I’ve recently been playing Divinity II: Ego Draconis. With the release of Divinity: Original Sin, and the great reviews it’s been getting I thought I’d give another game in the series a try, especially since I already had a copy that I picked up in some bundle sale once. It’s kind of sad that I can’t remember where I picked it up, it was just sitting there in my steam game list, and I had no idea how it got there.
Dubious shopping habits aside, I’ve been enjoying it, and it recently made me revisit a common decision in RPG style games, to loot or not to loot. More specifically, the question is whether to loot or not loot items belonging to non-hostile characters. For example, do you go empty out all of the chests in the local farmer’s house? It makes an appearance in most games, and for the most part there are no consequences for doing it. It’s a common joke to point out the inconsistency of the supposed hero and savior of the world stopping by to go through the houses of everyone in the village and take every last coin, potion, or weapon they are storing.
This is often a moment of character crisis for me. When I play a character through an RPG, I often try to figure out what sort of underlying philosophy drives my character’s actions. This may be a very nerdy thing to do, but in a good RPG there are often decisions between two morally gray options. For example, there’s a man in the village who keeps pigs as pets, and some soldiers have confiscated them to help out in a famine in a nearby city. Do you let the soldiers keep the pigs so that they can help save the lives of people in the famine? Or do you return them to the man because he loves them like children? I find having an overall philosophy for the character helps me make satisfying decisions, and these decisions help shape that philosophy.
Fun tangent, but back to the main point: looting. I often find myself torn on this, on the one hand that potion I’m taking could mean the difference between life and death deep in a dungeon somewhere. But on the other hand should I really be taking stuff that isn’t mine? Like with the moral questions addressed in the last paragraph, I try to find a philosophy to follow regarding looting. What’s funny about it is how I often find myself thinking: “How can I morally justify taking this awesome sword?” I usually end up trying to follow a rule of taking anything that belonged to an enemy or is clearly abandoned, and I can loot anything belonging to a sufficiently rich group or individual. So I won’t take the ten copper from the house of the starving peasant, but I’ll happily take the sword from the king’s armory. Turning my character into a somewhat chaotic neutral person. I do good deeds and try to help people out, but I have little regard for the law and will take what I feel is fair game.
The thing about this is that I really wish it was handled better in gameplay. It often feels like those items are laid out with the assumption that I will take them. If I don’t take the coins, weapons and recovery items that are spread around, then I will have a very difficult time progressing through the game. I wish that games would offer some sort of acknowledgement of your decision to not rob everyone blind, and perhaps offer you something to make up for it. I suppose that would remove a lot of the moral dilemma, the prevailing thought often seems to be that it’s not really a moral decision if it doesn’t cost you anything to take the high road.
I think this has gone on just about long enough, but I did want to share one of my favorite stories about looting, this contains a pretty minor spoiler for Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Right after the first area you find yourself in Sarif headquarters as the head of security. In past Deus Ex games you had the option of sneaking around and pilfering all sorts of stuff from just about any area you found yourself in. So I went to work, sneaking through the gratings, reading people’s personal emails and stealing the candy bars from their drawers. All behavior perfectly in line with the character’s position as head of security right? Anyway, later in the game I returned to Sarif headquarters and checked my email. There was an email talking about how people around the office had recently started having things go missing, and would I please investigate. That was an awesome moment for me, I felt embarrassed about my immediate almost automatic decision to loot the place. It was an awesome demonstration that my earlier actions had consequences, and made me rethink many of my decisions throughout the rest of the game. I wish more games would do things like that.