[quote name='gunm']It's a dev choice--why couldn't my female Shepard make sweet love to Ashley? At some point you just have to accept the limitations of what can be done with the game.[/QUOTE]
...
Shit, has it been two months since I last typed up an essay on this?
[quote name='gunm'] Nah, seriously, how else are you proposing they handle that then? This kind of game has thousands and thousands of branching choices and responses, etc that need to be programmed. It's not realistic to make everything a grey area or take every possible scenario into account.[/QUOTE]
Well, here's an idea:
ing
don't. Your actual alignment doesn't change anything. At no point does the game go, "Well, you have 35 paragon points and 110 renegade points, therefore, X will now happen". The
only thing the paragon/renegade system does is lock out certain dialogue options. Arbitrarily. There is no reason that, say, punching a reporter in the stomach should prevent someone from being able to argue in front of a group of judges. There is no reason that saving the life of a drugged-up volus should make me
better at arguing in front of said judges. Or that shooting a mech with Garrus' rifle makes it easier for me to talk Miranda and Jack out of killing each-other.
It's just a bunch of arbitrary bullshit that restricts freedom so that they can pretend there's more replay value than there is. I understand that these sorts of things
can be used in place of remembering what you actually did (see KotOR, where certain dialogues open up when you hit a certain point on the light/dark scale, or see how DA2 tried and failed hilariously to do this with their friendship/rivalry system). I get that. But ME never
does that. The game remembers if you gave Tali the geth parts, not if you have 110 renegade points.
Remember Garrus' sidequest in ME1? Where you chased down "Dr. Heart"? Garrus is all gung-ho to kill the guy. He
in' wants it bad. So you can do the "renegade" thing and kill him first, then tell him that the important thing was killing the guy and doing it quickly, not who pulled the trigger. It's an extremely minor detail, but it was carried over to ME2. Garrus doesn't remember how many paragon or renegade points you had, but he
does remember if you killed Dr. Heart, and he remembers why you said you did it. And if you contradict yourself? If you go back on what you said when you told him why you killed Dr. Heart? Garrus gives you shit for it. Paragon/renegade never enters in to it.
What I'm getting at again here is: there are myriad examples of the game remembering specific actions instead of using your paragon/renegade score as a "cheat-sheet" (which is actually a fairly legitimate use of it). The
only thing your paragon/renegade score is used for is locking out certain dialogue options (and your character's appearance in ME2). That is pretty bullshit.
[quote name='gunm']Anyway, I don't think the system necessarily "stops you" from playing how you want to play, because many folks do want to play strictly as a "good" character, just as there are those who like the purely "evil" choices. What we never really see though, is an "evil" path where evil really "wins" and is able to get away with everything, consequence-free.[/QUOTE]
And a lot of us want to just play a
ing person without worrying about "good" or "evil". It's pretty simple, really: you are shown a thousand ways to do things, and told that if you deviate from a specific
two - pure paragon or pure renegade - then you will be punished. You will miss out on many
stuff. You will have fewer toys to play with. There will be less dialogue. Gameplay will be more restricted.
Freeing that shit up would still let people play "pure paragon" or "pure renegade". It just wouldn't punish people who punched the reported
and wanted to save the refinery workers.
