The first step to making a good moral choice system is to not make it based on the morality of the choices. The less subtle you are about the choices you are giving a player the less concerned they will be about them. You need to make lots of choice in a game, both big and small in order to make it feel real and legit instead of being something to be gamed.
The first step to making a good moral choice system is to not make it based on the morality of the choices. The less subtle you are about the choices you are giving a player the less concerned they will be about them. You need to make lots of choice in a game, both big and small in order to make it feel real and legit instead of being something to be gamed.
See most games that include systems like this, tend to tie and obvious reward to the decisions which ends up making the choice feel false. If you want the good ending, then you are basically forced to make only good choices. Thus the system of moral choice doesn't end up feeling like a choice at all, because you can't make decisions organically. Every choice presented to you is colored by the longtime choice of which path or ending you ultimately want to take.
That's why I think the Witcher series provides a good system to it. While the choices you make still yield an ending result, the choice you make isn't so obvious. Top that off with the choices not being so cut and dry. You might think you are doing something good by saving a tied up soldier being held hostage by villagers, but 30 hours later after you save the soldier you learn that he went back to his camp, brought some men and slaughtered that village. On the other hand, if you leave him in care of the villagers, they ultimately torture him long and slow to death. Neither option can really be labeled "good" or "bad", and it allows the player to be in the moment of the game and make the choice on the fly without knowing what either outcome will end up being. You make a choice and you move on, then only hours later do you get the call back result of that choice usually so long afterwards that you had forgotten the choice to begin with. The result then triggers a memory of your decision and it feels really cool as a player to have the game call you back to that.
Ultimately the system shouldn't be a binary thing, nor should it be tied to predictable rewards.
You could also just make a game where you have to choose your character morale and ethic at the beginning of the game trough some kind of questionnaire "if X happen what would character do?" and then let the choice unfold without player input. Maybe a few time trough the story where you could modify it if something big happens that could realign your character morale compass (ie close friend of the main character dies, does that steel his resolve or make him question his path).
As often as Undertale gets praised for its moral system, I personally am not a fan. I mean, I get what it's trying to do, but in the end you're only getting three possible routes. Pacifist is what gets you the "Golden Ending". You're encouraged to do this, and there are no repercussions for doing so. Neutral just gets you pushed towards the Pacifist ending, and Genocide has the game flat-out telling you that you're a heartless bastard, while hiding the two hardest bosses behind that route if you happen to enjoy the battle mechanics and want to see how skilled you are. (Considering Undyne at the very least, you would think there would be a way to ask her to spar with you. Just a friendly bout, not "to the death")
I'm a major fan of a freeware game called "Iji". It's a shooter game with an experience and stat system, and is often described as a sort of 2D "System Shock 2". (I've never played SS2, so I wouldn't know) The setting is an alien invasion, and the game is much deeper than Pacifist/Genocide. It takes the approach that neither side is wholly right or wrong, but every major character in the game reacts differently to what choices you make, in some very surprising ways. Hell, the game even comments on your character build at times, or whether you had the foresight to prevent certain things from happening. I'll go into more detail, but much like Undertale, it's best to see it for yourself.
So, you already have your typical Pacifist/Genocide options. You can kill the enemies in the levels for experience points, or you can let them live. However, it's more in-depth. The aliens that attacked Earth have been fleeing another race of aliens that have been slaughtering them, and only attacked Earth because their entire civilization has been reduced to a handful of ships. They didn't have time to realistically go through the whole "We come in peace" spiel, they just needed a safe place to hide.
The game tells you in the beginning that your goal is to find a leader and ask them to leave peacefully, while stating that you're free to kill enemies in self-defense. If you choose to stay pacifistic, by Level 3 you'll have enemy soldiers willing to call a cease-fire, and all enemies (except for a small group of the other faction) will not shoot at you unless you instigate it. While you aren't specifically frowned upon killing enemies to protect yourself, you will hear Iji sob apologies after each kill, since she is a normal person and not a trained soldier.
If you choose not to kill enemies, logbooks that you find will reveal that they're debating if you're a threat that they need to kill. They will question your motivations for why you're still there and heading deeper into the war. If you do kill enemies, they'll be rallying each other to take you out, and consider you a major threat. Amusingly enough, if you're a pacifist, yet your character build gives you massive ammo capability (viable considering that stat also boosts the amount of healing per health pickup), they'll even wonder if you plan on stopping the war by just taking all the bullets so they can't shoot their weapons anymore.
Any discouragement for killing is done in a subtle manner. Iji's apologies slowly turn into screaming threats and cheers for each kill, as she becomes used to the bloodshed. The final boss even mocks how your method of asking for them to leave peacefully involves slaughtering every soldier you come across, with a body count measuring higher than a number of their most vicious troops. If you had been playing peacefully, the final boss's motivations are much more personal, attacking you out of rage due to a mistaken belief that you had killed one of his closest friends.
Further, there is an event that happens mid-game where a side-character can die. If he does, Iji has a mental breakdown and hallucinates him speaking through the facility's intercom. The final boss even sadly notes her mental state after the battle, realizing just how broken Iji has become. However, if you figure out how to manipulate events, you can save him, preventing her breakdown for a much more optimistic final portion of the game.
All of these events can mix-and-match. Individual enemies will leave different logbooks depending on how you acted around them in specific. There's even an entire sub-plot based around two un-named generic enemies that the game doesn't mark as anything special at all. You can kill one of them and not even realize it because they look and act no different than any other enemy.
Anyways, the game is incredibly in-depth as far as morality goes, and is a ton of fun to play regardless of which route you choose to do, unlike Undertale's horrible slog of a grind on Genocide. Even better, the game's freeware, so you can try it and enjoy it without having to pay anything. I'd recommend it as my favorite morality-based game any day.
It was not perfect, still find that whole "bribe your party into loving you" system annoying, but aside from that I loved the way choices and consequences were done. Much better than KOTOR or Mass Effect.
I liked Fable 2's more nuanced Good/Evil and Pure/Corrupt system that basically tripled your character customization possibilities.
But I'm a fan of Fable which seems to be a minority, so. Grain of salt and all.
The first step to making a good moral choice system is to not make it based on the morality of the choices. The less subtle you are about the choices you are giving a player the less concerned they will be about them. You need to make lots of choice in a game, both big and small in order to make it feel real and legit instead of being something to be gamed.
See most games that include systems like this, tend to tie and obvious reward to the decisions which ends up making the choice feel false. If you want the good ending, then you are basically forced to make only good choices. Thus the system of moral choice doesn't end up feeling like a choice at all, because you can't make decisions organically. Every choice presented to you is colored by the longtime choice of which path or ending you ultimately want to take.
That's why I think the Witcher series provides a good system to it. While the choices you make still yield an ending result, the choice you make isn't so obvious. Top that off with the choices not being so cut and dry. You might think you are doing something good by saving a tied up soldier being held hostage by villagers, but 30 hours later after you save the soldier you learn that he went back to his camp, brought some men and slaughtered that village. On the other hand, if you leave him in care of the villagers, they ultimately torture him long and slow to death. Neither option can really be labeled "good" or "bad", and it allows the player to be in the moment of the game and make the choice on the fly without knowing what either outcome will end up being. You make a choice and you move on, then only hours later do you get the call back result of that choice usually so long afterwards that you had forgotten the choice to begin with. The result then triggers a memory of your decision and it feels really cool as a player to have the game call you back to that.
Ultimately the system shouldn't be a binary thing, nor should it be tied to predictable rewards.
Indeed. While it may sound cliche, the phrase, "Goodness is its own reward" is something that should be remembered with moral choice gameplay. Some choices can have a physical benefit, whether from a good deed or a bad one, maybe you save a wizard and she teaches you a spell that's helpful in your travels, maybe you steal a man's girlfriend because she can get you inside a castle. But there should also be choices that have no benefit whatsoever aside from whether you care about doing the right thing or not.
And even then, some choices shouldn't even have a morality attached to them at all. Give players a choice for what symbol a town's guard decide to use, a raven or a lion and maybe later in the game you find that picking the raven lead to them studying magic and defending their town with it or if you picked the lion they made armor for themselves and defended the town like they were knights. Or maybe you choose a drink at a restaurant early in a game, a milkshake or a glass of wine and it translates into how people describe you, milkshake means they comment on you having a sweet tooth while the wine makes them see you as a more refined person.
We make millions of choices every day of all kinds and moral choice systems would do so much better if they remembered that.
I like the way the Telltale games do it, in that they aren't really moral choices you are being presented with in the first place. Instead they are choices that are designed to let you play the character in a way that makes the most sense to you. Lee in The Walking Dead is a conflicted good guy, whatever way you play him, but you can make him one who behaves more pragmatic, selfless, or more violent, and it is largely left to you to decide the moral implications of each choice. The game comments on your choices via the characters only, not by the narrative, so its also up to you to decide how much value you want to put in to the angry responses of the redneck fisherman or the whining, hapless teen. It's not like there is a cosmic karma where the world gives you a final bad ending for shooting more of your friends.
Most games suck at moral choices because they just turn it into a cost/benefits exercise. Bioshock fucks it up by presenting you with the option to murder little sisters or save them, the former giving you a massive boost of ADAM and the latter much less. Even if the game left it as this, there is the ground work for a basic moral decision: save children because it is the good thing to do vs kill children because there is a massive profit in doing so. But then the game gives you arguably bigger rewards for not killing sisters (unique powers and nearly as big ADAM stockpiles), so the choice is now about delaying gratification for bigger rewards, and stops being about moral choices. And then the game ends and makes you either a saviour or a tyrant based on just these few decisions. Great.
Then there is Dishonored, which doesn't describe itself as a morality system but absolutely is. Low deaths means lower chaos, aiding stealth playthroughs. High death means high chaos, which means more baddies to shoot. That should really be the limit of it, but the game instead judges you with exaggerated moral endings because you picked the play style you found the most fun. Worse still, its a world that is only karmic to a point, treating murder as a cause for societal collapse, but ignoring all the other malicious shit you do, like stealing medicine and money from the houses of impoverished, diseased communities, or feeding dead bodies to plague rats. Most games place no moral perspective on looting bodies or homes, even though that would be objectionable in a lot of circumstances. Worse still, it treats some behaviour as positive (low chaos), like selling a woman off to become some psychopath's sex slave or sending nobles to become slaves in their own mines. Excuse them if you like, but don't try to pretend these aren't cruel, evil things to do.
I see this all the time and once again, I find I have to explain it. Let's see
maninahat said:
Worse still, it treats some behaviour as positive (low chaos), like selling a woman off to become some psychopath's sex slave or sending nobles to become slaves in their own mines. Excuse them if you like, but don't try to pretend these aren't cruel, evil things to do.
This is the thing it isn't a moral system. It doesn't claim that slavery is "good", leaving people alive, however, lead to less turmoil in already troubling times. So, yes - cutting out the tongues of people and forcing them to work in their own mines is indeed cruel - most of the time the assassination targets would benefit from a quick death rather than living through the non-lethal alternative. But the impact is on the country - killing people raises unrest and makes everything worse.
maninahat said:
but the game instead judges you with exaggerated moral endings because you picked the play style you found the most fun.
So, should actions have no consequences? Should raising havoc in the city that is already on the brink lead to happy fun times for everyone? The game gives you plenty of rope and if you hang yourself with it, you definitely caused way more damage to the city than you needed to. The "but it's fun" doesn't excuse the fact that you did bad things.
maninahat said:
Worse still, its a world that is only karmic to a point, treating murder as a cause for societal collapse, but ignoring all the other malicious shit you do
The chaos rating system is definitely not perfect but it's not as bad as you make it out to be here - yes, you do get higher chaos rating from using lethal options, however, you also have actions that lead to reduced chaos. For example, saving Curnow in the first assassination mission will decrease the chaos. Again, the metric is on the overall stability of the city - he is a powerful political person and his influence will be beneficial.
So, yes, if you judge the chaos system as morality meter, it's fucked up but it's not about morality. It's measuring the...chaos, as the name suggest. It doesn't pass moral judgement on the actions but shows their reflection in the realm. The game is actually incredibly good at showing that - the more chaos you accrue the more everything starts to go downhill and it's visible in-game, so you do get plenty of warning before the endings.
The chaos rating system is definitely not perfect but it's not as bad as you make it out to be here - yes, you do get higher chaos rating from using lethal options, however, you also have actions that lead to reduced chaos. For example, saving Curnow in the first assassination mission will decrease the chaos. Again, the metric is on the overall stability of the city - he is a powerful political person and his influence will be beneficial.
So, yes, if you judge the chaos system as morality meter, it's fucked up but it's not about morality. It's measuring the...chaos, as the name suggest. It doesn't pass moral judgement on the actions but shows their reflection in the realm. The game is actually incredibly good at showing that - the more chaos you accrue the more everything starts to go downhill and it's visible in-game, so you do get plenty of warning before the endings.
I think it is daft to argue this is anything other than a morality system by another name; with higher chaos, characters in the game condemn your evil behaviour, act more evil, draws sadder pictures, and even the weather itself gets worse. In the add-on, your character gets murdered at the end if you have high chaos. You could argue that everything is just a consequence of the environment, with people becoming worse as the world around them becomes increasingly unstable, but the game makes you chiefly responsible for creating that environment, and not that plague that's killing hundreds/thousands of people or the oppressive police/inquisition state. That's a morality system!
The best Moral choice systems are those that do not present themselves at Moral choice systems. Take for example Papers, Please!
You have to make quite a few moral choices in that game but very few are seen as actual moral choices and worse the moral choices typically have you disobeying your orders and potentially injuring you and and your family. Consider this. It's subtle, it creeps up on you and it also means that you will suffer in some way.
In paper's please you decision to reunite a family is well and moral. but it's gonna be hard to square that when you have to explain to yyour family why they can't afford food or heat which results in your son falling ill.
The decisions are not pained as right, wrong, good or evil. That's when morality comes in. Morality is not about chosing the right or wrong, good or evil. It's about deciding what *is* right or wrong.
Despite what movies, games and YA novels would have you believe. Good and evil don't really exist and right and wrong is more a function of one's perspective. EVery horrific act has been justified and every well meaning act ghas hurt someone.
Which you then say encourages doing awful things to people when it doesn't. A morality system makes the character act "good" or "bad", while the chaos system makes the world do it.
I still don't see why is it bad to have bad things lead to more bad things. In most other games being evil directly benefits you - at most it's a short term gain for long term disadvantage[footnote]for example, an evil choice might be to extort a person for 2000 cash, while a good person may get 200 cash instalments that add up to 3000 cash over the course of the game[/footnote] which makes the choices have very little weight. But it's bad if they do? Shouldn't that be something an actual morality system have - real incentive to follow it, as opposed to the equivalent of giving out different flavour candy when you press the "be evil" or "be good" buttons?
I think the first inFamous game had a good morality system, in that the evil option was usually a self motivated choice, that would make things easier for your character. From shooting at the civilians to take the food drop for yourself, to shooting a civilian standing in front of you, blocking your path while you are chasing a badguy, it felt relatively realistic in that regard, as to something that would be a good/bad choice for someone in that situation.
The best Moral choice systems are those that do not present themselves at Moral choice systems. Take for example Papers, Please!
You have to make quite a few moral choices in that game but very few are seen as actual moral choices and worse the moral choices typically have you disobeying your orders and potentially injuring you and and your family. Consider this. It's subtle, it creeps up on you and it also means that you will suffer in some way.
In paper's please you decision to reunite a family is well and moral. but it's gonna be hard to square that when you have to explain to yyour family why they can't afford food or heat which results in your son falling ill.
The decisions are not pained as right, wrong, good or evil. That's when morality comes in. Morality is not about chosing the right or wrong, good or evil. It's about deciding what *is* right or wrong.
Despite what movies, games and YA novels would have you believe. Good and evil don't really exist and right and wrong is more a function of one's perspective. EVery horrific act has been justified and every well meaning act ghas hurt someone.
Funny you should mention that. I was just about to mention "This War of Mine". Same deal. You can try to have moral standards, but dwindling resources and numerous setbacks will probably push you to eventually rob the helpless old couple down the street so the sick person living with you doesn't die, or so you don't all starve.
It is a bit less subtle about it than Papers Please though, since your characters become depressed whenever they do something they consider morally wrong.
As often as Undertale gets praised for its moral system, I personally am not a fan. I mean, I get what it's trying to do, but in the end you're only getting three possible routes. Pacifist is what gets you the "Golden Ending". You're encouraged to do this, and there are no repercussions for doing so. Neutral just gets you pushed towards the Pacifist ending, and Genocide has the game flat-out telling you that you're a heartless bastard, while hiding the two hardest bosses behind that route if you happen to enjoy the battle mechanics and want to see how skilled you are. (Considering Undyne at the very least, you would think there would be a way to ask her to spar with you. Just a friendly bout, not "to the death")
I'm a major fan of a freeware game called "Iji". It's a shooter game with an experience and stat system, and is often described as a sort of 2D "System Shock 2". (I've never played SS2, so I wouldn't know) The setting is an alien invasion, and the game is much deeper than Pacifist/Genocide. It takes the approach that neither side is wholly right or wrong, but every major character in the game reacts differently to what choices you make, in some very surprising ways. Hell, the game even comments on your character build at times, or whether you had the foresight to prevent certain things from happening. I'll go into more detail, but much like Undertale, it's best to see it for yourself.
So, you already have your typical Pacifist/Genocide options. You can kill the enemies in the levels for experience points, or you can let them live. However, it's more in-depth. The aliens that attacked Earth have been fleeing another race of aliens that have been slaughtering them, and only attacked Earth because their entire civilization has been reduced to a handful of ships. They didn't have time to realistically go through the whole "We come in peace" spiel, they just needed a safe place to hide.
The game tells you in the beginning that your goal is to find a leader and ask them to leave peacefully, while stating that you're free to kill enemies in self-defense. If you choose to stay pacifistic, by Level 3 you'll have enemy soldiers willing to call a cease-fire, and all enemies (except for a small group of the other faction) will not shoot at you unless you instigate it. While you aren't specifically frowned upon killing enemies to protect yourself, you will hear Iji sob apologies after each kill, since she is a normal person and not a trained soldier.
If you choose not to kill enemies, logbooks that you find will reveal that they're debating if you're a threat that they need to kill. They will question your motivations for why you're still there and heading deeper into the war. If you do kill enemies, they'll be rallying each other to take you out, and consider you a major threat. Amusingly enough, if you're a pacifist, yet your character build gives you massive ammo capability (viable considering that stat also boosts the amount of healing per health pickup), they'll even wonder if you plan on stopping the war by just taking all the bullets so they can't shoot their weapons anymore.
Any discouragement for killing is done in a subtle manner. Iji's apologies slowly turn into screaming threats and cheers for each kill, as she becomes used to the bloodshed. The final boss even mocks how your method of asking for them to leave peacefully involves slaughtering every soldier you come across, with a body count measuring higher than a number of their most vicious troops. If you had been playing peacefully, the final boss's motivations are much more personal, attacking you out of rage due to a mistaken belief that you had killed one of his closest friends.
Further, there is an event that happens mid-game where a side-character can die. If he does, Iji has a mental breakdown and hallucinates him speaking through the facility's intercom. The final boss even sadly notes her mental state after the battle, realizing just how broken Iji has become. However, if you figure out how to manipulate events, you can save him, preventing her breakdown for a much more optimistic final portion of the game.
All of these events can mix-and-match. Individual enemies will leave different logbooks depending on how you acted around them in specific. There's even an entire sub-plot based around two un-named generic enemies that the game doesn't mark as anything special at all. You can kill one of them and not even realize it because they look and act no different than any other enemy.
Anyways, the game is incredibly in-depth as far as morality goes, and is a ton of fun to play regardless of which route you choose to do, unlike Undertale's horrible slog of a grind on Genocide. Even better, the game's freeware, so you can try it and enjoy it without having to pay anything. I'd recommend it as my favorite morality-based game any day.
I just want to quote you because I absolutely love Iji. I found out about it just because of the cover of the VNV Nation song at the very end of the game, which is beautifully done, and it's always a shame that I've never seen anyone else actually talk about it, despite being a very well done game, and the high price of completely free. More people should talk about this game because it deserves so much more recognition than it ever got.
Honestly, I thought the Mass Effect series did a pretty good job with it. None of your choices were treated as inherently "good vs. evil." It was more like "selfless vs. ruthless." And in many cases, it was a choice between two shades of gray: save the Rachni Queen but risk another Rachni War or definitely prevent a war by committing genocide? Brainwash the renegade Geth or destroy them? Even some of the small choices were like that: Get the soldier's remains from Eden Prime released to her grieving widow or let the Alliance study them to prevent future deaths?
I also like that no matter what choice you made, it was never the "wrong" thing to do, because your actions were always part of the larger effort to save the galaxy.
I think the best rejection of morality systems in a game was actually from KOTOR2 with Kreia. If you tried doing certain goody two-shoes acts in front of her, she would start telling you how much of a dumbass you are because those actions had more negative consequences than good in the end.
She also loved slamming the Jedi and their blind adherence to one way of doing things that actually made brilliant sense and made me agree with her. And even further hated the predestination of life that the Force was causing. It was all so much more interesting than the usual "Jedi good. Sith bad." crap.
DoPo said:
So, should actions have no consequences? Should raising havoc in the city that is already on the brink lead to happy fun times for everyone? The game gives you plenty of rope and if you hang yourself with it, you definitely caused way more damage to the city than you needed to. The "but it's fun" doesn't excuse the fact that you did bad things.
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