Originally Posted by Madscientist
I admit that this restricts players who want to play a chaotic char who changes his mind often. In reality you can torture somebody one day and save somebody else the next day. If you do so, most people would call you an insane psycho. maybe the game should do the same.


This kind of dichotomy is absurd to begin with.


What is choice?
Choice isn't about deciding whether to kiss the baby or to kill the baby. Everyone knows that it's "evil" to kill the baby. Anyone who's legitimately trying to roleplay a character is going to ignore this option. People who kill everything in sight are not just psychopaths -- they are suicidal psychopaths. Stupid evil is not a real alignment, and I cannot stress strongly enough that I have no interest in being provided with the stupid evil option.

Originally Posted by TV Tropes
Arcanum is a perfect example. Most evil actions fall into the stupid evil category. For example, you recover a wedding ring for a person who offered you 200 gold for it, the wedding ring is worth 30 gold in the pawn shop. The good option is to sell him his ring for 200 gold, the evil option is to murder him (and not get any money since he doesn't carry it on him).

Neverwinter Nights (and its related expansions) works like this when it comes to the Good/Evil alignment axis. It's almost impossible to gain evil points unless you kill anyone who looks at you a little bit funny, regardless of the number of witnesses or your own personal credo. Meanwhile, performing any kind of altruistic act — even for nefarious or selfish purposes — will have you racking up the Good points.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StupidEvil


I believe the premise of Undertale is that the game tempts you to follow the standard RPG mechanic of fighting (and killing) everything, before hitting you with consequences and making you think, "Oh god. What have I become?" I really love this premise (although I don't like what I've seen of the gameplay). The evil option is actually made attractive.

In the Witcher 3, it benefits from having a character with an explicit personality, so it can quite easily put you in the position where you know Geralt wants to do the right thing. Then it throws a curve ball at you by making it hard to work out how to make the "right choice".

But it doesn't even have to be a fixed character for this to be possible. Bioware has improved their design in recent games. Commander Shepard is essentially a blank slate, but he has a general purpose. Because he wants to save the universe (who wouldn't!?), they updated the dichotomy to be "paragon" and "renegade". These are different paths to the same goal. Still handled much more poorly than the Witcher, but it reflects a trend in the RPG genre to make choice about more than just black & white good & evil.

D:OS took the Mass Effect style one step further where dialogue options affect a range of individual traits, rather than just an overall "good" & "evil" stat. It's more nuanced, but I feel this still misses the point.


Wasted choices
If my biggest choice in the game is whether to be good or evil, then I'm going to make this choice once, at the beginning of the game. For the rest of the game, the other options are going to be wasted on me. This also applies to D:OS traits.

Fallout 4 had different factions, where you could help the Brotherhood and hunt the Railroad, for example. Each faction is well-meaning in its own way. This is a very basic way to make a choice more complex than just the binary "good" or "evil". But I still don't really like it because it's still not particularly personal.

The Witcher 3 established clearly that the primary effect of your choices is meaningful emotional consequences. Do you release the demon to save the children? Now you have to live with the consequences of your choice. There's no global tracker, and there's no clear "good" option. Every time you make a choice, you consider the circumstances and make the best choice you can. You make a choice every time.

Don't waste your time giving me choices when there's zero chance of me taking them. Make me think before I choose. Not just, "(roleplaying good) I'll kiss any baby I find." Or, "(roleplaying evil) I'll kill anything that even looks like a baby." I want to challenged every time I have to make a choice.


More than just good and evil
There are other choices we make. Choices about how to design my character. Will the character be a warrior? A lizardman? Will you be stealthy? Persuasive? What are the consequences of these choices?

Well, if you focus on stealth or on being persuasive, then you have to be prepared for the fact that the D:OS is fundamentally designed against you. The mechanics for these play styles are not terribly deep, and the game is not designed to let you finish the game by entirely focusing on these specialties.

But guess what? You can finish the game basically just by murdering anyone and anything. That's the only choice you really wanted to make, right?

I'd love to be able to make choices to be stealthy or persuasive and feel like it's a meaningful choice that will result in an entertaining game. But there is a stark lack of mechanical gameplay design when it comes to these non-violent options.