As much as I like the storytelling in SWTOR, I sometime feel the Light Side and Dark Side choices represent fairly well the "Stupidly Good" and "Stupid Evil" tropes. I get that feeling from time to time, but it was the most glaring was during KOTFE :

 

- Mass Murdering Emperor who is known to possess a lot of people (at the same time) within your mind tells you to accept his power... What could go wrong ? But then, refusing him - out of caution, mind you - is labelled as a light side choice ? As it is, the Dark Side choice to accept come out as stupid evil : "Well yes, mister body stealer, I will totally give you access to my mind by letting your power flow through me, because I crave for power and it doesn't matter if it destroys my brain afterward. I don't have any to begin with..." Because yeah, I totally didn't anticipate him trying to take over your body when you have the Eternal Throne.

 

- For the Stupidly Good side, we have a lot of Bounty Hunters missions : "Your mission is to kill this one." And then : "Nah... I will get paid but won't fulfill my contract. What could go wrong for my career if I let my assassination targets if they beg for their lives ?" Or the famous classless : "Destroy this generator, rebels use its energy !" except " I won't do it, some refugees use it too... ah well, let's hinder the war effort. Prolonging a war that made those refugees come here in the first place must be the right thing to do."

 

Lots of LS/DS choices are fairly intelligent, but my feeling is that they are too "extreme" in the moral compass. Even when you make a choice based on pragmatism or even just common sense, a Dark Side choice will be evil in the speech itself : blow the generator ? "Buzz off maggots !" even if you wanted to say "Well, sorry but this is war and you are colateral damage." Plus, most of the time, you don't have a middle choice : be either good or bad, but not neutral. You have to kill a target ? It's either "Go hide while you can, you poor thing !" or "Die you piece of garbarge ! I'll even smack you a bit before I blow your head off !"

I really enjoyed this, and I agree with your above sentiment.

As soon as they decided the mission of the dark side players was to "Save the Galaxy", the whole thing became stupid.

 

Since when did the empire care about saving the galaxy?

 

The dark side plot was written by someone with no comprehension of what it is to be bad, it is "fake bad".

Edited August 7, 2017 by Foambreaker

So it looks like Kreia was right. Go Gray Jedi.

Totally agree with this. Another good example is the Inquisitor story. If you go dark side you are little more than a drooling crazy person. If you go light side you are basically a Jedi. There is little nuance to the choices. As an inquisitor I am not interested in being a drooling crazy person nor am I wanting to be a jedi. There is a difference to being cunning and ruthless like Dooku or Sideous and being a drooling crazy person. I totally support more nuance to the light and dark choices.

I agree, and I think that a lot of the choices presented in the game as LS/DS really aren't...or have more nuance than they're suggesting. Like we were discussing the Knights in another thread - if you choose to let the Knight go, he gets killed by Vaylin. If you let Lana kill him at least it's probably quicker and less painful, but that's the DS choice. I think the focus on forgiveness is misguided a lot of the time too - like in the SW story it's considered LS to forgive Quinn...why should you?

 

Most characters and people have shades of gray to them, and developing the idea of Light Sith/Gray or Dark Jedi is a good thing about the game.

My favorite are any LS choice for the Empire that will result in the person being handed over to the Empire as a prisoner. Yes, the person gets to live a little longer...through agonizing torture. Very merciful action there

There's one moral choice that is interesting, because from the Republic and the Empire point of view are totally opposite : when you find some republic soldiers who are about to turn into rakgouls (or die horribly from a disease, I think it's on Belsavis). The Lightside choice for the Republic is to let them live, where the Light Side choice for the Empire is to mercy kill them. Now that's interesting, because it clearly shows us a moral difference between the factions.

 

But appart from that...

The only mitigating factor can be found into dialogues surrounding the moral choice : my Sith Inquisitor, pragmatic, evil, but not a maniac murderer. A lot of my light side choices to let people live was followed by : "Don't make me regret it, or I'll find you" or "Well, you're useful" (on Makheb, when I chose to save the sith lord who followed me).

Then again, not all the choices are handed this way.

I agree that some choices in the game don't really make a whole bunch of sense, but I do think there is something that the developers intended that didn't come to pass.

 

Bioware seems to want people to just make choices based on their conception of their character and let the consequences be damned. So a Jedi might kill a foe knowing the stain it puts on their soul (DS Points), but looking to atone in other ways.

 

An example from the movies was when Yoda sent Obi-Wan to go kill Anakin. Now Obi-Wan wimped out at the end, but when Anakin was limbless and helpless, Obi-Wan could have done the galaxy (if not the story) a big favor by putting him out of his misery.

 

I have never had a DS or LS character who has never had an opposite side point and I think that's intentional.

I agree. It turned into Lawful Stupid verses Chaotic Dumbsh*t.

I know I've said this before in similar threads but when it comes to the sort of "dual alignment" thing that Bioware's a softy for like Open Palm/Closed Fist in Jade Empire, or Paragon/Renegade in Mass Effect, they do tend to fumble on the implementation.

 

In Jade Empire, Open Palm was described as being kind, generous and helpful while Closed Fist was more about guiding people to help themselves even if meant being harsh. The actuality was Open Palm in being helpful and co-operative so you can get things done while Closed Fist was more "I'm currently in my internship towards becoming an Evil Overlord".

 

Same with Mass Effect. Paragon was pitched as the helpful compassionate while Renegade was described more as a 70s era action hero who's that wild card maverick who gets things done. The actuality was Renegade's all about being a sociopathic **** for no reason and Paragon's anything that's not Renegade.

 

I have done a total DS take no LS options playthrough twice because I play on two servers and I still insist that those were the most grueling playthroughs I've ever done in a game to the point they took the longest to get through things because some of the choices were so awful I had to take a break from the game.. Both were Jedi, one a Knight and the other a Consular. I had both at full DS 5 by the end of their vanilla story arcs.

 

I will admit it was hysterical watching the Olympic level mental gymnastics the Jedi Council took to justify the horrible things my Jedi did. I wish I could've screenshotted the cutscene bits where they're cautioning them about the Dark Side when my Jedi are full on pasty veiny glowing red eyes.

 

My Knight was more brutally Sith than any of my Sith and my Consular came across so much like a cult fanatic I expected if the Council asked her to drink the poisoned Flavor-Aid, she'd do so eagerly while still spouting Jedi dogma. A lot of the choices I remember really did seem more suited to a cartoonishly evil Dark Sided Imperial and only lacked the traditional Evil Villian longwinded monologue to finish the stereotype. If the choices had wider impact, no one in thier right mind would even want to be around someone Dark Sided much less work with them.

 

Light Side does seem to fare a bit better in that while some choices are brain breakingly naive, most are basic common sense choices for getting goals accomplished.

I hate being a LS Jedi or a DS Sith for exactly this reason. I tend toward a more middle of the road Jedi, but I really like a LS Sith. They seem to make more normal choices, as opposed to the paragon of good (aka boring as hell) Jedi or the drooling, puppy-killing psycho Sith.

There's one moral choice that is interesting, because from the Republic and the Empire point of view are totally opposite : when you find some republic soldiers who are about to turn into rakgouls (or die horribly from a disease, I think it's on Belsavis). The Lightside choice for the Republic is to let them live, where the Light Side choice for the Empire is to mercy kill them. Now that's interesting, because it clearly shows us a moral difference between the factions.

That's from Kaon Under Siege; the Tionese officer Major Byzal is infected and the choice both factions have is as you describe.

Plus the reasoning behind some of the choices your character makes aren't necessarily in keeping with said characters alignment.

 

For instance, I'll take the example 2 choices my Chiss DarkSIde 5 Imp agent made during the vanilla story.

1. She chose to have the Chiss officer on Hoth receive promotion rather than the Human (Light side choice). However, she did so for purely bigoted reasons. (chiss > human) (Planetary Hoth Mission)

2. On Voss, she chose to do the complete Marriage ceremony with the Voss gentleman during the agent Voss mission on that planet (dark side choice). However, if she had had the option, it wouldn't have ended. She would still have him as a spouse if the story allowed it (rather than Vector. I mean, Vector is a great companion, but... he's still a Joiner. And I don't like bugs...

 

Some of the choices the Empire character choices are confronted with are labeled Dark Side/Light side when they really are ambiguous at best.

I.e. Kill or imprison the General on the Black Talon. You kill him, it's dark side. You imprison him, he gets to be tortured by either the Sith or Imperial Intelligence. I suppose they reason "while there is life, there is hope" - ok, but there is a quality of life too. Another one is you kill, or save/imprison someone and you even have a conversation choice to "give them to Darth Baras to torture".

Likewise there are choices on Ord Mantell such as give the medicine to the refugee (light side) or to the soldiers (dark side). As a trooper, it is a very hard decision.