Відео

In my first run of Undertale, I did try to roleplay a bit, and this made me justify killing certain characters and getting a neutral ending: I tried putting myself in the shoes of a scared child lost in a strange world of aggressive monsters, and this led me to kill a small handful of random encounters, Toriel (who, from my character's perspective, was acting like a kidnapper), and the Dog Marriage couple (who tried to murder me because they didn't like my smell, so it was self-defense). I also used roleplay to justify sparing Undyne when I could have also rationalized killing her: I didn't want to make Monster Kid upset. Later, I saw an interesting take on Undertale's morality that made me rethink my first playthrough: you are not Frisk, so you should not make moral decisions from Frisk's perspective. If Frisk was left to their own devices in the Underground, maybe they would have decided to kill enemies in self-defense. But you know that you can make it through the game without killing anyone, and doing so comes at no risk to you because you can save and reload, so there is no way to morally justify violence here: it's not self-defense if you're not in any real danger.

Regarding roleplaying evil characters, I am playing a Chaotic Evil PC in a DnD campaign. You'd think that would mean murder hoboing my way through the setting but that is far from the truth. My character is a psychopath that derives joy from suffering of others but she still does lots of things that one would consider good, just for the wrong reasons. She needs to keep a good standing with the rest of the party for survival and attempts at manipulation, so she can't out herself as enjoying pointless cruelty. She was given a position of power by clergy of a good goddess, so she needs to act the part if she wants to keep it. And while she would be happy to go on a spree and slaughter some villagers, she won't because she can only defend herself so long from the law if caught. Just last session, she actively spared an enemy, hoping for information or maybe even a chance to turn them to her side and make use of their power for her own purposes. Turns out, there's lots of systems in place in societies, even ruthless ones, that prevent this pure evil kind of behavior.

I think a lot of Undertale design choices come from Toby Fox relationship with games, especially with Earthbound Like you would like to tell me the NEET guy who judges you every run, gets mad when go murder hobo and tells you it's not worthy, that when you keep going straight-up hacks the game breaking every rule, even borrowing its theme from the author Earthbound hack, just to give you one hell of a boss fight, is not a stand-by for the author? The real point of Undertale is that is just "A Christmas Carol" gamer edition

Fully agree that the Undertale morality system exists not as a morality system but as a commentary on content being locked behind evil options. But speaking of bad moral systems, would be really amused to see you cover the original Fable in this series, maybe as part of how that evolved over time. The game that states that the value of an innocent life is 20 killer hornets (IIRC - I think it's -100 for killing a non-hostile NPC, and +5 for killing a giant hornet) You mentioned roleplay a few times here - I rarely, if ever, roleplay while playing video games. I engage with the narrative and the games, but for me 'roleplay' has a very specific headspace which I don't tend to enter into while playing video games, as opposed to TTRPGs. And it's not just the presence of other actual humans - I'm comfortable entering into that headspace while doing solo games such as plugging Mythic into things, or playing journalling games like Thousand Year Old Vampire. Now - That's not to say other people aren't roleplaying when playing video games; I know some people roleplay while playing through CYOA books which is something I very much don't do. And I wonder if this is why I often get on with JRPGs more than WRPGs; I'm more comfortable engaging with a game where a character is either an Ageless-Faceless-Gender-Neutral-Culturally-Ambiguous-Adventure-Person (per Zork) avatar of the player rather than a real character; a fictional body with which to engage with the Content of the game, or an actual character with definition, who while I'm controlling the actions of during this game clearly exists outside of what I put into them. While a lot of WRPGs seem to want me to flesh out a character for them that happens to slot into the story and world they have in mind and I have no knowledge of, rather than either having the good old AFGNCAAP or a fully featured protagonist who I get to know while playing the game. (Also when I'm running TTRPGs I don't really bake moral choices into them. I just... Build a scenario - either a location or a timeline of how events will play out if the players don't get involved - And then figure out how the world would respond to what the players do with that, both in the immidiary and more long term. And while this approach probably wouldn't really work for a video game which tend to operate closer to a CYOA book (or, less nuanced, a series of sliders that don't remember what choices you made to get you into this position), does feel to me like it's the minimum _I_ need as a player to get into a roleplay mindset - Although other people are different, as I said I know there are people who get into that mindset simply from a CYOA novel, so I fully believe some people really are roleplaying when they play The Witcher, or Dragon Age, or Fable)

I haven't thought about it before, but, yes, it's better to have less choices than poorly written ones with being evil for the sake of being evil. As for Undertale, the metacommentary of doing a genocide run, becuase you want to see what happens is amazing. Especially when Sans asks why you killed his brother if from your perspective it doesn't matter. Also it greatly reflects how doing evil is not really being evil but choosing to do evil, like the in-real-life genocides are less about evil people being evil but normal people doing boring everyday stuff that when summed up results in a genocide.

SO much depends on the players at your table. I recently played in a 5e game that lasted six years, going from 1st level all the way to level 23 epic. The entire time, from level one onwards, my single class weapon & shield fighter was SO powerful relative to the other players that they were constantly complaining that the game would be easier if I made my character weaker, because then the GM wouldn't throw such tough opponents at us. The disparity was caused by the other players at the table having not the slightest effing clue what they were doing. None of them knew the rules, all of them were utterly tactically inept. One of them decided to be a forest druid in a city/dungeon campaign, despite being informed that they were hamstringing themselves. She spent much of the game plinking a single short bow shot at bad guys. We had a life cleric whom I trained to actually understand and use Spirit Guardians, but still had to be reminded virtually every fight to then cast Spiritual Weapon. Finally we had a rogue who took most of those six years to figure out they could use their bonus action to hide. And the above is hardly the worst examples of idiot players who are willfully ignorant. I am right now in a game in which our putative (again life) cleric (different player) is SO inept that in a fight with a bunch of relatively high AC bugs that have poison bites, thinks their best use of their first action is to fire their light crossbow with their dexterity of 9. When I suggest they cast bless instead, they don't know what that is, they can't cast that because it is not on their sheet, which they never bothered to actually fill out in the first place, and how dare I interfere in her "role playing" decisions (this coming from her beta boyfriend). 🙄

I always blew up Megaton late game to balance out my karma to neutral so that my trait that gives +30 speech would work..

I feel like there are several games that mustn't be excluded from the discussion on choice: 1. Tyranny 2. Void / Pathologic (any of the bigger games from Ice Pick Lodge) Would love to see your take on those games I agree that "Papers, Please" is a good example, and becoming an excellent player who makes the correct lawful decisions fast makes the main character immoral and cruel

That clicking in the background is a bit annoying

Lol, my first thought when reading the title was that you dont like gay chatbots

I just recently finished my first playthrough, i chose order not really knowing the difference between the two. I was dissapointed that i was essentially forced into becoming a dictator. Theres a big difference between "order" and "propaganda center"

Listened to this while hiking, was great👍 (I love frostpunk)

In Plato's Repubblic it is said that a city is bount to fall the moment internal strife creates factions and groups. Then there are basically more cities in one and that will make it impossible to stay unite. Bro was probably an order fan.

Child labor is the funniest thing to me in Frostpunk. Do you want to make the children do generally non-dangerous jobs, or do you want the children to starve and freeze to death while doing nothing? Very challenging choice. There is NO EXCUSE for child labor in the modern world, but uh, the apocalypse is different 😂

I really dont like how they did the Londoners. When they have speeches, if you let them speak freely 3 times, the 4th time you get the option to say "I let you speak, now its my turn" and it convinces every londoner to give up. It's exactly the kind of "good morals always win" thing that i feel the rest of the game avoids and counters so well

I think the simple choices in those games is not a flaw, it’s escapism. Life has very hard choices and it is fun to just play something that is simple for a bit.

Ye, the final lesson from Frostpunk is that if you are bad at management, you have to resort to immoral things, and if you're good at managing things, you can have "good" laws. It shows that, most likely, bad people on Earth are bad because they are incapable, and have to resort to such measures because they are incapable. I also think that morality in Frostpunk 1 is judged at the end of the game much more harshly than in FP2. In FP1, your ending depends directly on the choices that you made throughout the game. Going for that one law could mean the difference if your ending has "Crossed the line" or not. In FP2, the moral consequence is determined by the ending choices, where you either banish the opposition, or you reconcile the sides. It doesn't really matter if you choose this law or the other in FP2, as long as you are capable of performing the end tasks for reconciliation, you will get the "good" ending. In these terms, I prefer the Frostpunk 1 morality system, where the words "Crossed the line" and "For what cost" judge you at the end for not making the right choices. You did survive, but at what cost? It made me replay the game again and again until I could get the perfect ending.

The best ones are hard because they ask you to prioritize between two goods. Least of two evils is also okay but the making a player feel bad for something they must do to progress is only a good idea for very niche stories. Think New Vegas with the vault where you can choose to release people stuck there or flood their chamber to save the NCR’s crop. Do you prioritize preventing pain and death for the few or preventing mass hardship for the many? I mean it’s basically a trolley problem but you get it. It’s not “pet the puppy or kick it?”

i don't get the point to this video, is people remember the original launch ps3 is also plauged with overheating also, it is literally a thing that launch ps3s, with the back compat for ps2 are dying because of heat. and if i remember correctly xbox extended the warranty so people could get a new 360 that didn't get the red ring, they literally lost billions on it, but owned up to their mistake. or are we going to also forget sony's massive blunder where they got hacked, and thousands of accounts with credit cards went into the wild. yes the xbnox one was kind of a failure due to how they focuses it on everything instead of gaming. but lets face i. that is yet another reason the ps3 had issues, you could literally make a movie server and connect your ps3 to your pc for that. the cell processor may have been really forward engineered. but the problem was also the fact they split their memory 256 for cpu and 256 for gpu, where as the 360 had a 512 mb that either cpu or gpu could pull from.

Mass effect isn't perfect, but I don't think the choices really work that way at all. The points are even more arbitrary in that you level them up as skills, its much more like breaking a speech skill into intimidation vs charm. Little to no choices are locked by paragon vs renegade, but rather they are different approaches to a problem, and maxing out either tends to allow you to not need to make the choice, and resolve it with better rewards

The only issue I have with this video surrounds about the games talked about If frost punks morality system was put into one of the games mentioned prior it would not change those games. This is because with frost punk the player consistently interacts with one other entity, the people, and they can respond in kind The inconsistency in the previous games is that good and bad points seem to interact frost punks, with large sweeping ramifications, while you the player only interact with those choices personally.

7:07 i just want to say while i agree with everything you've said, i don't think blatantly evil options should be removed from games. If someone wants to be a psycho they should be allowed to do that, and having consequences for it isn't a bad thing. 12:35 to really harp on this point, renegade and paragon are meant to represent exactly what is said. When viewing your actions as a specter, are you a pargagon for the spectre corp, or more akin to a loaded gun ready to go off on the target. This said, when you disagree with the council and do the right thing you are rewarded paragon points. For example, the council gets angry when you spare the archni queen in the first game, but this action awards paragon points. Which harkons the question. A paragon of what? A specter who personifies what that role is supposed to entail, ie a paragon, would kill the arachni queen. Yet they are going to be viewed as a renegade for fullfilling the will of the council?

I'm split on this. Because of age 42 & also "the gamer backlog", many times I don't want to spend more than a few minutes lost. On the other hand, it's being given the solution. You really don't feel the value of discovery & accomplishment. So, I think it shouldn't be forced into the environment of the game so blatantly like that. Better through a nested menu or map, a time or distance limit before it appears, or even a toggle. Personally I'd like a toggle so I can instantly switch from screwing around all over the place to, all right...I have to sleep in 2 hours, lets get down to business.

I think you make a great point. It is way I enjoy faction reputation system like in Fallout NY over Karma systems. What I will say about obvious evil choices, is in games like Fallout it is fun to do evil play throughs and seeing just how evil the game allows you to be

1 is like trying to run an outdoor kitchen in a blizzard, and everyone is depending on you for food. 2 is like trying to run the same kitchen, but now there's a dozen other cooks, and they're all yelling at each other and at you.

Great video, and a very interesting conversation - I don't necessarily agree on all points, but it does make you think. Have you played "This War of Mine" by the same studio that did Frostpunk - it also has a LOT of interesting moral choices at a very personal level? Edit to add: I think a lot of the issues with the morality systems in Fallout 3 (which I haven't played) and Mass Effect (which I have and love) are that they tend to conflate 'true' morality with reputation. Stealing (and getting caught) should damage your reputation - everyone now knows that you're a thief; if you don't get caught, though, it really shouldn't. And it sounds to me (see above proviso that I've not played the game) that this might be what the developers were trying to achieve with the perk you mention that gives you full karma - you can _be_ as evil as you like (and I don't hate games for giving you a "just want to watch the world burn" option, not that I'd ever take it) while _seeming_ to be a paragon of rectitude. Which does make for an interesting character (although not necessarily as implemented). Also interesting (since you mention BG3 at the end) to look at games which support multiple and/or non-standard ethics - for an explicitly evil aligned character, say a worshipper of Shar, murder may be considered a moral act (for their own internal morality), but it would still be seen as heinous by society at large (reputation).

mandatory "what about undertale" comment

Children yearn for the mines

5,000 Evolvers Exiled from the city. This angered the frostlanders which were 39% of the city.