2. Increased Karma Importance
Measuring moral decisions on a +/- scale can't possibly be an easy thing to do. I mean, there are literally hundreds of different standards by which to assign values of good and bad, and very few of them are as simple as "drowning people good, saving nuns bad". When companies like Interplay, Bioware, Bethesda, or others set out to build systems of moral measurement, based on a numbers, such as the Fallout Karma system, I imagine it's as daunting a task as anyone has ever attempted in a videogame. And to be fair, it works pretty well for the most part. But in the newer games, especially New Vegas, there was a simplicity to the Karma system that clearly strove for moral ambiguity, but landed somewhere between apathetic and unimaginative in that murky "good enough for government work" section of philosophy. OK, it made sense that blasting a random passerby in the face with a shotgun just so I could help myself to his iguana on a stick is bad. There was little to gain and the cost was high (buckshot isn't cheap). But, not everything fits into such a clear cut category. For instance, shortcut that the developers took in New Vegas was that NCR troops all had good Karma, and Legion troops all had Bad Karma. Kill an NCR trooper, you get evil points. Kill a Legion trooper, you get good points. Yet the game presented the choice of aligning yourself with one of the two as a moral choice available to the player. How can it be up to the player if the game is already telling you one is evil and one is good? The dichotomous system led to such a simple choice that the Karma system kind of seemed pointless, unless you count the radio announcements as worthy goal, which is understandable since you have to hear them every five freaking minutes. Next time around, Bethesda would do well to take the focus off "kill based Karma" and put it on specific actions. No one is either good or bad in the real world, and the NPCs shouldn't be either. Most people make some kind decisions and some really cruel choices as well. One of the ways the original games dealt with this was by introducing stigmas, mostly negative ones. If you were mostly a good guy, but from time to time went around digging up graves for extra cash, word would spread and people would treat you accordingly. They would say, "There goes that Johnson boy. It sure is nice of him to take care of his grandmother so often. Maybe he's hoping she'll be buried with her valuables." Or, if you needed quick cash, you could join the slavers guild. Of course, that meant getting a tattoo on your head that drew some pretty serious positive/negative reactions from different factions of NPCs. You could even become a famous porn star (how famous depended on your stamina and charisma traits), which would get you huge charisma boosts with seedy folks. I could go on at great length, but I'll save you the mental imagery of me being a pixelated porn star and just get to the point. The Karma choices in Fallout 3 and F:NV just didn't seem all that important, because the world didn't give all that much of a crap about it. Sure, some of the bigger choices stood out a bit, but even those seemed to have a lack of staying power. The best example is the most obvious: I blew Megaton sky high the first time I played Fallout 3. Screw those people. Yet within minutes it seemed like everyone had forgotten about it. Sure there is other stuff happening, around the wasteland but you would think that word would spread about the guy who rigged an atomic bomb to blow, and people wouldn't be all that happy when they ran into him. And I don't just mean the occasional token Ranger/bounty hunter patrol. That is just a cop out. So let's have it, Fallout. Make my choices stick with me, so that the next time I play through, I have to actually consider the consequences of my actions.