Please... No Enforced Morality

I find myself in disbelief but I agree with you whole heartedly. I like to play morally ambiguous. If I'm out toodling in my space craft and I run into Zebulon who just happens to be asshole in my opinion, I should not have an entire race after me because I killed him/her/it. Who knows he/she/it may be just as much as a asshole to the rest of his race. I may be doing them a favor. The problem with a lot of games is a perceived code of honor or even karmatic justice for that matter. Do bad and bad will happen to you. The world don't work that way bad guys win all the time, why cant I? 

I completely agree and urge writers and quest line developers to challenge themselves to do it. This is year 2016. The time of shallow story-lines and fetch quests is over. If this SC is striving to be better than SC2 then it's not the graphics, not the music, and not the aliens that can do it, but a massively different story-line play-styles.

I don't know where you live, but karma is a b!tch here...

Totally totally agree.  If SCR gives you the freedom to explore the galaxy or customize your fleet, you should also have the freedom to take whatever path you want to reach your goals, good or bad.  There should be multiple ways to the same end, if not for moral freedom, at least for redundant ways to complete tasks/missions.

Well, I agree that moral ambiguity or even outright malice should be completely viable. But I feel like there should definitely be SOME negative consequences, even if they're indirect.

I find myself in strange agreement as well...

I don't think enslaving races I encounter is really in the game play that Star Control inhabits, but giving interesting choices (dare I say, like GalCiv!) for events and encounters would certainly fit within SC's narrative.  It's easy to see that two different captains in SC2 would react differently to finding Earth enslaved...one could do what we all did, and try to recruit allies to save the day. Another captain may cheat, steal, and deceive the other races into cracking that slave shield. 

If there is room for this in the new SC, it would increase investment and replayability...

Yes, there should be times when doing something amoral leads to a negative situation. (Just don't let it be EVERY or MOST of time.) If I assassinate a race's beloved leader in front of their populace, they're going to hate me. If I lure him to a distant star and THEN assassinate him, though... Who's to know?

Likewise, being altruistic should sometimes lead to a negative situation.

The reason I don't like the idea of multiple story paths is partly because it makes you want to play through a second time just to see the other storyline you missed, while the game will be pretty much the same thing all over again.  But more than that, as someone giving advice during the making of the game, I'd hate to see the devs waste so much time on so little end result.  What do you get in the end for making multiple good/evil paths for the story?  In the end, in the actual game that will exist.

This is a concept some old school game designers called "the glorious vision".  People develop a "glorious vision" of what an envisioned game will be like, and lose sight of what it will actually be in the end.  In this case, what it will actually be in the end is a some different responses and endings in a few storylines.  That's really all it would amount too in the end.  And for this the devs get to waste literally hundreds of man hours on extra art and dialog and time working out all of these, what amount to side quests.

I'd rather see them focused on one good story rather than trying to write two good stories, and I'd rather see them spend all that time on much more than what would in the end amount to a few extra side quests.  It's really just way too much work for very little gain compared to how much they can improve the game spending that time on more important and impactful things.

A good way to provide more gameplay without the multiple endings is to have just 2 endings.

A good ending and an evil ending.

So in one storyline you are aligned with the "GOOD" guys whatever that maybe.

You can reply it by doing the storyline where you are aligned with the "EVIL" guys (apparently).

That would simplify storylines and make the gameplay and options much more meaningful and would reduce the ambiguity of your actions. You know if you have to play good or bad, not in between....

What is good and what is evil? Can't someone be a selfish, arrogant ass and still be a "good guy"? I try not to use the words "good" and "evil" and rather use antonyms like altruistic / selfish, xenophobic / tolerant, or moral / amoral to describe what I want out of an RPG play-through.

No, see, that's exactly what I don't want. During an amoral, selfish play-through, I might do some nice things like help an old lady across the street. Why? What if she has a reward for me? If I find out that she had nothing to give, though, I might shove her back into traffic. }:>

If I were playing "evil", I'd shove her into traffic before even getting past the first dialog choice.

By your own definition you are not doing something "nice" to help an old lady if what you are expecting is a reward.

Me working at my job is not because I am "nice" it's because they pay me to work.

Nice would be if whatever the outcome you are not going to draw your gun and start shooting people.

Most "evil" characters depicted in movies and such actually do supposedly "NICE" things but not because they are "NICE".

Think of the movie Galaxy Quest when they went to an innocent looking planet to replace their beryllium sphere and encountered cute little aliens. There was this one alien that had an injury and was limping. The cute little aliens were very "KIND" in letting him through to take a sip of water and......... Yes very "KIND" indeed.

Also notice how I added all the subtle hints that "GOOD" may not necessarily mean "GOOD".

And "EVIL" is only apparently "EVIL".

The point is if you have 2 factions fighting each other then you could get meaningful gameplay by playing each side.

That is pretty much what DUNE 2 and DUNE 3 and many other RTS/Strategy games end up doing.

Starcraft, C&C, etc.

To create meaningful battles you need at least one opponent (but that get's boring fast so having 2 other factions seems to be pretty common).

In that process you create a gigantic game of Rock-Paper-Scissors.

But since you have now created 3 factions then why not make it possible to play the other 2 and give meaningful storylines to the other factions? After all, all the assets have already been made and the only thing is to weave storylines for the other factions.

In SC2 you were automatically with the "New New Alliance of New Stars" and your aim was to defeat the Ur-Quan.

You were stuck being the "GOOD" guy (supposedly).

How much fun would it be to then have a chance to play the Ur-Quan side and have to fight against a fully decked Precursor ship with the Sa-Matra?

SC2 was a somewhat linear game.

Games like Skyrim are just too open ended that it begs the question that maybe the "ended" should be dropped.

While I would love to have the freedom of Skyrim in SCR that may turn SCR into an Elite game or other such space faring game.

The reason why we all love SC2 is the storyline and the aliens all weaved into a funny and amazing space adventure. So going into an open ended Skyrim may be a little too much.

But having narrow storylines in this age of technological wonders is not.... "good".

And yet, in the end, all you wind up with are some "side quests" for evil conversation options.  It's a wonderful "glorious vision", but in the end, it's really just half-a-dozen side quests.  That's how it actually works out in the end.

I would rather see a single story carrying you through an amazing arcade game.  I would rather see them focus on that than spend a lot of time writing two different versions of the story and the "evil" version's associated side quests.

It sounds great, but doesn't amount to much in the final game that would exist.

I am not talking about side quests.

Have you played Starcraft at all? Or Dune 2?? Are those missions side quests? No.

RPGs are the usual suspects with "character alignment side quests".

And that is what I want to avoid as well. If you cannot get unique endings according to your game and alignment and end up with a canon ending with your character being a scarred badass or a freckle-free angel then there really is no point as it means your actions have made no impact to the world.

As I stated in earlier posts multiple endings are good if they truly are unique endings but the downside is that sequels will be hard create as it would mean having many starting points. The alternative is to stick with 2 (at most 3) storylines that run parallel (like if it was a parallel universe -think of it this way-, what if Hitler had won the war universe kind of scenario.)

Hence my example of Dune where you could play as the Harkonnen, Ordos, or Atreides.

But also like in Starcraft where you can play the Human campaign, Protoss campaign, or Zerg campaign. 

But those games don't really give you that much freedom and although you get to see a storyline there is little continuity in the sequel. They tie all endings and create a canon start.

But they are just side quests, that's all it actually amounts too in the end.  Playing different factions in an RTS isn't really relevant, its an entirely different thing.  This is essentially a text adventure game.  There are no separate factions with entirely different unit lineups to work with here, only response choices in an interactive story.  In the end, we really are just talking about half-a-dozen or so side quests to support evil responses in the conversation.

One of my personal philosophies in game design was "if it can't be done well, don't do it at all".  The "glorious vision" of a game where you can be good or evil and the NPCs will react to you accordingly and realistically can't be done well, in the end it is just a few side quests associated with 10 times the work needed to actually create them, so I personally would not do it at all and focus on game elements that can be done well.

Of course you can. But why bother when you can not do it and still make a sale...

I've spent a lot of time traveling, fighting and seeing some things that prove to me whole heartedly that morality is a human condition and not a cosmic rulebook.