For the most part, I enjoy morality systems in games. Despite what our podcast hosts think about them, I like the choices it gives in how you can play a particular game, however transparent those choices may actually be for achieving the final goal. My one grating problem that I do have with these systems, however, is when choices are completely black and white, good/evil decisions for choices that are obviously a lot more deep than just choosing which side of the fence you are on. Even games with typically well done morality systems fall into this awful trap, and some do it especially badly. Here’s one such tale of woe from the Capital Wasteland.
SPOILER ALERT! If you are planning on playing the Fallout 3 DLC The Pitt at all, or do not want to have anything about it spoiled for you, DO NOT READ THIS NEXT SEGMENT. SPOILER ALERT!
This weekend, as any of you who watched my live stream know, I played through Fallout 3′s DLC The Pitt, in which you follow a transmission from a group of slaves in jeopardy somewhere in the city of Pittsburgh. The DLC was surprisingly good for an inexpensive expansion, but I’ll save that discussion for another time. My concern with The Pitt was with the morality choice you are given at the end of the DLC.
The basic story of The Pitt goes like this: You receive a distress call from the people of the former town of Pittsburgh with a sob story of people being kept as slaves and forced to work the steel mill, and a horrible plague is turning people into monsters. Your job is to infiltrate their ranks, work your way up the food chain to the head of the Raider operation there and steal the cure so the people can be freed. Simple right? Steal the cure, fight the raiders, free the slaves. Evil is punished, good job. Or you join the raiders and become an icon of oppression that all other raiders and slavers can look up to. However, the option you are given is nowhere near as black and white as one would assume.
After working your way up to an audience with Ashur, the ‘Lord of the Pitt’ and hearing the slaves side of the story, he informs you that the man who called you for help has not been telling the whole truth and wants you to kill him. Ashur then runs off to take care of some rioting that starts up, and you’re left to take a look around. Upon further inspection of the area you can get into Ashurs safe and fine some audio logs apparently left for his daughter once she has grown up. These logs reveal a story of how Ashur found the city in ruin, with carnivorous beasts and cannibals running amok. He talks of finding a working steel mill in the city, and how he needed workers to work in the mill so the city could have a bright future in devlopment – a ‘chance to build something new in a world of leftovers’. He mentions how the disease here tends to leave people sterile, so once the current generation dies off, so he had to seek outside help for recruitment, stating ‘by force if necessary’ (so yeah, he’s kidnapping people as slaves, which is a bad thing).
Later in these audio logs, he speaks of his daughter ‘being the cure’ for this disease, her holding a natural immunity from this horrible affliction. Wander this area a little more, and you’ll meet Ashur’s wife – a very nice lady who wants you to meet her baby girl. After hearing everything the lady has to say about the baby, how they are looking for a way to share the cure with everybody in The Pitt, and how she is taking great care not to harm the child, I am left with a decision: Do I kidnap the baby to give the slaves the ‘cure’ they are clamouring for along with something they can ransom for they freedom, or let the baby be so Ashur’s wife can develop a cure for everybody and bring with it the prospect of rebuilding civilisation and a future with no more need for slavery? My personal feelings of what would be the better moral decision in the long run – if not instantly gratifying – is to let things be as they are. The future of The Pitt is actually extremely bright with this cure laying here, waiting to be shares with everybody.
If you thought the same as I did, you would be wrong.
Leaving the baby in her crib and not kidnapping her is apparently the bad moral choice. As soon as you leave without the baby, every slae in the area is instantly hostile to you, trying to carve you up with their foul axe buzzsaws, and defending yourself leads to loss of karma. Handing this child over to the slaves as a bargaining chip so they can turn out/fight/kill the raiders effectively is apparently the right thing to do. I don’t care how much of it seemed horrible and wrong to begin with, but if the future of this place is for Pittsburgh to be rebuilt and turned into a bastion of hope for this harsh wasteland, it looks like you’re going to have to break a few eggs to make the perfect omelette.
This frustrated the hell out of me, as the incredibly deep woven plot surrounding all of this turned out to be an absolute black and white choice in Bethesda’s morality system coded into Fallout 3. Instant gratification wins out against the prospect of a hope in a dying world. Since I don’t want that particular character to be any less than the epitome of good in the game, I reloaded a previous save and kidnapped the child, causing me to have to kill Ashur and his very nice lady of a wife in the end.
So screw you, Bethesda. As much as I love what you have done with Fallout 3, and as much as The Pitt was an otherwise amazing expansion to this awesome game, I can’t help but feel you just earned Evil Points on my morality system. Let’s hope things are a little more clearly defined for choices in Broken Steel when I start that next, or if you have attempted another deep choice to make there is something a little more than just right or wrong.
