be something quite different 😳
One easy alternative that I think could have fit the narrative better AND avoided the requirement of murdering a town to bring your wife back would have been to change your targets from the living townsfolk to the very ghosts you're dealing with. Rather than making you kill people, require the player to intentionally sabotage the investigations and manipulate the final confrontations in a particular way that then 'fuels' the ritual to resurrect your wife. It could mean damning innocent souls, destroying them entirely, or they could even introduce a third, faustian character who controls the ritual and thus whose instructions you have to follow. The mental separation of "they're already dead" would help disguise the evil you're doing. It would be even more effective if it accelerated as you progressed; the first time is simply hiding a piece of evidence from the townsfolk, later it asks you to condemn an innocent soul or to set a guilty soul free, and then only at the end of the game do you ask the player to finally take a life. Initially display the choice to save her as one of love and dedication with acceptable consequence, then put them in Red's shoes of descending a moral slope and knowing that it was all for nothing if he turned back at the last moment.
Hell, that would even allow for additional options about whether you even TELL your wife what you're doing or if you hide it from her and just hope that she can reconcile it once she's alive again.
I remember in Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2, where your choices throughout the game decided whether you got the good or bad endings. Did you kill innocent civilians and pick dark side powers? Then you automatically got the dark side ending where you kill your trusty pilot partner and conquer the galaxy. It's not a particularly great ending and I can't imagine many people actually getting it (the light side powers are significantly more useful - force heal, anyone?), but the fact you don't pick it yourself is what stuck with me - your actions throughout the game decided your fate, not a 'be good or evil' choice at the end.
...this makes the fact that there's a 'be good or evil' choice in Jedi Academy stick out all the more.
@@Thanatos2k Plus, you don't have to go secret hunting to fully upgrade those powers. Jedi Outcast is such an improvement over Jedi Knight.
That's actually consistent with the themes of Star Wars; that the Dark Side seemingly both by its nature and the kind of people it empowers doesn't let you try to use it for good. Anakin's whole downfall and all; both him and Count Dooku were lied to and led into corruption, and ultimately expendable tools were who were to be disposed of as soon as the next candidate with potential comes along.
Holy shit ∆V? getting an ad? On RUclips? Localized entirely within the Second Wind channel?
Absolute ringer victory.
I thought the same thing! I am about to switch ships (as soon as I stop being addicted to DBD and Swirl W@tch)
I saw that game a while back and thought it looked really interesting, but had forgotten about it!
Reminds me of _Papers, Please_ where at first I thought this was the case (if you're good enough at the game you can sidestep the money quandaries) but as time as gone on I've realized that it's really not the case; in _Papers, Please_ the better you are at the game the more of a cog you're becoming in the giant authoritarian regime that makes life miserable for everyone. It changes the feeling of being good at the game from "I'm feeding my family, I'm doing okay" to "I'm screwing a lot of people over to feed my family".
I always enjoy this series, but this is honestly the best six minutes of instructional writing on game design I've seen
Scott should have remembered the age old advice of "watch where them huskies go, don't eat the yellow snow".
"Is that a real poncho, or is that a Sears poncho?."
Incidentally, the Vampyr review is on my shortlist of favorite ZPs. The jokes are just so good in that one.
"Ekons, we made it up."
-"I can fuckin tell you did."
"Lestat upgrades."
"FISH AND CHIPS."
I personally enjoyed his representation of Life is Strange's dialogue in that one
Hella Baguettes Yo!
I never liked how the TellTale games could only make your choices appear weighty by always making at least one character complain about what you chose.
It made me think of one choice in BG3 that did the opposite. One of my party members was given the choice of eternal servitude to save their family or to be free and presumedly let their family die. I advised the party member to choose the latter, and was pleasantly surprised when no one in my band criticized my character for making that call. The game acknowledged it was a hard decision.
I remember playing the first walking dead season. I liked it as I went on… until I realized that all points led to the same conclusion anyway. It didn’t matter which of two people you saved (when presented with a choice), because the other person was gonna get killed off at the end of that episode or the next anyway. Knowing that, I didn’t bother playing the other seasons. All it had going for it was the story, and your choices didn’t matter. Granted, it probably would be unfeasible to have every decision accounted for throughout the seasons, but they didn’t even matter in a season.
@@mrshmuga9 Yeah, but at least that choice impacted episodes 2 and a bit of 3. Season 3 did it much worse where you're given a similar choice at the end of an episode, but the person that survives dies halfway through the following episode without them doing anything.
It's oddly fascinating how often Vampayurrr pops up on these. Huh.
Because it was really close to being amazing but it felt flat into mediocre
It was made by the same people.
If nothing else, it's very interesting to talk about. I'd call that a win for gaming as a whole
I just love the way he pronounces it.
I actually really enjoyed it, but I liked dontnod before this
I think the Dark Urge from Baldur's Gate 3 is an interesting successor to Vampyr in a way. At the very least, I think that kind of approach, where if a player doesn't choose to commit violence their urges *force* them to in an uncontrolled manner, would've been interesting. Have Vampyr man making under-the-hood checks against his Hunger, and if he hasn't feed in a while... have the Hunger force your hand. You can even tie a few things into that on the combat side: Make some of your real cool vampire powers build a *lot* of Hunger when used. You can definitely *do things* with this concept.
6:26 Raold Amundsen, but to be fair I remember his name because of a game where he fucked up by waking up a sleeping eldritch abomination that was sealed there to prevent it from devouring the Sun
Always wanted to see more Tactics Ogre series discussuon on stuff like this. A series constantly judges everything you do, but mostly just adapts the world to see you differently. In most cases you aren't even really the main character of the story ...the the conflicts are very human, political, and full of subtext that almost no one gets on a first playthrough. Almost everyone is lying to bot only orhers, but often themselves. It's not written to be satisfying, but sensible. Constantly side with one party and get the heir killed...you just get shot, end of stort. Fail to schmooze with the powers that be? "Shame. You're fired, no one cares you killed a God, you're no one."
It's so rare to see the series mentioned, but it's really worth examining.
Matsuno is a genius, shame the last thing he did was write for a raid in final fantasy xiv.
I was so surprised when you were trash talking Vampyre in your interview. When I played it, I had no notion that there was a no-kill option during the tutorial, so I feel like the game had it's complete intended effect for me.
Thinking about Vampyr more, (slight spoilers) in I think the third chapter you are confronted by your first victim, your sister. And if you haven't consumed any of the prior chapter bosses, she gets pissed that you spared them but not her. But we didn't have a choice, the game forced her death, starting the whole more dilemma in the first place. If the game had done that, where if you didn't make a choice, one would be forced on you. That would have been interesting and played more with the 'undeniable' hunger bit. Even more so the love interest is like, ''I can't go on without blood' but we never have any problems and Johnathan even says in the 'good' ending that it can be resisted, so why didn't any of them try? Really not a single vampire before him tries just not drinking blood? Also, the bite attack literally has us drink some of the enemy's blood, so do they not count? Can't we just not drink all of their blood? So many problems come up with these gameplay and narrative choices.
Lies of P has my favorite moral choice system of a recent game. "Lie or Truth" is interesting, because the "best" outcome is nebulous and hard to pin down. It may be kinder to supply a comforting lie, but being truthful might be beneficial in ways you didn't predict. And you may not know which, in your eyes, was the best outcome until much later...if at all.
I did absolutely love Lies of P, but I dunno if it's really a moral choice system. The choices are meant to make you think about the nature of humanity, but in terms of gameplay there's usually one obviously correct option that makes P more human and unlocks more stuff + the true ending.
I enjoyed Vampyr but think Yahtzee's proposed suggestions on how to make it better are solid. It seems stuck in his mind because he views it as a lot of wasted potential that came so close to being brilliant, while for me it sticks as an experience I throughly enjoyed because I engaged in the moral dilemma mechanics throughout but also feel like had it taken just a few more steps it'd been even better. For what it's worth, I also think Banishers is a step backwards in handling the moral complexity Vampyr tried to put forth.
I think the big difference is Yahtzee didn't kill anyone because he felt that would lock him out of the good ending while I did kill quite a few people. And you know what? I still got the good ending.
The experience was so much better for being granted the moral flexibility but it might've helped the game somewhat if it had made clear going in that you are totally allowed some wiggle room. Kill too many and, yes, I do believe you get a bad ending but that's because you've gone full monster. Kill 3 or 4? Maybe you've just thought long and hard about who deserves it.
And indeed killing some NPCs objectively makes the world a better place, such as mercy killing a woman whose been brainwashed by another vampire and is now trapped within her own body and forced to eat rats with no other escape, or killing a woman who abuses her mentally disabled daughter which allows the daughter to live a life free of her. I, personally, played the game with the whole "no kill" mindset until I found a serial killer. Realising there was no other way the game would let me stop him I killed him and was delighted to see the lives of the NPCs around him improved because of it. It encouraged me to engage with the game's moral dilemma mechanic, knowing sometimes I'd get good outcomes and sometimes bad.
Would love to see a similar game in the future that leans in harder, maybe making some of the changes Yahtzee suggests in the video to really pull those final disparate pieces together.
There are four endings, based on how many you kill. Getting the best ending does actually require you to not kill anyone. The other good ending gives you some wiggle room.
@@Debatra.Literally the only difference between the "best no kill good ending" and "second best some kill good ending" are if Jonathan and Elizabeth seek a cure for vampirism by travelling the world or staying in the castle. It doesn't feel like one is "better" than the other. People just labelled one "best" because they associate no kill runs as the "good" path.
Your "kid who can't fight dependant on ghosts who can" has been made! Phantom Brave!
I think it's a massive oversimplification to say "challenge is what we're here for," when citing that Vampyr makes the game (somewhat) harder if you choose not to kill. A coworker of mine was appalled that I don't play Souls-likes because I don't enjoy the difficulty. His reaction was an incredulous "the difficulty is what makes it fun!" Obviously, given the success and ubiquitous imitation of Dark Souls games, that's true for many people, but Vampyr would have worked for me, because as a PLAYER, I'm there to see things. Characters, narratives, places, special powers, architecture (I do like From Software's architecture, my god), what have you. I don't want to be bored by combat. I want to have to put some effort in, but no, I'm not there for the challenge. I'm there for precisely the same reasons as books, movies, and anything else with a plot and characters. It's just more fun when I'm part of it.
This is why I really like the ending of The Last of Us. Joel always makes that choice regardless of the players. I like that the entire story builds up to that choice instead of an ending where you can choose a preferred outcome
Amundsen. That's why it's called Amundsen Scott Station.
You think he would be the cooler of the too but I suppose you can't be much cooler than someone who froze to death.
love the pog addition to the ad
One thing I found wild was the fact that Dr Reid's VA also played a pretty similar character in that disappointing Cthulhu game.
The presence of a game whose name has a *colon* in it in an ad from a Yahtzee video really threw me for a loop.
I feel like Banishers' moral dilemma could be interesting if there were pros and cons to both options- not just "banishment is blatantly best for all parties and the only alternative is grisly murder."
Off the top of my head- yes, lingering as a ghost is unnatural, with their very presence warping reality and it even hurting the spirit in question to stick around. But some ghosts are perfectly willing to tank that ache and are actively serving as guardian spirits against more malevolent ghosts and even malicious corporeal people, and removing them will not only be sad but will also go against *their* wishes and leave their loved one vulnerable. That would really force you to weigh up the pros and cons of exorcism, and give more weight to the "Is it better for my spouse to linger or leave?" question. (Bonus points if having a ghost partner actively aids in combat and going without is more miserable, but fighting without such a partner nets some other bonus, so the pros and cons weighing bleeds into the gameplay.)
I like your idea for combat: Have Andrea join the girl as a ghost guardian and the longer she sticks around the more murder-y, violent, and unhinged the ghost gets.
Eventually, Andrea becomes too erratic to work with her daughter, and the daughter has a choice between exorcising the ghost and learning to survive by herself, or doing a ritual to bind Andrea to her, at the expense of innocents.
I really want to play a game that locks the ability to turn left as a punishment for something.
@@louisduarte8763 By what I remember, that was a modified version of the game Rocksteady intentionally "leaked" to screw with pirates.
Sounds like something like Rogue Legacy would do.
Sounds terrible. I love it.
The biggest issue with Vampyr's "moral dilemma" was actually something Yahtzee brought up in his review back in the ZP era:
Why kill the good people we're attached to when you can feed on every human enemy in the game without killing them? It also hurts the idea of some sort of restriction, why would Vlad (Not gonna bother looking up his name) be blood starved when you can feed on enemies without consequence?
"please consult a doctor... because you are old" Jack both wounds me terribly, and makes me laugh 😆
5:27 While this is true for most games, there are a couple that have systems in place that could be considered the “removal of gameplay” that actually work. These are mostly games where the primary gameplay loop revolves around automating resource collection, such as Cookie Clicker, Satisfactory, and Minecraft with the Create mod.
4:33 I don't think Undertale's genocide path is even comparable as a moral dilemma. There's nothing particularly deep about it because it's completely tedious and suboptimal, so the only thing that would drive a player to pursue it is sheer curiosity. The writing only makes you confront your choices by pointing out how disengaged you, the player, must be to have made them. I think it gets too much hype in the moral complexity department, because its only thematic conceit is a metacommentary on your prerequisite lack of investment in the story, which feels kinda hollow at the end of the day. Undertale tends to have more moral dilemmas in the initial neutral playthrough, and the writing shines when you unravel the ways to bypass them in the subsequent pacifist run.
Shakletons voyage and its story may not have been the best dramatic, but the one you most would have wanted to participate yourself. I think it was the greatest adventure despite beeing actually a failure.
Yahtzee’s description of a little girl who needs a spirit’s protection reminds me of Phantom Brave. It wasn’t really interested in the idea of a moral choice, though.
Vampyr is my favorite review from Yatz. The witty humor has layers all weaved and overlapping. All the while giving articulate and informative discussion about the gameplay and story. This review was one of the only reviews that actually prompted me to buy the game he was talking about just to see how cool the game ideas were, failure or success. Really nice to revisit the concept personally.
It's like Bioshock all over again. Not only do you get almost the same amount of Adam for rescuing them, but you also get some really good items for your trouble. That's more true to life though. In real life being an evil dickhead tends to make things harder for you, not easier. We just feel like it's the other way around because the few dickheads who are successful tend to stick out in our memory.
I remember having this thought the other day. It'd be a really interesting idea to see a game that makes it significantly easier to choose the amoral option. As you get better at the game, you could choose more and more heroic options. That would make for a ton of replayability and allow for a great range of difficulty levels, giving players encouragement to test their limits without forcing them to beat their head against a wall for hours.
I was excited for the concept of Vampyr, I was going to try my best to be a good person but then start feeding when the game became too difficult. But it never got too difficult, the difficulty always felt fine and feeding seems like it would have made things too easy. Great concept that needed just a bit of tweaking.
You know, Mass Effect Andromeda actually did this perfectly (except that one instance with the Krogan colony).
On the topic of Undertale, the popular fangame "Undertale: Yellow" has a facinating level to it's kill/spare mechanics. You play as the yellow "Justice" soul, and are here to judge monsterkind on behalf of the 5 children who fell down here before you. And there's a point to be made for the "Judgement route", wiping the slate and saving the souls of those who came before. You even have a run-in with someone responsible for killing the child with the light blue soul, does he deserve another chance? I would reccommend playing it (or failing that, looking up a playthrough on youtube), as I think it's a great attempt at putting a new spin on the undertale formula. If Portal: Revolution can get a video, Undertale Yellow is well worth time of day. It's free on gamejolt after all.
Yeah I would like to see yatzee thoughts on Undertale yellow. Sure I know he going to be critical of it. I mean I can see take the piss of a certain character in the pacifism route(the character's name start with a C).
Thanks for bringing up Vampyr and why it also lives rent free for me.
This is why I kinda liked the moral choices in the first Dishonoured. Sure you get more combat options and the combat gets easier if you kill people but it's genuinely _fun_ to do a violent route and watch the city turn to apocalyptic shit around you.
It felt like your choices were reflected in the world, rather than just the direct plot, there was a kind of dark satisfaction in dragging the city down with you as you made not _bad_ decisions, the outcome was the same, they were just _violent_ decisions.
Honestly the fact that more than a couple of the “spare them” choices are a fate worse than death made them more interesting too. It certainly hammered in the idea that Dishonoured was a game about revenge no matter what way you spun it.
Agreed, I was thinking of Dishonored as well. Its a pity that people think the game punishes the use of powers, when in actuality it just allows you to play the game in different ways. There's no point to using sneaky powers/equipment, if you're just going to murder everything and there's no point to using deadly powers/equipment, if you're just going to sneak around everything.
I've not played it, but would imagine that Vampyre could have solved things similarly. If you intend to be a doctor, avoid combat. If you intend to be a vampire, embrace combat.
I’ve always bounced off Dishonored. I simply despise the morality system. The non-lethal route the game narratively incentivizes you to go down is just kinda… boring. ESPECIALLY if the RNG decides to screw you over and not give you the strong-hands charm. All of the most interesting pieces of equipment and abilities are lethal.
I also like the idea of a game that would let you resurrect them with anyone. Sure, this requires a kidnapping mechanic (hopefully mostly done off screen), but you can choose Chuck the baby sniffer.
6:42 DELTA V SPONSORSHIP! I LOVE THIS GAME! I PLAY IT A LOT! WOOOOOO
Roald Amundsen? The south pole station is named Amundsen-Scott, if you remember that it's not too hard to remember. It's like a neat space station, but closer to the ground.
This is why I love Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne. The game doesn't have much of a plot, but it presents you with a bunch of characters that represent perspectives on how life should be. Each one has its positives and negatives.
Your job as a player is to decide for yourself which perspective is the better one FOR YOU. There's no real "good guy right answer" at the end, just whatever you think is best after thinking about it.
Granted to me the only real dilemma is that you joined Lucifer(true demon ending) to destroy the cycle or you don't (freedom ending) and just hope stuff like concept doesn't reapprear.
That is one way to look at it, but in all honesty, you're most likely to go either Freedom or True Demon ending on your first play through, as you either try to play everything, or you just play through the main story.
@@Thanatos2k Yeah. Law tends to make you a tyrannical stooge for YHWV while Chaos just makes you the world's biggest asshole. Neutral is both the sanest option for any human being who has touched grass in their lifetime and is often the most fun simply because you get to fight literally everyone worth fighting... and fights are why you're playing in the first place.
Something I feel also came close to an ideal moral dilemma was the Taris levels in Knights of the Old Republic.
So your ship came under attack by Sith forces, and your escape pod landed on the planet below. It’s just you and your commander on a planet where the Sith are in charge, and you’ve got to travel into the most treacherous areas to find the Jedi you’re escorting because she’s vital to the war effort. You could be good and help people, but being bad can get you credits or deal with dangerous situations without fighting, because you’re strapped for good gear. There’s bounty targets worth money who’s only crime is pissing off the wrong people. You can agree to side with the bad gang to avoid a confrontation after you’ve worn yourself out fighting to their base.
But it’s not quite there yet because several evil choices don’t do much than be a dick for the sake of it. And after fighting into the Black Vulkar base, the guys waiting in the garage aren’t that difficult. The most dangerous foe is a plot mandatory fight no matter what. And exp is more important than credits, which you can get from being good.
5:46 reminds me of that choice near the start of one of the Wolfenstein games
The ultimate moral dilemma was whether or not to press F to pay respects.
I think personally that the best way to do moral choices is tie it to how well certain charecters like you as if we'll written it can genuinely change what the obvious choice is
Love the ideas you present too. Balance in choice. Wish I could play banisher in the world your idea won.
SuperGiant's Pyre has a similar mechanic to Vampyr's in that if you win the current cycle you get to choose one of your max level team members to permanently save from the jail-like limbo you're all trapped in. So the dilema becomes narrative pay off vs. selfishly keeping your strongest team members in limbo so you keep fighting more effectively
To be clear, great video - I just miss the "Let's all laugh at an industry that never learns anything teehehe" jingle
"Could have been cool if you could only fight as the grownup until your power ran out, then th kid has to hide." Sounds like an interesting game mechanic that would make for cool gameplay!
Reminds me of my first playthrough of Knights of the Old Republic 2. Tried to be lightsided, but with some more nuanced choices, then completed ruined my ending by accidentally picking the wrong side in the Civil War planet
Roald Amundsen beat Robert Scott to the South Pole, and made it back alive. But the story goes that, on learning of Scott’s death in the ice, Amundsen blurted out “He’s beaten me!” Scott had achieved immortality through tragedy, and Amundsen’s victory through careful planning and practical decisions was less narratively interesting.
The story in the exploration museum in Oslo is really quite epic, you even get to stand on one of the boats. But yeah - nothing beats tragedy - although both Kon Tiki and Titanic both won Oscars
Great video as always.
6:26 Roald Amundsen? You here?!
I've been nursing an idea for a game like Dishonored, where you'd play as a Fantasy thief who tried to steal a magic item, and got possessed by a predatory monster in the process. The plot would revolve around the player-character doing thieving jobs for a wizard, who promised to remove the possessing spirit in due time.
However, the spirit would also offer the player-character all sorts of magical powers, similar to the toolkit available in the Dishonored games. The downside - the game's mana equivalent could only be regained by eating fresh meat. Human beings would give the most restoration, though animals would also suffice. This would also be how the player unlocked new abilities. Every piece of fresh meat consumed would provide a semi-random amount of Blood Currency, that could be spent to unlock new abilities. With humans giving way more BC than animals, naturally.
So, right away there would be a choice. The player could either stick to mundane thievery, or embrace blood-magic for cool abilities like super-jumps and x-ray vision. They wouldn't even need to commit murder for it, as feeding on animals would be a viable (albeit less lucrative) alternative to maneating.
But there would be a second system, of the player-character losing their humanity the more they embraced the spirit's powers. If things got too bad, the spirit would overwhelm the protagonist entirely, and you'd get an ending where the protagonist abandoned civilized life and turned into a monster of urban legend. I imagine this system operating as a slippery slope. The closer the player was to the edge, the greater the impact of every act of predatory violence. The player could go on a maneating spree in the very first level, and get the Monster Ending immediately.
I also imagine there being break-points outside of maneating, that would affect how far gone the player-character was. For example, if you actively and directly killed an NPC, that sin would empower the spirit. The more people you killed, and the more often, the more you would fall to monster-dom. But only up to a certain point - if you killed people but never ate them, the fact that you never crossed that line would factor into the story. If the player played completely hands-clean, that would also factor into the story.
But if the player did eat people regularly, then they would gain an addiction-meter, where they would start suffering debuffs the longer they went without a meal. This addiction would get worse and worse, the further the player fell into monster-dom. At the highest levels, the player-character might start autonomously moving towards dead bodies to eat them, forcing the player to actively wrangle them back under control.
Killing and eating animals would also push the player towards monster-dom, but it would also stop at a certain threshold. This would represent the player-character developing a kind of harmony with the spirit. Feeding it in an ethical way, in return for some (but not all) of its powers. This could factor into the story too, with the protagonist deciding to keep the spirit around after all, forming a symbiotic relationship.
Unlocking certain powers could still push the player over the line, however. Anything that made the player-character more directly lethal would do it. X-ray vision has non-lethal applications, the power to devour people on the spot and leave no trace does not. Oh yeah, and the % amount of monstrosity that each act caused would be semi-random, and always hidden from the player. The player would only be able to tell how far gone they were by their visible symptoms. All this would force the player to weigh their moral choices intuitively, rather than numerically. Because they'd never be entirely sure how much wiggle-room they had.