Illegal things to do

We’ve been presenting the game for months now, talking about the families, locations, and all the different gameplay possibilities: develop your businesses, go into politics, do good things.

But given the possibility to do rotten things to your adversaries? Come on… Who would say no to that? 🙂

We’re proud and amused to say that The Guild 3 offers a wide range of morally dubious activities. Some of them are pretty straight forward: you can pickpocket, attack someone to rob them, ambush their transports… Or, bomb the house of a rival dynasty. All of these things are normally illegal (each map and political system can vary what is allowed or not, to offer more puritan games and outlaw regions) and will land you in front of judges if you’re caught. They’re still fun to do, though. In video games! We strongly recommend that you don’t do that in real life.

What feels interesting to us is the grey zone between obviously wrong things to do, like the ones above, and the obviously right ones to do. In these blurred areas, there’s a lot of wiggle room to allow for fun gameplay, and the very versatile trading system is a good location for that.

One of the things we argued about often during the design phases was the concept of bribing. What is considered a bribe? Sometimes, it can be straight up illegal. But very often, it can be debated as to what should be considered a bribe. So we created the trade system that everything can be traded, including goodwill. Possessions, of course, but political or trial votes, political office powers, kidnapped victims, evidences for crimes… Hey! Even children can be used for trade in The Guild 3! And the AI is taught to evaluate all of these concepts together. But again: don’t do any of these things in real life.

So if we come up with a trade where we will give you evidence implicating you in a murder in exchange of the hand of your daughter, are we blackmailing you or doing you a favor? And if we demand 500 gold coins, on top of that? Or if we offer you a business that we own but don’t want anymore? And if we want to trade proof of your crime and ask nothing in return, except your good favours, what kind of a trade is that? When does it become illegal, or just immoral? Or is it just a good business transaction?

The same thing could be said of political or judiciary votes. If we vote for you at one place in order for you to vote for us somewhere else, it’s “legal” all right. But how moral is it? This is why trades are powerful: because they’re private. Votes are known publicly. If you too often vote against what would be a logical vote, or vote too much against the opinion and interests of the population, it might turn against you, even if you didn’t do anything really illegal…

In the end, just to be sure, might as well send your henchman to bomb them all…! 😀

GolemLabs