(Spoilers) The "moral" judgement at the end did not make much sense

[rado907]

At the end of the game, Martin the blacksmith who raised Henry judges your actions throughout the game. It's not a big deal, but frankly that sequence barely made any sense.

For one thing, Martin judges you on sparing Brabant and Von Aulitz. But in both cases, leaving them alive would jeopardize Henry's mission, and therefore the lives of the people in the garrison, which happens to be most of the people that Henry cares about. In addition, Brabant just betrayed Henry's band and killed one of Henry's comrades. And he is torturing Henry's adoptive brother. That's a lot of sound reasons to do him in.

As for Von Aulitz, Warhorse did a great job humanizing him, and I thought his speech at the end was great. But he still effectively murdered Henry's parents. Live by the sword, die by the sword. And in a sense, giving him the honorable death standing up seems preferable to letting him die of the infection. So I'm not sold on Warhorse's moral dilemma here. It falls flat.

Earlier, the player gets to take a stand against Dry Devil and prevent the massacre of the innocents in the village. That was a great moment with a fine speech from Dry Devil. But the dilemma seems false. Surely there are ways of creating a distraction different from massacring the peasant population you are supposed to be trying to aid. A genius national hero like Zizka should be able to come up with something better.

The Semine dilemma was also weird. At the time the player learns of young Semine's betrayal, what we know is that Von Bergow is our prospective ally and the lawful lord of the land; that Semine is aiding bandits who murdered our buddies at the beginning and operate in concert with the creep who murdered our family and stole our sword. So it seems reasonable to want to capture and try Semine. So the way the game presents the situation, it is not at all clear that sparing young Semine, who is a traitor who brought personal harm to Henry, is a particularly good or moral idea.

Nor does the question regarding Henry's regrets for stealing and so on make sense. Surely stealing Sigismund's silver and killing those who support him as enemy combatants is reasonable? Now, apart from the main plot, Henry could indeed be a psychotic criminal. But in Martin's final judgement, the game fails to distinguish between the player's role-playing actions from the cinematic main plot.

There were better opportunities for Henry to be a good Christian and good knight and show mercy and chivalry. For example the duel with Erik. But that opportunity was missed.

So Martin's evaluation falls flat. Which, to be frank, still sort of works - Martin comes across as a somewhat limited and judgmental man. And that's fine. But I suspect that's not what the writers had in mind.

Curious what others think about that.

[Krono]

With Semine at least, the Margrave dude was almost literally frothing at the mouth about slaughtering everyone is Semine, even the people who didn't know about it and had nothing to do with any of the bandit stuff. That's why I chose to side against him and later lie to Von Bergow, but I don't believe it's intended to be seen as a black-and-white situation in either case.

So I didn't have an issue with Martin's judgement really, I ended up choosing everything he liked anyways, but Henry's Mom's judgements annoyed me. She got on about me murdering and stealing from innocents, when I tried very hard to avoid that. There are a few times in the game where the soldiers you fight and kill are apparently labeled as civilians, so they show up in your Civilians Killed statistic and any loot you take from them counts as stolen. So Henry's Mom is crying about all the murder and I'm just sitting here annoyed.