56 réponses à ce sujet

[AntiChri5]

RiouHotaru wrote...

AmstradHero wrote...

Superbly stated, tigriscaesius. Mechanics and pacing dictate that there must paragon and renegade choices, or else the "persuasion" attempts from either side would have to be removed entirely.  Yes, it's the choice of the writers, but it's a necessary evil to make the mechanic work. And I don't think I've felt on any occasion that their choice is unjustified. Would a paragon let innocent people die to kill one terrorist?  To take another fictional character, Jack Bauer from 24 is fairly "renegade" by Shepard's standards, but I imagine he'd still let the terrorist go to save lives.

Also, the black and white argument is a different issue to the initial problem raised in this thread.  I acknowledge that the black and white system isn't perfect, but it's clearly delineated and allows BioWare to tell us Commander Shepard's story while still allowing us some leeway to change his/her character.  What's more, no matter how many choices you give players, someone will still complain there isn't enough choice or "I didn't get to say exactly what I wanted.

I made a mod for NWN2 called Fate of a City, where I catered for Good, Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic and Evil alignments within the dialogue chains., That's five different options potentially resulting in different dialogue and reactions from people later in the game.  The amount of time it took to cater for those different choices was phenomenal, and I still had people delivering the aforementioned complaints. And yes, I still ran into the problem of people saying "I don't think choice X is alignment Y." Players have a different opinion on alignments, even when the structure of the dialogue tree identifies the nature of the choice (be it D&D alignment or ME2 paragon/renegade); the "greyer" the decision, the more likely that someone will take issue with it.

Game designers only have a set amount of room to play with, and simplifying the system into black or white allows for some benefits to be gained through a conversation gameplay mechanic. What's more, they can potentially avoid the issues of people saying "I didn't get to say exactly what I wanted", because you're presented a limited set of options, which takes away the player expectation that they will be able to do that.

 I agree completely.  The problem isn't with the game, it's with the players.  We ALL have a different idea of what constitutes a particular response, and whether we think the response is a particular alignment.  Like Samara herself says "If you have 3 humans in a room, you'll have 6 opinions."  With this in mind, it will be impossible to please everyone as there's no realistic way to cover ALL the different variations of what answers a person could have.  With that in mind, Bioware wrote situations with responses they felt fell within Paragon/Renegade.  Sadly, there will aways be at least ONE person who disagrees.

Can i be that person? I like to be different. 

[tigriscaesius]

RiouHotaru wrote...

AmstradHero wrote...

Superbly stated, tigriscaesius. Mechanics and pacing dictate that there must paragon and renegade choices, or else the "persuasion" attempts from either side would have to be removed entirely.  Yes, it's the choice of the writers, but it's a necessary evil to make the mechanic work. And I don't think I've felt on any occasion that their choice is unjustified. Would a paragon let innocent people die to kill one terrorist?  To take another fictional character, Jack Bauer from 24 is fairly "renegade" by Shepard's standards, but I imagine he'd still let the terrorist go to save lives.

Also, the black and white argument is a different issue to the initial problem raised in this thread.  I acknowledge that the black and white system isn't perfect, but it's clearly delineated and allows BioWare to tell us Commander Shepard's story while still allowing us some leeway to change his/her character.  What's more, no matter how many choices you give players, someone will still complain there isn't enough choice or "I didn't get to say exactly what I wanted.

I made a mod for NWN2 called Fate of a City, where I catered for Good, Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic and Evil alignments within the dialogue chains., That's five different options potentially resulting in different dialogue and reactions from people later in the game.  The amount of time it took to cater for those different choices was phenomenal, and I still had people delivering the aforementioned complaints. And yes, I still ran into the problem of people saying "I don't think choice X is alignment Y." Players have a different opinion on alignments, even when the structure of the dialogue tree identifies the nature of the choice (be it D&D alignment or ME2 paragon/renegade); the "greyer" the decision, the more likely that someone will take issue with it.

Game designers only have a set amount of room to play with, and simplifying the system into black or white allows for some benefits to be gained through a conversation gameplay mechanic. What's more, they can potentially avoid the issues of people saying "I didn't get to say exactly what I wanted", because you're presented a limited set of options, which takes away the player expectation that they will be able to do that.

 I agree completely.  The problem isn't with the game, it's with the players.  We ALL have a different idea of what constitutes a particular response, and whether we think the response is a particular alignment.  Like Samara herself says "If you have 3 humans in a room, you'll have 6 opinions."  With this in mind, it will be impossible to please everyone as there's no realistic way to cover ALL the different variations of what answers a person could have.  With that in mind, Bioware wrote situations with responses they felt fell within Paragon/Renegade.  Sadly, there will aways be at least ONE person who disagrees.

I restate a little, for clarity...

I think it's perfectly fair for players to want to say whatever they want. The problem in this case is that there is a) no way to maintain dramatic tension with that many choice options, and  that many choice options wouldn't necessarily be true to the Writer's Vision of Commander Shephard. The former issue is a design problem many theorists, designers, artists and so on have been working to fix for years now, with questionable amounts of success. The latter issue was Karpyshyn's (or whoever's) choice; Shephard is essentially their character, not ours. My point: I think Bioware learned their lesson from NWN and similar games, and decided to stick with a limited number of paths for their own sanity/what's true for the story.

That said, I certainly prefer what's there over no choice at all.

Now, I like to roleplay my Commander Shephard a little too, but realizing the above, I work with what I've got and still find the game enjoyable as Commander Shephard's story. If I want more space to be free with my choices, I swap over to Dragon Age - an Avatar-based game - where the design decision has always been more in favor of the player, offering them extended play-control.

So I'm essentially agreeing with you, AmstradHero; I just wanted to elaborate.

Modifié par tigriscaesius, 11 avril 2010 - 01:22 .

[Seven05]

For what it's worth, I've had no problem going through the game hapharzardly chosing between various paragon/renegade responses on a whim (I guess you could call this role playing) and still having full loyalty of all team members at the end. Well all of my team aside from the one who died technically, although she was loyal to her last breath.



Perhaps you're worrying about it too much. Just ignore the red and blue things under your floating head when you assign 'squad points' and play the game. Of course, after the first play through you already know what's going to happen so you're likely trying too hard to have the 'perfect' game and unintentionally breaking it in the process.



I don't know the exact values, but even midway through my third play through, paragon and renegade are roughly even- slighly favoring renegade. I also don't think I've been doing things in any specific order aside from always going to omega first.

[Credits]

How do you regain Jack's loyalty after siding with Miranda? o.o

[spacehamsterZH]

I really wonder how people manage to turn this into a serious problem in their game. My first playthrough, I had an imported character from ME1, played about 60:40 Ren/Par, and the only dialogue option that was ever grayed out for me was the last one with Morinth. When I took that character through NG+, I ended up closer to 50:50 with no ME1 bonus, which resulted in not being able to gain Zaeed's loyalty after refusing to help him plus Morinth again. And that was it. Everything else worked out just fine and dandy, and nobody died in the end.

I'm inclined to agree that it's good that the current paragon/renegade system reinforces that your choices have consequences, but what doesn't make sense to me is that aside from a few smaller things like the dancing Asari, it doesn't really matter whether you go 100% paragon or renegade as long as you're consistent.

Modifié par spacehamsterZH, 13 avril 2010 - 12:09 .

[FFTARoxorz05]

AntiChri5 wrote...

FFTARoxorz05 wrote...

The only thing I don't do paragon is Zaeed's mission I think, and after reading this I'll continue doing it last. Keeping things under lock unless you go one way or the other every time is really boring roleplaying-wise, and I'm surprised that Bioware didn't transcend this since every other moral choice system is equally flawed.

If only developers listened to Yahtzee...

Please tell me that isn't serious?

Considering he pointed out the flaw in Fable's moral choice system and no developer has yet to fix their own moral choice system (since they're all easy "play the game twice" buttons), yes, I am serious.  At least in KOTOR you don't HAVE to be all the way light or dark to beat the game, but if you don't like losing random team members for your ME3 save, you do in ME2.  He also has a good point about quick time events and calls games on all the bull**** that normal reviewers don't, though I never get what his beef is with turn-based games.

Modifié par FFTARoxorz05, 13 avril 2010 - 01:27 .

[spacehamsterZH]

FFTARoxorz05 wrote...
At least in KOTOR you don't HAVE to be all the way light or dark to beat the game, but if you don't like losing random team members for your ME3 save, you do in ME2. 

Except, you know, I played it 50/50 and got everyone out alive. But yeah, it's totally broken and boohoo, BW's older games were so much better.