The Light/Dark mechanism, as mentioned, is not really a choice of good vs. evil. Sometimes we need to be like Qui-gon and cheat at dice.

Similarly, the player can look to Aric or Qyzen for a thumbs up, but earning their affection isn’t the same as making the “right” choice.

Each of these choice mechanisms affect your character, giving your decisions real consequences. However, none of the penalties is so great that it overpowers the player’s ability to choose.

In fact, establishing a moral code and finding where it leads me gives me a strong method for differentiating between characters. It makes them more distinct and allows me to enter their differing personalities as I play

(Which, no, is not as good as a tabletop RPG, but it’s still miles away from WoW. And, no, don’t expect me to be able to explain why I can do tabletop RPGs but find the online equivalents frightening. People are weird, and that includes me.)

But it’s OK to like different sorts of games too. No, there won’t ever be a programmed RPG where you get the depth of character interaction that you do in a RP MUSH. On the other hand, the NPCs tend to stay in character and not stiff you because they don’t like you OOC or you’re on the wrong timezone or you didn’t want to cyber with them, which does occasionally happen in MU*.

I do find that Bioware type RPGs and SWTOR in particular are offering a more character based experience than typical MMOs, and when I wrote this, I was pondering how it felt to have an actual emotional reaction towards a character and NPCs in a game like this, because that’s unusual.

So I’m not disagreeing with you exactly, but I still enjoy SWTOR for what it is.

I won’t go into detail here, since that would be just become a wall of text, thus just in short: my so-called “character” in WoW for example was a toon, it was defined by the class and interchangeable by any other “char” of the same class. (Give and take a little on basis of player skill, but that’s it. )

This contrasts with being known as lawyer (the real worst fo all evil) in Neocron 2 (hands up, anybody here who ever played that pile of bugs? ) or having served in a regional militia for several years (RL!) in a Xyllomer (again, hands up if anybody here even ever heard of it) at some time being judge and lateron being acting regent in that area really makes a character. (I could bring up more, in different games, but interestingly enough, most of them were rather small. )

The basis for that, in short: interaction with other people. I played my character, it formed. Sometimes it surprised myself, realizing that my character in some situations decides quite differently than i’d ever do so. Now in contrast, TOR: nobody ever cares for the decissions of my character. While you “decide” all of the time, i can count on one hand when the decissions of my character ever mattered. And still have several fingers left. At the same time, the game makes sure that nobody but you can ever be affected by your decissions. And yes, it strongly encourages to either go the “moronic, naive always-good” or the “brainless, psychotic always-bad” route. Both of them are rewarded, anything in between is punished.

So, yes. If you come from a toon game, like WoW and the likes, had little to no RP interaction to other players in your past games and just find your char to perhaps be a character for the first time, SWTOR might be an improvement. It’s tried and proven in single player games, after all. But in terms of an online game and knowing what already was done over 20 years ago, the only thing SWTOR can be credited for is: players who never before saw the difference between character and toon suddenly are surprided by geting a microscopically small infusion of character into their toon. So yes, perhaps that’s a merit of TOR: giving players of other MMO”RPG” a touch of “RPG”, albeit at a strictly limited dosage, but somebody who’s been into online RP for quite some time, the system is more restrictive and punishing than having nothing at all.

So there are times where I feel my ‘good’ characters have been necessitated to do ‘Dark’ things in order to follow their codes of ethics. And sometimes choosing the Light options leads to unforseen negative consequences.

It all leads to me caring a lot more about my SWTOR characters than I have in other games.

And often the best way to achieve a better future outcome is to adopt a moral creed to use in decision making, an ethical code such as you described. ‘Do as you will, but never to harm.’ ‘Don’t interfere with someone else’s choices, where they do not impact you.’ ‘Honor your father and mother,’ and so on. Such a code might even be ‘I want to act such as I think will lead to improving the world’. But even then, that alone doesn’t make your action good or evil, what matters is the actual consequences.

The point is that at the time of a decision it’s not possible to know whether that decision was good or evil. You have to see what happens as a result. Even if you act with the best of intentions, intending to cause the world to be a better place, but because of your action you cause greater harm than would be otherwise, then you did something evil. This makes applying it to gaming difficult. Giving you 20 lightside points for healing a dude is easy. Healing a dude, and then having the simulation keep track of all the effects that has, tally them up, and decide that on the balance you get 8.45 lightside points is more difficult.

As for why this matters, I suppose that I fall into the camp where I think ethics in games that matter beyond simple cosmetic effects could lead to interesting gameplay. That becoming more good or evil should have some impact on how you play, on options available to you, on the way other characters react to you. But that’s only fun if morality has a bit more nuance to it than simply ‘slaughter helpless orphan children for the lulz’ vs ‘rescue cute adorable kittens from being victimized by the evil corporation’.

I also don’t really want to Godwin this discussion, but fanatical people can do some pretty horrible things in the belief that they will eventually make the world better (ie. warcrimes, murder, and so on.)

When I play these types of games I find myself constantly confused by how I’m assigned good or evil ‘points’. Be a bit brutal to someone to prevent widespread famine and starvation? How evil of me! Stop a bandit gang from kidnapping a young woman, provoking a huge battle between the gang and the town, leading to the deaths of the woman, all the bandits, and half the town? But stopping them from taking her was good, right? A merchant is charging too much for medicine? Intimidate him into giving meds away for free! Do it for the children (and good points)! And then no other merchant dares to sell medicine here again, and disease runs rampant.

I’ll be more forgiving of these types of games when they stop penalizing me for supposedly evil acts that make the world a genuinely better place to live for everyone.