Get Rid of Morality Systems

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Soviet Heavy

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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.
 

Epic Fail 1977

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Yes, get rid of the ME morality system.
But don't remove the moral dilemmas, and make sure that each "major" choice has consequences.
That's what I'd like.
 

Risingblade

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I like what they did in the first dragon age where you weren't told what the good/bad action was and had to decide for yourself what to say
 

ThisIsSnake

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

Soviet Heavy

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Soveru said:
Morality is too conceptual to be measured by stats and graphs
Which is why a system like the ME2 one doesn't work. I need X many points to pull Spectre authority over some dumbass? And only if I'm evil? Why not pull rank and get it without being a jackass?
 

Ghonzor

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You can't really just split things into "Good" or "Bad." I feel like there should be multiple choices and various effects to go along with them. inFamous was particularly silly about this. The choices had no real weight. It trivialized them. Hopefully in inFamous 2 they fix it at least slightly
 

Soviet Heavy

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ThisIsSnake said:
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.
 

Krantos

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Oh god, don't get me started.

In the interest of keeping this short, I think Morality systems can work, but they need to do several things:

1. Keep neutral open: ME2 mucked this up by linking the persuade options to morality. Essentially, many avenues were locked off unless you played all good or all bad. This leads, as the OP said, to choosing options for the points you get rather than role playing.

2. Keep it grounded. Unless there is a clear reason to in the game lore, don't call it "good" and "evil." These terms are so subjective they are basically meaningless. If you have to call it something, name it in a way that makes sense in-game.

3. Keep the options multidimensional. Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 are a great case study for this. The Paragon/Renegade choices in the first game were really about different styles of approaching problems. A paragon might take the choice of trying to save everybody at the cost of putting everyone at risk, while a renegade might sacrifice a handful of people to make sure more are safe. In Mass Effect 2, Paragon/Renegade was basically just Nice/A*hole. There were some exceptions to the rule (i.e. the Geth problem), but the majority of the options basically came down to Nice guy or douche bag.

- Have it mean something. If you include a system like this, have it reflected somehow in-game that doesn't unnecessarily restrict freedom or gameplay. The best example I have of this is KOTOR. Light/Dark means something in-game; it's not just an arbitrary dynamic forcing you to play through twice. Note this one is difficult to balance with #1.

That's the short version. I do like games like Dragon Age and The Witcher which do away with the system, but I also like a well executed morality mechanic.
 

The Cheezy One

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Dec 13, 2008
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I think the morality system is useful in directing your character and making choices. It's just badly implemented. Rather than having good/evil, have it four way (giggity) - good/evil and lawful/chaotic. This is a bit generic and not 100%, but: A Lawful evil person has plans for their evilness, while a chaotic one just kicks anything that happens to be passing. A lawful good person does whatever is right, and never strays from that, while a chaotic one will do whatever is necessary for the greater good (echo: the greater good).
Having this measure your character means that there is more than just "you're a good person, so I will follow you". A chaotic person can be seen as more impulsive, and will likely attract the attention of revolutionaries or younger, more energetic people, while a lawful person will be more widely appreciated by calmer people. Mixing this with a good morality system - see some of the fable choices from the end of F3, or Mass Effect choices, and you can have a far more diverse character

Edit: This guy knows what he's talking about, go read the full post, but I specifically want to mention this one

Krantos said:
1. Keep neutral open: ME2 mucked this up by linking the persuade options to morality. Essentially, many avenues were locked off unless you played all good or all bad. This leads, as the OP said, to choosing options for the points you get rather than role playing.
Neutral is too often seen as a blank slate, what you start off as. While I am generally a good guy, I like to play neutral sometimes, and as it is the hardest one to stick to, why do I get the least rewards (Apart from Sergeant RL-3 in Fallout 3)?
 

Slings and Arrows

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At the rate we're going, the only way to counteract the morality system morass that every RPG has been stuck in thus far is going to be 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"). Or indeed to just present all the choices without any automatic association with anything (none of the color coding of Mass Effect that would cause you to see the option as "Fluffy huggy teddy bear" or "complete prick" before even reading it) and to program quests to be open enough that you could take a variety of actions outside conversation and have things still turn out in the end. One game I actually found fairly solid for that sort of thing was Oblivion, I can't even recall any system of measuring morality, just your relationship to the law and people's overall attitude towards you. And if a quest wasn't mission critical there were a fair number of ways you could have it turning out depending on how you acted in conversation and how you succeeded and failed in combat.
 

ThisIsSnake

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Soviet Heavy said:
ThisIsSnake said:
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.
True, I think a middle ground should be added, like a triangle/rectangle that has rivalry (right), friendship (left) and a third option that I can't be arsed thinking of a name for (y axis). The third one will always increase and never decrease whilst the other two swing your alignment, the alignment determines the bonus that party member gets and the third one determines the strength of that bonus. That's off the top of my head.
 

Smooth Operator

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Bioware makes the worst systems in pursuit of casualisation, they replaced response decisions with morality decisions (good, funny, bad), and just so the brainless monkeys don't miss they color coded it... talk about restriction

I don't mind a moral system in the background to spice things up, but it should never ever take over other parts.
New Vegas had a good plan with factions, but it was a very crude system and extremely buggy (go figure), if someone were to do it properly we could have some sweet moral choices in the future.
 

tthor

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I love morality systems, but HATE the common execution. i hate the idea of choosing 'do you want to be GOOD, or do you want to be BAD?' its just retarded. instead of focussing on good or bad, they should just focus on grey, maybe even forget the terms 'good' and 'bad' altogether. just let the players be able to choose their actions, and then have those actions, whatever they may be, play out, causing positive or negative (or neutral) consequences for the player. THATS how morality should be done. morality is an idea that verys from person to person, not a law set in stone that should be enforced by the game.
 

mjc0961

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Nov 30, 2009
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Ghonzor said:
You can't really just split things into "Good" or "Bad." I feel like there should be multiple choices and various effects to go along with them. inFamous was particularly silly about this. The choices had no real weight. It trivialized them. Hopefully in inFamous 2 they fix it at least slightly
I agree 100%. inFamous SERIOUSLY trivialized them. It trivialized them to the point where they might as well have not given you a choice at all because no matter what you pick, the game manages to blatantly ignore your choice so its one and only set of plot points can occur.

It was a game that needed to learn that there's no shame in having one single story, so you don't have to hide that one story with a bunch of lies about choices you can make as you play. And they need to fix it a hell of a lot more than slightly for the sequel.

Not that I'd be caught dead playing it to find out if they do fix it or not.
 

Hive Mind

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You want them to get rid of morality systems... but leave in all the moral choices... and still have them affect the world?

I see.