Fallout: New Vegas Game Director Reveals the Secret to Creating Moral Choices in RPGs

Josh Sawyer draws inspiration from ancient Greek plays and believes other developers should also turn to the classics.

Recently, Fallout: New Vegas game director Josh Sawyer presented a new blog post. He decided to share his thoughts on creating moral dilemmas for role-playing games.

According to the developer, the industry should abandon the widespread "black-and-white thinking." Sawyer himself drew much from classical plays:

I originally studied music and theater, and continued to do theater even after I switched to history. This may sound trite, but especially because of the games Obsidian works on, I often think about ancient Greek plays — for example, "Antigone" or "Oresteia," where characters face very difficult moral and ethical choices.

He explained that the characters in the plays find themselves in situations that are "literally agonizing, and they have to make terrible decisions":

And the decisions they make are never exclusively good or bad. For example, the story of Oresteia begins with Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter to return home.

Josh Sawyer believes that decisions in RPGs are more effective when "individual decisions are not so clear-cut" and players really have to reflect on their choices.

According to the developer, ancient Greek plays managed to show the ambiguity of decisions thousands of years ago, and he asks: "why not turn to them?".