Review - Infinite Space

• Game: Infinite Space
• Format: Nintendo DS
• Other Formats: None
• Developer: Platinum Games/ Nude Maker
• Publisher: Sega
• Genre: Role Playing

Out of all the fictional jobs that we wish existed in real life, starship captain has got to rank near the top. Exploring never before seen regions of space, fighting battles with guns that could take out a small country and sending anonymous crewmen to die pointlessly, it's got everything. Strangely, despite the number of games that try to mimic Star Wars in some way, this Star Trekian life is something of a rarity in gaming, but now comes Infinite Space to satisfy all your redshirt-sacrificing needs.

The story focuses on Yuri, who in accordance with JRPG tradition is a young boy coming of age who must face up to his great destiny and mysterious powers. Said powers in this case being an ability to activate the Epitaphs, magic space boxes that are somehow connected to the Void Gates used to travel between systems. He also needs to face up to the Lugovalian Empire that is rapidly conquering all galaxies that stand in its way. As generic as the overall plot sounds, the characters, dialogue and subplots are consistently well done, as are the numerous homages - and not just the expected Star Trek/ Wars/ Gate similarities either, Arthur C. Clarke fans will recognise a lot of themes within the story.

Frak! Smeg! Frell! petaQ! Drokk! It's not proper sci-fi until someone hurls a made-up swear word at you. Belgium!

At the heart of the game are your ships themselves. There are over a hundred in all, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The game offers an impressive level of customisation, with your design choices making a noticeable difference to how your fleet operates. Shields and armour let you go toe-to-toe with the enemy, radars and long range weaponry let you hold back and attack them from a safe distance, and security offices give a big advantage if you try to board enemy ships. Simply buying the best of everything is not an option, as your ship has fairly limited space for modules, so for every improvement you make there is a tradeoff in terms of something else that must be left out. You also need to manage your crew, hiring staff for everything from First Officer right down to accountants and the serving staff in the mess hall.

Ship upgrades are done through the medium of Space Tetris.

When battle begins, the two fleets are placed at opposite sides of a battleground, with the options to move forward or back, or to fire any weapons that are in range. There is a kind of rock-paper-scissors dynamic to the three main moves - Barrage is made up of three times as many shots as Normal, but can be almost completely negated by Dodge, dodging a Normal attack however just makes you easier to score a critical hit on. As the game goes on, you also gain access to fighters, AA guns, boarding parties and special attacks. The number of combat options is very limited when compared to the ship upgrades, but if anything this goes to underline just what a difference the right design choices make.

The battles use the strangely underused gimmick of turning the DS touch screen into a control panel

All this may seem somewhat overwhelming, and in truth it often can be. This fact is not helped by the often shockingly poor levels of user friendliness. There are dozens of stats to take into account, plus special skills for all your crew and many of the ships, but the only way to learn what they all mean is to drop whatever you're doing and go to the tutorials at a starbase. Ship customisation would also be a lot easier if you had the relevant stats visible on the top screen - as it is you are told what improvement the current module will give, but not how effective you already are. Most unforgivably, there is no way to look up your current objectives, so if you can't remember where you are meant to be going then your only options are a) fly to every one of the dozens of nearby systems, checking every building until you finally reach the one that sets off the plot, or b) GameFAQs.

These annoying problems with accessibility may well be enough to make many players give up in frustration, but stick with it and once it clicks the scale and ambition are truly impressive. A great game at its best, it's just a shame it makes you work so hard to see it.

Score:
7/10

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A Critique of Turn-Based Member Slapping

I have never really been one for RPGs in the classical sense – the inane ‘grinding’ to produce a team that can take on the next big-bad, of whom should really have taken into account that the player would generally be at a lower level by this point in the long-winded, over-drawn dross of what the developers profess to be a story. Or perhaps the inclusion of rooms measuring barely sufficient in diameter to hammer-throw the proverbial distressed cat, that yet take aeons to traverse thanks to a metaphorical roll of a dice after every footstep designed to drag you kicking and screaming into a circular room barely resembling where you were walking, in which good and evil both take turns to stand there while the opposition slaps them round the face with their dicks. By this time of course, I would have moved a grand total of 2 feet in half an hour and long since died in the real world from old age and contempt for my fellow man.

It is needless for me to say at this point that I have never garnered the will to play much more than an hour of all the Final Fantasy games combined, and the mere notion of forcing myself to trudge through the series’ myriad of numbers leaves me cold like an Eskimo’s genitals as he squats in the freezer section of Farm Foods subsequent to being dumped by his girlfriend*. Puzzling as that concept may be for a lot of you JRPG fans (the Final Fantasy bit, not the Eskimo remark), the notion is made even more the enigma as I explain my deep-seeded love for the Golden Sun games created for Nintendo’s Gameboy Advance.

All the hallmarks are there (much like a good card shop) that point to a pretty standard JRPG fare - from the levelling systems based on experience, the ‘random’ turn-based battles or the collection of equipment and items to aid you in your quest. What the developers, Camelot, have managed to do however is wrap it up in a tight package that doesn’t make me want to push my fist through my throat and poke my eyes out from behind with my bloody fingers. I’m not even entirely sure how they did it to be honest, even after all these years. It could be the sublime presentation – from the inspired musical score to arguably the system’s most impressive graphical flourishes. Or it could be the engaging story that gets to the point and actually keeps you on your toes like the fabled midget at a urinal, rather than throwing walls of pointless dialogue at the player for half an hour that simply explains through use of an elaborate arrangement of ‘ums’ and ‘ahhs’ that the princess is in another castle.

In order to set itself apart from the other mounds of mud in the sludge that is the JRPG swamp, Golden Sun brought to the already finely-furnished table the collection of Djinn. These elemental sprite-like characters are quickly comparable to Pokémon (a series of games of which I have purposely left out of the discussion as they goose-step in the no-man’s land between RPG and easily definable genres), but bare little resemblance with regards to function and gameplay. Not content with merely attaching themselves to party members in order to increase stats and change classes to your will, Djinn can be used in battle to attack, defend, make tea and summon fearsome deities to unleash a metric fuckton of pain down on the unsuspecting enemy team with their members out, expecting the regular ‘you slap me, I slap you’ affair.

Even after completing the first game and being subjected to the metaphorical kick in the scrote that was the finale’s cliff-hanger, the player is able to transfer their entire party and items over to the sequel by way of a password function – albeit featuring a biblical amount of gibberish text and numbers to commit to a notepad before attempting to type it in exactly. Regardless, it is still a kind of warm and fuzzy addition that is purely there for the fans, and a function that I personally hadn’t seen since the Sonic & Knuckles ‘lock-on’ cart for the Sega Megadrive.

I still can't figure out if this is a dude or a chick.

Either way, that's one poncy bastard.

I think what shines through the most with these games, what makes them seem so wondrous to me, is the blatant labour and love that went into their creation. These are the developers responsible for Mario Golf and Mario Tennis, dressed up in a gimp suit for Papa Nintendo and asked to dance around so that the giant can get its jollies off. Golden Sun is Camelot’s baby, and it shows. Roll on Golden Sun DS – maybe it will give me a reason to stop using the console’s touch screen as a coaster.
For my hot mugs.
Full of turds.
That frequently overspill.

* I also don’t care for Resident Evil or Metal Gear Solid. That’s right internet, come and get me.

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Best of the Worst - Virtual Hydlide

A Guest Review by Jambo

This Review is part of our 'Best of the Worst' ('BotW') series, in which TGN writers/guests attempt to find the very worst games in existence, and offer proof of it's terribleness, in the form of a review.

• Game: Virtual Hydlide
• Format: SEGA Saturn
• Developer: T&E Soft
• Publisher: SEGA
• Genre: RPG
  

There are a hell of a lot of awful games that decide to ‘grace’ the videogames world with their presence, but now I believe we have a new benchmark to compare others against: Virtual Hydlide. This isn’t your average RPG. Hell, it’s not even sub-standard. This BotW is here purely to compel you to not ever consider buying this game. If it appears on eBay for next to nothing don’t even click on the link. Seriously, don’t bother. Now, onto the actual game...

Is it any coincidence that the two games I have elected into the BotW vault so far are both made by T&E Soft? Maybe, but it is not without good reason. Virtual Hydlide is an action-RPG which was released on the SEGA Saturn in 1995. The Hydlide series has been around for a while but has never achieved any large success due to it being seen as a poor man’s Zelda. The first game appeared on the NES, but fans(!?) of the series claim this Saturn version to be the worst. If that is what the fans are saying then you know it must be a true turd of a game.

Hydlide is the ‘magical’ world which you, the plucky, pixelated hero, must explore. Perhaps the magical part is that it manages miraculously to make every environment look exactly the same as every other, along with all the enemies popping up out of thin air. The story is quite typical of the genre, and indeed the other Hydlide games. A dark demon called Varalys attempts to take over the land and he kidnaps a princess who then splits into three fairies. The gamer has to track down these three fairies, find three magic stones, defeat one or two bosses and finally face Varalys in a climactic showdown. That is if you can slug your way through the terrible graphics and painstaking gameplay…

Gameplay that is far too simple, and this is where the game really stumbles. You have three different strengths of attack (though you won‘t notice the difference) and as you progress through the game you can pick up a small selection of analogous swords and daggers to aid you in this button mashing quest. For most of the game you are placed in a wide-open environment and are forced to follow a marker to your next destination where you may find an enemy to fight or you may just be flung to another dull and remorselessly samey environment (including a graveyard, a dungeon, a large field, another graveyard and some more dungeons). This ruins the sense of progression and makes the game seem forcibly dragged-out.

It really doesn't look that bad, but considering the frame-rate, this is probably a GIF animation of gameplay.

This quote is taken from the blurb that can be found on the reverse of the box: “Killer trees, deadly dragons and bloody-thirsty zombies are rife in this magical slash and hack adventure”. Now, call me cynical, but any game that lists trees as enemies must be approached with caution. The most damaging enemy, though, is the graphics engine. Unlike the previous Hydlide games, Virtual Hydlide escapes from the user friendly top-down view and takes the first steps into motion captured video. The result is an awkward mix of ‘photo-realistic graphics’ and a choppy frame rate. Although at first glance the graphics may seem alright, it isn’t till you actually play the game for any length of time that you realise just how slothful and distorted they are. When you get up close to a foe you can never be sure if your attack will actually hit them or if you’ll be made to just watch helplessly as the game slows down (and when it returns to normal you find that you are dead). Enemies flicker through walls, objects get grainier the closer you get and the scenery tends to move of its own accord. If you can remember the '80s TV RPG sensation ‘Knightmare’ then you’ll have a pretty good idea of what to expect… only worse.

Music is vitally important to videogames and a good soundtrack can heighten the senses and add emotion and emphasis to particular scenes. Virtual Hydlide prefers to torture its player with noise similar to that of a cat passing a 10 inch kidney stone whilst being stroked vigorously by an overly enthusiastic child with a terrible case of halitosis… with a megaphone strapped to its mouth. I suppose that is a tad undue, there are a few samples of music that rise to ranks of ‘run of the mill’, though it's the sound effects that provide the true anguish. Constant grunts of “Ungh”, “Aiee”, and “Squish!” quickly vex.

Knightmare was awesome. I'm gonna go YouTube me some Knightmare.

There are a couple of neat touches. The game uses a pretty good ‘weight-limit’ idea where the hero can only carry items up to a certain weight. This does theoretically add some strategic value but is badly executed and so in practice becomes a chore. The final dungeon is something that has to be seen to be believed. Without giving too much away, expect Tron-esque rooms coupled with the terrible, nausea inducing motion-capture; who needs an acid trip when you have got this?

The game tried something new. Motion-capture was uncharted territory and to try and use it in the RPG genre was a courageous move… but one that here proved disastrous. The idea of a photo-realistic virtual world was great, but the hardware limitations seriously destroyed any fun the game may have contained. Perhaps the worst parts are that VH contains no text and no non-playable characters to interact with, thus making the story a novel inclusion rather than a major driving point: there are no towns to visit, no side-quests to enjoy and nowhere to rest meaning that the duration of the playing time is a constant fight against ennui. That, and the lead character looks like a stocky transvestite… oh, and by the time you finished reading this you probably could have completed the game.

Twice.

Score:
9 turds out of 10

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Extolling the Virtues of Oblivion

• Game: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
  
• Console: Xbox 360
  
• Developer: Bethesda
  
• Publisher: 2K Games
  
• Released: March 2006
  

First things first, Oblivion was my first trip into the world created by Bethesda in The Elder Scrolls. I had missed Morrowind before it despite people saying that it's the best thing since sliced cheese (because bread just don't cut it for me anymore). So, naturally, I was blown away at the impeccable level of detail in this game. Practically everything can be interacted with in some way. Everything in the game exists, it is tangible, if you pick up a gold coin, you can actually drop a literal, physical gold coin. If you pick up a mortar & pestle, you can drop a mortar & pestle. You can even use a mortar & pestle to create your own custom potions with the plants you can pick up (and can drop). No more items existing only in the ether of the game-world and if you did indeed drop them, come back later and they'll still be there. The world is one great inventory box. It may not be the best thing in gaming ever, but what I'm trying to get at is just how much care and attention has been put into this game.

Suffice to say, the rest of the game is much the same. There are tons of tiny little townships and villages that dot the land of Cyrodiil, and each one seems to have its own story. On my first play-through, I stopped off at an inn for the night in a tiny township, in the middle of nowhere, after a day of tiresome traveling (for my character, not me, I was loving it). I ignored the town-people's threats that I was not welcome there and headed up the wooden hill for some deeply deserved slumber. In the middle of the night, I was awoken by some crazed lunatic attacking me. I promptly disposed of him and fled. Much later, in the city of Chorrol, I heard rumours of a missing girl and went to speak to her mother, Seed-Neeus, who told me her daughter had gone missing while making a delivery to Hackdirt. I went to the village Seed-Neeus mentioned and discovered it to be the very same village I was attacked in as I slept. This stood out for me; by chance I discovered this village almost at random and created my own little story out of it. This happens throughout the game, time and time again. Although the main story is set out for you, you can create your own little world and story. Oblivion really lets the imagination fly.

Lush game-world? Check.

After creating your character, you start the game in prison for an unknown crime and with your only companion, the old lifer in the cell opposite, slinging insults at you. This doesn't last for long, though, as your cell is a secret exit from the Imperial City and needs to be used by the Emperor who appears to be in mortal danger. However, the Emperor notices you, and says he's seen you in his dreams. You follow the Emperor and his guards as they make their way through the secret dungeon. However, the assassins find and kill the Emperor, but not before he sends you off on the first part of the main story. After this, you're on your own. You escape the prison sewers and set off on your journey to keep the Dragonfires burning.

Before you exit the sewers, though, you can again edit your character's features and skills. What sets Oblivion apart from most other RPGs, is that you aren't given experience points when defeating enemies. Instead, for each of your characters skills, you get a bar which gradually fills up every time you do something associated with a skill. For instance, if you take damage while wearing heavy armour, your heavy armour bar will fill up. When it's completely full, you'll level-up in that skill. Once you have levelled-up enough in your major skills, your character will level-up. Each time you level-up, you are given a set amount of skill points you can add to your attributes, you'll get better weaponry and more money from looting, the challenge of the game will increase, and stronger enemies will appear. It's a system that works really well, and it gets you to do a lot of the things in the game that might have been overlooked otherwise. It can be a little confusing at first, but with a few hours of practice and after you've levelled-up a couple of times, you'll get into the swing of things.

You can fight either in 1st or 3rd person view, but 1st person is where it's at.

The main story will probably only take you about 15 hours to complete, but the huge amount (and quality) of the side-quests will have you playing this game for at least 100 hours. There are the side-quests you'll stumble upon, whether through talking to people or overhearing conversations, such as the aforementioned Hackdirt side-quest, but there are also the guilds. There's the Fighter's Guild, the Mage's Guild, the Arena, the Thieves' Guild and the Dark Brotherhood. Then there are the Daedric Shrines, the mines, the caves, the Ayleid ruins and the forts, each of these are like dungeons ranging from tiny to massive and are practically filled to the brim with gold and loot. Then there are the Oblivion Gates, which lead you to the titular realm of Oblivion, and contain expansive game worlds in themselves. There really is a heck of a lot stuffed in this game, and all of that is only the content that came on the disc. Factor in the downloadable content, and there's another 30 hours of gameplay added to the massive amount of play-time already.

It really is an immense game. It's completely compelling and comprehensively compulsive. It's crucial that you own or at least play this game. It's certainly not without its faults (like every other game) and it maybe showing its age a little now, but it's one of those games that really needs to be experienced by as many people as possible, and not just because Patrick Stewart and Terence Stamp are in it, the men with the Best Voices Ever™. What's more is that Bethesda are all set and ready to release their new game, Fallout 3, which promises as much as, if not more than, Oblivion. Heck, if it's half the size of Oblivion, it'll still be absolutely huge.

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Extolling the Virtues of Mass Effect

• Game: Mass Effect
  
• Console: Xbox 360
  
• Developer: BioWare
  
• Publisher: Microsoft
• Released: November 2007
  

As big a problem I have with certain aspects of Mass Effect, I do love it very much indeed. Something I really wasn't expecting from the same team as Knights of the Old Republic. Although KotOR isn't a bad game at all, I seemed to trudge through the 40+ hours of it without ever enjoying any of it, until perhaps near the end. So, no, Mass Effect wasn't a game I ever expected to enjoy as much as I eventually did, which is indeed a rather nice surprise. In fact, I knew I was playing something special as soon as I started Mass Effect, quite the opposite of KotOR. The opening cinematic that introduced the character you'd just spent about 20 minutes creating really set the scene for just how awesome they were going to become over the course of the game. I knew immediately that I could expect a lot better from this than from KotOR.

But enough of KotOR, that's Star Wars territory; Mass Effect is set in our very own galaxy (The Milky Way, in case you didn't know) about 180 years into the future. It's all so very in-depth and rather believable … or most of it is, at least. Mass Effect explains how almost everything in the game works; from your guns, to your shield, to your 'biotic' powers. Reams and reams of text - some of it narrated. Why, you ask? Because this is the kind of thing that gets Sci-Fi nuts hornier than when they see Klingon cosplay porn. But if you don't want to enter the kingdom of the fat, spotty, love-starved virgin 30 year-olds, then you don't have to, as most of this stuff is very easily ignorable. Now, I'm not a complete geek, but I admit I am a completionist (meaning that when I play a game, I want to see and do everything - at least to the limits of my gaming ability), so I read nearly all of it and damn, it's actually quite interesting when it isn't flying over the top of my head at 70,000Kpc/s.

You can land on quite a few planets and check out the scenery. Some of it really is quite stunning.

Then there's the actual game and, boy, is it epic. After the first couple of hours of gameplay, you're given the freedom to choose where you want to go next, provided you know of the system you want to explore. You're given missions that are essential to the plot and side-missions, which, while they lack the cinematic flair and dazzling locations of the plot-based missions, still serve to extend the life of the game well past the 20-hour mark. It's in the plot-based missions where Mass Effect really comes to life, though. The worlds you explore vary greatly in terms of setting, whether you're stranded on a skyscraper laden planet under attack by the self-aware cyborg AI Geth or conducting an investigation into the apparently dubious experiments a shady multi-global company is doing on a freezing ice-world.

It might be an RPG through and through, but the battle system is notable only by its apparent absence. This is a good thing, as there is definitely a battle system in there, it's just that it's completely seamless to the rest of the game, it's played in real-time and, most importantly, it's a shoot 'em up. Yes, there's none of that nonsensical turn-based fighting in this game, it's full-on blasting action. Grenades, sniper rifles, shotguns, assault rifles, pistols, biotic powers, technological warfare; it's all in here, and it works great. There's even a cover-system and recharging health. It's kind of like Gears of War, but without the burly and incredibly ugly men running around and grunting.

See, it's a 3rd person shooter. A 3rd person, RPG, space-opera, conversation-simulation, shooter.

Now, regarding the sex scene - even though it's not particularly titillating, I see it as big step forward for the gaming industry. It's handled pretty much like how films handle it; getting to know each other, flirting, sexual tension and then they get intimate. It doesn't seem contrived, at all. There's build-up to it all the way through the game, leading to your choice between the human male or female or the female alien. Even then, it's entirely optional. If you don't fancy seeing your man or woman making-out with a bald, blue-skinned girl with no ears, then you don't have to. Then there's the fact that there's barely any flesh on show, a bum shot and perhaps a bit of side-boob, but it's mainly just naked kissing. The controversy it garnered is really quite baffling after you've experienced it for yourself, even more so if you wonder how God of War got away with its nipple-showing threesome, replete with button combos and moaning.

The choice over who you make 'the beast with two backs' with is only one of several choices you make in Mass Effect, and each of them has their own consequences. The biggest choice comes at the end of the game, which directly affects the ending you get. Moreover, the decisions you make in the game will carry onto Mass Effect 2, along with your character, and seeing as Mass Effect is set to become a trilogy, these decisions will carry on into, and possibly find closure, in Mass Effect 3. So, even if you have finished Mass Effect, know that it is only the end of the beginning, which is an exciting thought.

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Beyond Lawful Good and Chaotic Evil

Quick moral quiz - as you leave the village an old man comes up to you claiming to have been robbed by bandits in the wilderness. He desperately needs the treasure that was stolen from him and promises to reward you if you get it back. Do you:

1. Ride to the bandits' camp and fight them all off but let them live once they promise to be nice. Take the treasure and return it to its owner but refuse to accept a reward because you were only performing your moral duty as a generic do-gooder.
2. Ride to the bandits' camp, kill everyone and loot their corpses. Then go back to the old man, refuse to give him back the treasure but threaten to kill him if he doesn't give you the reward anyway. Kill him and loot his corpse. Then stamp on a puppy. Loot the puppy's corpse.

Depending on your choice here, your Evil-O-Meter will move slightly in one direction or other, also you probably get more money and XP for choosing the second option, it's just a sidequest though so don't expect any kind of lasting consequences.

The above scenario is obviously a simplified version of the kind of moral choices that modern RPGs try to offer, the problem is that it's not simplified by that much. A typical moral choice will boil down to taking the unambiguously "good" option or the unambiguously "evil" option (occasionally with a few neutral options thrown in). As such, the whole moral choice aspect comes down to a decision made right at the start of whether you want to play a good or evil character.

The pursuit of good/evil points also leads to the character's actions feeling forced - a good character will go out of their way to help everyone who asks, even when they clearly have far more important things to be concerned about. Evil characters on the other hand seem downright insane; a truly self-centred person would probably just ignore the majority of sidequests (and maybe even the main quest) because they don't care about the problems of some random peasant. This however will be counted as neutral by the game mechanics so you need to take the quest anyway then throw in some act of gratuitous cruelty to make the point that you really are EVIL!

And this leads us to the biggest problem, the goody-two-shoes and asinine jerk characters clearly have no rights being on the same quest with the same teammates. The game needs to railroad the player and horribly break the plot to provide an excuse for why a character would go on a quest they clearly have no motivation for (generally an evil character on a good quest, although I imagine playing a good character in Overlord causes this kind of problem too). Someone who genuinely wanted to roleplay an evil character might want to take over the first low-level criminal organisation you fight, kill the leader of the good guys, or sell out the forces of good and take a position working for the villain. But these choices goes way beyond the level of variation that is allowed by the script and so either there will be no option to do any of them, or at best you'll get a few extra lines of dialogue giving a hand-wave to force you back onto the main path. Thus you have the paradox of an "evil hero" - a heartless killer who slaughters the innocent while battling the forces of darkness and amassing a team of pure-hearted allies.

And of course these allies may complain about your latest rampage but will never think of abandoning the psychopathic killer they've mistakenly teamed up with. Kill, steal and stab your friends in the back for minimal reward and they'll still follow you right up to the pre-scripted bit before the last dungeon where the two paths finally diverge.

I think a better option would be to abandon the forced attempts to allow both good and evil choices and instead let the player choose between different moral philosophies on the same side of the scale. Take it for granted that the player character is a hero, but let them choose how best to go about saving the world - more like Lawful Good vs. Chaotic Good rather than tying yourself in knots aiming for Lawful Good vs. Chaotic Evil. Do you work strictly within the law or break the rules for the greater good? Sacrifice innocent lives to stop the bad guys or save the civilians but let your enemies get away? Mass Effect tries to use this system, with both Paragon and Renegade being basically good but differing in how ruthless they are willing to be. There are still some cases of asinine jerkiness - anyone wanting to get full Renegade points needs to be highly xenophobic and needlessly rude - but it manages to be one of the few games where both paths make sense.

Taking the idea even further it would be interesting to see a game where there are meaningful consequences for both "idealistic" and "ruthless" actions. Even Mass Effect tended to allow the Paragon to accomplish everything the Renegade could, making the "I did what needed to be done" defence ring hollow. Ideally, both options should have something going for them, both in terms of reward for the player (most of the time, the evil route will lead to more fighting and stealing, hence more loot and XP) and moral consequences.

Making it so that neither path is obviously more "good" than the other, would still give just as much choice as the more traditional good vs. evil dichotomy but since the choices are limited to the heroic ones the story would make more sense and feel a lot less like you were being railroaded. Perhaps more importantly the player would hopefully end up actually thinking about which one they should choose rather than simply going for the one that earns the most points for their alignment. All in all, the story and your choices in it would become a lot more interesting.

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