Ultima is all about virtue, what virtue means, and how to embody it. I can't really imagine a story like that these days. I'll always have a soft spot for Lord British, he's such a perfectly American American.
What's a shame is that these options got pared away as the games got bigger. I wanna say Ultima 7 was when the Avatar became canonically a blonde white guy no matter how you had played them before.
It would be incredible to have a modern game where your choices were about how to be virtuous and the conflict for the player was to try to figure out what virtue actually is. The most complex moral dilemma we get in games these days are just dialogue trees where you decide whether to be nice or an asshole.
I dunno. Pillars of eternity and tyranny have some pretty interesting stuff in them. They're modern right?
Tyranny was particularly amazing, there are a lot of very mixed choices to make and you can legalese your way out of a shitload of accountability. In fact
gameplay path
You can legalese so fucking hard the literal avatar of justice/law turns on the evil empire and sides with you
:::.
I think it manages to make playing someone stuck in the military bureaucracy of an evil empire trying to stay alive and torn between loyalties pretty interesting.
I had no idea, that's awesome.
Ultima is all about virtue, what virtue means, and how to embody it. I can't really imagine a story like that these days. I'll always have a soft spot for Lord British, he's such a perfectly American American.
What's a shame is that these options got pared away as the games got bigger. I wanna say Ultima 7 was when the Avatar became canonically a blonde white guy no matter how you had played them before.
Reject modern gaming, return to retro gaming.
It would be incredible to have a modern game where your choices were about how to be virtuous and the conflict for the player was to try to figure out what virtue actually is. The most complex moral dilemma we get in games these days are just dialogue trees where you decide whether to be nice or an asshole.
Most games that give you that option don't even have any consequences for those choices, either. It'll be like:
"Will you kill this person?"
"I will not"
"Oops, they died anyway"
The worst is in Bioware games where you get the option to kill someone but even if you don't they just stop appearing in the story
"Do you want to nuke this town?" Sure!
proceeds to have positive karma score
I dunno. Pillars of eternity and tyranny have some pretty interesting stuff in them. They're modern right?
Tyranny was particularly amazing, there are a lot of very mixed choices to make and you can legalese your way out of a shitload of accountability. In fact
gameplay path
You can legalese so fucking hard the literal avatar of justice/law turns on the evil empire and sides with you :::.
I think it manages to make playing someone stuck in the military bureaucracy of an evil empire trying to stay alive and torn between loyalties pretty interesting.