Where were you on the day the water was poisoned?

So we all know the end of the Warden storyline, and if you don't then

SPOILERS MAY OCCUR...just not in this particular post...
So yeah, Good Rebel gone bad. Doesn't seem like something a Warden will do, eh? So anyway, what's your thoughts on it, and if you could put in a different ending, then what would it be? (Meant to write this right when I finished the storyline, months ago, but I forgot and I think it seems like a good thread idea)

There's a different ending I would have used for all the paths.

Loyalists:
"Cole is planning a great purge of the ranks of Powers Division. Only those he considers irreplacable and who have remained perfectly loyal to him will remain. The rest will be destroyed. Unfortunately you're not on the list of irreplacables. You have only one chance, Loyalist: flee to Primal Earth and hide until the Emperor changes his mind."

Resistance:
"Cole is planning a great purge of the ranks of Powers Division. Only those he considers irreplacable and who have remained perfectly loyal to him will remain. The rest will be destroyed. Naturally you're not on the list of irreplacables. While we would normally have thought this was great and looked forward to a surge of new recruits from former Power Division types we can't trust most of them and we don't have enough psychics to hide them all from Mother. Sorry to say this but your usefulness as our man on the inside is over. We're not hanging you out to dry, though. Here, we have a portal to Primal Earth. It's a rough place but we think you'll do fine. Please let them know about our plight and try to convince them that not all Praetorians are bad, okay?"

Personally, I find the actual morality choices in Praetoria to be about 50/50 between pretty good and pretty horrible. The pretty good ones I don't want to comment on, because... Well, they're pretty good. The pretty bad ones, though, tend to be bad for two reasons:

1. They all revolve around a false binary fallacy, either by reason of game mechanics limiting us to only two choices where a situation could allow for more, or because the story is strong-armed into a binary choice by ham-handed writing. This reminds me of many a bondage comic I've read, where the writer will go out of his way to suggest dozens of escape methods, and then systematically close them with exposition, leaving me with but one impression - the gods of story writing get off on said binary choice.

2. What might otherwise have been a decent choice of morality comes down to a choice of allegiance. What might have been a choice between right and wrong or a choice between idealism and pragmatism instead devolves into a choice between the Resistance and the Loyalists. Because the developers hamstrung themselves into every choice being either Resistance or Loyalists, this has resulted in some moral choices being awkwardly "square peg in a round hole" hammered into the Resistance/Loyalists duality, even when neither faction really came into play in the story leading up to said moral choice.

Frankly, morality is a pretty hard thing to write for, and I don't feel that our writers did a very good job of it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Yeah it's fundamentally a borked story.

One of the big issues for me is that we used to have this "good guy vs bad guy" thing going on: Heroes vs Villains. Now you can barely get a fagpaper between them. They are just this morally grey mess that can switch sides at will and do whatever the hell they like with impunity. There's no consequence to going bad (or vice versa) and there was a perfect opportunity to restore that duality with Loyalists and Resistance: Loyalists could have remained Loyal to Cole and Resistance could have allied themselves to the Primals.

Sadly that opportunity was missed and the story we got was incredibly poor - which is at odds with much recent content. It's simply a fait accomplis: We're offering you the choice of paths but there's only one outcome. Thus is becomes pointless.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk