Morality in GW

I was capturing some skills this weekend and it occurred to me that in RP terms, our characters are sociopaths. It's as if our characters are in the Sunspear sanctuary and say "Hey, there's a captain in the Arkjok Ward with a neat spell, let's bag him." Death isn't permanent for our characters, but it seems to be with the enemies.

Then there's the EotN mission, "Frog Stomp", where you help the Paragon, Hayda, massacre hekets -- five groups. I know everything resets in Guild Wars, so you'll encounter the same enemy the next time you play, but I hope in GW 2 there will be consequences for our actions. Maybe killing someone will have permanent effects.

Those hekets have families man. They're fathers, mothers, sons, daughters.

THink of the children... :/

Well, you might want to pay closer attention to what you're playing. Like, follow the storyline, and notice that in Kourna, our heroes are fighting a guerilla war against the Kourna army, occasionally fighting some Corsairs on the side. Slave taking, pirating corsairs, mind you (read the gold dubloon collectors texts).

Heket aren't very worked out, but constant inter-species warfare seems to be the norm in the world. Refugees fleeing Ascalon getting raided by centaurs, Ascalon being conquered from the Charr in the first place with the Charr taking it back during the invasion, etc. Seems most sides are nicely at war with each other, making sure there's lots of sapient orphans left to continue the grudges forever.

Now, you want immoral? How about murder with intent to steal (see Tihark Orchard mission if you don't resort to bribery) or killing allied non-human leaders (a quest involving Panaku in Shing Jea islands). Hunting endangered giants for their tusks (a quest for Mirza Veldrunner, you know, a centaur that's supposed to be quite attuned with nature...). And I'm sure there's more.

+1


OT though, its a game man, if you cant eaven pretend to kill pixles in a game, on your computer..just..wow.

If we dont kill them, they kill us.

I know, it's only a game; it doesn't keep me from enjoying Guild Wars. It will be interesting to see if GW 2 is more of the same, or an attempt at greater realism.

You're right! Next time, we'll find their families and kill them too!

Fixed that for you.

And we wonder why the other races of Tyria hate us...we run into their homes and kill them all.

If u haven't read anything about GW2 here it is; Guild Wars 2 will have dynamic events and there will be consequences based on if u fail them or if u complete them. For example, there may be a bandit attack on a town and the bandits kill alot of the citizens. The consequences for that is the shops they worked in will close, until another merchant comes to town to sell stuff. (According to what i've read and remember).

When it comes to TV or movies, there's a psychological mechanism at work called "suspension of disbelief." It's what lets you see Kevin Spacey play a crazy-guy-or-maybe-an-alien in Kpax on HBO tonight, and watch him playing a scarred teacher with a heart of gold in Pay it Forward tomorrow, and then see him playing Verbal Kint in The Usual Suspects on Tuesday - and NOT think about the fact that you're watching Kevin Spacey, or that you just saw him die in SE7EN last night.

The same holds true in our games. We refer to our toons as "me" or "I" - "I totally facerolled Dhuum... I got drunk, cast Drunken Master so I could run fast, and hit him with my uber-sword-of-deathness."

Is it a commentary on your mental health that you refer to your toon in the first person and describe feats that are impossible in the real world? Or are you psychologically aware that it is, in fact, just a game... a fantasy realm without any of the actual consequences that make morality necessary to begin with?

You didn't kill the captain in AW and steal his skill. What you did was engage in an action that sent the appropriate 1's & 0's through the system which told the server to temporarily remove those pixels from your graphic display... and if you send other 1's & 0's through by zoning out and zoning back in, that same system is going to reassemble those pixels into a recognizable form for you to do it all over again.

Morality can best be defined as "that which works." It does not work for us as a society to run around killing each other... this is something we have agreed to as a society. Those who disagree are "immoral," by the definitions the majority have agreed upon. There is no such thing as an absolute with regards to morality beyond anything other than, "that which works" versus "that which does not work."

In the world of the game, killing the captain and capping his skill is "what works" based on the morality of that environment.

So the dragons in gw2 have all rights to destroy us.

They were very first in Tyria and we took their jobs and invaded their property.

sillythread

... you just ruined guild wars for me



now everytime i kill a charr i only imagine his children weeping over his dead body as his wife curses the people that did this to him

Sure, why not have 1000 players spawncamp a mob and kill it to farm the xp or whatnot.

Sorry. That wasn't my intent.

Well, if I'm off-base here, my apologies to everyone for this thread. Personally I enjoy GW and I'm looking forward to the sequel.

lol dont worry i was just kidding

nothing would ever ruin setting fire to charr for me

In EQ1 you gained factions with various races, which was both good and bad..

Bad because it could be a bit of grind to get in good standards with some races..

Good because is was heck of a fun to for example try become accepted/friend or even allied with normally sworn enemies It wouldn't work in GW1 really, but it could work in GW2. For example, killing Frogs would increase their hate, and doing quests/events for them would eventually get you some froggy friends.

I thought about the same thing when I read the novels. When a character dies there I'm thinking "What no res?" .
In the game you just stomp through everything without a single afterthought. There are only a few scripted events where NPC's truly die.
I always hated it how you couldn't prevent the death of Brechnar Ironhammer while you could just kill the one group of Mursaat coming at you.

Fable tried to throw morality into a fantasy game genre. all it accomplished was having players desire to be the ultra overlord of evil.

personally i wish we were able to attack and possibly kill certain NPC's in game just for fun. i would love to lock blades against Panaku, slap Kormir around for her stupidity, and even knock some sense into that jealous wench elementalist whose name has slipped my mind.

Maybe having a morality meter for a players toon could be interesting, but i'm quite sure it honestly wouldn't matter to most players considering when you break the game down to basics, its all about hack and slash.

i used to play a game that had "Ultimate Mode". in that mode, if your character died and you didnt bring a rez stone or werent rezzed by a party someone within 3 minutes, your toon was deleted. This actually made the game alot more fun for me, and i would love to see something like this implemented in more games.

They had a game in development (maybe it was an MMO) but it turned out to be too ambitious of a project for something like that so it never made it.

I wish Oblivion was more dynamic like that. Maybe Skyrim will be, heh.

The whole Norn Tournament thing my assassin was fighting these guys and going "Where the hell is that Bastard Panaku".
Wanted to show him up and instead he talks about a loss not being profitable.


Hey Anet for winds of change...let Panaku die, by my hands.
Talon Silverwing can watch.

I remember when schizophrenic Gwen came to burn Ascalon City and kill everybody. Now I add her as a hero to my party, flag him to mob ALONE and yell "I will avenge you!". 4/15/2005 never forget.

Ahh... Nothing like a taste of their own medicine.

Who cares? They are hekets. They are just awakened and harpy food.

I'm more concerned about the people that choose to drink from the chalice of corruption.

I wish they had degeneration in outposts too, and that the degeneration they got was +100 everywhere but the places they must visit to reach the next quest, so they kept dying again and again until they cleanse themselves, and no amount of regen in the would could counter that.

When I see one of those idiots that drank, it's the only moment I'd like GW1 to have PK, so I could beat them up.
Remember that animated gif with the guy beating someone and saying one word with each hit?
IT would be something like that:
You*punch*don't*punch*drink*punch*crap*punch*some* punch*ran*punch*dom*punch*Am*punch*Fah*punch*gives *punch*you!*punch**punch**punch*.

Diablo 2 does the same thing. If you made a hardcore char and he died it was unplayable. You could do this online and off.

We basically practiced genocide on the Mursaat and killed thousands of Charr after our forefathers invaded their territories. Applying everyday morals to games that aren't infinitely complex doesn't work because those games are designed to give you a different experience than your daily routine, and due to their technical limits, they have to force you down a certain path that is unexpected and interesting.
I would have liked a cutscene or two in which my characters questions themselves if what they do is right or not, especially in Prophecies.

I guess that in a sense, Perma-Sins who're running missions and doing SCs, usually only killing key targets to accomplish their goal, are the least morally objectionable type of heroes in the game, at least from a PoV within the GW universe. :P

You do realize that after successful SC some of us would pop essence and wipe all mindblades, dryders, smites and abominations?

original SWG had faction that was nice.. if you got on good terms with a faction they helped you.. was funny to see Alkharans and Jawa helping me kill Tuskens and Rebels. If you ran around killing townfolk and innocent civilians eventually all the police forces went aggro on you.

Same in EQ2, I never got on the bad side of Centaurs because they were the only thing in Thundering steppes not out to kill me.. they didnt help.. but, at least they were not homicidal at me. As one pointed out.. enough good faction and things became non aggro.. trade opened up. That was huge in Kunark.

A few black sheep among a breed of hero that values all kinds of life enough to take only the ones that are absolutely necessary. Compared to the hordes of noobs and ordinary players who're butchering their way through Tyria, Permas look like saints! (I'm trying to help improve your reputation here) =3

Kinda like the Ewok bawling over the dead Ewok in Return of the Jedi (its on Spike right now)?

Our characters are dumb-asses anyway, and the story is lame too, with a few excruciatingly obvious plot twists thrown in for good measure.

Prophecies especially is a nonstop suck fest of fail until the very end when you have to save the world from the evil god-like villain that you brought to power in the first place.

Don't even bother trying to make sense out of any of it. Killing everything in the game that "I" possibly can is more than it deserves, but I'm a generous guy.

Yeah, Oblivion got my hopes up when I started playing Dark Brotherhood missions.

...but the main quest still didn't change.
What if the Night Mother made a deal with Mehrunes Dagon to provide mortal soldiers in the invasion?

Something like that would have totally blown my mind.

If Skyrim provides a good/evil dynamic instead of just infamy, it could create a level of replay value that has never been dreamed of before.

This is exactly the reason I don't play war themed shooting games: I just don't like killing people. But hekets? You do eat chicken sandwich don't you?

There is an MMO in development where death is permanent for a character: Salem, you migth want to check it out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1jJEKieaww

Most of those have always bothered me, especially if you aren't given any practical alternatives. The cost on the first is set way too high to be affordable, whether you pay the outrageous price for the vase or bribe Bokka's guy directly. OTOH, I would gladly kill that minister who demands a bribe in Raze the Roost, and I hope WoC lets us get a little revenge on that scum.

In the second, I always back off and let Panaku do the killing after his victim has spotted us. (And I flag the henchies out of the way so they don't get involved, either. Panaku is on his own for this, and bad cess to him.)

There are a few quests in NF that have a moral choice where you do get an option. For example, I can always skip the Message to Janeera quest from Ruthless Sevad by taking the medical supplies directly to Elder Jonah.

I don't worry much about the giants, because they are hostile anyway. I figure any red dot on the radar is fair game, since whatever it is will attack me on sight without asking questions. I am a bit horrified by those who will attack friendlies (charmable animals), though, for the sake of a few vanquish points or holiday drops.

The latest round of GW2 demos seems to be rather heavy on people stirring up non-hostiles, usually moas, such as the leaked video of thief gameplay from GDC. I hope this will not be a normal part of GW2 gameplay, but I did notice a lot of deer wandering around. (Note: I do enjoy deer hunting IRL, so this isn't about having some mushy objection to killing Bambi. It's about being encouraged to kill everything in sight just because it's there.)

That is too utilitarian for me. The ends do not always justify the means.

It depends on the societal constructs and social agreements/contracts/taboos. Absolute morality is a myth. What we have are the morals which we as a society have set and defined, usually via our religious beliefs but not always. We have defined them based on agreed upon end-goals, generally involving survival of the species in one form or another.

You don't even have to travel to some mythical planet elsewhere in the universe to find societal constructs in which many of the behaviors we, in our society, deem as immoral within our society are instead utterly moral within their context... we find them right here on earth among the other populations that share this planet with us - plant, animal, insects, etc.

Morality is a relative construct agreed upon by the majority, enforced by the majority, and predicated on an end-goal upon which the majority agree. If a behavior becomes necessary for the survival of the species (or detrimental to the survival of the species), that which was once moral or immoral will quickly change.

If tomorrow it was found that the survival of the human race was definitively dependent upon our consuming the flesh of our dead - some necessary enzyme we are unable to chemically reproduce - cannibalism would become "moral" nearly overnight. Within a generation, it would elicit no more comment than sitting down to eat a bowl of peas & carrots does today.

And why? Because the majority would decree it to be moral in pursuit of the end-goal the majority agreed was the priority: survival of the species.

Morality is always, in every situation, nothing more than what the majority has decided "works." Immorality is always, in every situation, nothing more than what the majority has decided "does not work." Both are fluid, flexible and subject to change based on changes in the environment in which they are functional/not functional.

And in the context of Guild Wars, where the end-goal is to "win the game," (actually another form of survival of the species - your toon's species LOL) it is utterly moral to send those 1's & 0's through in a pattern which causes the foes to disappear from your graphic display.

An interesting reply, Gizzy.

One of the ways games get around the problem of morality is to have everything in the game world trying to kill us. I noticed this in the Elder Scrolls games such as "Morrowind" and "Oblivion" too; you couldn't travel to another town without every wild animal trying to kill you on sight. In GW, it's the same thing (with the exception of potential ranger pets). Of course, in Nightfall you also have the Kournans attacking you and the rest of the Istani soldiers on sight, which at least made more sense.

I like what BioWare has tried to do over the years in terms of forcing us to choose, sometimes the lesser of two evils. By contrast, "Fable" IMO sabotaged itself by making the results of our moral choices juvenile: being evil means you grow horns, being good means you have a halo and butterflies, as well as townspeople gushing over you. It's as if the "Fable" devs were trying to sabotage their own game.

And what about the morality of Ms Packman gobbling up all those poor Ghosts.

There are other games with stronger morality issues.
But this thread is an amusing read. :P Thanks.

I think it's probably something a lot of developers grapple with when rolling out a new game... and obviously, it's a discussion I've participated in on more than one occasion. LOL

I like games where your choices influence who you are/become as a character. It reminds me of my old D&D days when you had to make a choice if your character was Chaotic Evil, Neutral Good, etc. That choice actually influenced what you were "allowed" to do as the RP progressed. You couldn't just go in and wipe out a non-hostile encampment of Kobolds if you were NG, even if you believed doing so would later save your party some trouble.

Games have advanced to the point where rather than your alignment dictating your options, your choices dictate your alignment - your personal morality within the created game universe plays a major part in that - and the morality of the universe itself is often observably fluid in a way we don't see (or actually refuse to see in most cases) in our real world.

In the universe of GW1 - Charr are bad... look what they did to Ascalon, right? But wait... then there's the whole storyline involving Pyre. Hmmm... that sort of changes things a bit, doesn't it? We accept the shift in morality - maybe all of the Charr aren't quite as evil as we thought. Gwen violently disagrees and will likely continue to.

Fast-forward in time, GW2. Now how do we think of the Charr? It's no longer so moral to kill them on sight.

It's flexible morality - because morality changes with the environment (political, social, familial/tribal, financial, medical, etc).

I like that ANet is actually using flexible morality as part of the lore... and that from the way it sounds, there will be observable effects of your moral choices in the new game. I think that one of the best compliments you can pay to a developer is this: your product is fun... and it makes me think.

Great idea