Why Frostpunk handles Moral Choices better than most games

Blaze
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1st playthrough: "Cool I can have the children help me heal people faster" 2nd playthrough: "The children yearn for the mines, who am I to refuse them"
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Frostpunk asks "what is the freezing point your morality?"
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When it comes to morally good choices. Humans tend to like doing good, there's a reason the "good" path is so common to play, because human psychology actively incentivizes helping others. Game Developers need to realize that they don't always need to give a mechanical bonus for doing the right thing, because people will do it anyways, oftentimes giving them a narrative reward and allowing them to see how their goodness helped others is enough.
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It's also worth mentioning that Frostpunk doesn't force you to go the most extreme choices. You don't HAVE TO become a dictator/"god"... but you can
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One choice I found particularly interesting is by the end of the game. You're told that the coal mines are collapsing and the only way to save them is to sacrifice 15 engineers. They even tell you they're willing to do it for the sake of everyone else. So I was like, "Ok, this pains me but we have to do it". Then a while later you're told that you need to send 15 more engineers. You're given the choice of not sacrificing the new batch of engineers and completely waste the sacrifice of the first group or to sacrifice the new group as well. It was a sunken cost fallacy applied to human lives and it really got me thinking.
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Too add on the children in Frostpunk, if you choose care houses, the children also are the first to get warmth and food. They are also the least likely to get sick, so when you start losing people to the cold(both meanings), it is not the children, but the valuable workers and engineers who die first.
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Frostpunk makes you make tough decisions, I chose to not allow child workers in my first run, when the storm came I had gone full dictatorial work in the mines until your fingers fall off, New London survived the winter with more robots than people. Edit:Wow, that's a lot of likes, nice to know people agree with me so thanks I guess
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My first choice is soup. ALWAYS SOUP! I don’t care if your meal has no flavor to it, we have more important matters to attend to, such as: 1. NOT STARVING TO DEATH 2. NOT FREEZING TO DEATH 3. NOT GETTING SICK AND DYING 4. KEEPING THE MASSES IN LINE
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My mom wanted to play Frostpunk once. She put even Stalin to shame.
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I've always loved the thing about leadership - both extremes, and all the harsh laws, are either traps like Child Labour, where they're easy solutions to early problems that screw you over later on (like, automatons make most of your workforce obsolete, especially when you start to rack up the steam cores - and now you have a bunch of unemployed children without the benefits of Shelters and you miss out on healthcare efficiency that makes storms way easier to survive [The research boost is also good, but you run out of research eventually. You will never run out of the sick]) or are bandages over your own failures, keeping the doom spiral going as long as possible, just a more long-winded (and somewhat literal) failstate than exile or execution. In essence, evil is a skill issue. Both profound and hilarious, imo.
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Your comparison to Mass Effect was honestly right on. Evil is impractical. Being a murderous psychopath is impractical. Being hated is impractical. There is no real use for being a bastard because having more allies to assist you is just objectively more helpful than whatever they try to bribe you with. Frostpunk is the opposite. Good is strictly speaking, impractical and detrimental. Serving everyone a full meal in place of a cheaper alternative is a strain on the economy that directs more citizens off vial duties to gather more food. No child labor lowers your pool of workforce and makes you build extra buildings that are more or less dead weight aside from a stat buff, which also crowds out buildings like hospitals and houses from heat sources. Taking in a ton of sick people that can't work crashes your healthcare and causes your healthy workers to also get sick, and then die. These are not arbitrary penalties; they are the logical conclusion of giving away limited resources in a time of extreme scarcity. In Frostpunk, saving people is a luxury , you cannot just make a binary yes or no choice, you need the surplus manpower and resources to actually pick the good options, they are a reward for being well prepared and excellent at management. Which also means that when times are tough, you won't have it. You can't feed the hungry without food, you cannot house the homeless without resources to build. "Evil" choices become a simple matter of necessity and pragmatism, which make them feel a lot more personal and dependent on your skills as a player, more than being a choice made arbitrarily to see what happens.
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You see a cat: 1. Pet cat 2. Kill cat Frostpunk: You are starving to death.. 1. Pet cat 2. Eat cat
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I'm pretty sure it's because games like "the outer worlds" are pretty define on the correct moral choice and if you choose something the developer doesn't agree with the game disagrees with you on your choice.
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It does seem like Frostpunk has a theme that the difference between meaning well and doing well is competence. If you want to keep the children out of the work force, if you want to refuse becoming a dictator along with the more extreme laws that come before, if you want to keep New London a city of hope that can afford to take in all who come seeking refuge… You need to be one badass Captain.
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The Obvious Problem with most Morality systems is they are "Black and White", their is a obvious GOOD path and Bad Path or Choices to be made. Also, Choices are supposed to have consequences (good and/or bad) but most of the time they DON'T and are just "Isolated incidents". Not to mention the "rewards" for said choices are not always Equal. The 3 game examples you showed are the perfect examples of all 3 of these failings. Frostpunk however, gives you one simple goal "Survive at any cost", with the obvious question being "how far will you go" or "what will you sacrifice" or "what is the price you are willing to pay". The choices you make have Consequences, and they are YOUR choices to make. YOU are the Captain, and the worst thing that can happen is Failing your people. And its pretty easy to Justify these choices given you already in a FROZEN HELL of an Apocalypse. Thats probably the Hardest part of Morality system, JUSTIFICATION of your actions and the CONSEQUENCES of those Actions.
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I think the one, singular weakness in frostpunks morality is that final "credits" scene. For those out the loop, it tells you all the things you did, all the horrible choices you made. "We put our children to work, filled our food with sawdust, imprisoned dissenters and spread propaganda..." And then as your sat there going "Holy fuck what did I do" it says "And yet... I don't think we crossed the line" Or on the other hand. "We sheltered our children and persued radical treatment. We spread propaganda and embraced torture..." "But I think we crossed the line" And like, I get what they're going for, but I don't want to be told if the game thinks I did or didn't cross some arbitrary line. I think it would be far better if it instead went "We put our children to work, filled our food with sawdust, imprisoned dissenters and spread propaganda... and we survived... Now we have to decide if it was worth it..." To end on a line like that would really hammer home frostpunks whole "How far will you go to save the city" bit, rather than patting you on the back because you only locked away anyone who disagreed with you, rather than killing them.
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Spoilers for Frostpunk 2. 11bit Studios says it themselves when you first start Frostpunk 2. "Failure is part of the game." I might be paraphrasing but it was along those lines. That messages only pops up the first time you start a story mode run. I've done 2 runs of the story mode to completion. My first blind run I was able to balance the zeitgeist, choosing tech and laws that made the most practical sense for what the city needed. I had a fair balance of Adaptation and Progress, leaned more towards Merit instead of Equality, and leaned more on Tradition instead of Reason. I Embraced the Frost and colonized the Frostland. I had a reasonably sized population spread out amongst various colonies. I had a labor shortage here and there, only allowing productive outsiders to join my city. But the city did not fall because I chose to keep the peace as much as possible and focus on survival not idealogy. Meanwhile my second playthrough my population ballooned to 65000 by the end, I had chosen to Defeat the Frost and focus all the resources into New London, no permanent settlements outside of it. I leaned heavily in Progress, Equality, and Tradition, I wanted to see how that affects the game. In the end I chose to become the Captain, I was forced to stage a coup because I had doomed my city to starvation by letting in all outsiders while not allowing for other settlements, I had drained the frostlands completely of all resources, no food. Only the 2 "unlimited" food nodes were still producing food for over 65000 people in New London. There was no way I could support the population with the choices I made. If I had done things differently, Equality might have worked with Embracing the Frost and spreading out the population. But Equality doomed my second city. Everything was in the negative and there was no way to "complete" the playthrough without forcing the coup. I didn't have enough time to pass all of the Rule laws to claim Captain's Authority before everyone starved to death. So I "won" by failing. I can see the mechanical synchronization of certain choices with certain laws and techs now that I've learned from my failure. It really is a lot of nuances that paint a bigger picture that is greater than the sum of its parts. This series and the studio behind are really the best presentations of morality and survival I've seen.
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One of my favorite things is the added nuance to the Faith/Order decision in Frostpunk 1 when viewed in the context of Frostpunk 2. I liked Order in Frostpunk 1 because the idea of setting up watches for crime is something you need to do as a city grows. So I viewed Order as more necessary for the long-term vision of the city; however, in Frostpunk 2 the Stalwarts (order faction) value Merit meaning that if you side with them you'll lead to choices like splitting up families so that only "productive" people can live in the last city on Earth. Faith as you said in the video has its drawbacks as spending limited resources on temples and shrines but when you get to Frostpunk 2 their faction values Equality which will have you saving more people and thus requiring more resources to keep everyone alive and warm. It also shows how actions like that can have consequences that you won't even see down the road since the Captain who chooses Order or Faith isn't alive to see the impact of their choice in Frostpunk 2.
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First time i play frostpunk i though it just another common city builder but when i finish New home scenario i feel like i become Dictator who would do anything for my city to SURVIVE.
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Crossing the line? There is no line, I AM THE LINE, and i will go as far as we have to. Join me you, have no choice.
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I'd also like to point out that faith has other merits such as taking up less of your valuable workforce on guard duty. While it can be a waste of resources to built those shrines and churches, you'd also have more people gathering resources to build said shrines and churches. Then there's also the house of healing which can save you so many steamcores while still giving you the flexibility to allocate your engineers to other task when you're having a cold epidemic in your city. Order safes your resources. Faith safes your manpower. Which of them do you need more desperately?
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I think why we the system they have set up is good is for two reasons: 1: most choices have a knock on effect, even if it doesn't actively effect the city, it works in guilt tripping the player. (For example, a poets death due to the propaganda you passed). Or they make you happy you did them as you see it have a positive effect. 2: depedning on the situation, you are more inclined to do it. For example in The Last Autumn, you are working against the clock. The longer it takes to build the generator, the worse off you will be with motivation taking a nose dive. So you want to succeed which prompts you to do some... "Necessary Measures." Like rounding up workers, or... Creating a Penal colony. You'll do these things to either break up strikes or get more cheap labor to work the generator. Neither option is good but you when strikes plague your workshops and workers are dying right and left... Those options become attractive. Tldr: your choices in Frostpunk fit the narrative and are effective at having effects later on the line.
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I really like the realisation that being "bad or evil" is essentially a skill issue. You have to resort to those things because you are in fact an inept leader. It really puts a new perspective on another reason for authoritarianism.
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Pathologic 2 should be included in the conversation. You're a healer tasked to save the city from the plague but to do that you have to live long enough to see this through. Your supplies are low and you have no money. You can rob people living in the healthy district, ruining your reputation. If they fight back, you have to either flee or kill them, ruining your reputation even more. Or you can pillage a house in the sick district at the risk of catching plague yourself. The plague that you'll have to either manage for the rest of the game or use a very rare resource to cure yourself. The same resource that can be used to cure people that were put into your care. The game has has time system, it's almost impossible to complete every quest because you don't have enough time for everything. But sometimes you won't do a quest because you are on the brink of death. Of course you have saves, but if you die you get a permanent penalty to your max health and other stats. You have to be selfish to survive. You will have to kill people to save more people. The problem with moral choices in videogame is that unlike real life, being good is easy and has no cost. Pathologic 2 has no such issue.
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The other thing with Frostpunk's morality is that choices aren't often based off logic or data, but fear. The fear that you MIGHT need a larger workforce so you HAVE to ennact child labour. The fear that you MIGHT run out of food so you HAVE to approve cannibalism and send the sick and injured into the snow to die. The fear that there MIGHT be an uprising so you HAVE to become a god/dictator. It's all fear, and it's very interssting. Of course it's a trick that only qorks once, after one successful playthrough it'snot hard to realise you don't have to make any of the ethically questionable choices.
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There is no right or wrong morality. Only the city or damnation.
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Another aspect of frostpunks morality that I haven't seen mentioned in this video is that if you complete the game without using extreme laws (mostly by maxing out the faith or order trees) you get a different ending where the game tells you that you managed to hold onto your humanity.
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I find it pretty interesting he considered 'Faith'/Purpose the likely 'good' option when to me it immediately seemed like the more easily evil option. I could immediately see how that'd lead to intense fanaticism and zealotry. But I do enjoy how EVERY path can lead down to great extremes and it's less about which is more moral, and more which will help you survive well.
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once again Frostpunk teaches us that being evil is a skill issue
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Something I think worth mentioning in Frostpunk is what the people do outside your control. (at least the first time when you don't know the events) I remember in my first playthrough I did Order and I tried to not take any laws that got to far despite having problems with the Londoners. Then the Londoners killed one of my guards and I immediately saw red, I had a moment of "I tried to be nice, but if this is how act anyway!" and quickly signed both the Prison and the Torture law. I nearly signed the New Order law, but then the splash screen happen where it ask if you are sure and that many will die. It made me pause for a second and consider if I really was ready to go that far and decided no.
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Frostpunk writes characters (attitudes, views...), its not really morality, they simply have different ways. "Morality" or "Karma" is just limited and doesn't reflect relationships, goals, attitude, views, commitment, perspective of others on your actions, etc...
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the best part is, if you don't sign certain purpose laws, you get the 'good' ending in the final cutscene, there is a point where, if you went too far in the faith/order tree, it will say: Then we crossed The Line and it will list atrocities that the captain enacted, but if you don't sign those laws (prisons/propaganda for order, faithkeepers and righteous denunciation(?) for faith), it will say: But yet, I do not think we crossed The Line also the final cutscene changes depending on what law you enact first, which is funny eg. First, we tightened out belts (soup) or: We sent our children into the mines (i think you can guess)
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5:45 pretty sure Megaton is built around the Children of The Atom cult. Like, they’re the founders and make up the majority of the citizens. Everyone else is there for the business and safety afforded by the relatively harmless, industrious, and friendly cultists.
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A while back I was thinking about games needlessly rewarding "Good" choices when players are naturally drawn that way. I wanted to start a more realistic TTRPG game, where "bad" choices were often more profitable, especially in the short term. I was really inspired by Frostpunk. So I created a city with an oppressive Orwellian government, whose tight control was arguably justified because of environmental factors making survival rather tenuous. There's a morally grey rebel faction who wants the players' assistance. The existing government offers them access to valuable resources. The rebels offer very little but promise access to a super rare valuable resource once they take power. It's worth noting that players are just barely scraping by themselves. Their number 1 concern is making enough money to keep their rustbucket spaceship running. Until now, they've effectively played both sides and milked the city for everything its worth. Last session though, they backed themselves into a corner and have been forced to pick a side. Here's the plan they came up with: - Steal the cities entire supply of food and medicine - Torch the warehouse in a false flag attack, implicating the current regime - Fly offworld for a few weeks, allowing starvation and sickness to do its thing - Tensions rise until the rebel faction (who they recently supplied with advanced weaponry) have enough popular support to launch a coup - Players return as heroes with a ship full of food (its the same food they stole earlier, and they intend to sell it not give it) This plan was cooked up independently by them after the Rebel leader mentioned he needed something to wake the people up, and suggested a much less evil plan. Its been interesting to watch the kind of moral decisions they make when they're pushed to the edge and have the greater freedom of choice that TTRPGs offer.
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Frostpunk really teaches the meaning of "hard times". "We can't let children work, we..." Increases efficiency by 50% looks at coal reserves "Maybe we can let children work."
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Part of the issue is that a lot games have a choice between good and evil because RPGs (the usual suspects) are the kinds of games that are supposed to have a morality system. There is not really an overarching moral dilemma or goal to be achieved that your choices guide you towards, its just there. Frostpunk manages with one simple phrase for each game. "The City must Survive" and "The City must not Fall". That is the axis upon which ALL of your decisions are made in Frostpunk. Where is the line drawn? How far exactly is the Captain/Steward willing to do in order to preserve the city and/or the lives within it?
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I watched Bricky enforce child labor and almost immediately the blast coal mine was burning yet he suffocated the children to save the mine and coal. 98 of them died and his reaction killed me 💀
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Sort of adding on to this as well is a game like Vampyr, where it really forces you to embrace people for the XP while having decisions that can affect the story, but also depending on the severity and importance of the person you consume, can affect how easy the game is for you, with causing prices to rise and having some characters disappear entirely, and while they do make obvious some who you should embrace, as it gets later it becomes a harder decision to make, and can feel the actual temptation of drinking blood. Maybe not the biggest gray area choice, but I do feel like it definitely has a stronger chance for a gray area then many other decision games.
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I’ve been struggling to type out a comment about the morality of Frostpunk, how I cried when I beat A New Home for the first time due to having done it while sticking to my guns/morals… I think the best way to sum it up is what happened when I finally beat the Arks. Picture this. You’re trying to save both New Manchester and the Seedling Arks. You just realized there’s (seemingly) not enough resources for you to pull it off. You’re at the final storm. You have good upgrades, robots, heating, etc… But it seems like you may have to let one die so the other may live. You go back to earlier saves, but… The outcome is the same. You, seemingly, can’t save both. The thing is… I knew it was possible. I’d done New Home after endless trial and error, refusing to give up and take what would boost me but compromise my morals. So what I did instead of letting them die or letting the Seedlings die was micromanaging the final hour down to individual worker bot actions, refining a bit of stuff here, getting just enough resources there. I did this for nearly a real-life hour before I actually pulled it off, and saved both New Manchester and the Arks. The satisfaction was IMMENSE. What I love about this game, part of what makes it art in my eyes, is that doing good is often HARDER than doing what we would consider evil in our current circumstances. Not getting children into work means you miss out on all those extra hands. No Sawdust Soup means needing to deal with starvation and death by it a lot more often early in the game. Letting New Manchester die makes riding out the Storm way more comfortable… But you don’t HAVE to do that, if the circumstances allow you to wiggle through or if you instead opt to endure the consequences of waiting to implement something which, while better, takes more time. You don’t HAVE to play evil, so to speak, if you’re both patient and willing to take the time to learn and improve. As another commenter put it, evil is a skill issue. Signing in those harsh laws not only screws you in the long run but makes it so that you never learn how to ADAPT.
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I think a major thing is how like in the real world, the moral choice isn't always the correct or better choice, and FP2 handles this really well. It also makes the most important thing, the actual morality and alignment of each choice matter with events popping up and changes happening. There are consequences you can't immediately see like in real life.
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Dakrwood and Rimworld are well made in this sense. In Darkwood, set in a horror/supernatural setting that's extremely hard to survive in, killing random people might give you a lot of items you couldn't otherwise get. Furthermore, you can follow an evil character's quest line to get some extremely rare and game changing items, part of the game takes lesser ammount of time and you are also not robbed by that character and forced to fight them in the future. But that's it, every time I killed a random villager who managed to survive years in that hellscape only for me to randomly kill them for their items, I actually felt terrible. And this feeling was enhanced by the fact how rare at least semi-sane survivors are in that game. And in Rimworld, you crashland on a lawless planet at the edge of the known universe. You can literally survive how you like. You can set up a cannibal gang, organ harvesting operation or a slave oriented society. Hell, in one playthrough, I literally captured and bred people like cattle in a cave, genetically modified them to make escape more difficult for them and I used them as an infinite food and money source. And there wasn't really any punishment for it, except other factions being angry at me for doing horrible things to their members (I mean they constantly tried to destroy me, but my defenses were simply too good). However, if I wanted to, I could still technically ally these factions back and only capture always hostile pirates and bandits. Being evil literally gave me only positives. But that's exactly it. You can also make good deeds in that game and never even touch these fucked up things I talked about. Actually, the only reason my people weren't going mad from all the horrible shit they've been doing to the prisoners was because they fanatically followed a religion I specifically made for that evil playthrough, since without it, my people would actually care about the prisoners, cannibalism slavery, organ harvesting etc. BUT, that still wouldn't really guarantee me being a good guy in other scenario, I could simply choose survival as my priority with my people sometimes having to be a bit sad about that hungry child we couldn't afford to accept into our community. And that's how the "bad" decisions usually go if you aren't trying to be outright evil, everyone who isn't straight up bad is still very pragmatic. And that's why actually focusing on being good feels so refreshing.
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id like to give extra mention to how the Faith/Order laws work within the main (New Home) scenario In New Home, you dont get access to the "Purpose" tree of laws until a little while in, and you get access because a large portion of your city believes you are doomed and begins causing problems, and threaten to leave the city, permanently lessening your workforce. the numbers of these people (The "Londoners") grows the less hope you have, and most Purpose laws serve to raise hope and convince people to leave the Londoners. To put even more pressure on you, the Londoners also begin spreading graffiti, further lowing the hope of your people, unless you have sufficiently progressed into the Purpose tree to limit the damages. Even later, the Londoners begin stealing from you, and holding rallies to bolster their ranks, causing more and more problems, which further encourage you to sign laws like Public Penance or Prisons, or take more drastic measures to raise hope, such as Keeper of the Truth or Propaganda, eventually giving you the option of New Faith/Order, which promises to get all remaining Londoners in line, and saving the city from falling apart from the inside. Of course, if you know what you're doing, and are patient, you can avoid all of these harsher laws, if you let the Londoners speak and protest, you will get the last word, a speech of your own which convinces mass amounts to defect from the Londoners, if you don't retaliate when your guards are beaten for removing graffiti or finding stolen goods, the perpetrators apologize, but these outcomes aren't obvious, you might not think these will happen, and will simply panic and sign more authoritarian laws to try and save the city
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Absolutely fantastic video. Frostpunk is one of the few games I have actually agonizing over choices in. Other than duels and the last few choices in either special tree, all the choices have their good and and bad, and weather you pick the "morale" choice or not you see the way your people respond both good and bad, which really does a good job selling your choice as actually effecting the citizens. Like you will have some glad the kids don't have to work, but others complaining about a waste of resources and time. Frostpunk was the first game in years when it came out that I trully got immersed in. At the end during the last storm, it truly, desperately wished for my citizens safety, tightening my grip on my leg every time a citizen got sick or died.
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Frostpunk 2 is true to the formula of ambiguous moral choices. Crushing opposition isn't just an "evil option", the opposition actually actively OPPOSES you, organising strikes and protests, radicalising if you choose to crush them by force and putting the survival of the whole city in jeopardy if you choose to wait it out. Also every faction has options to research radical ideas, each coming with a massive boost and a massive drawback. Also, if you choose to get rid of your least favourite faction(s) the problem of opposition will go away, but so will the ideas of said faction, and every faction has some ideas that are objectively better than analogues from other factions. Choosing an "easy" playthrough of control and no opposition creates hard ceilings and limits. Choosing to balance different factions, and preventing civil war is difficult, and requires a LOT of compromise on whatever your own vision for the city is.
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To be fair, the hotel room in Tenpenny tower was really nice! Enjoyed every stay there!
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I completed a neutral run of A New Home in Frostpunk. I loved the whole moral dilemma. As someone resolved to not make use of Faith or Order laws, every mistakes of management were harshly felt. I am proud to have not used any of those laws and to have generally chosen not so harsh options in the adaption laws. Though that came at some cost, like trust being a constant struggle. I was treating every promises like a desperate cry from the people and I tried my best to always accept them and didn't fail to fulfill all of those I accepted.. It's really interesting, once I reached the end, to be faced with my choices... and however not that great they were... I have not crossed the line.
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I’d argue the best game that handles morality is Pathologic 2. Pathologic has you as the son of renowned and loved doctor that…ahem…can no longer perform his duties. You’re returning to your hometown just before the return of a deadly plague…and you’re one of the only people with the chance to stop it. The problem is that you are no hero, and you can die just like anyone else. As the means for survival get more and more difficult and your ability to withstand the plague from killing the names characters around the map (or yourself), you get tempted into doing more and more horrible things to survive. The game goes out of its way to make some quests end with you worse off than you starter. For instance, the friend of your protagonist requests that you allow her to set up her mansion as a makeshift home for the sick, asking you to gather containers of water from around town. Completing the mission unknowingly brings her tainted water that, if you succeed in bringing her, infects her district tomorrow. Congrats, you just made things worse! You could have ignored the mission and saved that part of town for another day, but because you were so willing to be a completionist and step beyond your station you put others at risk. Good job, hero.
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Frostpunk mentioned Yippy. I love this game a lot. Thers also another thing you didn’t mention, and that is after a lot of runs effectively becomes more important than morality. Like overcrowding for example. It’s a lot more efficient than extra food for the ill that you just pick it because it’s that helpful not that it’s good. Over time you just become desensitized to what you are actually doing that you forget that it’s evil.
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"Every upper lip gets stiff at 20c below." -the Stupendium, 2018
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Ngl I love running apprentices for kids purely because it is funny stacking a medical tent to have 250 efficiency making it more efficient than a health house or infirmary which costs a steam core
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this is one of those vids you watch and half way through go "this guy must have a million subscribers" then look and realize that hes underrated af and soon will be at a mill due to how well he freely perceives viewpoints like this. 10/10 Hope rises.
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In Frostpunk 2 in the middle game you get a decision of letting old people who are in need of care starving (they themselves want it), if you don't allow it, everybody losses trust add you get a sad message. By thinking deeper about these people , having worked to the bone the last 30 years and seeing louts of loved ones starving or freezing to death i totally could understand why that choice was morally wrong in their worldview.
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10:20 was literally thinking "at least he hasn't mentioned the ME series. That was like the furthest from actual decision making.
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The other thing that makes (both) Frostpunk games so good at the moral choices is bigger picture against the small picture The bigger picture is that you saved New London, you with all of the sacrifice and the morality and the damn laws made it possible, you admninistrated and managed to survive the cold, the odds, the own people and the coal. Only then, when the storm passes when everything goes back to a sense of peace you are able to pick on those small pictures You made coal extraction more efficient...but you sacrificed the childhood of thousand kids, you gave food for everybody by getting them drunk and giving them only soup, you had enough beds in the medic facilities because of the triages that you had to do, the food industry survived because you processed the dead bodies of your people to turn into food. It is then, and only then, after seeing the big and small picture that the game asks you One. Single. Question. Was it worth it but NEVER judges what your answer may be
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The first game I played with a morality system was the original Fable. Spolier alert for my favourite game, but the choice at the end where you either keep the most powerful weapon by severing your final thread to humanity (your sister) or throwing away the power you worked so hard for really hit me as a kid. Like, you spend the entire game accruing power to save your family, have you lost sight of that goal in the pursuit of that goal. Then the lost chapters threw away that choice by rewarding you for the sacrifice play. Never fully forgave the devs for that.
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I'd be a pretty evil leader, but I'm usually just chill about it.
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As one wise man said Child labor is terrible but starving to death is even worse
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the thing i like about frostpunk is that the purpose and law trees slowly get worse over time, but also help you out a lot more. the best example of this is the engineer's side of the labor tree, where you slowly turn into a labor camp, but strikes go down and efficiency goes up at the cost of these convicts lives. however, you don't have to go that far, that is entirely the player's choice. they're just leaving it as an option for if youre really struggling, which you always are
I think that always shocked me, was how I started to see people as numbers. In frostpunk 1 you care when people die. But when you have 30k citizens 300 dying from machines means nothing as long as the factories still churn out products. Frostpunk shows what it means to lose yourself and stop seeing life as valuable. And that’s what makes it so good
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I loved Frostpunk 2 because it further expanded and improved the morality questions of Frostpunk 1. Frostpunk 1 i always went dictator cause it was fun and i wanted to see how far the devs would let me go, Frostpunk 2 made me actually question how far i wanted things to go and the game pokes at your beliefs to see how hard you believe in them and the potential consequences of certain laws paired together. I was shocked how polarizing(pardon the pun) Frostpunk 2 was cause it just did everything i liked about 1 but better.
3
6:18 the answer 'why' should have been that they made a nuclear powerplant out of it
2
Really cool video! Love frostpunk and shared with my discord to help others see this as a really good game. Look forward to see your take on the sequel
This game is genuinely satisfying to beat when you don't ever resort to morally reprehensible choices, suffering hard to win, strategizing and making deliberate decisions in this game is character-building, it teaches you that by suffering now, you can prevent tragedy later. To not resort to child labor, I made the adults suffer, harsh first day and night with an emergency shift forcing them to work 24, hours on a Gathering post, but look where it brought me, enough infrastructure for three more gathering posts and future projects and a second workshop, and I also managed to complete faster gathering before the day's end and it absolutely made the early game bearable without child labor and not only that but secured me a solid mid game. That's when I knew that I've learned and grown, I planned accordingly, prepared for the outcome and secured myself, I laid down a solid groundwork for the future, the game explicitly tells you not to react but to plan. This game shows that incompetence gets people killed, that to be a leader you have to sacrifice yourself mentally for the betterment of the many, you need to organize and plan ahead, the present matters now sure, but the future matters the most, never settle for a reaction, settle for an evolution, and that is one of the best lessons I've learned in a video game, but not just lessons but experience, to keep your moral principles intact in hard times of struggle genuinely makes you feel good and I felt good when I won the first time, it was special, this game is so good.
1
One other thing Frostpunk does is that there is only one of those choices that you really need to make (faith or order). The other laws you can implement are always there as options but never insisted upon. That said, refusing to participate in a decision is also a choice, one that can have drastic consequences if you wait too long to go through with something. This is something 2 comes back to. Often you can use laws as a way of getting people on your side, and sometimes it's easier to let a law you don't like pass than commit to stopping it. The question evolves from "How far are you willing to go?" to also asking "How far are you going to let them go?" and the question becomes very slightly and interestingly different when other people are effectively the ones making the choice.
2
Listened to this while hiking, was great👍 (I love frostpunk)
1
I realized what frostpunk did to me during the halfway mark in the storm. I'd researched prosthetics and was happy all the people who'd lost limbs in the mines could now be thrown right back in. I literally traded safe working for flesh, blood, and limbs to maximize coal output.
I only have 3 laws to survive Soup > Radical Treatment > Ill Crowding .... and everything works like a charm after that ..
3
16:25 The Children can gather some coal, as a treat
2
I’m ten minutes in and we’re still talking about every other game besides Frostpunk, I came here to learn about frostpunk
Imagine my surprise, listening to this video as I draw, then looking over and being jumpscared by Woolie and Reggie.
The Children Yearn for the mines
4
"hey children! You like minecraft, right?" - best decision you can make in Frostpunk
Just want to point out a little detail about Megaton in Fallout 3, if you ask around the town you will eventually find an old lady that tells you the town's history. To summarize, the town was built there because the crater the bomb formed was used as shelter from sandstorms shortly after the war, it was then made a trading post due to its convenient location and later formed into a town when the traders banded together and built defenses against the (at the time) newly formed raider gangs.
17:29 "The designers wouldn't want you to start the whole game over because of this choice, but in a game like frostpunk the failures are often slow and subtle..." My first playthrough I died horribly, just because I wanted to play a morally good playthrough I chose to ban child labor and start building care houses right away. Then, I needed to build those houses with wood I didn't have, with workers I couldn't use because they were already with their hands full and I didn't have a quick way to gather more wood. So then the discontent rose, because I couldn't keep my promises, but I was just doing the good decisions, right? Wrong, I doomed us all, and I restarted the game before they exhiled me. This is when the game got to me, Frostpunk has a different philosophy with the morality system: it doesn't change no "ending", but it harms the failstate, you can fail by not keeping your promises or making easy, but cruel choices, child labor is as much of a choice as making soup on the kitchens because it was never about in-game morality, it is YOUR morality and YOUR decisions. Did you really NEED to make the children work? You may never find out unless you play more, get better, make better decisions.
Frostpunk was and is certainly an experience. This game makes you actually feel your choices, like, genuine emotion over what you have done, instead of another statistic.
On a slightly different note I really like how the kill Parthurnaax quest in Skyrim is handled. Paradoxically the lack of urgency makes it even better, it's not 'oh the guy turned evil and is blowing a town up go beat him or try to save him', it's just uncheckable suspicion: he might, on his own admission, turn evil at any point if not strong enough to contain himself anymore, but nobody knows If and when, it asks how far are you willing to go to beat suspicions. On top of that the lack of urgency, the fact that it is a mere side quest, tied to no major event, with little rewards for whatever you pick solves for me what usually is a pretty big problem in most of fiction's dilemma: what is interesting in those dilemmas is actually trying to come up with solutions and justifications, and oftentimes it's hard to implement in a game where everything has to abide to code/the way the world is built and so you're often met with a yes/no situation, which, on top of that, is too often shoved in your face to resolve quickly (you can always pause to think but the in game time left for you to decide is often ridiculous compared to the scale of the dilemmas). If, unfortunately you can more or less only come up with two/three solutions for Parthurnaax: kill, don't kill and wait, I like how you can wait, take your time in game to fully think about it go take 20 level and marry Serana, Parthurnaax has already been waiting for hundreds of years, he can wait, you are allowed to be undecise
Re your point about nonsense Fallout karma, I'm currently replaying RDR2. The dumbest honor related situation I've had so far was I found this guy by the road, he asked me to give him a ride over to a nearby town and I said, sure, hop on. And then I go towards the destination full speed, riding a big horse, fail to notice some sort of animal carcass or a rock by the side of the road. We crash, guy gets damaged falling off of the horse, immediately turns scared of me and runs away and I lose honor. Should I have been a more careful rider? Yep. But to immediatelly turn the guy hostile and give me bad person points? That's just not fair.
4
I really look forward to the anthology book series for Frostpunk. I'm sure there'll be a story on the "good" ending. But I think everyone that knows the game understands how quickly things escalate to insanity.
1
In one of the scenarios, your scout comes across 20 or so children waiting for rescue. This was towards the end of the scenario, and I was hunting for a rare resource(steam cores). When your scout meets them you are presented with a few choices: escort them back to your town, or give them a map and let them find their way on their own. I was feeling indifferent, so I selected "give them the map" option. The reply comes: 'the children look at you in disbelief as you hand them a map and point them in the direction of your city. The youngest one even starts to cry" The sheer skill of storytelling and the power harnessed of emotions and morals is shown in this moment. I was shook 😂 and it affected me so much that after just one more mission, I chose to turn around and escort them back. By choosing to do so, I was abandoning any chance of finding more resources, to soothe my conscience. Frostpunk is possibly the best game I've come across in terms of how it handles moral dilemmas. Masterclass!
My secret sauce was always going with stocking gathering posts with kids. Its a safe job, as long as you keep it heated. Plus you can keep it always around by going for coal thumpers. Of course, if you optimize your play you eventually end up automating away the need for most workers anyway. So the research boost can be really good instead.
Mass Effect was interesting in how they iterated on the Reputation system. Mass Effect 1 had a player skill Charm/Intimidation that unlocked the decision like you mention. This lead to the player deciding which path before reaching the decision points. Mass Effect 2 had you gather Paragon/Renegade points from your actions. This lead to the planned decision making you mentioned. In Mass Effect 3, you had a reputation system which went up regardless of paragon or renegade actions and enabled both actions as necessary. In this case, there's no real choice, just color coded triggered events. (colored coded events instead of choice was a pattern in ME3). A better example for a game is Infamous. You have the blue/red playthrough, but it's smart enough to have different mission structure and power trees.
Had to make a difficult Triage choice when my hospitals where being overwhelmed in the late game. Lost something like 107 subjects but the City did survive!
I think Frostpunk's 2 morality is just that little bit harder, well maybe a lot harder from a moral standpoint, I hope you have fun! Its seriously such an amazing moral system, last time I was this mentaly challenged was New Vegas
3
On Fallout's Karma w/ stealing : Stealing a lot of things once can be argued as a crime of opportunity. You see a lot of stuff, you don't see three different things to steal, you see one group of stuff that looks valuable. If you steal one small thing, but then go back to steal again that's telling of your intentionality. (Or.. you know, it's a developer oversight.)
Good video and meeting explained. Frostpunk was love at second sight. Visually, musically and technically a masterpiece. But failing quickly can discourage players from even starting. But if you accept failure and continue playing, you will discover a game with emotions and depth that is rarely found in this form. Whoever beats the final opponent will cheer as if their football club had just scored the championship goal. The better you get, the easier it is to make morally good decisions and the game will show you at the end whether it was worth it.
it's not about the reward, it's about the message.
1
I agree completely on the mass effect section. I got locked out of the quarian and Geth peace because I’d been playing each choice as an individual one
The first time i wined i left to die the refugee kids, since i had no resources to keep them, even tho i had kid workers enabled, i simply couldn't feed them if i wanted, but then i had a great expedition that granted me space enoug to reach the hydroponics and hunger was not a problem anymore. I felt bad, and that made me save every last survivor i could when the final storm came. The city survived, as every human life i encountered after the kids did
19:20 Warhammer 40k in a nutshell💀
1
Frostpunk has recently shot twords the top of my favorite game list and I like all the choices but one we can all agree on is that the children yearn for the mines
1
Remember, the City Must Survive. One single day of life is worth anything - until it cost everything.
1
This makes me think of the Knights of the Old Republic games. The first game had very binary "good" and "evil" options that were VERY explicit. Neither option really changed much beyond the ending of the game. BUT because of the story of the game, either option would make sense for the roleplaying aspect. The second game has the exact same system, but it is also fairly well known that Obsidian never got to finish the game as they wanted to. The Restored Content Mod (The most popular mod of the game) isn't just a title. It does what it says by restoring content that Obsidian didn't have time to add (For those who don't know, Obsidian was given 9 months to make KOTOR2 and the people leading the development of the game knew next to nothing about Star Wars beforehand, so 9 months to research and then develop the game). But there are a lot of things left in the game that suggests KOTOR2 was supposed to have either an expanded morality system or a different one altogether (Such as Grey Jedi robes that you can only wear if your morality is strictly neutral or the story actively stating the opposite). Likely, the morality system wouldn't have been as amazing as Frostpunk's, but to this day I really wish Obsidian had been allowed more time to do whatever they wanted with the game. With the nature of it being Star Wars and a roleplaying game, the morality system makes sense. Sure, Sith or Jedi, good or evil, etc, etc. But a lot of the story of KOTOR2 heavily suggests that the Jedi can't be considered "only good" and Sith can't be considered "only bad" because there's nuance to everything. It's like the story of the game contradicts the morality system. One of my favorite moments in KOTOR2 is when you get to a planet and a beggar asks you for 5 credits. If you say no, you get yelled at by your teacher and she shows you how you just influenced him to go out and rob someone in his desperation. If you say yes and give him money, you get yelled at by your teacher and she shows you how you just made him a target for thieves and he gets killed and robbed. There's no path you can take where there's a "good" option. Every action has consequences.
Reviewer: "You may risk children getting hurt or killed to prevent coal/food from running out and the entire city dying." Me: allocates children to the mines by accident when I had plenty of workers and meant to put one of my several automatons on the job and only noticed when they started dying
1
But big bomb goes boom 🥺👉👈
1
I find this is what i love most about 11bit games. Even in this war of mine shit is happening in the background, some hard choices need to be made. And then they ramped it up with fp1 and the fp2
Man this was entertaining to watch. I played the first one and got all its achievements and boy do you need to just tighten your boot straps and make the right choices.
1
6:00 to be fair, sometimes you DO want to roleplay as the most evil for the evulz villain.
1
Most works from 11bit studios masterfully handles complex moral dilemmas: “This war of mine” for example
1
23:50 or you can pretty much kill the goblins, side with the Emerald Grove, and then have both druids and Tieflings facing each other in a civil war.
I do make the kids students an overdeveloped as much things I could do often
As someone who played Frostpunk excessively, I completely agree with your assessment that the tough moral choices are ultimately one of competence. If you were just a better leader who managed everything more efficiently, you wouldn't need to make those sacrifices. Now, with that said, on the highest difficulties you do need to make some compromises, but nothing that I would consider to be a sacrifice. With all that said, I do think that they dropped the ball on a few areas where the moral nuance falls apart on a cursory inspection. One of the examples is one you mentioned in the video: extending child labor to more dangerous laws. This isn't just morally questionable, it's also just bad management. Kids have lower efficiency than adults, and the "dangerous" jobs are all heavy industrial work with expensive infrastructure that you want to be operating at maximum efficiency. Employing kids there is just bad management. Another bad example is Preserve Life vs Radical Procedure. On the face of things, this looks like a genuine moral quandary: do you try to keep gravely ill people alive until you can research a safe treatment method, or do you use experimental procedures to cure them now at the risk of amputation? On the higher difficulties, however, grave illness is extremely lethal and even the mere act of transferring a patient from a medical post to an infirmary is often enough to kill them. This completely undermines the moral quandary, as Radical Procedure is literally saving lives while Preserve Life is going to get people killed.
Oneshot has a unique binary moral choice at the end. Throughout the game people will tell you that even if you DO restore the sun, this world is dying in other ways, and the sun isnt even a guarantee things will get better. The game also does an amazing job of making you feel emotionally attached the the main character Niko, who will talk to you and close the game when you put them to bed in order to save. So when given the option at the end of "Restore the sun but trap Niko here forever and never let her see her mom again." or "Let Niko go home but doom this entire world to a certain doom." it makes you really think about what the right choice is. I personally chose the let Niko go home, as she's a child and this responsibility was thrust on her unwillingly. This isn't her battle to fight and everyone was telling me even if the sun was back the worlds issues would still consume it. But the other side also has plenty of reasons for choosing it. I think it handled the concepts Undertale tackled better, what with a video game character being a real person, and your computer merely being a window into the world.
I love the differences between the first and the second too, with frostpunk one it’s all about taking drastic measures to survive, but in frostpunk two it’s more nuanced and all about managing the political factions and you might not even need to go that far
Something I really thought was cool/creepy was how your law choices change the city's soundscape; as you go deeper in the Order laws, you start to hear the marching of boots mixed in among the muffled calls of the announcements broadcast across the city. I'm sure there's a similar result in the Faith path, but I didn't play that route.
Ye, the final lesson from Frostpunk is that if you are bad at management, you have to resort to immoral things, and if you're good at managing things, you can have "good" laws. It shows that, most likely, bad people on Earth are bad because they are incapable, and have to resort to such measures because they are incapable. I also think that morality in Frostpunk 1 is judged at the end of the game much more harshly than in FP2. In FP1, your ending depends directly on the choices that you made throughout the game. Going for that one law could mean the difference if your ending has "Crossed the line" or not. In FP2, the moral consequence is determined by the ending choices, where you either banish the opposition, or you reconcile the sides. It doesn't really matter if you choose this law or the other in FP2, as long as you are capable of performing the end tasks for reconciliation, you will get the "good" ending. In these terms, I prefer the Frostpunk 1 morality system, where the words "Crossed the line" and "For what cost" judge you at the end for not making the right choices. You did survive, but at what cost? It made me replay the game again and again until I could get the perfect ending.
Now, I just started playing Ace Combat Zero yesterday. But there, you can go down three different paths. Also morality based. You get extra points, rank and money from also targeting civilians. You also get more difficult fights, which some people would see as a bonus. That sets you down the mercenary path. You can just take out your targets, just do what you are told and nothing more. Soldier path. Middle Ground. And then you can go "No Bullets Fly", not kill your targets if they are incapacitated and can't fight back. Gives you the least points, worst ranks, reduced pay. Knight Path.
I think you make a great point. It is way I enjoy faction reputation system like in Fallout NY over Karma systems. What I will say about obvious evil choices, is in games like Fallout it is fun to do evil play throughs and seeing just how evil the game allows you to be
Your first city: Im going to do my best and keep the city alive! Your first successful city: what have i become...
I have about 7-8 runs in Frostpunk, never chose child labour. I can definitely say, you can feel the dire need for labour. Nobody is available to get that 15 silver for that next better bunkhouse. The research goes fast so that is a plus point, or the med posts. But I have gone all the way in Faith, so pretty maniac to see once it got to the ending.
1
I wish you had the ability to "reset" laws in Frostpunk. To use your example of child labor: allow that edict to be taken temporarily - for a set number of turns, or something - then have a decision pop up after those turns pass that greatly increases discontent and/ or hope depending on whether you follow through or not.
Some good narrative games I have played with that have good moral choices are the Life and Suffering of Sir Brante in the times of the Fall of the Blessed Arkansian Empire, and Suzerain. Yes, Your Grace is also interesting, although I haven't finished it.
In frostpunk 2 I chose decisions that caused 2k ppl to die from overwork and terrible work quality. But! I had a growth rate of 3k, so I still made a surplus of humans.
2
Frostpunk is the game that tell you: there is neither right nor wrong of the option you choose. But do always aware that, any decision you make has its consequences. So question yourself once more: for the sake of your city and your people, how many more horrible things are you willing to do? How much more of a monster you would accept to become its savior? Survival is never pretty. Human nature is never simple. Satisfying solution never exist at all. Just do your best, and do even better after every failure. The city must survive, Captain.
1
This is why I think Spec Ops: the Line has some of the best moral options. It doesn't tell you if you made the right choice, because there is no right choice. For instance, save Gould for the intel or rescue survivors? Doesn't matter, Gould doesn't have the intel on him and the survivors you save will either die there or die from dehydration after you destroy all the water in the CIA coverup. Shoot Riggs when he's pinned underneath the truck, or let him burn. If you shoot him, you committed a violent act of mercy on someone who condemned thousands to die in a slow and agonizing way. If you let him burn, you've only increased the amount of misery as you continue through Dubai. Regardless of what you pick, you still destroyed the water rations in the city. Even the endings have this with neither being good or bad, just debatably better.
1
Glory to Order and/or Faith!
1
The thing with mass effect, and one of the few things the third game fixed, is requiring doubling down lest you become underleveled in dialogue. Even if one wants to play a more neutral path, opurtunisticly picking renegade options where they make sense, there will not be enough investment in eighter to get any good resolutions from late game dialogue. So even if one wanted to dabble in renegade, the game would punish you.
I like new vegas approach as well and how it uses black and white morality at the start of the game, it establishes what the player values before having said views being challenged
me, an aspiring DM creating a campaign for my friend group: Interesting
The only issue I have with this video surrounds about the games talked about If frost punks morality system was put into one of the games mentioned prior it would not change those games. This is because with frost punk the player consistently interacts with one other entity, the people, and they can respond in kind The inconsistency in the previous games is that good and bad points seem to interact frost punks, with large sweeping ramifications, while you the player only interact with those choices personally.
In my first playthrough of frostpunk, I only made morally acceptable choices (extra shifts yes, child labor no, save amputees yes) and managed to keep literally everyone alive.
As someone who played Frostpunk excessively, I completely agree with your assessment that the tough moral choices are ultimately one of competence. If you were just a better leader who managed everything more efficiently, you wouldn't need to make those sacrifices. Now, with that said, on the highest difficulties you do need to make some compromises, but nothing that I would consider to be a sacrifice. With all that said, I do think that they dropped the ball on a few areas where the moral nuance falls apart on a cursory inspection. One of the examples is one you mentioned in the video: extending child labor to more dangerous laws. This isn't just morally questionable, it's also just bad management. Kids have lower efficiency than adults, and the "dangerous" jobs are all heavy industrial work with expensive infrastructure that you want to be operating at maximum efficiency. Employing kids there is just bad management. Another bad example is Preserve Life vs Radical Procedure. On the face of things, this looks like a genuine moral quandary: do you try to keep gravely ill people alive until you can research a safe treatment method, or do you use experimental procedures to cure them now at the risk of amputation? On the higher difficulties, however, grave illness is extremely lethal and even the mere act of transferring a patient from a medical post to an infirmary is often enough to kill them. This completely undermines the moral quandary, as Radical Procedure is literally saving lives while Preserve Life is going to get people killed.
Oneshot has a unique binary moral choice at the end. Throughout the game people will tell you that even if you DO restore the sun, this world is dying in other ways, and the sun isnt even a guarantee things will get better. The game also does an amazing job of making you feel emotionally attached the the main character Niko, who will talk to you and close the game when you put them to bed in order to save. So when given the option at the end of "Restore the sun but trap Niko here forever and never let her see her mom again." or "Let Niko go home but doom this entire world to a certain doom." it makes you really think about what the right choice is. I personally chose the let Niko go home, as she's a child and this responsibility was thrust on her unwillingly. This isn't her battle to fight and everyone was telling me even if the sun was back the worlds issues would still consume it. But the other side also has plenty of reasons for choosing it. I think it handled the concepts Undertale tackled better, what with a video game character being a real person, and your computer merely being a window into the world.
I love the differences between the first and the second too, with frostpunk one it’s all about taking drastic measures to survive, but in frostpunk two it’s more nuanced and all about managing the political factions and you might not even need to go that far
Something I really thought was cool/creepy was how your law choices change the city's soundscape; as you go deeper in the Order laws, you start to hear the marching of boots mixed in among the muffled calls of the announcements broadcast across the city. I'm sure there's a similar result in the Faith path, but I didn't play that route.
Ye, the final lesson from Frostpunk is that if you are bad at management, you have to resort to immoral things, and if you're good at managing things, you can have "good" laws. It shows that, most likely, bad people on Earth are bad because they are incapable, and have to resort to such measures because they are incapable. I also think that morality in Frostpunk 1 is judged at the end of the game much more harshly than in FP2. In FP1, your ending depends directly on the choices that you made throughout the game. Going for that one law could mean the difference if your ending has "Crossed the line" or not. In FP2, the moral consequence is determined by the ending choices, where you either banish the opposition, or you reconcile the sides. It doesn't really matter if you choose this law or the other in FP2, as long as you are capable of performing the end tasks for reconciliation, you will get the "good" ending. In these terms, I prefer the Frostpunk 1 morality system, where the words "Crossed the line" and "For what cost" judge you at the end for not making the right choices. You did survive, but at what cost? It made me replay the game again and again until I could get the perfect ending.
Now, I just started playing Ace Combat Zero yesterday. But there, you can go down three different paths. Also morality based. You get extra points, rank and money from also targeting civilians. You also get more difficult fights, which some people would see as a bonus. That sets you down the mercenary path. You can just take out your targets, just do what you are told and nothing more. Soldier path. Middle Ground. And then you can go "No Bullets Fly", not kill your targets if they are incapacitated and can't fight back. Gives you the least points, worst ranks, reduced pay. Knight Path.
I think you make a great point. It is way I enjoy faction reputation system like in Fallout NY over Karma systems. What I will say about obvious evil choices, is in games like Fallout it is fun to do evil play throughs and seeing just how evil the game allows you to be
Your first city: Im going to do my best and keep the city alive! Your first successful city: what have i become...
I have about 7-8 runs in Frostpunk, never chose child labour. I can definitely say, you can feel the dire need for labour. Nobody is available to get that 15 silver for that next better bunkhouse. The research goes fast so that is a plus point, or the med posts. But I have gone all the way in Faith, so pretty maniac to see once it got to the ending.
1
I wish you had the ability to "reset" laws in Frostpunk. To use your example of child labor: allow that edict to be taken temporarily - for a set number of turns, or something - then have a decision pop up after those turns pass that greatly increases discontent and/ or hope depending on whether you follow through or not.
Some good narrative games I have played with that have good moral choices are the Life and Suffering of Sir Brante in the times of the Fall of the Blessed Arkansian Empire, and Suzerain. Yes, Your Grace is also interesting, although I haven't finished it.
In frostpunk 2 I chose decisions that caused 2k ppl to die from overwork and terrible work quality. But! I had a growth rate of 3k, so I still made a surplus of humans.
2
Frostpunk is the game that tell you: there is neither right nor wrong of the option you choose. But do always aware that, any decision you make has its consequences. So question yourself once more: for the sake of your city and your people, how many more horrible things are you willing to do? How much more of a monster you would accept to become its savior? Survival is never pretty. Human nature is never simple. Satisfying solution never exist at all. Just do your best, and do even better after every failure. The city must survive, Captain.
1
This is why I think Spec Ops: the Line has some of the best moral options. It doesn't tell you if you made the right choice, because there is no right choice. For instance, save Gould for the intel or rescue survivors? Doesn't matter, Gould doesn't have the intel on him and the survivors you save will either die there or die from dehydration after you destroy all the water in the CIA coverup. Shoot Riggs when he's pinned underneath the truck, or let him burn. If you shoot him, you committed a violent act of mercy on someone who condemned thousands to die in a slow and agonizing way. If you let him burn, you've only increased the amount of misery as you continue through Dubai. Regardless of what you pick, you still destroyed the water rations in the city. Even the endings have this with neither being good or bad, just debatably better.
1
Glory to Order and/or Faith!
1
The thing with mass effect, and one of the few things the third game fixed, is requiring doubling down lest you become underleveled in dialogue. Even if one wants to play a more neutral path, opurtunisticly picking renegade options where they make sense, there will not be enough investment in eighter to get any good resolutions from late game dialogue. So even if one wanted to dabble in renegade, the game would punish you.
I like new vegas approach as well and how it uses black and white morality at the start of the game, it establishes what the player values before having said views being challenged
me, an aspiring DM creating a campaign for my friend group: Interesting
The only issue I have with this video surrounds about the games talked about If frost punks morality system was put into one of the games mentioned prior it would not change those games. This is because with frost punk the player consistently interacts with one other entity, the people, and they can respond in kind The inconsistency in the previous games is that good and bad points seem to interact frost punks, with large sweeping ramifications, while you the player only interact with those choices personally.
In my first playthrough of frostpunk, I only made morally acceptable choices (extra shifts yes, child labor no, save amputees yes) and managed to keep literally everyone alive.