Consume the Little Sisters and get 100 adam. Or save the Little Sisters and get 90 adam now and 30 adam in ten minutes. Oh, what to do!

Enough moral dilemmas, I want immoral dilemmas where the bad choice makes more sense in the context of the narrative and is easier, it shouldn't be easy to be a good person all the time Edit: Thanks for all the recommendations guys, more interesting games in the backlog is a great thing

Vampyr could've easily worked in a Little Nightmare's Hunger mechanic where if you didn't eat anyone after a point you literally go feral, someone random goes away, cue upgrades. Then you can't abstain your way through the humanity checks.

I think another way that Banisher's moral dilemma could have worked is by questioning if "The dead must move on" Even is the right choice in the first place. Frame it like a form of religious zealotry, where the only reason "The dead must move on" is because the code of order the banishers follow say that the dead must move on. And then add choices where banishing the ghosts is actually the bad choice. Something like, say, a group of orphans lost in the woods who are dependent on a local spirit who took pity on them. Do that, and you might actually have an interesting plot on your hands.

A while ago I saw someone complaining that playing as a good Person in WH40k Rogue Trader is way harder than being an evil dick, and that's exactly how it should work. The evil path SHOULD be the easy way out, it SHOULD be more difficult to find peaceful solutions, that's how being good and evil works, especially in a setting like 40k that pretty much defaults to evil.

"If you remember pogs, consult a doctor because you're old now." ... Listen here you little...

I'd forgotten that draining your patients was even an option in Vampyr, because it was so immediately obvious that it was the "wrong" path that I just tuned out any prompts to do it for the rest of the game.

I remember in "Dragon Age", where on my first playthrough as a mage, I sacrificed a child's mother at her request because if she didn't do that, there would be no way to remove the demon from her son and hundreds of innocent people would die--there simply wasn't time to do anything else! It felt like a genuine moral choice with no right or wrong answer. And...then I found out you could just wander off to the mage tower, leaving the demon to do whatever it wanted for weeks on end (but somehow nobody dies), and get them to do the job without killing anyone.

How far we've fallen that Fable 3's dilemma of "Make several unpopular choices as king so your kingdom has the necessary resources to fight off an eldritch abomination, or side with your peoples' opinions while understanding it will leave them severely underpowered when said eldritch abomination shows up" now feels like a superior system, mostly because it has the forethought to include the third option of "Milk the real estate market for every penny, then donate your profits to the war cause so you don't have to upset the people."

A thing about Vampyr that killed me the most, was that some of the people you needed to save were just generally horrible people. Like at least 3 of them were actual serial killers, and others deaths would cause some NPC's to live a better life. And while it could lead to an interesting "But where would YOU draw the line" it still feels weird how letting the psychos live is still a requirement for the good ending.

Replacing the big Scottish guy with a little girl could work if the wife/mother (yeah, I completely forgot their names) works like how Ender Lillies does, where she can act like a sort of stand that attacks the enemies while the girl is just an anchor point. But going back to the characters we do have, I feel like making the Scotsman a hypocrite wouldn't be a bad thing. Like, your wife tells you not do it because it's wrong and you have to banish the half of other couples along the way, but you decide to go through with it and that puts a dent in your relationship. If you want there to be a negative effect to the ressurrection, maybe it brings her back crippled, or it makes your nipples fall off, something. But the human sacrifices make it pretty much a no-no.

Just in time for lunch, perfect. Also, “Should I compromise my entire moral basis and crux of my life choices, or do what makes sense considering everything I’ve already done.”

A doctor is the least dramatic job a vampire could possibly have. Doctors have the equipment and skills to safely drain someone of some of their blood, and they will recover. All Dr. Vampire need to do is ask politely for someone, anyone, to donate blood, so Dr. Vampire could keep his head on straight. VAMPYR is absolute forced, artificial drama.

Best example I can think of for a bad moral choice is in InFAMOUS 2. The setup is this: You need to get a faction of people to join your cause. You have two options: The Hero path is to break into a hospital run by the enemy faction and steal a medical truck that you will deliver to the neutral faction as a token of goodwill. The Villain path is to have a friend dress up as the enemy and start slaughtering innocent civilians, and then let you "stop" her. The evil option here is just stupid. Nobody in their right mind would EVER pick that option in real life.

It's also mind-boggling when a game's moral compass makes no sense. Look at the original Dishonored: killing the bad guys is morally bad, but leaving them alive but horribly disfigured, enslaved, outcast or otherwise ensuring a slow, painful death at someone else's hands is just peachy. Tell me that a quick knife thrust wouldn't have been more merciful for Lady Boyle than giving her to her stalker as a plaything....

3:21 yatzee you are proposing a dad game

Just once, i would like to see a game whith a moral choice system where the only way to get the "good ending" isn't to do all one way or the other, but rather end up somewhere in the middle because the correct thing to do in each situation differs depending on the context

In addition to vampyre. It has to be asked (and im pretty sure you said this same thing back in the original review.) Why can't he just feed on the countless enemies that he is actively trying to kill. They have plenty of blood he could drink without compromising his morals.

When the very first Bioshock was close to release people hyped up the "moral dilemma" of killing the little girls to get Adam (currency to buy abilities) or to cure them and set them free, which is the good boy option and supposedly the harder one gameplay wise because you dont get their Adam. But if you do cure them they occasionally leave you gifts of Adam, dumbing down the choise to whatever you want the good ending or the bad ending.

The thing is I like being a hero in games. So if a game gives me a choice between being a hero and doing bad things I'm gonna pick hero no matter what penalties are applied. Mistreating characters, even nameless NPCs, is rarely fun for me. The only games that I actively enjoyed being evil in where games based around that from the ground up, like Dungeon Keeper and Overlord, which also didn't take themselves particularly seriously.

"Considering the theme of 'the dead must move on'" - For a moment I thought The Dead Must Move On was the name of the game. But I guess having a name without a subtitle is verboten.

There's a game called Gleaner Heights that tries to be a "darker" Harvest Moon type game, and it tries to offer a moral choice that's POTENTIALLY interesting, but it falls short upon careful examination. Throughout the game, the Mayor offers certain projects that you can fund to make the town a better place (build a playground, stock the library, etc.) as you progress in certain character's stories, you can discover that the owner of the town's hotel has incriminating photos of the Mayor with a young girl (who was also mordored prior to the start of the game) and that he was blackmailing the mayor into implementing those projects that you helped fund. Once you have the photo, you basically have three options. -Give the photo back to the blackmailer, who will pay you for your compliance and continue to blackmail the mayor into, again, basically making the town a better place -Give the photo to the Mayor, essentially allowing him to destroy evidence that he was romantically involved with a minor -Give the photo to literally anybody else in town, exposing the mayor and ending the blackmail. This option leads to the mayor unaliving himself and it gives your character a SIN, which you generally want to avoid to get the game's good ending. So the game kinda makes it seem like the GOOD option is to side with the blackmailer. Doing something immoral to influence the power of a bad person in order to make positive change. But at the same time...WHY are those my only three options? The town has a sheriff. The town has a special agent who is specifically there to investigate what happened to the girl. Why can't I get a different outcome by showing the pic to one of them so they can arrest and investigate the mayor, keeping him in protective custody. Once I started thinking about that, I noticed it wasn't that the game gave me a choice where there's no "good" option. It's that a good option clearly exists, but the game doesn't really let you do it. ...Or I guess you could also just not show the photo to anybody, but then the story doesn't go anywhere.

I’m aching for the lawful-chaotic axis to be realised. Let me be a principled bastard or a clumsy saint and everything in between.

This has made me think of some of the permanent buffs/debuffs you can get in Baldur's gate 3 and how I played my first whole run through occasionally at disadvantage because I'd let my vampire friend feed on me. I had not realised you could just get a cleric to heal the bloodless condition so each time I did it was an absolute deliberate choice of "can I afford to be debuffed ATM?". It's a shame it was so reversible!

Vampyr made me think of Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume on DS. That also had a system where you could sacrifice party members for power, but unlike Vampyr it was way more tempting because that game was incredibly difficult. The demon you made a deal with who lets you kill others for power can even add super-powered enemies to missions if she gets annoyed at your lack of bloodlust.

There's a line from a webcomic, forever ago now. True pretty much every time. "If you have a choice between two things, you can usually tell which one is the right one. Because it's harder." If you want moral dilemmas in games to matter, it has to be true in the game too.

dontnod games in general always felt like they are just one step away froom being great. like the whole memory editing and combo building in remember me is really cool, but you only get to edit someones memories like 3-4 times across the whole game and the combo building while nice isn't even close to being as good as the one in god hand. it's a game that enters my mind like once a year simply because of how close it was to being great.

I’d personally love the idea of having to give yourself permanent debuffs in order to save NPC’s or accomplish a secondary goal. Giving somebody one of your weapons or PART OF YOUR SOUL or something. Instead of enemies getting harder and harder, they only get a bit harder and you’re either nerfing yourself for the sake of others or breezing through the game. (You should still get buffs and improvements and new weapons and shit, OBVS, but I still think this gameplay sacrifice angle has some weight to it)

The biggest problem for me with Vampyr is that some characters frankly deserved to die, but you still get punished for draining them. There’s one character who is a serial killer whom, if you kill, is not missed and his mom even ends up adopting a street orphan. You better believe I drained him, as well as a few others (the gang leader, for example). And for it, the second purest ending is, in my view, the more satisfying and emotionally fulfilling ending despite it technically being a middling one in terms of morality.

I swear, every time Yahtzee either praises a mechanic, or in this case, highlights a mechanic that could have been brilliant had it been tweaked slightly, which also happens to have been perfectly executed in Pathologic 2, I grow a few more grey hairs. He has stated multiple times that he will never try to play it again, as his first experience with it was quite negative, which is of course perfectly fair. Pathologic 2 is one of the most brilliant cases of story interwoven into gameplay I can possibly think of, and I wish its brilliance reached more people honestly.

I wonder if a way to make Vampyr more interesting would've been to make fights where the result is other important characters we are supposed to care about are murdered by other vampires if the main character is too weak to defend them. Though, I also think having the game hold to its guns and MAKE you choose is a good option. Forcing players to realize they can't be above it all and if you want to be good overall despite that, you have to think it through and try to do the most good in the story you can.

I quite liked the moral dilemmas in SOMA. They gave you pause for thought for what would really be the right thing based entirely on the scenario the main character had found himself in that he was still coming to grips eith every step of the way, and because there was no gameplay incentive you were thinking more about the implications of the choice itself rather than what reward or ending it would give you. They tied in beautifully to the theme of the game.

I gotta say, one of my deepest fears in making a video game or other story is making what I think is a gripping and intricate moral dilemma only to find out I'm the only one who thinks so.

The Pitt dlc in Fallout 3 was a fascinating moral choice, in that it asked you to do the right thing overall (free the slaves) by doing something both wrong and personal (kidnap a baby). Even though I knew it would free all the slaves, it was hard to feel it was the right thing when I was standing next to the crib about to kidnap a literal baby.

Playing Kotr 2 and one of the early moral choices is whether to work with cops to stop a smuggler, or help the smuggler. The dark side option gets far more money and and an extra shop with good gear, whereas the light side option means a vendor gets arrested so you have less money and less options for what to buy. There is an actual punishment for "doing the right thing" that makes it so even a light side character is tempted to stray a bit.

Apart from forcing the player or making the combat grueling, I feel like the way to tempt the player more than "Oh, here's a flat XP reward" would have been "Oh, here's the actually interesting abilities and combat modifiers and shit. Oh, what's that? You want to use a charge attack? Sure, that one's just over in Little Orphan Jimmy's veins, waiting to be unlocked. Traversal? Well, Mother Theresa over there, who's literally holding this entire convent together, just happens to be pumping a slick, cool dodge roll through her heart..."

It's oddly fascinating how often Vampayurrr pops up on these. Huh.

I quite like how Frostpunk dealt with it's moral dilemmas. Partially because the games hard enough that you do need the options that make immoral laws gives you, but also because as a whole, these laws give you more options, and expand your gameplay choices. Also because doing a bad job meant that people died, there is a corresponding moral counterweight.

So far, the best dilemma I ever got was in Spec Ops: the Line. Riggs is pinned under a semi truck after destroying all the water in Dubai to cover up America's failing in rescuing survivors. The truck is on fire and you have his gun with a single bullet. Do you let him burn because you get one bullet more, or do you shoot him and commit an act of mercy on a man that wants disaster survivors to die so the world doesn't find out about how America fumbled Dubai's evacuation? Doesn't matter what you pick, the water truck won't magically fix themselves. It's genuinely an interesting choice. Also, it's cool that there's different dialogue if you walk away, or watch Riggs burn. It's a nice attention to detail.

One easy alternative that I think could have fit the narrative better AND avoided the requirement of murdering a town to bring your wife back would have been to change your targets from the living townsfolk to the very ghosts you're dealing with. Rather than making you kill people, require the player to intentionally sabotage the investigations and manipulate the final confrontations in a particular way that then 'fuels' the ritual to resurrect your wife. It could mean damning innocent souls, destroying them entirely, or they could even introduce a third, faustian character who controls the ritual and thus whose instructions you have to follow. The mental separation of "they're already dead" would help disguise the evil you're doing. It would be even more effective if it accelerated as you progressed; the first time is simply hiding a piece of evidence from the townsfolk, later it asks you to condemn an innocent soul or to set a guilty soul free, and then only at the end of the game do you ask the player to finally take a life. Initially display the choice to save her as one of love and dedication with acceptable consequence, then put them in Red's shoes of descending a moral slope and knowing that it was all for nothing if he turned back at the last moment. Hell, that would even allow for additional options about whether you even TELL your wife what you're doing or if you hide it from her and just hope that she can reconcile it once she's alive again.

I remember in Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2, where your choices throughout the game decided whether you got the good or bad endings. Did you kill innocent civilians and pick dark side powers? Then you automatically got the dark side ending where you kill your trusty pilot partner and conquer the galaxy. It's not a particularly great ending and I can't imagine many people actually getting it (the light side powers are significantly more useful - force heal, anyone?), but the fact you don't pick it yourself is what stuck with me - your actions throughout the game decided your fate, not a 'be good or evil' choice at the end. ...this makes the fact that there's a 'be good or evil' choice in Jedi Academy stick out all the more.

Scott should have remembered the age old advice of "watch where them huskies go, don't eat the yellow snow".

I never liked how the TellTale games could only make your choices appear weighty by always making at least one character complain about what you chose. It made me think of one choice in BG3 that did the opposite. One of my party members was given the choice of eternal servitude to save their family or to be free and presumedly let their family die. I advised the party member to choose the latter, and was pleasantly surprised when no one in my band criticized my character for making that call. The game acknowledged it was a hard decision.

Man, I've wanted Vampyr to get this kind of credit for years and years. You nailed it: it was so close to greatness but just didn't quite make it.

Thinking about Vampyr more, (slight spoilers) in I think the third chapter you are confronted by your first victim, your sister. And if you haven't consumed any of the prior chapter bosses, she gets pissed that you spared them but not her. But we didn't have a choice, the game forced her death, starting the whole more dilemma in the first place. If the game had done that, where if you didn't make a choice, one would be forced on you. That would have been interesting and played more with the 'undeniable' hunger bit. Even more so the love interest is like, ''I can't go on without blood' but we never have any problems and Johnathan even says in the 'good' ending that it can be resisted, so why didn't any of them try? Really not a single vampire before him tries just not drinking blood? Also, the bite attack literally has us drink some of the enemy's blood, so do they not count? Can't we just not drink all of their blood? So many problems come up with these gameplay and narrative choices.

Amundsen. That's why it's called Amundsen Scott Station.

God the vampyr discussion is so cathartic to hear. The first hour of that game when I thought I understood how that system was gonna work out absolutely blew my mind. And then immediately the game face-planted as I realised I had absolutely no need to bother with those mechanics.

I think the Dark Urge from Baldur's Gate 3 is an interesting successor to Vampyr in a way. At the very least, I think that kind of approach, where if a player doesn't choose to commit violence their urges *force* them to in an uncontrolled manner, would've been interesting. Have Vampyr man making under-the-hood checks against his Hunger, and if he hasn't feed in a while... have the Hunger force your hand. You can even tie a few things into that on the combat side: Make some of your real cool vampire powers build a *lot* of Hunger when used. You can definitely *do things* with this concept.

Incidentally, the Vampyr review is on my shortlist of favorite ZPs. The jokes are just so good in that one. "Ekons, we made it up." -"I can fuckin tell you did." "Lestat upgrades." "FISH AND CHIPS."

Holy shit ∆V? getting an ad? On KZfaq? Localized entirely within the Second Wind channel? Absolute ringer victory.

You know, Mass Effect Andromeda actually did this perfectly (except that one instance with the Krogan colony).

One thing I found wild was the fact that Dr Reid's VA also played a pretty similar character in that disappointing Cthulhu game.

Yahtzee’s description of a little girl who needs a spirit’s protection reminds me of Phantom Brave. It wasn’t really interested in the idea of a moral choice, though.

Always wanted to see more Tactics Ogre series discussuon on stuff like this. A series constantly judges everything you do, but mostly just adapts the world to see you differently. In most cases you aren't even really the main character of the story ...the the conflicts are very human, political, and full of subtext that almost no one gets on a first playthrough. Almost everyone is lying to bot only orhers, but often themselves. It's not written to be satisfying, but sensible. Constantly side with one party and get the heir killed...you just get shot, end of stort. Fail to schmooze with the powers that be? "Shame. You're fired, no one cares you killed a God, you're no one." It's so rare to see the series mentioned, but it's really worth examining.

I like your idea for combat: Have Andrea join the girl as a ghost guardian and the longer she sticks around the more murder-y, violent, and unhinged the ghost gets. Eventually, Andrea becomes too erratic to work with her daughter, and the daughter has a choice between exorcising the ghost and learning to survive by herself, or doing a ritual to bind Andrea to her, at the expense of innocents.

"The closer to truth a fiction is without being so, the more dangerous it is" and that danger is what makes a thing alluring or at least exciting

I feel like Banishers' moral dilemma could be interesting if there were pros and cons to both options- not just "banishment is blatantly best for all parties and the only alternative is grisly murder." Off the top of my head- yes, lingering as a ghost is unnatural, with their very presence warping reality and it even hurting the spirit in question to stick around. But some ghosts are perfectly willing to tank that ache and are actively serving as guardian spirits against more malevolent ghosts and even malicious corporeal people, and removing them will not only be sad but will also go against *their* wishes and leave their loved one vulnerable. That would really force you to weigh up the pros and cons of exorcism, and give more weight to the "Is it better for my spouse to linger or leave?" question. (Bonus points if having a ghost partner actively aids in combat and going without is more miserable, but fighting without such a partner nets some other bonus, so the pros and cons weighing bleeds into the gameplay.)

I enjoyed Vampyr but think Yahtzee's proposed suggestions on how to make it better are solid. It seems stuck in his mind because he views it as a lot of wasted potential that came so close to being brilliant, while for me it sticks as an experience I throughly enjoyed because I engaged in the moral dilemma mechanics throughout but also feel like had it taken just a few more steps it'd been even better. For what it's worth, I also think Banishers is a step backwards in handling the moral complexity Vampyr tried to put forth. I think the big difference is Yahtzee didn't kill anyone because he felt that would lock him out of the good ending while I did kill quite a few people. And you know what? I still got the good ending. The experience was so much better for being granted the moral flexibility but it might've helped the game somewhat if it had made clear going in that you are totally allowed some wiggle room. Kill too many and, yes, I do believe you get a bad ending but that's because you've gone full monster. Kill 3 or 4? Maybe you've just thought long and hard about who deserves it. And indeed killing some NPCs objectively makes the world a better place, such as mercy killing a woman whose been brainwashed by another vampire and is now trapped within her own body and forced to eat rats with no other escape, or killing a woman who abuses her mentally disabled daughter which allows the daughter to live a life free of her. I, personally, played the game with the whole "no kill" mindset until I found a serial killer. Realising there was no other way the game would let me stop him I killed him and was delighted to see the lives of the NPCs around him improved because of it. It encouraged me to engage with the game's moral dilemma mechanic, knowing sometimes I'd get good outcomes and sometimes bad. Would love to see a similar game in the future that leans in harder, maybe making some of the changes Yahtzee suggests in the video to really pull those final disparate pieces together.

I also like the idea of a game that would let you resurrect them with anyone. Sure, this requires a kidnapping mechanic (hopefully mostly done off screen), but you can choose Chuck the baby sniffer.

Your "kid who can't fight dependant on ghosts who can" has been made! Phantom Brave!

I call this "Fallout 3 morality". When a game tries to be about choices but the only choices are "hero" or "literal psychopath"

I really want to play a game that locks the ability to turn left as a punishment for something.

6:26 Raold Amundsen, but to be fair I remember his name because of a game where he fucked up by waking up a sleeping eldritch abomination that was sealed there to prevent it from devouring the Sun

Lies of P has my favorite moral choice system of a recent game. "Lie or Truth" is interesting, because the "best" outcome is nebulous and hard to pin down. It may be kinder to supply a comforting lie, but being truthful might be beneficial in ways you didn't predict. And you may not know which, in your eyes, was the best outcome until much later...if at all.

Live is Strange pulls of the good vs love motive. It's target audience, teenagers, value love more, the game actually builds up a romantic relationship and the game is a sunk cost phalacy: The inciting incident is saving the loved one and the finale is the realisation of the consequences. As an adult you know what the better choice is, but you can still feel your younger self choosing differently.

"please consult a doctor... because you are old" Jack both wounds me terribly, and makes me laugh 😆

I think that the best moral descisions in games aren’t “be good or be evil” it’s “do the good thing and struggle or do the bad thing and succeed” it’s why I loved papers please so much because the entire game is fundamentally built around the fact that in order to be a good person you need to sacrifice money and potentially get a fine, each good decision has almost like an inbuilt cost associated with it and so you get a tangable dilema of “do I do the right thing for this person and get a fine or do I do the wrong thing so that my family can eat tonight”

still one of, if not THE, most insightful voice in gaming. bless you, Yahtz

I was excited for the concept of Vampyr, I was going to try my best to be a good person but then start feeding when the game became too difficult. But it never got too difficult, the difficulty always felt fine and feeding seems like it would have made things too easy. Great concept that needed just a bit of tweaking.

This is why I kinda liked the moral choices in the first Dishonoured. Sure you get more combat options and the combat gets easier if you kill people but it's genuinely _fun_ to do a violent route and watch the city turn to apocalyptic shit around you. It felt like your choices were reflected in the world, rather than just the direct plot, there was a kind of dark satisfaction in dragging the city down with you as you made not _bad_ decisions, the outcome was the same, they were just _violent_ decisions.

This is why I really like the ending of The Last of Us. Joel always makes that choice regardless of the players. I like that the entire story builds up to that choice instead of an ending where you can choose a preferred outcome

To be clear, great video - I just miss the "Let's all laugh at an industry that never learns anything teehehe" jingle

On the topic of Undertale, the popular fangame "Undertale: Yellow" has a facinating level to it's kill/spare mechanics. You play as the yellow "Justice" soul, and are here to judge monsterkind on behalf of the 5 children who fell down here before you. And there's a point to be made for the "Judgement route", wiping the slate and saving the souls of those who came before. You even have a run-in with someone responsible for killing the child with the light blue soul, does he deserve another chance? I would reccommend playing it (or failing that, looking up a playthrough on youtube), as I think it's a great attempt at putting a new spin on the undertale formula. If Portal: Revolution can get a video, Undertale Yellow is well worth time of day. It's free on gamejolt after all.

I remember being confused by Vampyr's story in part because the driving narrative of most vampire stories is that they either must drink blood to keep living and/or their thirst gradually drives them mad until they do. Taking that away and only linking the amount you drink to your power level really reduces the strength of that narrative. If I can be THAT picky with who I consume then I can just go after bad guys, some estimates are 25% of the population are actually psychotic so its not like it will be hard to find people. Even worse narratively but better practically is that the upgrades don't go away with time which would allow me to be even more picky. Now I'm looking not just for people who have made bad decisions but for the truly unredeemable to consume and I know for certain I'm the good guy again even while being a vampire.

I remember having this thought the other day. It'd be a really interesting idea to see a game that makes it significantly easier to choose the amoral option. As you get better at the game, you could choose more and more heroic options. That would make for a ton of replayability and allow for a great range of difficulty levels, giving players encouragement to test their limits without forcing them to beat their head against a wall for hours.

Roald Amundsen beat Robert Scott to the South Pole, and made it back alive. But the story goes that, on learning of Scott’s death in the ice, Amundsen blurted out “He’s beaten me!” Scott had achieved immortality through tragedy, and Amundsen’s victory through careful planning and practical decisions was less narratively interesting.

It's like Bioshock all over again. Not only do you get almost the same amount of Adam for rescuing them, but you also get some really good items for your trouble. That's more true to life though. In real life being an evil dickhead tends to make things harder for you, not easier. We just feel like it's the other way around because the few dickheads who are successful tend to stick out in our memory.

this reminds me of undertale... "doing the bad choice just to see what happens" makes you a horrible person AS THE PLAYER not as a character and it explores that idea in depth making you think about your choices in videogames and the choices of the designers of those videogames

Something I feel also came close to an ideal moral dilemma was the Taris levels in Knights of the Old Republic. So your ship came under attack by Sith forces, and your escape pod landed on the planet below. It’s just you and your commander on a planet where the Sith are in charge, and you’ve got to travel into the most treacherous areas to find the Jedi you’re escorting because she’s vital to the war effort. You could be good and help people, but being bad can get you credits or deal with dangerous situations without fighting, because you’re strapped for good gear. There’s bounty targets worth money who’s only crime is pissing off the wrong people. You can agree to side with the bad gang to avoid a confrontation after you’ve worn yourself out fighting to their base. But it’s not quite there yet because several evil choices don’t do much than be a dick for the sake of it. And after fighting into the Black Vulkar base, the guys waiting in the garage aren’t that difficult. The most dangerous foe is a plot mandatory fight no matter what. And exp is more important than credits, which you can get from being good.

Roald Amundsen? The south pole station is named Amundsen-Scott, if you remember that it's not too hard to remember. It's like a neat space station, but closer to the ground.

I like Metro 2033's "moral points" system because the points aren't grading good/evil, they represent the opinion the Dark Ones have of your character. If you play cautiously, explore a whole bunch, listen to NPC conversations, etc, that determines whether the Dark Ones see you as a person that can be reasoned with, or an enemy that must be destroyed. The main way to lose moral points is unprovoked violence, because that makes the Dark Ones see you as a threat.

Thanks for bringing up Vampyr and why it also lives rent free for me.

You can't do my boy Roald Amundsen like that.

love the pog addition to the ad

Great video as always.

Reminds me of my first playthrough of Knights of the Old Republic 2. Tried to be lightsided, but with some more nuanced choices, then completed ruined my ending by accidentally picking the wrong side in the Civil War planet

I always enjoy this series, but this is honestly the best six minutes of instructional writing on game design I've seen

Goddamit, I was young only yesterday and now this! How could this happen to me?! Damn Pogs.

"please consult a doctor if you remember pogs as you are old now" why am i being attacked?

I was having a great video and then I had to be reminded about pogs. Thanks for that.

Damn and I remember hearing Vamypyre's moral dilemmas were great too and hoped to get around to it

i hadn't heard of vampyr before, and now that i know how close it came to being so interesting, i'm going to be rabidly infuriated every time i think about moral choice mechanics, thanks yahtzee

i love that i can still listen to this guy talk his talk with what is basically a face lift to the whole look and a changed up formula. it's also darker and easier on the eyes, which is a plus for me personally

Two games that really drove me nuts with their moral dilemmas were inFamous: Second Son and The Suffering, and both because they try to flip the script on you. inFamous:SS does it late game and in a super frustrating way because it has a simple, binary, superhero vs supervillains setup, where the bad Big Brother types are clearly bad until the very end where they try to go for a twist "they were good actually" bit of moral greyness, past the point you can change your own path. And The Suffering because it's grey from the very beginning; a child's idea of prison would be that prisoners = bad guys while wardens = good guys, but right away it brings up racist profiling of criminals, social struggles that lead to crime, you being potentially falsely accused, the prison guards being sellouts and sadists, and then the whole supernatural element being a literal haunting brought on by all this suffering and injustice. At some point one moral choice is to help an old white prisoner escape or let him be killed by monsters, but you have NO idea what he was in there for (but given he's old and white, it might have been really bad). If it didn't have a binary good and bad option, it would be a very interesting moral dilemma. But nope. Oh well, at least none of them are Ghost of Tsushima where there actually is no moral choice system.

I've been nursing an idea for a game like Dishonored, where you'd play as a Fantasy thief who tried to steal a magic item, and got possessed by a predatory monster in the process. The plot would revolve around the player-character doing thieving jobs for a wizard, who promised to remove the possessing spirit in due time. However, the spirit would also offer the player-character all sorts of magical powers, similar to the toolkit available in the Dishonored games. The downside - the game's mana equivalent could only be regained by eating fresh meat. Human beings would give the most restoration, though animals would also suffice. This would also be how the player unlocked new abilities. Every piece of fresh meat consumed would provide a semi-random amount of Blood Currency, that could be spent to unlock new abilities. With humans giving way more BC than animals, naturally. So, right away there would be a choice. The player could either stick to mundane thievery, or embrace blood-magic for cool abilities like super-jumps and x-ray vision. They wouldn't even need to commit murder for it, as feeding on animals would be a viable (albeit less lucrative) alternative to maneating. But there would be a second system, of the player-character losing their humanity the more they embraced the spirit's powers. If things got too bad, the spirit would overwhelm the protagonist entirely, and you'd get an ending where the protagonist abandoned civilized life and turned into a monster of urban legend. I imagine this system operating as a slippery slope. The closer the player was to the edge, the greater the impact of every act of predatory violence. The player could go on a maneating spree in the very first level, and get the Monster Ending immediately. I also imagine there being break-points outside of maneating, that would affect how far gone the player-character was. For example, if you actively and directly killed an NPC, that sin would empower the spirit. The more people you killed, and the more often, the more you would fall to monster-dom. But only up to a certain point - if you killed people but never ate them, the fact that you never crossed that line would factor into the story. If the player played completely hands-clean, that would also factor into the story. But if the player did eat people regularly, then they would gain an addiction-meter, where they would start suffering debuffs the longer they went without a meal. This addiction would get worse and worse, the further the player fell into monster-dom. At the highest levels, the player-character might start autonomously moving towards dead bodies to eat them, forcing the player to actively wrangle them back under control. Killing and eating animals would also push the player towards monster-dom, but it would also stop at a certain threshold. This would represent the player-character developing a kind of harmony with the spirit. Feeding it in an ethical way, in return for some (but not all) of its powers. This could factor into the story too, with the protagonist deciding to keep the spirit around after all, forming a symbiotic relationship. Unlocking certain powers could still push the player over the line, however. Anything that made the player-character more directly lethal would do it. X-ray vision has non-lethal applications, the power to devour people on the spot and leave no trace does not. Oh yeah, and the % amount of monstrosity that each act caused would be semi-random, and always hidden from the player. The player would only be able to tell how far gone they were by their visible symptoms. All this would force the player to weigh their moral choices intuitively, rather than numerically. Because they'd never be entirely sure how much wiggle-room they had.

Omg, the sponsor at the end, "consult a doctor because you are now old..."

5:46 reminds me of that choice near the start of one of the Wolfenstein games

Thumbs up just for the last second quip alone.. Frozen husky poisoning.. that is kind of good not going to lie..

Vampire: The Masquerade/Requiem use systems that force you to have to feed eventually no matter what you do. In Requiem, for example, when you go to sleep in the morning you need to spend Vitae to wake in the evening, and if you took injuries at the bashing or lethal levels you have to spend enough vitae during daysleep to repair them if you didn't do so before sleep. And if you run out? You enter Frenzy, lose control of your actions, and something happens out of your control to feed. So it's always smarter to seek out blood and prevent that, and how you do it determines the risk and dangers, and killing people by feeding lowers your Humanity and makes you more willing to take monstrous actions, so being smart about how you feed can mean some times you're risking bigger problems. Whereas Vampyr seems to follow an "all or nothing" position where there is no grey in between "murderous monster" and "starving monster."

As an aside: IMO, Bioshock's moral dilemmas fell flat because the devs assumed (fairly) that this world has a lot of people who are just plain evil, and therefore would *absolutely* kill a little girl for a brief advantage. What's _actually_ happening is that we live in a world structured around rewarding people for doing evil things, such as scamming each other or swearing fealty to a military autocracy, so there's a lot of people who do evil things *_because it benefits them in the short term._* So, because killing the little girl doesn't give you _as much_ as sparing her, people optimized the evil out of the decision, because people don't _WANT_ to be evil, they want to _SURVIVE._