Moral Choices

[dyre]

I don't like moral choices. They're usually ridiculously simplistic and black-and-white, and even if they aren't, I don't want some game telling me what's right and wrong.

I'd prefer just...choices. Choices with consequences. For example, if I allow a village to be overrun by the bad guys so I can regroup my army, I don't want the game to tell me "you made a bad moral decision!" Rather, I'd want any survivors from the village to hate me, and some other NPCs to disagree with my choice, while other NPCs continue to support my leadership and my choice. Perhaps the army thinks I made a good moral decision, while the villagers think I made a bad moral decision. Maybe the noble who owns that village will try to take revenge on me later. Don't tell me what's the right thing to do; just tell me how the various characters in the world react to my actions.

Honestly, as far as I can tell, only Bioware games really suffer from moral choice syndrome. Most other RPGs I've played recently (Witcher 2, Deus EX HR, and even the mediocre Kingdoms of Amalur) just have choices with consequences. One game I've played that really does it well is the beta of Age of Decadence. You can join a number of sides, all of which have legitimate bot conflicting goals. The people in each of these sides are loyal to those they trust, but brutal to their enemies. So there aren't really good guys or bad guys, just different people with different goals.

 

[Etteparg]

I want to be able to do whatever I want and then at the end of a quest or specific action I can add +20 to my morality, or maybe even +30 if I felt like I did a really good job.

 

[Radoh]

I think the best morality systems are when they don't make use of it.
Like in Fallout 3 when you meet Harold the tree mutant in Oasis.
You meet him and he tells you that he wants to die, and you can do that for him, but doing so turns down two other possibilities in either slowing his heart rate to keep the plants from growing too fast and thus maintain the community for a long time without outside interference, and the choice to speed his heart rate up for the reverse effect. Any three of these choices are considered by the game to be neutral, but damned if I didn't sit there, staring at his rhythmically beating heart trying to figure out what the hell I should do. Then there's the asshole approach of just setting him on fire but we'll ignore that.

 

[laggyteabag]

I like the choice system, because it lets the player have more of an input to the game, but I HATE the morality system, im going to use the original Mass Effect as an example (Spoiler alert)

At the end of the game, you can tell Joker to either-
A) Go in now with the fleet and try to save the council, but risk loosing some ships, that will make destroying Sovereign harder.
B) Focus on Sovereign, Keep the maximum amount of ships that will make destroying Sovereign easier, but the Council will die.

I chose choice B because destroying Sovereign just made more sense to me than trying to save 3 people, choice A however, is apparently the "Good/Paragon" choice, which would have benefited my Character.

The sooner Morality points go, the better the choice system will be.

 

[tjcross]

I think the best morality systems are when they don't make use of it.
Like in Fallout 3 when you meet Harold the tree mutant in Oasis.
You meet him and he tells you that he wants to die, and you can do that for him, but doing so turns down two other possibilities in either slowing his heart rate to keep the plants from growing too fast and thus maintain the community for a long time without outside interference, and the choice to speed his heart rate up for the reverse effect. Any three of these choices are considered by the game to be neutral, but damned if I didn't sit there, staring at his rhythmically beating heart trying to figure out what the hell I should do. Then there's the asshole approach of just setting him on fire but we'll ignore that.

i loved that quest i knew i was going to speed it up since by doing that i would restore the world that much faster needs of the many right?

 

[Radoh]

I think the best morality systems are when they don't make use of it.
Like in Fallout 3 when you meet Harold the tree mutant in Oasis.
You meet him and he tells you that he wants to die, and you can do that for him, but doing so turns down two other possibilities in either slowing his heart rate to keep the plants from growing too fast and thus maintain the community for a long time without outside interference, and the choice to speed his heart rate up for the reverse effect. Any three of these choices are considered by the game to be neutral, but damned if I didn't sit there, staring at his rhythmically beating heart trying to figure out what the hell I should do. Then there's the asshole approach of just setting him on fire but we'll ignore that.

i loved that quest i knew i was going to speed it up since by doing that i would restore the world that much faster needs of the many right?

That's what I was thinking, but that 'needs of the many' argument assumes that the 'few' will be dying as a result of the action. I was going to choose that, but could I really force this man to stay alive forever when he was forced to be rooted into the ground and unable to truly live while his internal organs were slowly stretched out of his body and across the landscape?

 

[More Fun To Compute]

I think they should take games back to the 9 Alignment system, if anything. By that I mean the combination of "lawful", "chaotic", and "neutral" with "good", "evil", and "neutral".

Pfft, only two axis, unacceptable dumbed down tripe. We should go back to the virtues of the Ultima games at least. That had three parameters. Truth, love and courage which combined into 8 virtues. If you consider all the opposites and indifferent states to the virtues then there would be way more than 9.

 

[Dr Namgge]

As awful as the game was, I really liked Shadow the Hedgehog's approach to it. Ten different endings, varying from purest good "Shadow beats the aliens, saves the world, stops Eggman" to the evilest "Shadow beats the aliens, takes over the world, kills Eggman", and every iota inbetween. Admittedly the endings were pretty much worked on a tree branch, with each decision sending you to a particular next level, and giving you the story as it goes so it wasn't a true moral/karma system, it wouldn't be that hard to implement the choice of level based on a percentage of the karma metre, and then vary up the endings so a true saint gets the holy ending, a true demon gets the evil ending, a true neutral gets a, well neutral ending.

Or, go one better, have several karma metres. Much like in the original Mercenaries, working for one faction too much annoyed the others and meant you wouldn't be able to work with them without appeasing them. have each karma metre tied to different parts of the story. For example, have one for a love interest, one for a best friend, and one for your boss. doing well with the girlfriends ends married, badly ends single, well on the friend is staying together, bad is drifting apart, and the boss is promotion for good, and fired for bad. You could then, at the end of the game, take all these scores and use that to give the ending so that in one version you lost your best friend, but got married as a manager, while in another your best friend might be handing you money as you were left unemployed and your girlfriend left you, or any combination thereof.

 

[Woodsey]

Provide choices, remove any indication of where those choices may be on a 'moral compass' (there shouldn't even be an indication in the design documents for the game), make them unpredictable and miserable as fuck (both in what you're choosing and what the consequences are). Everything should come at a price.

Questions of morality and codes of conduct should only ever be applied by the players themselves, there should be no outside influence from the developers. See The Witcher games and Deus Ex series.

I can understand BioWare's decision to measure it, but even the companion influence system makes it too mechanical.

 

[Buttersnaps]

They should just give you a variety of choices that cover most of the options in the situation that make sense, then give you logical (not necessarily expected) consequences that follow from those choices. No need to tie it to an artificial morality system.

I feel like more games should go in this direction too.

On another note though, I like what Dark Souls did in terms of morality, where there were the 9 covenants on the lawful/chaos/good/evil scale thing, and depending on which one you were in it would shape the multiplayer experience. Too bad a few covenants seemed kind of broken though.

 

[xshadowscreamx]

its the immoral decisions that you make that you remember the most.

 

[Lugbzurg]

I'd say I agree with what Yahtzee was talking about when he was addressing this. It shouldn't be just black and white. There should be shades of gray in there somewhere. And not just gray, but the entire rainbow spectrum. I think the Elder Scrolls and Fallout titles do this, but I'm not sure. I haven't played any of them, just yet. (I have a collection of three 2-D Fallout titles, so, that's a start!)

Also, it shouldn't always be obvious as to which is good and which is evil. Or you might even think you know, but, it comes to bite you in the butt later when you find out you were dead wrong. Also, there should be more consequence. Even right then and there. You could have a set of choices that might hold both "good" and "evil" things in each one.

Think Frogger, but more complex. Do I let these froglets sit here a while longer, living immobile, empty lives, or do I shatter them right now and put them out of their misery? Oh, come on! For those of you who have played the 1997 outing, what did you think when you "rescued" your first froglet?

 

[Something Amyss]

I get your point, but then the problem is that the game is penalizing you for not playing a certain way (which is a lot worst). I wouldn't mind so much if there was no situations that can only be solved if you go 100% in either direction...

I agree that this is a larger problem, and this is why we need to work on it first. A lot of these games and an aura of "you're playing it wrong!"

 

[tjcross]

I think the best morality systems are when they don't make use of it.
Like in Fallout 3 when you meet Harold the tree mutant in Oasis.
You meet him and he tells you that he wants to die, and you can do that for him, but doing so turns down two other possibilities in either slowing his heart rate to keep the plants from growing too fast and thus maintain the community for a long time without outside interference, and the choice to speed his heart rate up for the reverse effect. Any three of these choices are considered by the game to be neutral, but damned if I didn't sit there, staring at his rhythmically beating heart trying to figure out what the hell I should do. Then there's the asshole approach of just setting him on fire but we'll ignore that.

i loved that quest i knew i was going to speed it up since by doing that i would restore the world that much faster needs of the many right?

That's what I was thinking, but that 'needs of the many' argument assumes that the 'few' will be dying as a result of the action. I was going to choose that, but could I really force this man to stay alive forever when he was forced to be rooted into the ground and unable to truly live while his internal organs were slowly stretched out of his body and across the landscape?

yes that's a good point but i still say that in my mind doing it was the right thing by helping terraform the world that much faster and the guy didn't seem to be in pain from it he just didn't want to stay stuck to the ground but afterwards he admits that he can see through the trees so logically the more trees there are the further he can "move" but if it weren't for that it would have been something i thought about after i did it a lot longer