Too Much Good Karma?

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DwayneGAnd

Look, Ma! Two Heads!
Just like in previous games, this game has a lot of opportunities to gain karma. Maybe too much. You gain karma from killing enemies such as Fiends, Escaped Convicts, and Feral Ghouls. Because of this, regardless of how you solve certain quests and gain evil karma or remain neutral, it's next to impossible to finish the game with neutral or evil karma, unless you go on a killing or stealing spree.

I suppose this is true for the previous games. Where the only way to have a lot of evil karma is by killing everyone you meet. Of course, there are times where you'll be forced to kill creatures and people that will give you good karma. This would make getting Ain't Like That Now or Just Lucky I'm Alive difficult.

Fallout 3 would probably be the easiest game to be evil as there are several quests that can reduce your karma down to the lowest level.

Is is just me, or do the producers of this series want you to be the good guy despite having opportunities for evil?
 
I once played through the first Fallout game as a psychopath. I was killing everyone in the game to preserve the secret existence of Vault 13. It seriously messed up the ending game slides. They badly contradicted each other and sometimes contradicted what I actually did in the game. It was obviously not designed for a thoroughly evil playthrough. From the beginning of the series, it's apparent that they're designed for the player to be the good guy.
 
Some evil karma playthroughs in the first game actually kill everyone in the vault too, except for the overseer. Some evil playthroughs don'tt kill characters that give good karma such as Gizmo or the Skulz. A true pyschopath would kill everyone regardless.
 
DwayneGAnd said:
Some evil karma playthroughs in the first game actually kill everyone in the vault too, except for the overseer. Some evil playthroughs don'tt kill characters that give good karma such as Gizmo or the Skulz. A true pyschopath would kill everyone regardless.
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Not really. Not if it did not suit their goals.
 
Fallout 3 would probably be the only game where it's easy to be evil as the usual enemies who are always hostile, such as raiders and feral ghouls don't give you karma like they do in previous games or New Vegas. In New Vegas, karma practically has no effect in-game, aside from interaction with Cass.
 
Karma shouldn't even be in the games anymore. Putting a binary system onto a world that often presents itself as morally grey is just silly. I don't even like it in Fallout 1 knowing that Cain wanted the Gizmo ending to be better for the town while the Killian ending was worse for the town. How the hell would you assign karma to that? Fallout's world often shows issues that today's world faces. Is progress worth the sacrifices? It covers bigotry, traditions, repeating mistakes from history, etc. Just drop karma. The real karma system is when you do something and you, the player yourself, find the choices you've made for your character to be irreconcilable with your own beliefs or when you do what you see as morally just and right. Not some stat in the pip boy or some popup in the newer games. Oh no you stole!!!! BAD KARMA!!! Well who the fuck did you steal from? Goodsprings? Yeah most people might feel that's appropriate to feel bad about stealing from. Ceasar's Legion? Yeah a lot less people feel bad about stealing from them yet both actions carry the same mechanical weight.
 
I got vilified by the ' White Gloves ' halfway through massacring them. I just cannot get along with cannibals.
 
New Vegas' shift towards placing more importance on Faction Reputation rather than Karma made a super binary stat like that much less "video gamey" in my opinion and fixed a lot of problems I had with it.

That being said a lot of the stuff that either rewarded or penalized karma were pretty nonsensical, I would recommend the JSawyer Mod for a more balanced overhaul of the mechanic.
 
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