art by ShinodaGE

First, I want to express my thanks to all the fans and other readers of Fallout: Equestria!

Fallout: Equestria has received over four thousand favorites on FIMfiction. I am honored. Even moreso, I appreciate all the thanks and feedback, especially some of the awesome detailed comments I've been getting each chapter from new and repeat readers. I have likewise been receiving some amazing private messages. In a particularly moving and cherished message, a military veteran wrote to thank me for writing a story that "captures the mental and ethical realities of combat with eerie accuracy." (The entire message was very touching and I wish I could share more, but I won't without permission -- I respect the privacy of those who PM me.) On a slightly related note, my interview with FOB, the website dedicated to bronies serving in the military, went up today. Check it out.

In addition, Lunar Echoes just did a two-hour-plus review and analysis of Fallout: Equestria. Unlike the review by AnYPony, Jim Fear, Dr. Wolf and Antony C. which I linked in my Something Old, Something New blog, this review is very spoiler heavy. (They also occasionally get it wrong. For example, Velvet Remedy's virtue is kindness and the story was never rewritten or updated to incorporate content and ideas from episodes that aired after December 2011.)

Now, on to the actual meat of the blog...

I’ll probably never finish playing FarCry3. The game suffered from front-loading all the best content. The first half of the game was superb. The second half failed to live up to what preceded it. On almost every level – villains, objectives, scenery, atmosphere – the second half of the game was like a bad sequel. But what finally drove me away was utter disgust for the character I was required to play.

Unlike a lot of games that try to implement moral choices and some sort of moral system, FarCry3 seemed utterly uninterested in whether what the character was doing was good or right or heroic, instead choosing to focus on other themes. This was ultimately to the game’s detriment, as progressing in the game often required acts that were morally unpleasant – just because the game designers don’t particularly care if something is moral or not does not mean that the players won’t.

For example, the opening of the game did a wonderful job setting up the pirates as a force that I could wipe out in good conscience – they were horrible, sadistic and murderous men who made me feel like I was saving lives when I removed them from the gene pool. Even those who may not have been so downright evil were enemy combatants in a war they had chosen to declare on me. And the game did a good job reinforcing this with many of the random encounters. Absolutely none of that can be said for the mercenaries introduced midway through the game. I expect this was intentional. The game makes a point of claiming it is about insanity, and this is a fair way of showing the character’s increasingly murky morality and perverted mentality. But in choosing to do that, the game chose to create a protagonist whom I found progressively less enjoyable to play. Inevitably, the game’s demand that I mass-murder a huge swath of these guys was more than I was willing to give it.

Fallout had the merit letting the player choose the kind of force the character would be in the world. The choices were rarely nuanced, and the moral system used by the same is both overly simplistic and mechanically absurd. But at least the game offered choices.

Of course, the Fallout games use karma, a completely black & white system based entirely on triggered specific actions (such as giving a homeless man water) or the results of actions (such as the death of raiders). I do not believe we can fault the games for not being able to factor in intention, or for being driven by consequences more than actions. But we can blame a system for allowing us to buy off a murder spree in a settlement by burying a guy in gifts of bottled water.

Most of the “good” and “bad” actions in the games are reasonable when isolated, but become morally bizarre when integrated into a larger whole. (For example, it’s okay to kill powder gangers because they are “evil”, but your karma will take a big hit if you scavenge their trailers afterwards because you are stealing from them.) And the karmic designations of people in the game will sometimes seem very questionable. (“Oh, I was going to feel bad about catching him in that explosion, but his body has a finger on it instead of an ear… so apparently it was okay?”)

I remember one play-through of Fallout 3 where I used a mod that allowed the Mesmetron to work on a wider range of human targets. I decided to play the character as someone averse to killing, who would instead use the Mesmetron on raiders and the like as a non-lethal option. Of course, the Capital Wasteland didn’t really have courts and prisons, so she would sell them to slavers where they could pay penance for their crimes by working the rest of their lives for the needs of society. The net result of this was that she had the karma of the devil incarnate, even though she completed all the quests in the “good karma” manner, leading Three Dog to simultaneously praise and loathe her. “Thank you for saving that town, you horrible bitch.”

Despite the poorly handled polar system of Karma, the Fallout games did have the occasional delve into shades of grey, and sometimes offered up stories where there were either no good choices, or where the choices that would seem to best would lead to horrible consequences. Tenpenny Tower and the ghouls in Fallout 3, the entire situation with The Pitt, and dealing with the Gecko power plant in Fallout 2 are all prime examples.

Likewise, the reputation system in Fallout: New Vegas was a considerable step in the right direction, allowing your actions to raise and lower the regard with which the game’s various factions viewed your character. The qualitative and quantitative elements of this mechanic were still wonky, and the karma system sadly remained, but it has given me hope that we’ll see something better, or at least similar and better implemented, in Fallout 4.

A game that attempts to touch on morality does so best when it presents us with choices which make us hesitate and reason what the best course would be -- situations filled with shades of grey, where each choice has merit. The Fallout games did, on rare occasions, make such offerings, such as at the end of “The Pitt”.

Also, for all the shortcomings of Fallout’s karma system, it did provide a sliding scale, allowing characters to fall between the extremes of Messiah or Satan Incarnate. Even karmic neutrality was a possibility. This gave the karma system a leg up on games such as the Metro games and the original Bioshock.

Too often, games that attempt to touch on moral choices treat good and evil as a zero sum equation. Furthermore, these games tend to undercut any quandaries about morality by only presenting starkly black or white choices. BioShock, for example, only offers the player moral choices in the way you harvest Adam, and the options are so starkly “good” and “evil” that your dilemma is “Which ending do I want?” or “How greedy do I feel?” and not “What do I think is the right choice in this situation?” Granted, you could argue that the good ones were somewhat tainted – you were choosing to either kill children for power or save them… for slightly less power. To quote Yahtzee’s admittedly over-critical review of the game:

“In the good ending, you’re a virtuous flower child with love and a smile for all the shiny-coated beasts of God’s Kingdom; and in the bad ending you’re some kind of hybrid of Hitler and Skeletor whose very piss is pure liquid malevolence. I’m sick of games that claim to have choice but that only really come down to Mother Teresa or baby-eating. All I’m saying is that a little middle ground is nice now and then.”

However, BioShock’s absolute wealth of glorious qualities more than make up for its implementation of moral choices and outcomes. If anything, I’d say this is one of the game’s few flaws that keep the game from being too perfect. Where the game fails with morality it succeeds with philosophy. It is a rare and precious gem of a game that gives you so much to think about when you are not playing – and not in terms of tactics (that’s the price of admission), but in terms of philosophy, sociology, economics and more. The game distinguished itself by being a deeply though-provoking philosophical piece, and the morality system was the one discordant note in an otherwise breathtaking symphony.

The same, sadly, cannot be said for Metro: Last Light. Metro: Last Light is gorgeous, perfectly atmospheric and has truly impressive stealth mechanics. But sadly, Metro: Last Light’s amazing offerings in the realms of stealth FPS cannot make up for having one of the most egregiously shoddy morality systems in recent gaming. The game’s points of morality rarely line up with any discernible moral choice. Instead, if you as a player find the world interesting and stop to listen in on conversations, the game rewards you with good guy points. Even worse, no matter what bloody swath you carve through hundreds of opponents, many of whom are just soldiers unfortunate enough to have been born in the wrong parts of the metro, so long as you spare two specific people, you’re on the side of the angels.

Likewise, you can spare every person you come across, acting with mercy and compassion, but if you take out the guy who massacred a town after stealing a bio-weapon, you get the bad-guy ending. Never mind that the man is both a mass murderer an unrepentant, morally-void threat to society…the “good” option is to just walk away and leave him free to hurt more people – making that choice a top contender for the most morally offensive and stupid mechanic in PC gaming history. In fact, the “good” choice should logically lead to the bad ending. If the lesson you teach your companion is that the lives of strangers are so worthless to you that you will set free an unrepentant mass murderer when you have the chance to stop him, then how does that translate to your companion convincing his people to stop the bad guys from killing you?

For an extreme example, I’ve recently been replaying a very old set of games called Might & Magic (a series of RPGs not to be confused with Heroes of Might & Magic), and Might & Magic VII’s moral duality is practically parody. You eventually must choose whether to follow the “path of light” or the “path of darkness”, aligning yourself with sides that drape themselves in over-the-top affectations of GOOD and EVIL. The critical choice is completely devoid of deeper morality – you choose who to appoint to a political position, the guy with the good-sounding name or the guy with the evil-sounding name. Your previous ethical and political decisions have no bearing on the outcome.

However, the consequences of the choice are game-altering, not merely determining which forms of magic your characters can learn, and which zones are hostile, but what quests are available and how each character progresses in their class. For example, choose to follow the path of “light” and your sorcerer will eventually be able to progress to the status of Archmage. Choose “dark”, and your sorcerer will instead progress to the status of Lich. (For added fun, even the skin of your user interface changes.)

Might & Magic VIII takes this a different step, making the choice between “light” and “darkness” a largely amoral one. In order to save the world, you have to build an alliance of factions, some of which are at war with each other. You have to choose which sides of each war you will woo, and your decision will determine your path, but no side is presented as ostensibly moral or villainous. Likewise, the game does away with the idea of branching character development based on path as the paths themselves are no longer representing a moral mechanic.

Of the games I have played, perhaps one of the most interesting modern games at delivering moral consequences has been Dishonored. By eschewing “good” and “evil” for a stability-vs-chaos scale, the game avoids making overt moral judgments (although, honestly, it still does treat high chaos as evil in the end). Plus, the results of your choices influence the makeup of the world around you with each progressive level, creating subtle (and not-so-subtle) changes to the environment. For example, if you go on a slaughter spree in the streets of the plague-ridden city, the number of rat swarms will increase. These changes will affect gameplay and further decision making – your actions have consequences that are not relegated to an ending film. Even better, the game offers non-lethal, satisfyingly just options for the elimination of each principle target. And it makes you work for these options.

However, the game that probably did the best at challenging my ethics was Divinity: Dragon Commander. In stark contrast to Metro: Last Light, the gameplay is lackluster in both the strategy and combat phases; but where Divinity: Dragon Commander really shines is in ethical decision-making during the diplomacy phase – the phase of each turn where you take a step back from world conquest to deal with management of your empire through the enacting of laws and policies. Your empire has racial factions, each with their own dominant political, social and religious sensibilities. Sure, their representatives are largely caricatures of modern political stances, but they still manage to bring arguments to the table that push you to evaluate your choices.

Every decision will have consequences – in the very least, they will alter how favorably each faction views you, and can have other (sometimes quite unexpected) impacts as well. Displease the dwarves too often, and you might find your royal coffers running on empty. Make the imps happy enough, and they’ll offer up the opportunity to gain a fantastic and horrible new bomb… if only you’ll allow them to mine in the one place where the mystical material they need can be found (despite, you know, the whole “sacred elven burial site” nonsense). Divinity: Dragon Commander was surprisingly good at making me examine if and when I would embrace practicality or expediency over my personal sense of right and wrong.

As the above examples probably indicate, there are a lot of games that I haven’t played, including many which should probably be touted or panned for their moral systems and how they attempt to implement them. Which games and systems do you think are noteworthy, and why?