FredrikSvanberg

I'm not sure if it changes the morality of the situation or action but it certainly adds a whole other emotional dimension to it.

Perhaps. The challenge as described did consist of writing an arc where a hero "must do evil for the 'greater good'"(emphasis mine). If that's a cop-out then at least it's one that all the arcs will be stuck with.

Yes, of course. I said that I have a problem because of my point of view, which is very close to - if not entirely - utilitarian. Granted, I might not personally be able to kill a child to save a hundred lives, so I might not be able to live up to the tenets of this philosophy. I've never been in a situation where I've been required to kill anyone so I don't know if I would be able to do it. A hero on the other hand is someone who, in my opinion, is supposed to be able to make these difficult decisions. What all this means is that in this situation I find it hard to consider the act of killing the child as an evil act since it in fact saves a hundred lives.

In reality I would probably not be able to kill the child and would just stand around, possibly pleading with the guy on the other end of the camera to not press a button but in this game I can play a hero who actually makes these choices and takes the responsibility for his actions and kills the child after ruling out all other solutions as impossible. And I couldn't say that he has been forced to commit an evil act, according to my utilitarian philosophy.

Naturally this is probably beyond the scope of the challenge and certainly outside the morality presented by the game in general (although I can't readily say what that morality is supposed to be). I don't really think we need to spend more time talking about it here - except for the purpose of entertainment of course.

I didn't say that there was NO way to write this, just that there is almost always other solutions, and being forced to take one of the evil ones just for the sake of the story is bad. It's surely a bit of extra challenge to make this (bad) choice seem to be the only possible option.

In your specific case I don't know who these prisoners are or who is threatening to execute them. If they are soldiers captured during a mission, the threat of dying is part of their job and they have accepted that when they signed up. Kidnapping and threatening children to protect their lives is not even on a long list of things I'd try first.

I wasn't entirely pleased with the end debriefing either but that's Marshal Brass for you.

Thanks! Glad you liked it.

Thanks for your review. The arc was even more of a "just a bunch of stuff that happened" before, when I tried to emulate the original Kalinda content further by not having any kind of connection between the missions at all. They were just illustrations of typical Arachnos activities. At least now there's a connection between the 1st and 4th mission (Lady Darkdoom failed to catch Operative Burch - suspicious!), and between the 3rd and 5th mission. The snakes were just thrown in because it wouldn't be a lowbie villain arc without them. And just to be different I use them as temporary allies.

I'm sorry that you expected an arc where you learn to think for yourself and break free from Arachnos. In my opinion that was the first mistake of the original VEAT arcs; assuming that we would want to become Destined Ones ourselves, and this soon in our careers. Naturally, the way the game works, we will have to somehow become involved in that story in order for the higher level content to work, but at this level I think it's fine to just follow orders. Not to mention that the high-level VEAT arcs make the low level arcs completely pointless; at a certain point we basically nullify and cancel out all the changes we made up to that point and end up back at some sort of status quo which doesn't make much sense.

I consider this arc to be an introduction to Arachnos. We're sent to take care of some things which tie into content we might already have seen from "the other side" so to speak. It's supposed to be about how Arachnos actually guides and controls everything even when they appear on the surface to be a bumbling giant of an organisation where one hand doesn't know what the other is doing behind its back. That impression of Arachnos is what at least turned me off when I started playing villains, so in order to make VEATs feel less like morons for joining the losing side I tried to make the Arachnos army appear like they at least have a clue of what's going on.