Vampyr's moral choices have "a lot of grey"

While we were at E3 this year we not only got a chance to get a demonstration of Dontnod's Vampyr but we also got the chance to speak to the game's lead level designer Florent Guillaume about the project, and we asked whether the choices you can make in the game are split between good and evil, right and wrong.

"Yeah, so there are two extremes but we don't want to judge anything," he explained. "We don't want to judge the player and [...] there's no karma system, there's no moral system, there's no black or white. There's a lot of grey [...] areas and again puts you in the shoes of this character. He needs to kill, he needs blood to evolve and to survive, and to do so you have to take the lives of innocents. And all these characters populating the world have all their stories, their own stories, their relationships with other characters, and the choices that you make on the lives of people will affect the other people relating to them. So, for instance, if you kill a mother, what happens to the boy?"

We then asked how this will be demonstrated to the player, and how this will work in practice, and Guillaume said that it's all about the citizens, and the player learning more about them. "There's a lot of mechanics in the game to do that," he said. "Some citizens are linked to the main storyline, so as you progress in the game and discover new areas you meet new citizens, and we give the incentive to the player to learn about the citizens, to talk to them." Doing this then unlocks hints, XP boosts, gameplay options, and more.

Do you like ambiguity when it comes to morality?