One thing i noticed quite early when playing skyrim, was the ammount of quests wich would involve you doing something evil, or considered incorrect would neat you most of the time the best reward. It felt like the game was trying to give the players that choose to play a good character a hard time. I personally felt like the rewards from some of those quests could have been made more balanced, thus making it better depending on people's aproach.

Like for example fallout 3, a series wich i recently discovered and have been playing. The game offers a variety of rewards to the player, many good ones are given when you do evil acts, but many others and equaly as good are given to good characters. It felt more balanced at least for me, compared to skyrim, where most of the good rewards lies in doing missions for the darkbrotherhood or thieves guild, along with siding with lots of deadras.

What do you think? Do you think the game could have been better balanced or do you think it's fine?

I agree with you.

yes and no. the more morally wrong the bigger the reward.
the reason you are bad is because it pays more. thats why people are bad in real life, its easy and it pays money.

Yes i agree with that too to some extent, it shows that trying to be good can be difficult in a world found in the middle of so much crime. The thing is, sometimes the reward is just plain DUMB, take wiping out the entire DarkBrotherhood for example, what do you get? 3 Grand... yeah that's a really good reward for wiping out an entiry team of trained assasins that are notoriously well know for their acts across all lands...

Yep. This has been an issue (if you care) since back in OB too. In Skyrim, the problem seems even worse. The two best quests in terms of adventure and complexity, DB and Thieves, demand evil acts. Some would even put Companions in that category because


Yeah, you had that issue in OB and there was one part of the FIghters' Quest which was pretty disgusting too.

I suppose the answer is that Bethesda believes that its customer base prefers fantasizing about doing evil rather than being a champion doing good. I'd prefer the good, but since I can either wish for that or PLAY the games, I choose to play.

Yep. Fable III was like that too: the evil weapons are slightly better than the good ones.

Fallout 3 had at least one weapon that was better in it's evil forms. To get the Blackhawk you had to be greedy/selfish and to get Callahan's Magnum you had to be outright evil. I think technically you had do to the 'wrong' thing to get A3-21's Plasma Rifle, but there was a way to glitch and still get it for doing the 'right' thing.

Werewolves is a morally gray area. You don't see Aela running around killing the citizens of Whiterun. At the same time, you do see the Silver Hand hunters having mutilated and tortured werewolves.

If being a werewolf was truly a malevolent deed, the Companion's Circle would've been annihilated or the Circle would've annihilated Whiterun. And if the Silver Hand hunters were truly benevolent, they wouldn't go around decapitating werewolves and putting the severed heads on pikes, torturing them, and caging them, they'd kill them swiftly and with some level of integrity.

Well, if werewolves were such benign creatures, they wouldn't get such a bad rap nor would there be a Silver Hand. Note that while the Companions hunt the Silvers, the citzens are ok with them. No Jarl or other gives a task to croak them so they have popular backing. If the werewolves were regarded neutrally, then you could assume the werewolf ID in the middle of town & nobody would say boo. Try it.

As to how werewolves are treated by the Silvers, we don't know the why of it. Maybe those were captured after having killed a whole family of innocents or the Silvers are trying to figure out how to convert them back to human.

The mere existence of a group sworn to wipe out another group doesn't make that group right. I can think of one organization in the US that's still around today which is more prevalent in the South.

Well, since we've seen both sides of it we're better informed to make decisions than the Silver Hands (who operate outside of cities and attack us on sight) and undereducated townspeople.

Yeah, there is some mention of the Silver Hands "studying" werewolves, but, and keep in mind that I'm not a doctor, I'm pretty sure putting their heads on spikes won't convert them back to human or teach us anything other than duration of life cycles of flies.

So you think that the common citizens so stirred up by werewolves are just having an imagination attack? I don't see that. Like I say, do a change in town and see how well it goes.

As to my having become one, I had a choice between doing that and essentially not playing the game so I did it. Same with what I did in Thieves or DB. In all three cases, I was pretty darned unhappy but enjoy the game play too much to let my sense of RP over come it.

In an ideal world of games, I'd like to see the evil factions, such as Thieves or DB opposed by a good faction and like the civil war, we'd get a choice of which to join. I'd much rather rid the world of thieves than restore their guild to greatness, but again, I can either play the game as dealt or not.

I'm not saying they are benign, only that not all of them are vicious beasts. And how can you even be sure that the Jarl and everyone else know who the Silver Hand is? They operate outside cities, isolating themselves from society. And most likely, the existence of the Circle, is secret to everyone in Whiterun.

I would guess, from the perspective of the citizens, that when the Silver Hand attacked within Whiterun, it was a bandit infiltration.

This is something I struggle with as well. Not exactly the same but while trying to improve my pickpocket skill, everytime I pickpocket someone I put back an item or gem of greater value then what I took. Or I just put back the original item I pickpocketed and move along. Guess this is my own form of balancing good and evil.

I agree. I've seen similar things in shooters too (first and third person). There was one multiplayer shooter out two years ago where one faction of soldiers had the best attire (hoodies and masks) which gave them a criminal feel (although that wasn't their history). Overall, they had the best weapons and the best maps to defend which resulted in that faction winning the vast majority of battles against the others. They also had the most members because they looked uber.

The perception seems to be that it is cool to be evil (or at mimimum neutral) - do what is expedient (profit). I'll may play Skyrim like that one day, but not today.

No, they're uninformed. We are informed, but not given the option to pass that on to the people within the game. It's fear of the unknown that drives them. I've heard many sob stories from the NPCs about how bandits did this or that to them and have only heard one story of a werewolf doing something to them.

The people in Skyrim are uneducated about werewolves just like all the fans of True Blood, Twilight, et al are about vampires.

I'll stop here because this thread is turning into another werewolves and vampires thread.

This.

It shouldn't be easy to be good. You are being good to help people, not for profit. Doing things for profit and greed are often characteristics of evil.

The Bards College could be viewed that way too. In order to become a member the player has to make up lies and persuade a senior bard to introduce deliberate errors into a rare historic document, all for the frivolous purpose of holding a small festival.

Maybe that isn't as evil as murder. But in any kind of academic setting that's grossly unethical (and ought to have gotten both the NPC and the player expelled from the College).

Yes, Fallout 3 is more balanced, the rewards for being good or bad or neutrel more fair. Theres good factions and bad factions and choices that are more straightforward and balanced.
Blow up megaton, get money and luxury apartment. Defuse the bomb, get good karma and a house. Simple, clear and not at all hard to do.

I agree. There is too few purely good options all over the game. No purely good faction. No virtuous knights you can join to crush evil. You can't destroy evil in the most straightforward way, killing it, even.
There is no good faction you can join to oppose the a bad faction sometimes.
For every evil faction there should be a good one opposing it you can join.
It's too grey. They should have delinated more and made it clearer who was good and who was bad.
The factions should be bad faction, good faction, make it clear. Good faction does good stuff, bad faction does bad stuff.


The daedra offer most choice in being good and getting rewarded properly.
Meridia, Asura are good daedra.
Peryrite is neutrel. Just doing what he's supposed to. Hircines a fair daedra.
Theres bad daedra, which you can choose to serve.

There you have a choice. Serve them all or serve who you want.

But outside of those quests, it's ridiculous.
Do you want to destroy the thieves guild? Well you can't! Do you want to beat your way through evil Farkas style, and just get it over with? You can't!
The game won't even let you be evil properly sometimes.
FFS, you can't even kill Louis Letrush to get Frost. You've got to tell him you're going to kill him, before doing it! For crying out loud!

Do you want to be be a good virtuous person, destroying evil? You can't theres no reward for it, or it's less.
So theres loads of bad or stupid options. But you refuse to do them. That leaves you with...a lot less good options than there should be.

Hell, even there you don't have much of a choice if you want the Oblivion Walker Trophy/Achievement. I'm not, but a lot of people are Trophy/Achievement hunters and they're forced to be evil if they want them all.

You have to do it once and never again. It's not that hard. I only objected to one artifact, personally, and that was the Skull Of Corruption. But I did it, felt bad about it, then ploughed on with the trophy run.
I help Erandur usually.
Once you get the trophy you can do whatever you want. There are far worse trophies in the game.
The TG ones are the worst in the game. I started appreciating how well Caesers Legions(Fallout New Vegas) quests for the trophies were written after that moronic, tedious slog. At least CL make sense in their actions and what you do, however moronic and disgusting they are. The TG forces every nasty, pointless, illogical, evil, stupid thing it possibley can on you.

If you do the "right" thing, you're doing it to be good and don't need a reward.
If you're doing something bad, most likely you're greedy and get loot.

I don't know, never noticed this before.

The moment I started reading this thread my mind suddenly turned towards all those guys who sit in their caves minding their own business until we come along and put them all to the sword so we can take their stuff. (morally this makes us no better than those bandits ourselves)

Suddenly I don't feel like such a good person any more.

You never hear anyone mention the Silver Hand outside of The Companions, and the Jarls seem to have a problem with them in my game. Out of the 9 bounty missions I did, 6 of them were in Silver Hand locations, where the Silver Hand member was referred to as a "Bandit Leader" in the note.

Also, try going to the Silver Hand bases before you even get to Whiterun. They'll try to kill you. They aren't a group of paladins devoted to protecting people from Werewolves. They're bandits who also want to kill Werewolves. As Farkas said "Bad people who don't like Werewolves."

My guess is that the Companions were hired to get something back for someone that the Silver Hand stole, but finding themselves in a hard situation, the members of the Circle transformed and killed most of them. Survivors then regrouped and devoted themselves to getting revenge against them. This is probably when they adopted the name "Silver Hand," too.

Namira and Boethiah are pretty bad, too.

TG doesn't force us kill anyone other than Mercer though, right? It's been a while since I finished it. The rest is petty thuggery with some fraud and conspiracy on the side.

Circle werewolves are a different kind than normal ones.

Circle werewolves have control of their impulses. For the typical kind see Hircine's quest. That guy's one of the ones that give em a bad rep.(Is compelled to kill, can't help himself)

The silver hand are evil hunters of everything. They have corpses of every race littering their bases. Just normal people. Not just werewolves. They're just sick hunters who do it for fun.