It’s not a question I have an answer to, but I am hoping someone can enlighten me.
You see, when I was growing up my bed time was filled with damsels in distress, Grimm’s fairy tales and all sort of other stories, which may have been a little horrific, sometimes even gruesome, but there was a moral at the end of the story.
The heroes of the stories always did good, sure they might have made some errors of judgment, but at worst they were bad, never evil.
Now WoW has been to date a relatively “clean” game. Sure you hack things to death, but even the “darkside”, the Horde were (generally) moral.
I have always had an issue with the preservers of nature, the Druids, slaughtering x number of innocent creatures for a pocketful of silver, but somehow I was able to turn a blind eye to this. Well except when my animal loving wife is standing behind me expressing her displeasure.
But now I am confronted with a new issue. I have heard people mention the moral dilemmas that WoLK places before them, having to make a choice between two unpleasant paths, but until this week I haven’t has to confront this myself.
So what changed?
1st up I was asked by a member of the Kirin Tor to torture a prisoner, because they had made an oath that prevented them doing it themselves.
Next a similar request from the 1st Death Knight I recall encountering in the game.
So now I am suffering from two reoccurring nightmares.
- my encounter with the Death Knight left me shaken and slightly stirred. He also had captured and was “questioning” a prisoner and needed a few little tasks done while he completed his job in isolation.
- the moral transference or suspension of morals in order to accomplish a task.
Why should I be asked to put aside my moral values in order to gain the full experience of a game?
Sure I could skip the quest, but why oh why have Blizzard included quests that require you to become anti-social and quite simply cruel?
Now I appreciate that a certain ex-president had a penchant for off shoring problems and turning a blind eye, hell so did a certain Australian ex-Prime Minister.
I also understand that when confronted by the representation of these unspeakable breaks in morality that the media (and I am including the game industry in that title) point out that they are just reflecting current societal values.
Yes, I know, The old “Is the media a reflection of society, or society a reflection of the media” arguement.
To my mind these things are just simply inexcusable. It reminds me of the old forum threads suggesting the government’s fears that WoW was a terrorist training tool.
I begin to wonder if the opposite isn’t true. That WoW is a tool of the government designed to shift our moral values to the extent that we can’t criticize a government for loose moral and human rights values, because after all, we choose to throw our morals out for the sake of 5g and 10 minutes of eye opening joy.
Gnomer and Out!
PS: on top of all the bad stuff they juxtapose stuff like this:
lol…..i told you not to read the quests
blah blah blah…i’m not committing genocide for XP
lah lah lah….i’m not listening to your tortured screams…i’m thinking about the xp
My children need me to tell them who are the good guys and who are the bad guys….my answer is that depends on who you ask. the people i am fighting probably think i am. i think they are
If i get xp….they are bad
in a heightened state of security the Lich King has pushed upon us. it’s everyones responsibility to slay first ask questions later…..damm those scourge and their heathen ways
Wait until you get to Dragonblight and fat, cute and cuddly Tuskarr ask you to, believe it or not… Slaughter the Wolvar mothers and abduct their children to be raised by the Tuskarr to be indoctrinated to despise the ways of their own race.
I kid you not.
Ohh they are the ones that go missing… and some suggest are filling cook pots?
Yes and you have to do it over and over again to get the awesome fishing pole and the pet… Yes, I’ve done it, I admit.
On the other hand I’ve helped the poor sea lions or whatever they are to find their spouses in order to get the same rewards. That counts as a good deed doesn’t it?
Got to mention Sholazar Basin, where you’re killing some ape kids, I think it is, to get the mother out from her den… a sad event when you think about it.
Your morale compass will change after a while in WotlK, trust me.
Yes, some of the quests in WotLK actually make you think and feel things. But I see this as a good thing. Doing quests in Vanilla or BC, most of them weren’t very interesting. I hardly ever found a questline that had a good story or motivation behind it. It was all:
“Go kill the bad guys, and I will give you a reward.”
Whoopee.
But now, there are fuzzy lines. WHO are the bad guys? Where does your character draw the line? What is your character’s alignment? It kind of forces a little of the RP of the MMORPG on you to make decisions like this. Gets you more involved in the quest and feel like you’re a part of the story, rather than just some little minion going around killing beasties.
It’s like movies… how many people would watch movies if all of them were good guys killing bad guys and winning? Boooring!
@pewpewlazers: You don’t have to kill any Wolvars doing that daily quest. Just run in, grab the kids, and run out again – no creatures killed.
The morality of most quests is dubious; why blindly follow the instructions of someone you have never seen before, simply because they have a ‘!’ over their head?
The consequences of our actions in completing these quests are never a problem, though:-
the baby Wolvars simply disappear, they don’t really end up in a pen somewhere. You can’t go and visit them to make sure they are being treated well, because they don’t exist.
How can you be concerned for the welfare of creatures that vanish as soon as you pick them up?
I think the addition of moral ambiguity to the quest lines in WotLK was done to heighten the emphasis that this could very well be the end of the world. If Arthas wins, we lose EVERYTHING. You, your friends, your family, everything will become subject to the Scourge and cease to exist as you know it. Think you would have many moral dilemmas as a mindless, rotting zombie? This is a win-at-all-cost effort and your hands will get dirty.
Current politics or government using games to re-program our moral compass ideas aside, the target audience for gaming is maturing and eventually we get bored of the grind for the XP when it’s constructed in repeatable patterns of kill X number of Y and bring me .
Developers spend many hours designing these quests; I hope they know that people are now actually reading them instead of blindly hitting accept.
If you’ll excuse me, I need to bake some cupcakes to bring with me while I find someone to torture.
[...] inevitable that you will have come across several posts lately regarding some Northrend quests. Gnomeageddon, Bigbearbutt, Critical QQ, and more have remarked on the quests in Northrend that are rather [...]
I read in an article before WotLK was released that Chris Metzen said the idea behind the “morally oogy” quest lines, and the instance the culling of strat, were to put you in Arthas’ shoes. He said he the idea behind it all was that once you reach the head man himself, you’ll have made a lot of the same choices he did, and will you still hate him so much? Or will you side with him, having seen the difficulties of his choices.
The article was in a PCGamer magazine, sometime midway last year. Hope that helps.
Fortuantely, I’m not real big on lore. OK, that statement is a little inaccurate. I’m not real big on reading. With that said, I’ve only ever read about 5% of all of the text in the game. Half of the time, I don’t even know why I’m doing what I’m doing. Getting too involved in the storyline actually takes away from the experience for me. To completely wrap my head around the lore would be to openly admit that I’m a bigtime nerd. And like I said to begin with, I hate reading. So these “moral questions” never really trouble me. Ignorance is bliss.
I personally like the quest in Sholazaar Basin where you summon a spirit to find out about killing its kind. Then it begs you to leave its species alone, you ignore it, and continue killing things.
All this for Hemet Nesingwary, whose agents you spent plenty of time killing in Borean Tundra trying to save the same creatures you are slaughtering in Sholazaar Basin…
The whole thing makes your head spin.
Ignoring the rest, Druids aren’t supposed to be walking, talking, protectors of the cute fluffy bunnies.
People forget about Nature, red in tooth and claw. Balance isn’t about no one killing the cute and fuzzy creatures, it’s also about keeping the cute and fuzzy creatures in balance, even if that means killing some of them.
-Ialk
[...] OK, OK.. I was banging on about the horrendous immoral quests in WoLK the other day, but I fear that Euripedes infiltrated my psyche, cause this week I found [...]