Get Rid of Morality Systems

[Chamale]

I think instead of a "karma meter" there should be decisions that affect various characters' opinions of you, but don't actually change your karma. If you kill the corrupt leader of a faction, that faction will hate you but their rivals thank you. If you steal from the rich and give to the poor, the rich will try to have you arrested even as you're a hero to the poor.

Not many games have had a system like that. Recently, New Vegas tried to do something like it where a quest gave you options that might make one faction like you more and make another hate you, but there was still an overall karma meter. You could murder everyone in the game, and if you murdered the drug dealers last their deaths would redeem your karma meter and make you a saint.

 

[Cenequus]

I can see why morality system is flawed specially in games like Dragon Age. And more to the point I agree to

The way they are implemented restricts role playing. Instead of playing your own character, you are playing at most two or three preset characters.
Most moral bars are shitty evil/good splits, and while Bioware does it better, that's like saying they're better at being a leper for losing more appendages.

How about instead of limiting speech options if our Paragon/Renegade score isn't high enough, we simply leave all the options there for the player to choose? Be a jerk with a heart of gold, or a good guy who makes bad decisions. Anything in between also works, but it is all infinitely better than a couple of presets that only work if you dedicate every speech option to them (Mass Efect 2 I'm looking at you)

Instead of railroading us onto one path with no deviation, give us broader options. The irony of the morality system is that it only reflects the morals the developers want, not what you might feel. So your character isn't so much yours as it is what the devs want your character to be.

EDIT
Sorry, more info. KEEP Moral Choices, just get rid of the Morality SYSTEM.

I can see why morality system is flawed specially in games like Dragon Age. And more to the point I agree to keep the choice remove the system,but the problem doesn't comes from the game itself but from the person. I'm not a 100% person so I don't play to maximize rewards etc so I don't get to experience the flaws of the morality system. As up tight it might seem I play the game without saving most of the times and what I choose it's there to stay.

The reason why I think this is how the game is meant to be played is that I never get to the point where I feel forced to say something I wouldn't otherwise.

Maybe overall the morality choices are getting dumbed down,atleast apparently,I didn't liked the speach wheel in DA2 at the beggining not because the dialogue was limited but it did felt like that. Same I felt when DAO came out even if it had apparently more choices(5-6)the results we're still good/evil. That felt dumbed down alot too for me where I was coming from NWN2 where I had the good old 9(LG-->CE).

 

[Nieroshai]

The way I look at it, there are two types of RPGs, the type that lets you create the narrative while still having its own lore, and the kind that has its own intended narrative but gives you a little wiggle room and may even have alternate endings. Mass Effect is the second one, Oblivion is the first. I see nothing wrong with there being two types of RPG.

 

[Nifarious]

somewhere along the lines of making a game out of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" ("Press X to refute traditional tables of values as set forth by religion and philosophers and forge your own in a world filled with people determined by their very nature to cause you to fail because your philosophical superiority threatens them").

You get major approval points for bringing Nietzsche into this, but I think you and I played a very different Oblivion. The game had no real moral element, it was just a matter of completing all the quests or arbitrarily killing NPCs off if you wanted to preclude yourself from doing their quests. That's nothing against the game, more more exactly, Shivering Isles, but there was zero way of customizing the world around you without resorting to something like NPCicide.

My honest opinion is that since morality is broken in Western Culture, there's not a whole lot of room for hopeful developments within the industry, even despite the general outcry of this thread. Still, the necessary changes aren't difficult. Developers just get lazy about putting work into more than just one real outcome. Eg. Different choices porting from ME to ME@ were meaningless and pretty much promise to be so in ME3 as well. Playing for the evil Legion in Fallout NV was utterly boring and restrictive, although I do appreciate also finally being able to give all the interested parties a big F U at the end. Fallout 3 was abysmal with your 'join the brotherhood' or 'quasi-infiltrate the brotherhood but you can't join the Enclave so, uh, enjoy randomly killing things?' options. Dragon Age was dialogue driven instead, which while enjoyable, was really just a matter of unlocking a book on tape, as opposed to actual gameplay or roleplay.

The key theme here is developers not creating the space to make player choices matter. That's what the crux of all this uninteresting moral posturing. Companies just don't care about replayability because playing again doesn't make them any more money. They instead offer tiny ways of personalizing your character the way all mass marketing/mass culture does. Personalize your clothes, music choice, hobbies, whatever to substitute for being an actual person on your own. Sure, you can actually do replays like I have. But the results on all cases are disappointments, at least on this level.

Still, RPGs offer the immersion that keeps us playing...

 

[Vault101]

well i mean with NV and ME things are a little different

 

[drbarno]

I'd like a morality system rather like shadow the hedgehog.

 

[Kahunaburger]

Yeah, definitely agree on The Witcher and Fallout: New Vegas as examples of doin it rite.

Most games with morality systems make you choose between stuff like saving children and killing children - The Witcher makes you choose between raising a child based on authoritarian or permissive parenting styles. That is awesome. The focus stops being on an arbitrary meter and starts being on facing the consequences of your decisions.

And New Vegas, IMO, is a perfect example of a game that had 90% of a good idea and sabotaged itself with the remaining 10%. NCR vs. Mr House vs. Legion vs. you is an interesting choice - you're basically asking whether a destroyed civilization can reasonably be rebuilt with democracy, whether it is fine as a pseudo-anarchy, or whether it needs one of two forms of autocracy to be stable. That is a cool decision. All possibilities have complicated ramifications, and you can see them being actively debated on any Fallout-related forum. The problem is that when they equate NCR with good, Legion with evil, and the others with neutral using the karma mechanic, it completely messes up any authentic choice they could have created.

 

[RyQ_TMC]

Funny how in every morality system-related thread it always comes down to Mass Effect. Anyway, a few things to say.

Planescape: Torment utilized the standard D&D two-axis system, the Nameless One starting out at True Neutral and his alignment changing with your choices. The greatest thing about the system was that there was no obvious way of telling how your actions would affect alignment. So OK, it was pretty easy to tell that being helpful earned you "good" points and so on, but since you couldn't see the point changes, and some consequences were pretty unexpected (you would get chaotic points for just talking to Xaosites, as their madness rubbed off), the only way to see the changes was when you ventured into the character screen and noticed your alignment has changed at some point along the way. And then alignment would affect what equipment you could use, how some people treated you, and all those little things. The beautiful thing about that system was that since alignment changes came so slow, you really couldn't "grind alignment" to cheat, that since there were so many dialogue options you could really be whatever character you wanted to be.

Neverwinter Nights didn't really utilize it in home campaigns, but its powerful creation tools had options for both D&D alignment and faction points. I think this addresses the problem many people have with morality systems, namely that they are arbitrary. In user-made NwN campaigns, you could really make your choices affect how other people see and treat you without utilizing a good/evil slider. It was a good one, I think, although this kind of solution would require a crapload of scripting for it to seem meaningful.

Most games with morality systems make you choose between stuff like saving children and killing children - The Witcher makes you choose between raising a child based on authoritarian or permissive parenting styles. That is awesome. The focus stops being on an arbitrary meter and starts being on facing the consequences of your decisions.

That's one thing I really liked about The Witcher, but it should be said that the system wasn't implemented too well. Many consequences were obvious, and for me a real letdown was when at one point, an earlier choice was arbitrarily labelled as "good/evil" (it was made into "I fight injustice / I'm a selfish jerk", but the implications were clear). If the sequel has more of the rare "wow, I didn't see that coming" consequences, I'm in.

 

[Alon Shechter]

Yes, but having the sort of thing you (and all of us) want would be a gigantic project of a bajillion costing game that will be 42 times bigger than the world in Minecraft and with graphics 42 times better.
Maybe i'm just mad, but I think the requests of game changes in these forums are absurdly difficult to actually make.

 

[RyQ_TMC]

Yes, but having the sort of thing you (and all of us) want would be a gigantic project of a bajillion costing game that will be 42 times bigger than the world in Minecraft and with graphics 42 times better.
Maybe i'm just mad, but I think the requests of game changes in these forums are absurdly difficult to actually make.

Find me an online forum where requests of changes (in any area) are not absurd. I'll wait here for the next couple decades.

But the discussion is more about "what we want to see in games" than "is it at all feasible". We're all gamers here, we understand there are limitations. Nobody seriously complains about the fact that the old 2D games had more varied monsters than today's 3D ones. Of course, we sometimes notice that technical innovation has limited many things (Shamus once wrote a column about full voice acting severely limiting choice in games, for example)... But we like to fantasize about "the perfect game". Do you tell people who dream of flying that their dreams are absurd and they should be ashamed of themselves?

 

[Anti Nudist Cupcake]

Yes, get rid of the system that measures your morality and limits you to be either a good or evil character and nothing in between.

Also, I know people are gonna give me funny looks for this, but remove player character voice acting as well.

WAIT! Just hear me out first, and THEN shoot me.
Take what the developers at valve have in thought when they make a player character, they give him/her no voice. This isn't to cut costs, this isn't because they don't have the time for the writing or the voice acting or anything like that but because it makes the game MORE engaging. Why? Well, by giving the player character no voice or obvious personality, they have YOU fill the gaps with YOUR personality, by doing this YOU become the voice, YOU become the main player character.

Basically, when the world reacts to or people are talking to you in the game world it makes it seem all the more like they aren't talking to some guy that was written to be very different from you, but actually talking to you yourself.

Yeah, couldn't really find the right words to explain this, NOW you can shoot me.

 

[Grabbin Keelz]

Fallout New Vegas was the best in moral choice I've played so far. The actual karma meter does almost nothing in this game, the reputation meter is far more important.

 

[AJax_21]

I liked how Metro 2033 handled the morality system. You didn't have the usual good/bad meter that, if not used properly, breaks any sense of immersion you can have in the game world and just boils them down to stat points. In Metro 2033, Your actions in through out the adventure can have a subtle impact in the ending like being stealthy most of the time, listening to conversations in the stations, helping certain characters...etc. The game never flat out tells you which are the good or bad choices, it's the up to the player's interpretation. I really hate it when a game, especially RPGs, never forces the player to choose morally gray. *cough*masseffect2Infamous*cough*

 

[Juggern4ut20]

Allow me to be a contrarian for a moment and present a way that moral systems might make sense. Lets look for a moment at Knights of the old republic and say you played the game making decisions that gave you light side points. Towards the end of the game you begin to see that certain actions or dialogue trees are absent or grayed out to you. These dialogue tree options and choices have to do with the exact opposite perspective from that you have established your player is based on your actions earlier in the game (as a light side hero you can no longer choose dark side actions). So basically, the game has prevented you from radically changing your characters personality based on your own decisions earlier in the game. Lets pretend that the original star wars trilogy was a very long game. At the end, there might be an option for luke to kill vader and fall to the dark side, kinda like in Kotor. But if you played through the game the exact way the movie went, it wouldn't make any sense story wise, or in other words within the narrative created by your choices earlier in the game, for that to happen.

This is where i think the idea for the mass effect 2 paragon and renegade stems from. The idea that once you established a character in the narrative of the game, it would not make sense to dramatically change them later in the game. I think this could be implemented correctly given the right people working on the game and the correct direction.

 

[Alon Shechter]

Yes, but having the sort of thing you (and all of us) want would be a gigantic project of a bajillion costing game that will be 42 times bigger than the world in Minecraft and with graphics 42 times better.
Maybe i'm just mad, but I think the requests of game changes in these forums are absurdly difficult to actually make.

Find me an online forum where requests of changes (in any area) are not absurd. I'll wait here for the next couple decades.

But the discussion is more about "what we want to see in games" than "is it at all feasible". We're all gamers here, we understand there are limitations. Nobody seriously complains about the fact that the old 2D games had more varied monsters than today's 3D ones. Of course, we sometimes notice that technical innovation has limited many things (Shamus once wrote a column about full voice acting severely limiting choice in games, for example)... But we like to fantasize about "the perfect game".

Dude, the OP is complaining, not politely wishing for something better.

Do you tell people who dream of flying that their dreams are absurd and they should be ashamed of themselves?

That was just plain unnecessary.

 

[moretimethansense]

They should use the Dragon Age system, where instead of your morality affected it's your party members opinions of you.

That one has its faults as well, where you needed to agree to what the NPC liked in order to speak more to them. If you disagreed enough, they'd leave or you'd kill them. It cuts out their dialogue and limits your conversation options.

Dragon Age 2 is a little better, since it is now either Friendship or Rivalry, but it still has problems. You won't be punished for disagreeing with them, but now you are curtailed the same way as Mass Effect 2, where you are either Evil/Rival, or Good/Friend. There is no middle ground, and if you don't dedicate to one or the other, bye bye dialogue.

Okay I'm going to be blunt here, if you only make dialogue decisions that make your party members like you, you are shit at role playing.
Try a good tabletop RPG with an experianced group sometime, you'll see what I mean.

OT: I don't necceserily think that we should do away with morality gauges entirely, yes Mass Effect's is lawed, yes there are many that don't really work, but that doesn't mean thet they never work!
What they should do is incorporate the morality gague in to the plot somehow or make it so that being good is a challange, EG: a game where there in an easy way to do almost anything, but it will always cost something importand to the protaganist, like their sense of honour or pride or the lives of his companions, and if by the end their morality gague has fallen low enogh they get the "evil ending, as they have proved that they are willing to play dirty, to sacrifice everything for power and reward.

Of course I love it when a game simply preents me with ambiguous desicions and no gague, but not every game needs that or would benefit from it.

 

[Zantos]

The morality system ME uses shouldn't be removed, it just needs a little rehashing.

What it does is define everything as good or evil, a black and white choice. Secondly it assumes all scenarios have a good option and an evil option. COnsider the two following scenarios, one is borrowed from someone else and one I just thought up now so there's probably a better one. Spoilers for the 6 people in the known universe who haven't played it or been told the story.

So the first example (borrowed) is Legion's loyalty mission. At the end you have to choose between the paragon option of removing the geth free will and reprogramming them all to believe what you believe, or the renegade option of wiping them out. Sorry to everyone who wants to play a purely good lawful character but fuck that! Brainwashing was chosen as a paragon option because it's what, less bad than killing them? They should both be renegade. It's a scenario engineered to be a difficult choice so why not go all the way and make it so there is no good way out? In real life, if you brainwashed a bunch of people and your defence was "at least I didn't kill them" then that shit wouldn't fly, so why should it in this? I'm sure there are plenty of examples ingame that this could be applied to.

Secondly, look at the final decision. The destruction of the collector base. Paragon is blow it up, renegade is keep it and hand it over to cerberus. Yes we know that once Martin Sheen has the technology he'll probably use it to murder some Asari orphans or something, but on the whole it means at least someone would have advanced technology to fight reapers with. And it isn't your fault he was the only major power actually interested in the reaper threat. So weigh up the points, rather than some arbitrary number of paragon or renegade points for each, have a mixture. You get some paragon points for destroying the station, but you get some renegade points for the several billion extra people that probably die due to being severely short on advanced tech. You get renegade points for handing the collector base to the illusive man, but paragon for at least having someone with bigass anti-reaper guns.

I think changes like that would improve the moral choice system at least a little, and make it more flexible since you can earn paragon and renegade points at the same time and thus get more dialogue options on the side of the spectrum you aren't really playing on.

 

[Trolldor]

The way they are implemented restricts role playing. Instead of playing your own character, you are playing at most two or three preset characters.
Most moral bars are shitty evil/good splits, and while Bioware does it better, that's like saying they're better at being a leper for losing more appendages.

How about instead of limiting speech options if our Paragon/Renegade score isn't high enough, we simply leave all the options there for the player to choose? Be a jerk with a heart of gold, or a good guy who makes bad decisions. Anything in between also works, but it is all infinitely better than a couple of presets that only work if you dedicate every speech option to them (Mass Efect 2 I'm looking at you)

Instead of railroading us onto one path with no deviation, give us broader options. The irony of the morality system is that it only reflects the morals the developers want, not what you might feel. So your character isn't so much yours as it is what the devs want your character to be.

EDIT
Sorry, more info. KEEP Moral Choices, just get rid of the Morality SYSTEM.

No.
Sometimes a black and white morality system can be fun.
Don't use a morality system when you claim your game is about choice though.

 

[BodomBeachChild]

New Vegas got the morality kinda right. I still hated how killing specific people was good karma when indeed I murdered the bastard. But the overall choices for what NV was to become was perfect. All the routes to the future of Vegas are all kinda shitty for the place, but some less than others. My only issue with the way you are asked to handle everything is you cannot outsmart the game. I tried to screw everyone over and (in my own head) bring a real independent Vegas and one of my games has no ending because I farked with he quest lines too much.

The Witcher though nails it. "What do you think is the better idea/lesser evil" (Kill a werewolf since you are a monster killer? Or spare him and see what the outcomes of kill it would net." Or you can chose the "I'm a Witcher. I'm neutral as hell" option.

 

[Outright Villainy]

Morality slider bars, yeah, I'd agree, they're rubbish.

I kinda like faction systems, which New Vegas did pretty well. It allows much more replay value since not all factions are aginst each other, but you still have to make choices of who you'll side with, what group most appeals to you. I think it's the best way of having a metered system for decisions at any rate, since it's only guaging people's reactions, and not the overall morality of those actions. Personal morality meters are bullshit.