I personally think FTL not tracking your choices is a strength for its moral system. When games track it too much, it's no longer about "doing the right thing" when you choose the moraly good option, it becomes more about "avoiding" the future negatives that come with taking the bad/evil option. Doing the right thing doesn't automatically come with a reward and conversly, doing something that is morally questionable doesn't always come with a slap on the wrist. It mirrors the moral decisions we face irl better this way imo. That being said, Multiverse is the goat and its reputation system is still a huge improvement to show how the various factions feel about your actions, regardless of whether your actions were moraly good or not. (For example, slavers will no longer want to do business with you if you attack them too often.)
Well that's the thing, I've always held that it's better to reward the 'evil' choices more than the good choices. That to me makes a moral choice system a lot more interesting without invalidating the choices because when the 'optimal' choice is to do evil, being good feels that much more impactful. Plus I've always felt that you need such a thing to make being evil make sense. Cause typically people do bad things not because they just felt like being evil, but because they can get something they want or need out of it.
@@ogrenade840 to be fair, tracking your choices doesn't have to be about rewarding you or punishing you gameplay wise. It just has to reflect your choices and that can be through story, characters, world and mechanics. In my opinion thinking only in terms of gameplay rewards is limiting.
Well yeah of course, I was only referring to rewards mostly in response to how they were talking about the issue of rewarding the good choices too much and making evil choices too punishing because then there's basically no incentive to do bad. I do agree that just having story implications and acknowledgements of your choices would probably be enough for FTL's context because that would at least give you some reason to think about your choices after a few runs. But as seemingly everyone is in agreement, Multiverse's system is more than plenty in this regard
I don't know; commodification of moral choices always seemed worse to me. Then it becomes a utilitarian choice: ok, optimizing happiness because then revolt chance is lower, etc
yeah that can be an issue though that is why my personal philosophy is that the unethical choice should generally speaking be the one that gives you more rewards when you do go out of your way to reward players. Like The moral choice's benefit is that you might get a better ending or the characters might like you more, things that are nice but ultimately intangible. While the evil choices might not come with the happy endings, but you'll be pretty rich by the time you get there lol. It becomes a tradeoff. Do you take the harder path to get the better ending? Or do you take the easier more rewarding path regardless of who you need to trample along the way? Plus I would argue that the lack of any kind of overarching choice system also causes players to think of things in a more utilitarian context. Like I pointed out, in FTL when someone offers surrender, it's not really a moral choice after a certain point. You're not incentivized to think of it that way at all, so As a result the only thing worth examining about their surrender is if they're offering a reward that is tangibly useful to you in the moment. And if they aren't then you may as well kill them for scrap because there's no incentive not to. Nobody calls you out for your decisions and it has no more impact on the rest of your run. I don't think the game needs much, just a simple acknowledgement of your choices either at the very end or maybe when you enter Sector 8 or things like that I think could be enough to remind players to actually roleplay and think about more than just the material rewards of a given scenario. And as I and many others in the comments pointed out, the Multiverse Mod does pretty much exactly this. They keep track of what you do to things related to the Federation or Pirates or whatever and as your run progresses you can get some unique events and changes depending on your choices and behavior which I think goes a long way towards re-incentivizing players to take these choices more seriously.
Somewhere around my 12th run, I got a missile launcher early... but never any missiles. I got an achievement for not firing any. That was when I quit playing.
I don't hate that the player experience changes as the player gains experience. In an mmo, the new player experience will always be different than end game. The beginning is more about exploring the story and mechanics, absorbing the lore and atmosphere, but by the end game, it's more about optimizing and investigating into every nook and cranny, taking an analytic eye to the universe that hopefully the player has become fond of while immersed in it. I honestly think it's one of the strengths of roguelikes - the player experiences & explores the same world over and over but each time the player has new ideas and experience from the last runs, in a format designed to support that - in a linear RPG by contrast, the world and story are "new" the whole way through, but reexperiencing the world (via NG+) usually feels repetitious and boring, even if there are additional things to explore.
FTL and Into the Breach are games which I absolutely love in paper, but god damn I really can't stand the gameplay. I recently found out thanks to a comment in Semi Ramblomatic that I really don't like "Strategy" while I absolutely love "Tactics" which they explained as: "Tactics are second to second decisions you make in response to the actions of the enemy/obstacles, strategy is the grand overarching goal you are employing tactics in order to achieve." So games that focus on the bigger picture and managing various things at the same time consistently lose me and frustrate me since I'm terrible at that. And I usually end up bouncing off really quick because of it. Rant over lol.
For me it's more about the pausing and the amount of information at play I think. I suck at RTS games wholeheartedly which made me think I hated strategy games, but I enjoy games like FTL and Into the Breach and even things like Civilization and whatnot, and I think it's because those games let me pause and think about my actions for as long as I want before resuming and trying to play them out. Whereas with RTS games or even just a game that is like FTL but without the pausing feature would quickly become overwhelming for me
@@BlazeMakesGames interesting observation! I don't think pausing helps me specifically neither. I end up spending a lot of time thinking and planning and when I make my move it turns out I completely forgot about one thing that completely ruins anything I had planned and the cycle repeats. The first couple missions of Into the Breach were a lot of fun! But the moment I got to the next area I got overwhelmed really quick and couldn't keep up with all the things happening at once. I always end up forgetting about things and frustration comes in. Same with chess. I can take all the time I want but I just can't keep up with all the pieces and possible moves from the other player.
yeah I'll admit that my strategy has its downsides because I specifically am fine with working through every possible scenario. But that does mean that sometimes I take an absurd amount of time trying to understand all the scenarios. I once won a (untimed) chess game not because I was in a better position, but because the last few turns took me like 45 minutes to play because I kept looking for some solution, and as a result the other player got frustrated and made a mistake because they took their turn to quick. So like I guess it has some upsides, games like Into the breach I end up being pretty good at because all the information is always available and there's usually a solution if you look long enough. But I can sometimes waste way too much time looking for a solution where there is none. And if the other person doesn't get tilted I'm basically just wasting everyone's time lol
Honestly in all my hours playing FTL, I've never really considered morality. I've just treated it as a roguelike to get through and win the final fight. I get attached to my crew, but that's about it. And I think FTL works just fine this way. I'd rather not implement morality systems in a game this simple. Save those for more involved RPG type games.
I like the idea of FTL, but everyone I see who plays it, has hundreds of hours, never plays. So I never seen that there was an over arching story or narrative. Just seemed like a bunch of random events, where you just play as long as you can before you made enough mistakes that end up killing you.
I mean to be fair the narrative is pretty light. They basically say that the rebel flagship is threatening the federation and you gotta go kill it and that's pretty much the start and end of the story lol. Everything between the start and the final boss is effectively just random events that you need to survive and use to upgrade your ship to survive said final boss. Tho there is something to be said about the worldbuilding, as you do learn more about the various species of the galaxy and their different cultures and whatnot. And how different kinds of people are better at solving certain problems cause like Rock people are fireproof so if you encounter a flaming space station you can use them to put it out and stuff like that
I personally think FTL not tracking your choices is a strength for its moral system. When games track it too much, it's no longer about "doing the right thing" when you choose the moraly good option, it becomes more about "avoiding" the future negatives that come with taking the bad/evil option.
Doing the right thing doesn't automatically come with a reward and conversly, doing something that is morally questionable doesn't always come with a slap on the wrist. It mirrors the moral decisions we face irl better this way imo.
That being said, Multiverse is the goat and its reputation system is still a huge improvement to show how the various factions feel about your actions, regardless of whether your actions were moraly good or not. (For example, slavers will no longer want to do business with you if you attack them too often.)
Well that's the thing, I've always held that it's better to reward the 'evil' choices more than the good choices. That to me makes a moral choice system a lot more interesting without invalidating the choices because when the 'optimal' choice is to do evil, being good feels that much more impactful. Plus I've always felt that you need such a thing to make being evil make sense. Cause typically people do bad things not because they just felt like being evil, but because they can get something they want or need out of it.
@@ogrenade840 to be fair, tracking your choices doesn't have to be about rewarding you or punishing you gameplay wise. It just has to reflect your choices and that can be through story, characters, world and mechanics. In my opinion thinking only in terms of gameplay rewards is limiting.
Well yeah of course, I was only referring to rewards mostly in response to how they were talking about the issue of rewarding the good choices too much and making evil choices too punishing because then there's basically no incentive to do bad. I do agree that just having story implications and acknowledgements of your choices would probably be enough for FTL's context because that would at least give you some reason to think about your choices after a few runs. But as seemingly everyone is in agreement, Multiverse's system is more than plenty in this regard
@@BlazeMakesGames if you are responding to me then I should clarify my comment is in response to @ogrenade840 haha
Warcrimes is such a harsh word, we call them happy little war accidents
This is space, we haven't signed the geneva conventions. We don't even know where geneva is!
It's not a war crime the first time
I don't know; commodification of moral choices always seemed worse to me. Then it becomes a utilitarian choice: ok, optimizing happiness because then revolt chance is lower, etc
yeah that can be an issue though that is why my personal philosophy is that the unethical choice should generally speaking be the one that gives you more rewards when you do go out of your way to reward players. Like The moral choice's benefit is that you might get a better ending or the characters might like you more, things that are nice but ultimately intangible. While the evil choices might not come with the happy endings, but you'll be pretty rich by the time you get there lol. It becomes a tradeoff. Do you take the harder path to get the better ending? Or do you take the easier more rewarding path regardless of who you need to trample along the way?
Plus I would argue that the lack of any kind of overarching choice system also causes players to think of things in a more utilitarian context. Like I pointed out, in FTL when someone offers surrender, it's not really a moral choice after a certain point. You're not incentivized to think of it that way at all, so As a result the only thing worth examining about their surrender is if they're offering a reward that is tangibly useful to you in the moment. And if they aren't then you may as well kill them for scrap because there's no incentive not to. Nobody calls you out for your decisions and it has no more impact on the rest of your run.
I don't think the game needs much, just a simple acknowledgement of your choices either at the very end or maybe when you enter Sector 8 or things like that I think could be enough to remind players to actually roleplay and think about more than just the material rewards of a given scenario. And as I and many others in the comments pointed out, the Multiverse Mod does pretty much exactly this. They keep track of what you do to things related to the Federation or Pirates or whatever and as your run progresses you can get some unique events and changes depending on your choices and behavior which I think goes a long way towards re-incentivizing players to take these choices more seriously.
This is made partially more tolerable with a reputation system, used in Multiverse.
There are no crimes during war, there are winners, and there is everyone else.
Oh hey, ftl is basically war crime simulator... For every person you spared the less likely you're ready for the flagship
Somewhere around my 12th run, I got a missile launcher early... but never any missiles. I got an achievement for not firing any. That was when I quit playing.
Thanks for telling me about the multiverse mod!!!
its so good big recommend
Was expecting a hell of a lot more views bud nice video
Multiverse Mod fixes most of issues you have with base game, being the true way to play the game for me.
mhm ever since I learned about it it's just become the new version of FTL for me. It's such a great mod for a great game
@4:20, did you say commit Sudoku on purpose??
I don't hate that the player experience changes as the player gains experience.
In an mmo, the new player experience will always be different than end game. The beginning is more about exploring the story and mechanics, absorbing the lore and atmosphere, but by the end game, it's more about optimizing and investigating into every nook and cranny, taking an analytic eye to the universe that hopefully the player has become fond of while immersed in it.
I honestly think it's one of the strengths of roguelikes - the player experiences & explores the same world over and over but each time the player has new ideas and experience from the last runs, in a format designed to support that - in a linear RPG by contrast, the world and story are "new" the whole way through, but reexperiencing the world (via NG+) usually feels repetitious and boring, even if there are additional things to explore.
FTL and Into the Breach are games which I absolutely love in paper, but god damn I really can't stand the gameplay.
I recently found out thanks to a comment in Semi Ramblomatic that I really don't like "Strategy" while I absolutely love "Tactics" which they explained as: "Tactics are second to second decisions you make in response to the actions of the enemy/obstacles, strategy is the grand overarching goal you are employing tactics in order to achieve."
So games that focus on the bigger picture and managing various things at the same time consistently lose me and frustrate me since I'm terrible at that. And I usually end up bouncing off really quick because of it.
Rant over lol.
For me it's more about the pausing and the amount of information at play I think. I suck at RTS games wholeheartedly which made me think I hated strategy games, but I enjoy games like FTL and Into the Breach and even things like Civilization and whatnot, and I think it's because those games let me pause and think about my actions for as long as I want before resuming and trying to play them out. Whereas with RTS games or even just a game that is like FTL but without the pausing feature would quickly become overwhelming for me
@@BlazeMakesGames interesting observation! I don't think pausing helps me specifically neither. I end up spending a lot of time thinking and planning and when I make my move it turns out I completely forgot about one thing that completely ruins anything I had planned and the cycle repeats.
The first couple missions of Into the Breach were a lot of fun! But the moment I got to the next area I got overwhelmed really quick and couldn't keep up with all the things happening at once. I always end up forgetting about things and frustration comes in.
Same with chess. I can take all the time I want but I just can't keep up with all the pieces and possible moves from the other player.
yeah I'll admit that my strategy has its downsides because I specifically am fine with working through every possible scenario. But that does mean that sometimes I take an absurd amount of time trying to understand all the scenarios. I once won a (untimed) chess game not because I was in a better position, but because the last few turns took me like 45 minutes to play because I kept looking for some solution, and as a result the other player got frustrated and made a mistake because they took their turn to quick.
So like I guess it has some upsides, games like Into the breach I end up being pretty good at because all the information is always available and there's usually a solution if you look long enough. But I can sometimes waste way too much time looking for a solution where there is none. And if the other person doesn't get tilted I'm basically just wasting everyone's time lol
Honestly in all my hours playing FTL, I've never really considered morality. I've just treated it as a roguelike to get through and win the final fight. I get attached to my crew, but that's about it. And I think FTL works just fine this way. I'd rather not implement morality systems in a game this simple. Save those for more involved RPG type games.
Try VoidWar for grimdark 40k ftl action
Huh, it really does look like off-brand 40k combined with off-brand FTL lol I don't know what I expected
Might have to take a glance at it sometime
I like the idea of FTL, but everyone I see who plays it, has hundreds of hours, never plays. So I never seen that there was an over arching story or narrative. Just seemed like a bunch of random events, where you just play as long as you can before you made enough mistakes that end up killing you.
I mean to be fair the narrative is pretty light. They basically say that the rebel flagship is threatening the federation and you gotta go kill it and that's pretty much the start and end of the story lol. Everything between the start and the final boss is effectively just random events that you need to survive and use to upgrade your ship to survive said final boss.
Tho there is something to be said about the worldbuilding, as you do learn more about the various species of the galaxy and their different cultures and whatnot. And how different kinds of people are better at solving certain problems cause like Rock people are fireproof so if you encounter a flaming space station you can use them to put it out and stuff like that