Collider wrote...
Do you believe that DA:O's choices were morally complex?
IMO, I would say effectively yes in many cases.
There seems to be a trend in Bioware games - the moral choices seem to be becoming increasingly more ambiguous and less black and white. That's good news to me.
I did appreciate the clear effort in that direction for Dragon Age. There are not many mainstream games out there that can claim the same complexity. The games that do employ moral choices usually go with the standard "pure" and "evil" choices. Either you save the baby or eat the baby.
Too true. I feel exactly the same, and it's really nice that Bioware finally decided to give a rest to "Good X Evil" choices. It felt kinda annoying to me specially because even if it isn't that many, there's been already for awhile pretty good games with complex moral choices - such as Deus Ex and even Fallout - and Bioware (as well as other developers) nevertheless insisted for quite a while to stay within the bounds of Good X Evil parameters. It became increasingly boring to read games' propaganda which seemed to believe that they were giving to you HUGE possibilities by letting you choose between good and evil, light and darkness, and so forth and so on. Not that it's always bad to have a game oriented by Good and Evil axis: Star Wars KOTOR is an example of a game in which that kind of choice fits perfectly. It's just that it's been done to hell, and got tiring a long, long time ago.
Though, Dragon Age's moral choices weren't all perfect. Some of them seemed clear cut, although not as much as other games. For example:
Mage Circle - Either you kill potentially innocent people or you don't kill potentially innocent people. Too black and white for me.
Redcliffe - The mage circle route pretty much invalidates what could have been a tough decision.
Werewolves - The elven chieftain wants people who were not any way involved in the rape of his family (or clan members, can't remember) to suffer from the curse he made simply because they are of the same blood. In addition, part of his desire not to is because he'd die as a result, even though he's been living longer than his fellow clansmen have been. In additon, we know Zathrian is guilty, but we don't know that every individual werewolf had attacked the innocent elves of Zathrian's clan.
Bhelen and Harrowmont - Not bad in concept, but they should have done a better job at informing the player what positions the two candidates had.
Wounded Soldier - You can either help the soldier, or kill him for no reason. 
I think there's a lot to consider here. Let me try to separate some of the points I want to talk about.
- First of all, I do think that it's interesting and important to make some of the choices, specially the most relevant ones, morally complex and ambiguos. However, I don't think that it'd be interesting to make ALL of them that way - it would be just as unbelievable as making all of them simple and clearly defined moral choices. There are situations in which its mostly easy to decide what to do. There are situations where it isn't. Erring too far to either side would make the game equally farfetched. So yeah, while I do think there are choices in DAO that are more clear cut than others, I don't think that is necessarily or always a flaw, but rather a way of keeping the set of choices a character has to make believable, not forcing them to always be morally simple or morally complex.
- Secondly, I think we ought to be careful not to mistake morally easy choices with choices that are easy
for us to make. It's not because it's easy
for you to decide what to do in a given situation that the situation itself is simple, morally and otherwise. It seems to me that what makes moral choices complex isn't only whether or not one individual sees the situation as a clear cut one and therefore easily decides, but rather whether this situation is commonly and mostly seen like that or not. And while some of the choices you were faced with might have been simple to you, I think there's plenty of people to which they weren't, and if there's hardly an agreement on whether or not a situation or a choice is morally simple or not, it seems that's already a fairly good evidence that it isn't.
With that said, let me adress some of the choices you specifically pointed out:
- I'm with Knight of Phoenix on this one, even though I did side with the mages. It isn't as clear cut as that - maybe not killing potentially innocent people would kill a lot more of definetely innocent people. I sided with the mages because after all the scene with Uldred it seemed clear that those who remained alive were those who did not yet became abominations and weren't prone to doing so - and Uldred wouldn't keep them snared, if he didn't need yet to make them become possessed, etc. - so it seemed that the safest solution wasn't the better one. But it wasn't, for me, an easy decision to make - given the choice, I would request that all remaining mages were somehow examined - but it seemed that there weren't enough reasons to consider it better to confine or kill them ages than to save and spare them. It did take a lot of pondering though, and, of course, people who pondered just as much came to different decisions. Thing is, it seems that there is a lot at stake here for it to be as simple as sparing innocents or not, IMO.
- As for Redcliffe, I don't think it invalidates a tough decision - there's still quite a lot at stake if you choose to request help from the Circle, as long as you don't do it from an OOC perspective. What is it that the child will do during the approximately two days of travel (was it two days, one to go and one to come back? I'm not really sure right now)? Can it be that, trying to spare one life, many others will be lost? In fact, since ME2 did feature a part in the ending where the time you took before doing a mission (of saving your crew) did make difference on how successfull you were (how many people from your crew were still alive), when I choose to ask help from the Circle, I was scared to hell that it would go terribly wrong and tried to do it as fast as I could. But I think that, most of all, the chance of asking the aid of the mages actually gives depth to the Redcliffe's situation, as it makes the choice one that isn't of a binary sort, and thus makes it further complex and realistic. Choices aren't always "either/or"; you can think of alternatives. But, of course, there's always the risk that trying not to choose between one thing or another will make you lose both, or be far worse than simply choosing between doing this or doing that. Being restricted to binary choices, however, means still being restricted, to some level, in the same way as you are by Good or Evil choices. It's just the same situation where it's as if, when faced with choices, one could only think of two possible and opposite paths, even if they are not defined by good or evil classifications.
- Werewolves were actually a simple choice for me, but I didn't face off with Zathrian's until he couldn't be persuaded any further and didn't leave me any choice. In the end, he agreed to sacrifice himself... But I don't remember whether he'd do this anyway or I had to persuade him still somehow.
- I agree about Bhelen and Harrowmount. In fact, one of the choices I'm mostly uncertain about is having chosen Harrowmount as king... Big epilogue disappointment.
But part of me still hopes that Bhelen will be the worse king in the end, with his dictactorial rule and what not. One more reason to look forward to DA 2 and 3, I guess. :innocent:
Modifié par NuclearSerendipity, 23 novembre 2010 - 04:18 .
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