This forces players to attempt to identify what is considered good in the game space, and play accordingly if they wish to experience what Bethesda considers a 'good' play through or vice versa. It also assumes that in no way can you change that characters mind on a topic, because they are fundamentally good, bad or neutral they will only act based on their predetermined state. Any addition to that automatically forces the player to conform to what ever wacky morals Bethesda and it's developers has. The default state of Fallout is to approach everyone as neutral and make a judgement based on player perspective. It completely goes against the ambiguous choices that made Fallout great. It's an automatic assumption that bad people are bad, and good people are good. The reason I disagree with the karma is because it is fundamentally flawed with a core group of moral position. If you steal something, you're becoming a worst person (in theory, each case is a case), so by becoming a worse person, you're making the world a worse place too (I guess).Īlso, I can't remember anymore to be honest, but I think that you only lose karma from stealing from any 'evil' faction if you're in good terms with them, the exception is that if you steal from NCR or Legion, you always get bad karma, even if they hate you. In these examples, your actions are contributing for a better world, and karma is about making the world a better or worst place. If we kill a savage ghoul in self defense, it is again a neutral act, but we are finally ending the suffering that this human being endured for so long (maybe even centuries), this in a universal scale is a good thing (I guess) while in a character's personal scale is a meh.

It doesn't matter if we kill an evil, sadistic, psychopath in self defense (reasoning: because we are defending ourselves it should be neutral), it is still a good act because we removed this person from this world, it will prevent this evil from continuing doing horrible things. The problem here is that you are all considering Karma as a personal thing when it is a universal thing instead. I totally agree that karma is really stupid and definitely very badly implemented.

Fallout new vegas does karma matter