I’ve been playing through Fallout 3 recently. I got it back in the day when it first came out, got partway through, and then Wrath of the Lich King hit and distracted me, so I never did finish it. Recently I decided to go back and try again, so I started a new game and away I went.
If you’re at all worried about spoilers for a two year old game, you should probably stop reading now. Just sayin’. Spoilers ahead. That was your one warning.
I really enjoy the Fallout franchise, and I really dig the world and how it feels real and alive. What I do not dig, however, is Fallout 3’s “karma” system. Now, lots of games have alignment these days, and lots of people seem to like it. I’ve never been much of a fan of it, to be honest. Most of the time I just want to be the hero anyway, so having “evil” options is unimportant to me.
But I really take exception to a few of the specific instances of positive karma rewards for actions that, near as I can tell, are pretty damn evil. The first that really stuck out came in the quest Tenpenny Tower. This quest involves a bunch of humans living in an old tower and acting all hoity-toity. There are a group of ghouls who want to live in the tower, but the tower residents wont let them. There’s apparently room enough for the ghouls (well, the game claims there is–I never really found all that much empty space in the tower, to be honest) and they have the cash to pay for rooms. But the residents are a bunch of ghoul haters and wont hear of it. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to end this impasse in some way.
There are basically three ways to finish the quest. Two of them boil down to wiping out one side or the other. There are multiple ways to do it, but in essence you pick one side to champion, mow down the other side, and that’s that. I do not know for certain, but I suspect you get negative karma for taking either of these two options.
The third option is the one I picked. You try to be nice and friendly, and get everyone to live together and sing Kumbaya by the campfire and all that. You go to see the owner of the tower, Alistair Tenpenny, and ask him to let the ghouls in. He says he’ll do it as long as they pay, and as long as a certain four residents of the tower agree to it. He of course picks the four most bigoted residents (the others are fairly easy to convince) so you have your work cut out for you.
Or at least, I thought I’d have my work cut out for me. Instead, what happened was this. I went and talked to each of the four residents in turn. And the only possible way to get them to agree that nets you positive karma is to pass a speech check in which you fucking threaten them. That’s right, boys and girls. The “good” way to finish this quest is to threaten the shit out of people and force them to either accept the change or leave. What the hell? What is positive about that? Telling someone to accept something “or else” isn’t good, no matter what the final outcome!
Now, I can already hear some of you complaining. “But Dave!” you’ll say. “Isn’t doing minor evil in the service of good ultimately good?” And my answer to that is, most definitely, a resounding no. You can’t just take the expedient route to doing good–you have to do good to be good. Evil can be expedient. Evil can seemingly do good to accomplish evil. But good must be good. For goodness’ sake.
Some of you will cry “But Dave! Doesn’t the goodness of the outcome outweigh the small evil of the threats?” Well, if your concept of good and evil involves weighing one against the other on some cosmic scale and somehow trying to make sure your good deeds outweigh the sum total of your bad deeds, then yeah, I suppose you’re right. But here in the world I like to live in, the saying “the end justifies the means” is usually attributed to evil assholes trying to claim they’re not actually evil.
But here’s the real issue: The game doesn’t reward you with positive karma for finishing the quest and getting the humans and ghouls to live together. No, you get the karma specifically for bullying and threatening the residents of Tenpenny Tower. So the game isn’t even making the lame “the end justifies the means” argument. It’s actually saying that the means weren’t evil at all! Not just “not evil”, but actually good. That’s the bit that really bothered me. I can’t see how it can ever be “good” to threaten and bully people into agreeing with you.
The other quest that really stuck in my craw is a main storyline quest, so you can’t even avoid doing it if you want to finish the game. It’s the quest called Tranquility Lane. You find a Vault in which the residents are trapped in virtual reality pods (and apparently have been there for over 200 years). You can jack into an empty pod and enter their shared reality. While there, you discover that one man is controlling the simulation, and for the past 200 years has been tormenting the other Vault residents. He can inflict whatever pain he likes, up to and including killing their avatars, since there are “fail safes” in place that make it so the residents don’t actually die when their avatars do–they’ll just come back to life in the simulation eventually, I guess.
There are two ways to finish the quest. The first is the evil path–you talk to the dude controlling the sim, and help him out with his uber dickery. You do things like make a little boy cry, break up a marriage, kill somebody in a “creative” way, and eventually just massacre everybody in the sim. Of course, all these are simulations, and the people, although they’ll feel the pain and the terror, will not actually die. They probably wont even remember after awhile, since it seems like the evil guy likes to wipe their memories periodically so they’re easier to scare and torture over and over.
The good path involves skipping the torture, and going straight to murdering everybody in the sim. Only here you go a step further, and you turn off the fail safes so the murders you commit are real and the people trapped in the pods actually die.
I’m not making this up. The good path is to goddamn murder all the innocent people. The only person you do not murder? THE BAD GUY. You let him live. Presumably to live by himself in his now empty simulation. I suppose that is a form of punishment, especially since he enjoys the torture so much and now he can’t do that anymore. But seriously, what the hell? How is it that real torture and simulated murder are evil, but real murder, with just a bit of torture before hand, is good??
Again, I can hear some people trying to justify this with something like “But you released them from their torture! Isn’t that good?” Sure, release from torture is good. But murder is goddamn emphatically not. What gives you the right to decide that another person should die rather than suffer? Answer: Nothing at all. You do not have that right. Had the quest involved asking the people if they’d rather die than suffer some more, that would have been better. But no, you in your infinite wisdom just make a command decision, and decide that murder is your only option.
And the hell of it is, the game doesn’t even explore other possible outcomes. There isn’t even any hint of a solution that doesn’t involve murder in some way! I know we’re all supposed to be uber cynical and not expect to be able to solve every problem in a nice manner. But seriously game designers, can’t I at least fucking try to solve this issue without murdering anybody? Even if you rig it so I can’t do it, do I have to be so damn cynical that you engineer a situation in which you don’t even allow me to try? No, in fact, I get the distinct impression that the game designers may well have thought this was, in fact, the best possible solution to the quest. And that… that’s scary.
Seriously game designers. Fuck you. In the neck. With a shovel. Or, as we here on the tubes like to say: SHOVEL –> NECK.
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