I think the previous Fallout games managed this quite well. The worst offenders are probably KOTOR and Mass Effect since you are encouraged by game mechanics to consistently select good/evil options throughout the game to max out your meter.
Fallout 4
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iannis
Musty Nester
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I tend not to like them because they don't generally flow that well. Some games manage to do it very well (Vampire Bloodlines was surprisingly nicely written), but for most narratives it's the same shape of convoluted in a darker color palette.
For example -- It's one of those very few complaints that I have with New Vegas. The Brotherhood were my BROS. Being a wildcard and letting them live wasn't a good choice or an evil choice... those bitches were my high-tech crazy asshole arizona minutemen border patrol that I didn't even have to pay. Gotta keep those fucking undesirables out if you're gonna run any sort of self-respecting wasteland empire. And those brotherhood freaks, they'd do it for FREE! But really, the "right" choice was to blow up the brotherhood bunker. Why? Those dudes know the score.
Yeah, the good/evil meters really railroad the fuck out of you.
DA2's was way better with its choices being more about molding Hawke's personality. It actually changed the tone of his regular dialogue. You could make him more Benevolent, or Aggressive, or Snarky, etc, and it wasn't about good/evil at all. Some options were only available if you were really consistent in your choices, but it wasn't really about being a goody two-shoes or a jerk and you could really mix the different types together often.
j00t
Silver Baronet of the Realm
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the entire root of the problem with morality in games is that it is SOOOO hard to do it well. functionally, how you play a game SHOULD fundamentally change based on your morality. i mean, even more nuanced is character background. a good cop is going to handle a woman being assaulted VERY differently than how a good thug handles it. but not everyone wants to play as a good cop character and not everyone wants to play as a good thug character. not everyone even wants to play as a good character. but unless there are actual repercussions of these choices, then who cares? it is fundamentally immersion breaking to be a good thug, kill the would-be attackers, rescue the woman and never hear anything about the situation again.
you kill the thugs, then your crew pulls you aside and is like, brosef, you killed rival gangmembers for a woman you don't even know. what are you doing? then the rival gang members come to collect your head and your own gang is like, naw dude, take him. we're not starting a war over this fool.
on one hand it's cool to have all these events that happen based on your choices, but on the other hang that is a LOAD of resources that are being used to create these "morality based events and repercussions." there's only a limited amount of time and resources that can be used and most people are going to focus on the stuff that the most people see.
point is, either go full bore with morality and have it be a focal point of the game, weaving in and out of the main story. or leave it out.
There just shouldn't be "morality meters" that you work towards filling up. Games should record your actions and build up consequences towards them. If you keep acting like a dick, people should treat you accordingly. If you're mostly doing good shit then people should note that, but if you mix in random acts of crazy with that people should treat you like a bipolar weirdo. Likewise, if you do only good shit in front of people, but are silently murdering people out of the public eye then people shouldn't know about that.
Tuco
I got Tuco'd!
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Heh, in my most recent FONV playthrough I beat the entire gameworld, all the DLCs and a host of mods. But when it came time for Mr. House to ask me to kill the brotherhood I told him no thanks and left the main quest unresolved. There's something actually intriguing to the idea that you can deliberately end the game without resolving the main quest and it still makes sense. The NCR is strong, the caesar dudes are obliterated, Mr. House has his shit together and no big war over the dam actually happens.
Almost no games can really have an unfinished world like that and it still makes sense. Maybe just every bethesda game, lol.
Depends on the person. I enjoyed FO3 more, but only slightly. NV was pretty close to it. Though I would say that FO3's DLC is leagues better on average.
Tuco
I got Tuco'd!
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NV on release was a great but buggy game, but they've tightened it up a lot.
I'd actually rate FO3 as being better because:
1. It was original (if you care).
2. I liked DC much better than New Vegas. (I grew up in Las Vegas and downtown New Vegas was much pretty much a joke. Plus I don't like RPG cities in general).
3. The whole Caesar's Legion shit was silly. I liked fighting Mutants and Combine more.
Either way it's kind of like choosing between pumpkin pie and cherry pie. I'll be damned if I'm not eating both of them.
Fallout 3's gameplay reeked to much of consolitis so I couldn't enjoy it. New Vegas improved enough I could play it in spite of it's issues, though it helped I just came off of Skyrim, with its consolitis.
Fucking consoles.
Fucking consoles.
reavor
I'm With HER ♀
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New Vegas had in my opinion a much more intriguing and original storyline than FO3, and also had more fleshed out endings! The DLCs were incorporated into an overall story arc in NV with a moral message, while in FO3 they felt more like stand alone adventures. Fighting in FO3 became very easy after level 10 or so, while NV was more challenging overall. There were too many skill books, and SPECIAL increasing items/rewards in FO3. NV generally felt more connected to the original games, with a similar style of humor, which i liked. generally, with campfires and such, it seems to me that NV introduced more gameplay mechanics.
hodj
Vox Populi Jihadi
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New Vegas: Great because it was basically Fallout 2 in Fallout 3's engine, but flawed because bethesda only gave Obsidian a year to develop the game (hence why Vegas was so small and you couldn't join the Legion and that whole faction wasn't fleshed out like it was originally intended to)
Fallout 3: Great because better map
But what you should all do right now is download and install both on Steam, and then use this mod
Tale of Two Wastelands
Which makes all the big changes from Fallout New Vegas work in 3, makes 3 way more stable on Win 7/8 and you can play both storylines and ALL DLC in whatever order you want, traveling between the two at very centrally located train stations.
Fallout 3: Great because better map
But what you should all do right now is download and install both on Steam, and then use this mod
Tale of Two Wastelands
Which makes all the big changes from Fallout New Vegas work in 3, makes 3 way more stable on Win 7/8 and you can play both storylines and ALL DLC in whatever order you want, traveling between the two at very centrally located train stations.
j00t
Silver Baronet of the Realm
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FO3 had a very "new car smell" thing going on. It was fresh. At least gameplay wise... Also, brotherhood of steel play a huge part of that game and the dlc's, whereas they hardly have a place in new vegas. I love the bos so I didn't like that. BUT I think, overall, I had more enjoyment out of new vegas
Derpa
Trakanon Raider
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iannis
Musty Nester
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I really liked the NV DLC's. They managed to explore a different aspect of the gameplay with each one and managed to fill in interesting parts of the story. Those DLC's remind me of what an expansion pack should be. DLCs often leave me feeling a little bit ripped off
Finding Eden in the wasteland is sort of a fallout-standard idea, and was a good place to start. Dead Money was hellish and I hated it the first time I played it. But on a replay I really loved it and the idea of it. Going to the Big MT was just the pith of fallout humor. It only could have been better if they'd incorporated action boy somehow. Lonesome Road was probably the weakest one. I felt like there really should have been a timer on those maps because they went for a linear fast action fps feel and it almost worked -- but was a little bit odd that there wasn't a timer on those maps. The story for Lonesome Road got a little bit meta and self-contradicting as well, and really only made much sense when you did some wiki digging about it. But I guess how better to tie up your involvement with this latest fallout than to give us a meta-as-fuck story about the fallout that you were GOING to make instead of New Vegas, and tie it into New Vegas.
Finding Eden in the wasteland is sort of a fallout-standard idea, and was a good place to start. Dead Money was hellish and I hated it the first time I played it. But on a replay I really loved it and the idea of it. Going to the Big MT was just the pith of fallout humor. It only could have been better if they'd incorporated action boy somehow. Lonesome Road was probably the weakest one. I felt like there really should have been a timer on those maps because they went for a linear fast action fps feel and it almost worked -- but was a little bit odd that there wasn't a timer on those maps. The story for Lonesome Road got a little bit meta and self-contradicting as well, and really only made much sense when you did some wiki digging about it. But I guess how better to tie up your involvement with this latest fallout than to give us a meta-as-fuck story about the fallout that you were GOING to make instead of New Vegas, and tie it into New Vegas.