Jadak said:
To be fair, few games offer moral choices where evil is something other than 'murder puppies for fun'.
As with most others here I agree, but I think it's actually worse than that. Too often the evil choice isn't just something silly and over the top for no reason, but the game actually punishes you for doing it. The classic Infinity Engine games, for example, mostly had evil as an option, along with evil companions if you wanted to make a whole evil group. But being good meant more XP and store discounts, while being evil meant a pathetically small bit of cash, not being able to talk to some NPCs, and constantly being attacked when in town. Even in games that don't punish you quite so blatantly, there's almost always the problem that there's absolutely no reason for an evil character to accept the vast majority of quests, so they will always inherently fall behind a good character.
That said, I don't think it's fair to blame developers entirely for this, because there are obvious reasons why it's the case. Firstly, society is, on the whole, not evil. Most people do not spend all their time murdering people and taking their stuff, or even doing more low-key things as simple as stealing. Criminals exist, but they're very much the minority. So a game world in which evil is just as viable and common as good just isn't going to feel at all realistic. The IE games may not have had much of a good/evil choice in terms of gameplay, but in terms of the game world it was actually pretty accurate - if you constantly murder people, others will refuse to talk to you and call the guards instead. PnP D&D ended up with pirate cities and the like for precisely this reason - it allowed people to play evil characters without having all their games immediately devolved into a running battle with the police.
Secondly, developers are, on the whole, not evil. This is a point usually made in regards to bad portrayal of scientists, geniuses, and so on in media - it's not easy to write things that you don't know. How do you write things a genius would say if you're not actually a genius yourself? In addition, it's very easy to spot flaws after the fact, but it's much more difficult to actually fix things yourself. Take sport, for example. It's usually very easy to see what a given sport person/team/whatever did wrong in a given situation, even though those of us sitting at home watching couldn't possibly have done any better ourselves. Combine the two and you have the situation where writers struggle to come up with realistic evil because they have no real experience of it themselves, but at the same time it's easy for us to look at what they have come up with and say it's all wrong.
So while I would love there to be better and more interesting moral choices in games, I can understand why there generally aren't. Some villains become iconic, but most of them don't because writing realistic evil just isn't that easy.
Covarr said:
This is why I enjoyed The Walking Dead so much. So many choices were between "Evil, but safe" and "Good, but dangerous", and the game was simply too unpredictable to aim for a white knight playthrough.
While it did better than most, if you look at the stats showing how most people played it still had the vast majority choosing the same "good" options. It was a good effort, but I think it was flawed when it came to moral choices for the very simple reason that it was an adventure game and everyone knew that a choice would never make them lose. Unpredictable consequences, sure, but you always knew that no matter which option you picked the game would carry on. I think the choices could have been a lot more interesting if occasionally the "good, but dangerous" option was actually just plain wrong and got you killed.