Variety Friday: Why Skyrim Tries to Make Me a Dick

Skyrim is said to be the “Masterpiece” of modern day RPGs, but I don’t see how it can truly be a masterpiece when they don’t focus on morality.  Morality is one of the best features a modern day RPG can have, and by morality, I mean giving the player choices, and letting them choose their character’s versions of right and wrong.  It allows a player to choose between being an intelligent character who values the lives of others, or a berserker who kills all in his path.  But in Skyrim, I found there to be a severe lack of moral choices, it’s almost like Skyrim is trying to make my character into a big dick!

First, I’m going to touch the basis for moral choices, which are choices within dialog.  In most major RPGs you see the majority of moral choices within the game’s dialog; this is how essentially all choices are giving within the Mass Effect series.  But within Skyrim, in main and major quests, the game does tend to give you choices, but not enough differentiating ones.  And within side quests, you usually don’t have any moral choice at all and they are usually forced onto you with no other choices present.  I found that usually moral choices aren’t even present in the main dialog and that it’s just different ways to say the same thing, and that you essentially will do what anyone asks of you like a bitch, without question.  There are also no big choices that would affect a large span of opinions, say I just led the resistance to victory across Skyrim, and at the end, there are no big choices such as “I was wrong about you, and I don’t think you’re fit to lead *STAB*” and I don’t mean in this certain instance, I mean there are no choices like this within the whole game.

But, that example does bring me to another problem, which is unkillable NPCs; throughout all Elder Scrolls games I found this to be one of the biggest downfalls.  If I thought the leader was unfit to lead, I don’t have the option of killing him myself, since he can’t be killed!  So what if it doesn’t allow access to a quest or two, what matters is that it would have repercussions across the whole land, which would just expand the feeling of a living world, but instead you do the one biggest mistake a developer can do, which is straight up tell the players “no.”

Now telling the player “no” is acceptable in certain games, such as games like Dragon Age where it doesn’t allow you to kill any NPCs unless it’s part of a specific quest, but that’s less telling the player “no” than it is simply saying “it’s not within the mechanics of the game” which is fine.  But since Skyrim allows you to randomly murder almost any NPC you want, having certain NPCs that you can’t kill isn’t excusable.  I understand not allowing the player to kill core, main quest NPCs, but anyone outside of that should be killable by the player, though I never said they had to be easily killable.  The difficulty of killing them would probably have something to do with the character’s level, which I would assume would be in a “tier” such as in DnD, only characters at the highest tier of level could kill a very important a well guarded person, but now I’m rambling on into RPG leveling and that’s a topic for a whole other Variety Friday, so moving on.  Non-Killable NPCs may not have anything to do with morality upfront, but if you wanted to kill a crime leader or town mayor, those choices would be governed by what the player chooses as being right or wrong for their character.

Continuing on with moral choices within gameplay I find that random people tend to run up or try to kill me way too much.  Now this wouldn’t be a problem on its own if the game would give you ways of knocking out or restraining NPCs other than a shout and about two spells, that really isn’t enough ways to give the player a choice of killing or not, more than half the time I find myself running away since I don’t actually have a reason to kill whoever’s attacking me, and I don’t want to be a dick.  Also, the world of Skyrim isn’t as alive as the developers may have lead on to; I took the time to save a stranger I didn’t even know from execution and I saw him safely run away while I held off guards, then went and talked to him to have him simply say “hello”, and to find next time I came back to town that according to the citizens I didn’t save him at all!

If the game is going to let me stop an execution, at least allow the game to support the fact that I did stop an execution, instead of simply saying “What?  No you didn’t…..”  This is worse than a lack of moral choices, in that it is actually the false sense of choices.  If you are going to try and build a living world, or at least a believable illusion of one, there’s no point in giving the player a false sense of morality because it ultimately takes away the “living” feel of the game, and makes the player less engaged.  A game like Skyrim needs to focus on moral choices, or it will ultimately feel less engaging and not as good of a game.  Because not having moral choices takes the depth and connection to the character away, makes the world feel less alive, and can ultimately force the player into acting like a dick.

Variety Friday: Moral Choices Need Repercussions

After over 5 weeks of variety-less Fridays, I’m Back!  This week I am going to focus on something mentioned in my Deus Ex review, which was how the moral choice of killing or disabling people didn’t have any repercussions, so I’m just going to broaden that into how moral choices in games need to have repercussions, or they are meaningless.

Now, first we must define what actually constitutes as a “Moral Choice”.  I would describe it as a choice which plays upon the morals of a person, usually without clear outcomes so they are solely up to the player.  You can find a lot of these within the Mass Effect series as well as Dragon Age: Origins.  Those games base their story on moral choices, right and wrong, and etc.  One thing Dragon Age did well was that many choices didn’t have obvious answers, and only at the end of the game did you get to see a glimpse of what came from them.

Now, on to one of my main examples, Deus Ex; the original game based moral choices on a simple two answer choice which was present throughout the entire game, and that was the choice between lethally killing people, or non-lethally taking them down.  Now at the beginning you were simply told “You shouldn’t kill them” and then you got to choose to take the advice, or ignore it.  But, later on certain people with certain values either liked that you didn’t kill them and gave you bonuses, while if you did kill a lot of enemies other people would believe you did what was right, while others would give you shit about what being a citizen really means.  For me it was that talk with the general-looking guy who mans the armory, he simply said that he remembered when being a good citizen came first, and that reminded me that people are people (even if they are made of polygons without fingers) and then I decided to play a bit more on the nice side.

But, this isn’t about my experiences, what’s important is how the moral choice was present throughout the whole game, and while it was essentially a choice of the player, the game rewarded you for taking certain actions, whether good or bad, which is a great way to make choices meaningful and still up to the player.  Now as I briefly mentioned in the Deus Ex: Human Revolution review, there were almost no repercussions to killing or disabling people.  Depending on the player this could still be a moral choice for them, but for others (such as myself) I found myself thinking “Why not just kill everyone?  It’s not like anything bad will happen and it’s much easier” and nothing bad did happen, not even one fuck was given, I even killed half of the Detroit PD and a minute later all was forgotten and no one cared, there wasn’t even any faction like/dislike type of stuff going on.

Now when no repercussions are added to moral choices, two main things occur; one is that the sense of realism and immersion into the world is hindered, because you know people should have an opinion and act upon some of your actions (for better or worse).  And two being that there is a big gap in the story.  For the players, killing an important person in the plot or sparing his life should have a big effect in the game, though in Human Revolution, there were two occurrences in which I didn’t hear a thing from either saved character through the whole rest of game.  For the player they don’t get to see if they did something good or bad, while also not being able to simply see a possible back story.  On the developer side, they missed great opportunities to give the player advantages and disadvantages for being merciful or not.  Now these points don’t just apply to Deus Ex but for all games, since a lot of story based games have moral choices.

A very different example is Catherine.  The moral choices are essentially in the form of what is the player’s opinion on cheating and marriage.  While many games directly relate to your choices, Catherine instead showed your overall choice play-out in the dialog, without actually giving the player an idea of what could come upon his choices, so the player knows something is happening, but doesn’t know what until later in the game.  If Catherine didn’t have moral choices, almost all of the story would be gone and it would simply be another game such as Super Meat Boy.  Games need moral choices to not only have players question themselves, but to provide deeper story.

Now back to Deus Ex, I brought up a problem now it is only fitting that I propose a possible solution.  One of the main characters, David Sarif (Adam Jenson’s boss, Adam being who the player plays as) is represented as an evil person through advertising, but is actually a very rational person with some very different beliefs, if they could have built upon those beliefs and leaned Sarif to one side or another (supporting lethality or non-lethality) it could have not only altered the story in that you could keep Sarif happy or do your own thing, he would be second guessing you since you talk to him a lot anyway.  If you did something he specifically didn’t like, he should give you shit about it, revoke a bonus or something, while also losing some trust in you.  Simply giving just one of the characters an opinion in morality could have drastically changed the game.  This is true for many games as well, sure you could keep characters neutral, or you could experiment with alignments and developers would probably find this brings a more satisfying experience.