Morality Matters

[Plinglebob]

First of all, I would like to say that I agree completely with everything everyone has said that praises the Witcher and Deus Ex. This is how morality and choice should be handled.

Anyway, I think there are 2 reasons why we have morality systems and they are both the fanbases fault (or at least developers trying to pander to it).

The first is that nowadays people are demanding more and more choice from their games. Its now not good enough for a game to have a simple A to B story and instead we must be able to make our own choices in how the game proceeds, even if this choice is an illusion. Unfortunately, the easiest way to do this is through black and white morality systems with some sort of reward for doing either. Personally, I'd much rather have a game devoid of choice but with a good story (hence my enjoyment of JRPGS)

The second is the desire to "Win". For a lot of people (and developers) morality systems are used as a measure of how well they are doing in the game and the inclusion of rewards for going all out one way or the other (either in items, dialogue choices or achievements) encourages this.

 

[Shycte]

I thought DA: O was pretty cool on this front. There was no real, morality system, just your relationship to other characters. Of course, that only works is the characters are good and three dimensional so you care about them, which they were in DA:O. Damn you Morrigan, damn you.

Spoiler: Also, there is the part in Dragon Age 2 where

Aveline gets all angry on you for selling her husbands shield. I was like, wow, I never thought that she might care about that item. I just replaced it with a better you know. But it was her late husbands sheild and she wanted to keep it.

 

[MrGalactus]

Mikey looks like the lead singer from Madness.

 

[The Gnome King]

Extra Consideration: Morality Matters

Our panel welcomes a new member and turns its eye to the question of morality.

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Yahtzee nails it here with this quote:

Morality systems are something I've railed on a lot in the past. My problem is that their only purpose in a lot of games is to deny the player access to some of the game's content until they replay the entire thing from the start. And sometimes it doesn't even do that, and you have games where the good choice and the bad choice both have exactly the same effect, and then what's the point?

Yes. That. Exactly.

 

[traineesword]

I wonder if anyone knew that Metro 2033 had a morality system? There's not a single mention of it. Turns out, throughout the game there's things you can do - like helping a beggar out or a little street urchin - that will in fact cause you to get a different version of the ending. Pretty crazy. I didn't find out until after I beat the game and was looking at a guide, and I kind of went... huh?? What ending are they talking about?!

I did not know that...not like i'm exactly going to play through the game again though, it didn't quite impress me all that much. I got the ending where i sat down all relaxed as everything exploded (i hope this doesn't count as spoilers, because really, this could be the ending of so many games or the beginging of others).

anyway, I was playing Mass Effect 2 at a friends house, having never played one before. You know the first conversation reel thing? Where you can a troop is begging to come with you to save another member of the crew? I thought she seemed too emotionally attached and believed that she would slow me down, so i told her to stand down as I'd given her an order, believing that trying to keep everyone alive was a good thing to do. What happened was that my shepard, rather than soothingly explaining to her that she was a lower-ranked and less experienced officer, started barking out about how she'd given an order and it must be followed! My friend, whose game it was, immediately went "You dick! though i should have expected you'd always pick the bad options"...
I'm sure it probably got better as it went along, but this got "my knickers in a twist" about the whole mass effect morality system. It annoyed me how good and bad choices were always in the same places and at first glance didn't always seem particularly good or bad. I also came to not like the cutscenes trigger commands. left triggers a good option, right a bad one...always? So killing an enemy soldier in a cutscene is totally evil, but waiting about 5 seconds and then killing him outside of one is acceptable? Or maybe Garrus was just annoyed I used his gun (sorry, i'm pretty sure he was called Garrus, but I could be wrong...the archangel guy either way).

I found it very funny though that my friend seemed to immediately think I already knew everything about Mass Effect though. He was really bitter and unhelpful about everything, screaming at me to pick up the first ammo clip before the game had even told me the red rectangle wasn't part of the scenary...maybe i need a better friend to play videogames with xD

 

[00slash00]

the witcher was the only time being a dick to an npc made me feel bad. the second time through, i made choices that were complete opposite of what i did the first time through and some of them *SPOILER* like siding with the humans or killing the captain of the guard *END SPOILER* really made me feel bad

 

[ComicsAreWeird]

I like the morality system attached to the Frenzy mechanics in Vampire:Bloodlines because it fits the blood-thirsty nature of these creatures. KoTOR was on to something with ther light/dark side mechanics. Again...it belongs to that universe where the dark side of the Force is mentioned multiple times and even the best decisions might lead to that path. Morality needs to be thought out and adapted to the genre, universe and nature of the characters.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Broken record, coming through!

I'll keep repeating myself when it comes to this topic, but Silent Hill 2 had the best "morality" system of any game I ever played. You were never aware of the choices you were making untill the game ended. If you were protective of Maria and spent a lot of time with her you'd get the Maria Ending, if you kept yourself in a bad health condition and highlighted that kitchinknife the girl gave you too many times you'd get the Suicide Ending.

A good morality system is one that is invisible to the player, but every game shoves it into your face like a moral coconut cream pie.

 

[Ultimatecalibur]

Dude, that's just a rip-off of D&D's system with one of the two axes removed.

And most the other morality systems are D&D's minus the other (Law/Chaos) bar.

Fallout's Karma bar, KotOR's Light Side/Dark Side Points, Fable's Good/Evil appearance, Jade Empire's Open Fist/Closed Fist and Mass Effect's Paragon/Renegade system are all just the Good/Evil Axis in various different forms.

 

[jetsterjinx]

Lesson learned: GO FUCKING PLAY CHRONO TRIGGER. that seems like such an awesome game.

 

[Arkhangelsk]

Chrono Trigger did it so well. I actually felt guilty in my actions. And I felt tricked in the ways they turned the arguments against me when I didn't directly ask Marle how she was. It awoke real emotions of betrayal and guilt.

 

[Bostur]

I think morality gets too simple in a lot of games because being the angel is too easy.

In real life the reason we aren't all saints is because thats a very tough thing to be. We are being put under pressure by our own emotions, by society, by material needs etc. This means we sometimes do questionable acts. We don't do wrong things because we decide to be an ass, we do it because we feel forced to.

In games its all clear sailing most of the time. Why start stealing if we have more gold than the national treasury? Why would we want to kill innocent civilians if they seem like decent folks? If our friends seems trustworthy and helpful what would be the purpose of stabbing them in the back?
For moral choices to feel more real, I think games needs to put on the pressure a bit more. Being the good guy may have to be hardcore mode, the really tough game choice, not the default action that ends up being the easy way out.

So far games have done morality best when we are ignorant of the consequences of our actions. I think that can make a nice illusion of gray area stuff, but then our choices are really caused by our own ignorance not any real moral choices.

 

[blackdwarf]

what i hate arpund moral choice systems are two thing: the most systems work with a bad or good choice. that is ridiculious. the reason why i hated fable 3 so much was that you always had to choose between a evil or a good awnser, even when it didn't make sense. why is saving my girlfriend wherofore i kill a couple of people i dont know a bad thing? moral choice systems are only interresting when YOU use your MORAL to choose. mass effect did it right, with giving a couple of anwser, but nobody in the game knows what is good or bad.

the second thing i hate are the statictics. i dont have a bar what says what my moral is in real life. people that know me or how i look at myself tell me that. but in game whe always have a bar which says i'm evil, but the NPCs in the game don't act really different. if i'm evil i want to be feared or be attacked. this gives me the feeling that the world where the game takes place, is alive and is aware of the things i do and did.

 

[Griffolion]

I think a really good example of morality implemented without any form of mechanics is Eve Online.

There is no mechanic of morality implemented by the dev team at all, but there are moral choices to make every day in that game. Because screwing over another character you see in game is essentially screwing over another human being in the world and the persistent nature of the game means that they can come back at you for revenge, even when you're offline with your assets, territory etc.

So in EVE you are faced with moral choices, should I kill this lone miner in null sec space? Yes because he may have valuable loot and the lulz factor will be high. No because he could have been working there for ages and will be really frustrating for him, plus he could call his entire alliance and be on our asses quicker than a long sentence prison in-mate.

So i guess the main gripe with morality systems in games today is that it is morality regarding actions towards what are essentially pixels on a screen.

 

[The.Bard]

I actually enjoyed what Bioware did in Jade Empire more than any other game I've played. Instead of "Good" and "Evil", they went with a system where you could be a complete suckup, a completely evil murdering jerk, or more of a "survival of the fittest" neutral stance.

The game still only clung to a 2d meter (open palm = good, closed fist = bad), but the choices gave you much more freedom.

For instance, you might encounter a prisoner in a cage. The open palmer would free them. The evil person might kill them & loot their body. But the closed fist would tell them they needed to get free on their own and prove they were strong enough to survive by killing their guard. Sure, it was still technically evil, but it walked a wonderful line between "save everyone" and "kill everyone". I felt much more like a real character, and not some cartoony goody two shoes or mustache twirler. I felt like everything I did was completely justified, even though the choices were completely vile at times.

 

[rsvp42]

I can think of a way - make sure the games morality system is based on how you feel about the characters and story, rather than being based on the rewards behind the choices and the ending you get. Probably quite hard to do, but *insert saying expounding the values of not taking the easy way out here*.

Imma let myself finish, but...
thought of an example. That story that was on the Escapist today, about the (potential) lady who played through WOW until she had maxed her level without killing anything. Not killing anything was a moral choice on her part - she wanted her character to be a flower child, at peace with the universe etc. As far as I know, she will have had access to the same content (items, areas, level bonusses or whatever you get on WOW), and the actual WOW universe probably doesn't give a shit that she hadn't killed anything, but it made her feel better about her character and it's behaviour.

Possibly. I'm projecting quite hard there, but hopefully my point is clear.

But that WoW example isn't really a game system. That was just a clever player going outside the expectations of the game. If we're talking about a dev-created morality system, there's inevitably going to be some content or experience that is only accessible by choosing a particular path. i.e. the way the story in Mass Effect plays out will be different based on the choices you make. I'm not saying that's the best example of a morality system, but it doesn't matter how nuanced and well crafted the moral dilemmas are, any meaningful system will inevitably involve choice-specific content.

If in a game you're faced with the choice of killing a notorious criminal or giving him a chance to turn his life around, and then the effects of that choice show up later in the game, naturally there will be different outcomes and different content as a result. All I'm saying is that the attitude of "oh look at all this content I can't access" is the wrong one. Personally, I find a game that plays different the second time more rewarding and I don't dwell on what I'm not seeing on the first go.

 

[Karloff]

I think the real problem with morality issues in games, whether linked to a meter or not, is that they're inextricably linked with the overarching story, which is itself often so poorly written and implimented that you can't take the morality choices seriously.

My favorite example of this is the original Mafia. Never mind that you surrendered to cops when caught; even if you'd just shot twenty of them in the previous mission, you *still* surrendered, which to me seemed like a one way trip to the death house, but to the game was just a bump in the road. No, to me the big thing was the protagonist sparing two NPCs, which in turn leads to the big dilemma during the endgame. NPC one was fair dos; it was set up as a reasonable proposition from the start, even if it would have been nice to have a choice. NPC two was just daft. You break into a building, kill scores of people, get to the target, spontaneously have a crisis of conscience and let her live.

To which my reaction was, what?? I just waded through a river of blood to get here, I've never met this person before in my life, and on a whim I'm letting her live? What about all the people I just killed, and am going to have to kill in order to break out of here? Don't they deserve a chance to see the sun rise in the morning? But no, they're clearly marked as antagonist and therefore doomed to die, whereas this silly bint is marked as plot point and therefore must live. Stupid.

Bad story equals flawed morality system, gaming's GIGO.

 

[Illessa]

I thought DA: O was pretty cool on this front. There was no real, morality system, just your relationship to other characters. Of course, that only works is the characters are good and three dimensional so you care about them, which they were in DA:O. Damn you Morrigan, damn you.

Spoiler: Also, there is the part in Dragon Age 2 where

Aveline gets all angry on you for selling her husbands shield. I was like, wow, I never thought that she might care about that item. I just replaced it with a better you know. But it was her late husbands sheild and she wanted to keep it.

This. That scene jumped straight to my mind when the stealing lunch in Chrono Trigger was mentioned. The "Utility over sentiment" line made me feel genuinely guilty. I think a lot of people that complained about DA2's Mass Effect-esque dialogue aren't giving it the credit it deserves. I'd have preferred them to have stuck with full sentence options, but with the real choices having no inherent morale judgement attached (even their placement on the wheel wasn't consistent), and no mechanical benefit to always sticking with the same kind of response, those that approached with ME-style "I choose the top-right without looking at it cause I'm playing a paragon" missed out on a chance to play a character with some genuine nuance.

Also got to jump in on the Deus Ex and Witcher love - if every game approached choices like the Witcher I'd be a happy bunny.

 

[Illessa]

I see what you're saying, and games definitely should have the Mass Effect model of morality. But where WOW has succeeded in my opinion is by creating the game in such a way that it is possible to play through without killing. Could you say the same of other RPGs, such as Dragon Age, or FPSs such as Halo or COD?

Obviously pacifist runs on stealth games are par for the course, but that does include some RPG hybrids like Deus Ex and Alpha Protocol

First person games - only one I can think of that isn't marketed as a stealth game is Mirror's Edge, which is also a bit of an exception

Planescape: Torment (the only thing you have to kill is a zombie in the very first room, plus one other person unless you can pickpocket. There are a couple of others you have to fight, but you don't have to kill them)

The original Fallouts (of course you'll inevitably be indirectly responsible for a lot of death no matter how noble your intentions, but no one needs to die by your hand)

Course, I can't think of any RPGs that are less than a decade old...

 

[RMcD94]

I liked Fable 3's choice. I honestly didn't know what one to pick (mainly because neither one was obviously highlighted as good or evil), and so I spent maybe ten minutes wondering what one to kill. I went with killing the girl in the end, but I did have to think it through. The choice surprised me, coming so early, and it threw me off greatly.