The sandpeople quest in KotOR could have been decent.

[deuxhero]

If you axed the light/dark gains and fact that you get the reward for completing the quest peacefully (there is no reason the cheif should give you his weapon anyways) it could have some decent greyness. Your solutions are to allow them to keep their pillaging (but they do less of it), or remove the threat entirely via genocide.


Any other quests (any game) that are not gray only by nature of the karma given to them in game (or "because the devloper says so")?

 

[Erzherzog]

Star Wars = No grey areas

 

[Forest Dweller]

Star Wars - Kotor 2 = No grey areas

Fixed

 

[Lim-Lim]

Star Wars - Kotor = No grey areas

Fixed

Fixed

 

[Forest Dweller]

You serious?

 

[Lim-Lim]

Yes.

I'M VERY ANGRY ABOUT KOTOR VIDEOGAMES

 

[bhlaab]

Star Wars = No good areas

 

[St. Toxic]

Star Wars = No good

Fixed

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Star Wars - KotOR2 = No good

Fixed

Fixed.

 

[The Ticktockman]

Bullshit bullshit bullshit

fixed

 

[Wyrmlord]

My way of playing videogames:

Do the peaceful solution first for the XP.

Go back to camp and kill all those sandpeople anyway.

I love doing stuff like that in KotOR. Hmmm, I have option A, I have option B, but there's nothing in theory stopping me from doing both and having an all the XP you can eat buffet.

 

[Jasede]

Yeah, I like to min-max in CRPGs like that too. Honestly don't give a damn about "playing a character". Doublecrossing people for loot & XP is my standard way of playing every Fallout-like on my first time through, to enjoy as much of the game as I can.

 

[Wyrmlord]

That, and in games where there are no restrictions on the actions you do with other NPCs, it doesn't hurt to do and finish the quest with one NPC, and then use right-click, choose Attack, and kill them anyway.

Like Shadows Of Undrentide, where I did a quest for this one elf bloke, and then came back, gave him the item, got the XP, killed him, got more XP, and nabbed the nice Arcane Archer bow he happened to have on him.

I wonder why they put restrictions on characters you can kill, these days. If it is an essential character, and it ends up blocking your game progress, so be it.

 

[Azrael the cat]

That, and in games where there are no restrictions on the actions you do with other NPCs, it doesn't hurt to do and finish the quest with one NPC, and then use right-click, choose Attack, and kill them anyway.

Like Shadows Of Undrentide, where I did a quest for this one elf bloke, and then came back, gave him the item, got the XP, killed him, got more XP, and nabbed the nice Arcane Archer bow he happened to have on him.

I wonder why they put restrictions on characters you can kill, these days. If it is an essential character, and it ends up blocking your game progress, so be it.

I hate to praise Bethesda, but to be honest Morrowing had the best solution to that by far. You could kill anyone in the game that you wanted, but if in doing so you block any future progress you would get a message saying 'You have killed a vital character and doomed the world', then you were given an option to keep playing in a doomed world, or to reload. If you kept playing, the next time you saved you'd get an 'are you sure? This is a doomed world', or something similar. It meant you could kill anyone and either choose to live with the consequences (blocked progress) or reload. And utterly idiot-proof. They also put in a 'backdoor' way of progressing if you killed off pretty much everyone (or, more to the point, was a vampire, couldn't find the cure (which was pretty much the hardest thing in the game, as first you're told there isn't one, and to find it you have to track down some rare books in various libraries, stealthed so guards don't all come after you, and then follow the books' quest instructions to a place which is pretty hard to stumble across) or didn't want to be cured), where you could always progress to the end by murdering Vivec the god/king and taking his stuff.

Why they went from that to the 'unkillable NPC' retardedness with Oblivion is beyond me.

 

[MetalCraze]

Because lots of kids actually complained that the main quest gets broken when you kill an essential NPC even though there was a message.
Nothing is retard-proof when you are talking about ESF'ers.

 

[Barrow_Bug]

Tru dat.

 

[The Wizard]

there is only one character you should not kill if you want to "complete" the mainquest. grated, you need a little bit of thinking to figure that out and...nevermind.

yeah, kotor could have been good if it wasn't total gar-bitch.

 

[JarlFrank]

there is only one character you should not kill if you want to "complete" the mainquest. grated, you need a little bit of thinking to figure that out and...nevermind.

The last dwarf guy? Yeah I guess you still need him alive.

And why did they made plot-essential characters immortal in Oblivion? Well, isn't it obvious? Same reason why they included a quest compass. Worst offense is, though, that even fucking innkeepers who have only minor quests are unkillable.

 

[Wyrmlord]

It takes nothing to have an alternative bypass for any situation where you end up killing some essential character but want to continue with the main quest. If it must be there in the game.

Even something like,

"I found a note on the man which tells me that my next objective is to point C."

Yeah, that is a cop-out, but I would say it is totally acceptable. I don't expect games to be more realistic than that, and even Troika did it with the ghoul at the beginning of Bloodlines.

Other than that, they can just as well go the STALKER route, and not block the possibility of finishing a quest just because a quest character died. You'd have to somehow find the right way yourself (which is not too hard). Of course, it was necessary in a game like STALKER where random dynamic events in the world mean that a quest character would be killed just because he got struck by lightning while walking around.

 

[JarlFrank]

Yeah, I actually liked Arcanum's way of doing things a lot. Killed the guys from P. Schuyler and Sons? Missed important information because of that? Cast conjure spirit to ask the dead. Or search the cupboards to find a note. That's the proper way of doing things, not making questgivers immortal to prevent the player from doing something stupid.

 

[kris]

In a great RPG there shouldn't be any single person responsible for the main quest. In fact you shouldn't even feel that you really have to finish the main quest.

 

[Jim Cojones]

Yeah, I actually liked Arcanum's way of doing things a lot. Killed the guys from P. Schuyler and Sons? Missed important information because of that? Cast conjure spirit to ask the dead. Or search the cupboards to find a note. That's the proper way of doing things, not making questgivers immortal to prevent the player from doing something stupid.

Just putting a one, stupid note in a locked container gives you a possibility to finish the quest in two different ways than default talking with Shuylers (sneaking and lockpicking for thief characters, killing Shuylers and bashing the containers for warrior types). How hard can it be to think of more similar ways to give player to do things his way instead of "you must talk to them, you can't kill them, you can't...". But off course implementing such resolutions would cause the exponential growth of the amount of work needed to complete the production, wouldn't it? ;-|

Star Wars \ {Kotor 2} = No grey areas

Fixed

Fixed. Don't use arithmetical symbols when you work with sets.