Wasteland 3 choices2/24/2023 ![]() ![]() However, when doing so means that innocent marshals from a local town will die, and powerful weapons will fall into the hands of deranged lunatics, is this truly the more moral decision? Choosing to protect a mobster over handing him over to the police is obviously the more “Renegade” decision. When the choice is between saving an innocent family who’s been taken hostage or protecting a weapons convoy from cultists, saving the family is undoubtedly the more “Paragon” option. However, what may please one faction will more often than not deteriorate your relationship with another. This may sound as if it carries a similar problem to Mass Effect’s system, as players may decide to just do whatever makes a certain faction happy to boost their reputation and reap the rewards. From a gameplay perspective, this means rather than basing their decisions on whether or not they’re going to be good or evil, players must consider how their standing in the world at large will be affected by their actions. Rather than have a “good” or “evil” meter, players build reputation individually with a number of the factions in Colorado, with decisions positively or negatively affecting each group’s opinion of you. ![]() And when the choice is so neatly segregated into purely Good or Bad, you have a much greater tendency for players to lean towards the Good option. However, when a game offers players a distinct option between being a hero or a villain, more often than not players will gravitate toward what makes more sense in the context of the story. ![]() There’s no real choice to take a more morally righteous approach, and that’s why they are able to succeed as villain-centric stories. However, with each of these games, being a villain is the price of entry. Destroy All Humans, Overlord, Prototype - there are certainly a number of games that allow players to flex their more villainous tendencies. Grand Theft Auto V is one of the most popular games to ever exist, a game in which gunning down civilians and being a general scumbag isn’t just a feature, it’s a primary reason to play the game. Now, this isn’t to say that gamers are implicitly opposed to playing as more morally dubious characters. Even though you can progress the story in very similar ways whether you lean Paragon or Renegade, the reality is that when given a choice to be a good guy or straight-up villain, most players will choose to be heroic rather than villainous. Choosing to murder brainwashed colonists when you have the means to save them via sleep grenades isn’t a complex moral choice, it’s a litmus test for whether or not you’re a psychopath. Regardless of how you feel about bureaucracy, most people would probably agree that killing the entire galactic government is a bad long-term idea. And with this type of character, the loud-mouthed, arrogant, violent, and usually tactless dialogue options in the Renegade tree simply don’t match with who Shepard is. Shepard is a character who is meant to liaison with and oftentimes serve as a diplomatic figure for a multitude of alien races. While Renegade options are sold to the player as a way to make their Shepard a hard-ass who doesn’t play by the rules but gets results, many of these decisions simply don’t make sense in the grand scheme of Shepard’s role. ![]()
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