I don’t know. I put more hours into some of the older Might & Magics and Wizardries (much love for Wizardy 7), but the IE games were certainly some of the last of party based games. Were there any that came out after Icewind Dale 2?
Yes, The Temple of Elemental Evil!
Check it out, it has the best combat. Plot is paper thin like the module.
Awesomely put, Rollory.
It’s not that it’s not fun, it’s that it’s not interesting. Most games that try make the players have moral choices basically split everything into: “save the world” or “kick puppies”. There are no actual difficult choices that force the player to really think. Actual moral quandaries, or as I think Terry Gilliam puts it, “the evil of banality” – his idea of evil portrayed in Brazil was about apathy towards others and self-interest, not ‘I want to open the doors to Hell, hahahaha!’. True, scary evil is when good people do evil things and either don’t realize it or have rationalized it.
I (and I’m more most people here) can think of a ton of real good moral compass type situations that a game could present:
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your party is out on food, and you have to fight the bad orcs terrorizing the city. You’ll be fighting at 75% efficiency unless you get rest and food, but the only farm nearby refuses to shelter and feed you out of fear. Do you take the food by force? Steal it? Or just suck it up and fight at minimized capacity?
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Are you willing to kill one innocent to save the lives of many innocents?
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You’re an undercover detective, and a marginally bad guy is about to be executed by your gang. Do you let them kill him so you don’t blow your cover?
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Or, basically, what specific means are you willing to undertake in order to achieve an ostensibly greater good?
In general I am decidedly of the opinion that Bioware actually is terrible at writing RPG plotlines and their success so far is largely a lucky accident, where the writing flaws are obscured by the excellent gameplay.
Weird, I have the exact inverse opinion. I thought KOTOR was a disastrously bad game (mechanics-wise), but a wonderfully executed story.
That wasn’t an Infinity Engine game though. But I agree it was a fun game once the bugs were patched. I actually reinstalled it along with the Cirlcle of Eight mod not too long ago. Just waiting for some free time so I can jump in and get started.
I don’t know. I put more hours into some of the older Might & Magics and Wizardries (much love for Wizardy 7), but the IE games were certainly some of the last of party based games. Were there any that came out after Icewind Dale 2?
Sorry, I meant isometric party based games. I enjoyed those you mention quite a bit as well but I tend to prefer the top down isometric POV.
I had fun playing both evil paths, especially KOTOR. It’s not subtle, but I would say it’s far from terrible.
I was especially disappointed by the implementation of ‘evil’ in Jade Empire. The game spends several hours making it clear that the ‘closed fist’ path really isn’t about evil or nastiness, it’s about efficiency and using force and blah blah blah, and then when you actually get to make decisions, if you want to be closed fist, you have to act like a puppy-kicking jackass, and that’s as deep as it goes.
It’s almost as if one person had written and developed their vision for what Closed Fist would be, and then someone swooped in at the last second and totally rewrote it, to be in line with the typical, immature, Bioware take on ‘evil’.
The biggest problem with Bioware’s insipid take on evil is that it doesn’t ever require a sacrifice for good.
In the real world, if you find a wallet you can either keep it and the money inside(evil) or give it to the guy that lost it(good). The evil way gives you money at the cost of morality. In Bioware games, there is never that tradeoff. So you can give that guy his wallet, but he’ll reward you with an item roughly as valuable as the wallet.
So the only real choice is in dialogue, and the evil dialogue is always fucking retarded.
Well, if it were otherwise people would complain the good path is “gimped.”
And I got plenty of “muahahaha” out of the evil path in KOTOR, particularly in the Sith training area and toward the end of the game. Does it have the fine ambiguity of PST or Fallout? No, but it still worked all right for me.
Right, but instead evil is gimped. You gain nothing from it. You don’t get extra material goods AND the people hate you.
One thing that I loved about BG1 that I can’t recall many other RPGs off hand- they saved the big explorable city for the last half of the game. With most games it seems the major city is one of the first things you find and I usually find it overwhelming early in a game . But with BG1 I thought not reaching the city until Chapter 5 (IIRC) gave the game a nice late game boost- after my enthusiasm for exploring wilderness and tunnels started to flag, there was suddenly a ton of new and different content.
In BG2 you get all the good party members as evil. :P
And it’s usually boring, too. At least you had some interesting ramifications from ‘Closed Fist’ towards the end of Jade Empire -as much as I didn’t like the game, I’ll give them credit for that. It did change things, and significantly.
I didn’t find the evil side of KoTOR remotely boring, and toward the end it provided one of the most memorable “evil” moments I’ve seen in an RPG, allowing you to do something so vile that I hesitated to go through with it despite knowing it was just a game. Bioware’s approach is not as sophisticated as what Troika or Blackisle sometimes offered. It’s to let you play a cackling serial-movie villain. I don’t find this to be innately terrible. Sometimes I want to be a cackling serial movie villain.
There’s room for more sophisticated designs in which the evil path is played totally differently, or in which there are major gameplay differences between one side and another, in which the rewards for playing one way differ from playing the other way. Or of course in which no choice boils down to simply good or evil. I don’t think that was within the scope of what Bioware wanted to do; certainly in the case of KoTOR and BG2 they would IMO have been massive and satisfying games even if only one main “path” were available. Their approach amounts to a stylistic twist on the same material. If you like the game enough to try a second runthrough (as I did with both BG2 and KoTOR), the good/evil dichotomy provides some incentive to see how the same game plays out through a different lens.
Just offering a personal data point contra the apparent consensus that all Bioware RPGs are badly written, or that their “evil” paths are no fun.
I loved it in BG2 how you could kill Drizz’t and his gang, gank their phat lewts and then have some magic fucking fairy show up and take it all away from you. It’s like they’re following the Comics Code Authority.
It’s also stupid having an evil dialogue option in the 4th of 8 dialogue steps in a conversation with a good NPC where you’ve supplied 3 straight good answers on top of 4 other entire seperate conversations where you did the same. At least they’re usually the last choice, but y’know, let’s go ahead and assume that by that point I am, against all good sense, serious about getting into Aerie’s pants. Or, similarly, those few occasions where every option looks to my eyes like a jerky answer, yet somehow one isn’t.
This might be a good spot to throw in a quote from BioWare designer David Gaider on evil just for the sake of conversation…
See, we’ve had this discussion on this forum before. The issue with the so-called “calculated evil” is that it is often buried in long-term motivations rather than in short-term actions.
In the short term, someone who is of a Machiavellian bent might perform actions that are heroic in nature – for his own purposes, of course, but how do you get across to the player that when he selects that dialogue option “of course I’ll rescue you, fair maiden!” that what he actually means is that he intends to keep her captive once he’s done and then sell her at the nearest slave market. Or, wait, more insidious yet – he intends to romance the princess as her heroic rescuer, getting in on her good side and then marrying her to become the heir to the Kingdom, slowly corrupting it from within…
…but how do you get across such subtle motivations to the player, to inform him that such options are even available? Without blatantly telling him by marking that one dialogue option as (this is the evil path – trust me!) or something?
At best, we could have pre-defined evil plots that, as long as you follow the path, lead to diabolical and complex ends that would be plenty evil. But even then it must be pre-planned, and what everyone really wants out of the calculated-evil path is to be the one who is actively making the decisions and pushing the buttons – anything pre-scripted and right away you got the evil players (and it’s a small number as it is) rolling their eyes and saying that that’s not what their super-intelligent evil guy would do in that situation.
It’s an interesting problem in terms of implementing more complicated paths of action for the player – I’m more tempted, myself, to do what someone else mentioned and simply eschew evil in favor of paths that are simply different and leave the motives up to the player to establish for themselves.
How about:
Mention in the game manual that you can manipulate people in such a way, then provide some later game situations and dialogue options to support that?
WOW THAT’S HARD.
but how do you get across to the player that when he selects that dialogue option
Um, yeah, how about not relying on a fucking dialog tree to establish if I’m good or evil? You can be polite and evil or a complete dick but generally a good guy. Crazy thought, select ‘evil’ vs. ‘good’ based on the player’s actions. To quote Bill: WOW THAT’S HARD.
Using one of the editors way back when, I looked at the dialogue tree required to get in that stupid Dark Elf’s pants. It was perfect simulation of the cajoling, pleading, insults, and slap fighting it takes to get it on with a real-life crazy girl. Just picking the good option wouldn’t give you shit. Disturbing.
Planescape: Torment would present you with a dialogue option like “Give me what I want or I will beat your face in,” but it would give you two of them: “Truth” and “Lie.” It would do a similar thing for lines like “You can trust me to not steal everything in here not nailed down!” (I am obviously paraphrasing.) Thus, it makes the difference between telling someone you’ll help them for goodness’ sake or telling them for personal gain completely explicit.