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Old 2012-12-03, 05:56   Link #3423
Vallen Chaos Valiant
Logician and Romantic
 
 
Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Within my mind
Age: 43
My favourite element in Skyrim that is different, compared to Oblivion or Fallout3, was that there is no hard coded morality.

There is laws of the land. And there is alliances. Wrong someone, and they and their friends will hate you. But at no point were we just judged to have done something "good" or "bad".

If you kill someone or steal something with not witnesses, there is little consequences other than the odd random hired thug (and that seem to only happen once per character only.) So the only thing that stops you from stealing and killing innocents is your own morality. If you don't steal or kill, you are not rewarded for it. If you steal or kill, you are not punished for it. You are not told to act a certain way to fill up an omnipresent karma meter; why you do something is mostly left up to you.

Really, that's what gave Skyrim even more freedom than its predecessors. You are no longer told to enforce what the creator thinks is moral, they leave that up to you. Like how that one time I decided to not carry out an extra assassination on a woman who had no business being dead. The contractor was annoyed that I didn't do that extra job as an assassin, but there are lines even the Dark Brotherhood don't cross. What I do or not do makes my character who she is.
(I would have killed the contractor for good measure after she insulted me in the end, but unfortunately the game made her Essential.)
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