How karmic gameplay can be improved

[GrizzlerBorno]

If you MUST have black and white morality: ALWAYS have the good choice make the game more difficult for the player. Don't have black and white morality be equals. That's not how the world works, unfortunately.

Bioshock botched this up, when it gave you almost as much ADAM through those gift thingies, that you would've gotten by murdering little sisters. That just destroyed the morality issue. Why would you be greedy and selfish if you....didn't need to be greedy and selfish to get every single thing in the world?

As for different moral paths being equal in terms of their reward, this is important to ensure that the player isn't unfairly punished based on their choices (if good was made to be vastly harder than evil then you'd find that this would discourage people from taking that course of action). We all subconsciously metagame at times so it's not unreasonable to assume that just making good choices have extra difficulty that a large number of players would just opt for the evil option out of laziness (rather than for moral reasons) or take the good choice for an extra self imposed challange (rather than because it's the right thing to do). Keeping a choice grounded purely in morality rather in gameplay helps ensure that the morality system will be used as intended (namely for making choices on moral grounds) rather than being abused for easy power-ups.

Here's how Bioshock would have played out if I were Ken Levine: (spoiler alert duh)

If you go on a rampage and "absorb" every lil' sister who makes the grave mistake of crossing your path, you get ass bucket loads of ADAM, and can thus pimp out your protagonist with every amazing tonic and plasmid imaginable. You can breeze through the game, annihilating everything in your path.

If you don't kill the sisters, and instead opt to liberate them all; you walk through the game dirt poor, only being presented with pittances from that crazy lady (not the HUGE amounts of adam the game did actually gift you; however the gift boxes would contain some money and ammo) so you can scrape by with just the plasmids you desperately want, relying more on guns. The game will undoubtedly be slightly harder this way (but not a "higher difficulty level" hard; just a little harder), since guns do less damage then plasmids.

This essentially divides the two paths based on what you want to really focus in: Guns or Plasmids. Though neither path will be exclusive, by any means.

Now, at the END: When you go up against atlas; you're guaranteed to have a hard time killing him without plasmids (/if you killed no more than 1 sister). But you only have to fight him for so long (get his health to only 25-20%) before that whole cutscene plays out where the lil' sisters all gang up on him and stab him to death. They then help you up and you can escape with them.

If you have all the ADAM, you will have to duel Atlas to the death with plasmids, and no-one is going to come to your aid (since you murdered them all). So the last battle becomes INCREDIBLY difficult and long. Even if you somehow bring him to about 5% health: he'll cripple you, and you'll have to use all that stored up ADAM to cause some kind of mutated plasmid explosion that destroys the tower and just drowns everyone, yourself included.

Either that, or you get all "spent up" killing atlas; and as you fall, victorious but crippled.....the last of the lil' sisters comes up to you..... and stabs you in the eye to collect all the ADAM left in your bloodstream. Then her Big Daddy lifts his boot and crushes your head into the pavement. The end.

Poetic. No?

 

[hoboman29]

I think any time when you give a player a choice in game, it's for the benefit of imersion.
As soon as you start showing them (the player/s) the right/wrong answer, it becomes a monotomy within the game and just a different sort of grinding, because you're no longer trying to roleplay or get really 'in to' your character, you've just realised that you can get better abilities/items/etc by being consistant rather than showing the conflicting morals of a living, thinking person. You become an extra program in the game, rather than say... in a way, making the experience of playing the game an extra piece of your life.

I always thought that it would be a good idea if you don't reveal whether or not you've been good or evil up until the end. Also, never show the slider or whatever. Have it all be subtle hints in gameplay or how NPCs react to you. Also, make it matter. If I do something, I want to see the effects I've made on the world. Plus, give us something more than a different ending. In the end, it's always the same gameplay, but I'm sure that can change.

That's all I got.

Karmic gameplay is a big trend in gaming today but a lot of people say it can be improved to make for a better game so my question to you is how would you fix it.
My opinion is to make it so that there is no obvious choice on what is good and bad so that it doesn't come down to what gets me the best/worst karma and to supplement that no karma meter you should find out as the results unfold not because it had the red text.

I think what you've both said are the best possible suggestions. Make it less obvious which option/s are the good ones and the bad ones, and hide the overall karmatic display meter. Thus leaving the player to question what they've just done, almost like they would in a real life situation.

I think it would greatly improve games that use karmatic options as a main selling point.

Being able to see how you shape the world for example, I like what Fallout: New Vegas tried and failed to do, because as much as I like being able to choose how the world WILL end up, you never get to see it. SO it kind of gets the the last hurdle and trips over it's feet for me.

And for example what happened in Mass Effect with saving the council, I think some choices like that (which would have to be made in a split second on instinct and personality) in real life, shouldn't be given to the player as it means a character that has otherwise been evil the whole game can still try to do the right thing now, which yes, offers a chance for reform within themselves, but personally I think if they've been evil so far in the game, take the final chocie away from them and make them realise what they're actions have lead too in the personality / actions of their character. It might actually be remotely educational as well as more imersive.

The funny thing is that this solution is obvious and developers don't try to implement it I guess they're afraid of real moral dilemma

 

[ReservoirAngel]

I'd start with Fable 2's system. *ducks thrown tomato* wow! hear me out!

Fable 2 had two morality/karmic scales. One was good vs evil, which is the end choices you made factored into it. Kill an innocent, you get evil points. Save a puppy, and its good points for you. But on top of that they had the purity/corrupting meter which is basically factoring in how much of a dick you act. If you go on drunken binges, piss everyone off and charge double the going rent prices then you're classed as a prickhole and it translates as you being corrupt. If you lower rent, don't over-indulge on food or drink or sex or chocolate or stuff like that, then you're being a decent person which translates into purity.

Yes it's a very rough scale but it's still better in my mind than the simple "are you good or evil?" system most games with such systems tend to use. Because in the real world, people aren't just good or bad. They can go good things but still be a wanker or they can do bad things but retain a sense of decency.

So if I was going to improve this karmic, good/evil sliding scale system games have, I'd start there but add even more scales to improve the accuracy of how your character is judged. Yes it's not a solid plan, but I reckon its a start.

 

[Iron Mal]

Here's how Bioshock would have played out if I were Ken Levine: (spoiler alert duh)

If you go on a rampage and "absorb" every lil' sister who makes the grave mistake of crossing your path, you get ass bucket loads of ADAM, and can thus pimp out your protagonist with every amazing tonic and plasmid imaginable. You can breeze through the game, annihilating everything in your path.

If you don't kill the sisters, and instead opt to liberate them all; you walk through the game dirt poor, only being presented with pittances from that crazy lady (not the HUGE amounts of adam the game did actually gift you; however the gift boxes would contain some money and ammo) so you can scrape by with just the plasmids you desperately want, relying more on guns. The game will undoubtedly be slightly harder this way (but not a "higher difficulty level" hard; just a little harder), since guns do less damage then plasmids.

This essentially divides the two paths based on what you want to really focus in: Guns or Plasmids. Though neither path will be exclusive, by any means.

Now, at the END: When you go up against atlas; you're guaranteed to have a hard time killing him without plasmids (/if you killed no more than 1 sister). But you only have to fight him for so long (get his health to only 25-20%) before that whole cutscene plays out where the lil' sisters all gang up on him and stab him to death. They then help you up and you can escape with them.

If you have all the ADAM, you will have to duel Atlas to the death with plasmids, and no-one is going to come to your aid (since you murdered them all). So the last battle becomes INCREDIBLY difficult and long. Even if you somehow bring him to about 5% health: he'll cripple you, and you'll have to use all that stored up ADAM to cause some kind of mutated plasmid explosion that destroys the tower and just drowns everyone, yourself included.

Either that, or you get all "spent up" killing atlas; and as you fall, victorious but crippled.....the last of the lil' sisters comes up to you..... and stabs you in the eye to collect all the ADAM left in your bloodstream. Then her Big Daddy lifts his boot and crushes your head into the pavement. The end.

Poetic. No?

So your issue with Bioshock's morality system was that a) it didn't push you into a particular style of play and that b) it didn't make the ending so being evil makes you have your comeuppance?

Allow me to give you the only outstanding problem I had with a game called the Suffering. It also had a binary morality scale (be good by protecting people, saving them and showing mercy and evil by going on a murderous rampage, killing everything and then proverbially stump-fucking the remains) but it had a somewhat undocumented impact on the game. Being good meant that the Xombium bottles (anti-anxiety medication that functioned as in-game health kits) would heal you more (making it easier to protect people since you could soak up more damage for them as well as just making the game easier in general by ensuring you'll likely have an abundance of health kits at all times) while being evil meant you could transform into your superpowered insantity form more often and that it's special attack would do more damage (which really helps in just generally fucking shit up mosh pit style) as well as the opposite ringing true for both alignments (so being evil makes health kits half as effective and being good means you can't use insanity as often). This sounds like exactly the thing you were talking about but it also resulted in making evil playthroughs really bloody hard (when you need a supply of nine health kits to heal your bar completely when you're evil compared to the three you need when good there's a clear spike in difficulty). Yeah, being good meant you specialised more in using your guns but they tended to be the best option anyway (evil's advantage of more insanity time didn't really provide a huge bonus considering the drawback). Their attempt to shoe-horn in consequences (gameplay-wise) for my actions resulted in me being muscled into being good not because I wanted to help the people I met but because I didn't want to have to use three times the number of health kits to heal the same amount of damage.

Your model for how Bioshock should work wouldn't be much different from the example of The Suffering. You're baiting players into taking a particular choice and unfairly punishing players for a choice that should purely be based on morality, not pragmatism (making one choice clearly superior in terms of difficulty reduction just results in metagame thinking, the one thing you want to desperately avoid in an RPG).

In short, you'd be encouraging people to be munchkins.

As for the evil ending not screwing the player over, why should it? Villains don't always have to face the consequences of their actions and it's possible for heroes to be doomed but morally victorious and becoming an icon after death. A 'bad ending' killing the player makes sense if said bad ending is achieved through performance or percent completed (like how in the original Resi and it's remake, being in Danger for most of the game, saving no-one and not destroying the mansion got you the worst ending possible, namely because you clearly sucked at the game (or were desperately trying to get it), giving that same worst ending to a player just because they couldn't care less about the NPC's and having the game dance on your corpse just to rub it in would probably just prompt most players to respond with a middle finger and the phrase 'fuck you'.

The difference is that one (the Resi example) is a reflection on the players performance (and letting players have a chuckle at just how awful things went, especially for those who intentionally seek these endings) while the other (your example) would just come across as a heavy handed, moralising smack to the face for not choosing the designer's preferred moral alignment.

In short, no, it wouldn't be poetic to have an evil player have died at the end of Bioshock, it would have just been bloody annoying to have had the last 6-8 hours of gameplay and your choices be rendered pointless by having your character die anyway in a cutscene (making it doubly frustrating by making it so there's nothing you could do about it).

 

[GrizzlerBorno]

So your issue with Bioshock's morality system was that a) it didn't push you into a particular style of play and that b) it didn't make the ending so being evil makes you have your comeuppance?

Your model for how Bioshock should work wouldn't be much different from the example of The Suffering. You're baiting players into taking a particular choice and unfairly punishing players for a choice that should purely be based on morality, not pragmatism (making one choice clearly superior in terms of difficulty reduction just results in metagame thinking, the one thing you want to desperately avoid in an RPG).

In short, you'd be encouraging people to be munchkins.

As for the evil ending not screwing the player over, why should it? Villains don't always have to face the consequences of their actions and it's possible for heroes to be doomed but morally victorious and becoming an icon after death. A 'bad ending' killing the player makes sense if said bad ending is achieved through performance or percent completed (like how in the original Resi and it's remake, being in Danger for most of the game, saving no-one and not destroying the mansion got you the worst ending possible, namely because you clearly sucked at the game (or were desperately trying to get it), giving that same worst ending to a player just because they couldn't care less about the NPC's and having the game dance on your corpse just to rub it in would probably just prompt most players to respond with a middle finger and the phrase 'fuck you'.

The difference is that one (the Resi example) is a reflection on the players performance (and letting players have a chuckle at just how awful things went, especially for those who intentionally seek these endings) while the other (your example) would just come across as a heavy handed, moralising smack to the face for not choosing the designer's preferred moral alignment.

In short, no, it wouldn't be poetic to have an evil player have died at the end of Bioshock, it would have just been bloody annoying to have had the last 6-8 hours of gameplay and your choices be rendered pointless by having your character die anyway in a cutscene (making it doubly frustrating by making it so there's nothing you could do about it).

You raise good points, so let me make a few revisions to my "pseudo-plot": For the good ending..... you don't even try to kill Atlas. You just try to hold his attention long enough to let the crazy lady (seriously, what was her name?) stash all the sisters in a sub bound for the surface. Atlas wouldn't like that happening, since it would basically collapse the ADAM economy, but you keep him too busy to stop them.... and then you murder each other. How about that? It's not about comeuppance then. You die both ways. But in one path, you die serving your own cause; In another you die serving a greater cause.

If I wanted to get fancy, I'd put a timer in there, and if you can beat him fast enough, you get to be rescued(/murder everyone and steal the sub) too. How about that?

And I'm sure I can balance the difficulty somehow. How about this? If you're not killing sisters, you get very little ADAM and thus don't have the skills to do crowd control using the fire/ice spells, right? Well if the game senses that it's getting too tough for you/there are too many enemies for you to handle, it will spawn in a friendly big daddy (sent by crazy lady) who comes and pummels everyone's heads in. Just sometimes of course, so you can't rely on it or anything. But you know you have friends willing to help you, because you've helped them.

See, it can be balanced well, if you try. I think I'd have to agree that one path shouldn't be unforgivingly difficult. But if you can get creative....

 

[Iron Mal]

You raise good points, so let me make a few revisions to my "pseudo-plot": For the good ending..... you don't even try to kill Atlas. You just try to hold his attention long enough to let the crazy lady (seriously, what was her name?) stash all the sisters in a sub bound for the surface. Atlas wouldn't like that happening, since it would basically collapse the ADAM economy, but you keep him too busy to stop them.... and then you murder each other. How about that? It's not about comeuppance then. You die both ways. But in one path, you die serving your own cause; In another you die serving a greater cause.

If I wanted to get fancy, I'd put a timer in there, and if you can beat him fast enough, you get to be rescued(/murder everyone and steal the sub) too. How about that?

And I'm sure I can balance the difficulty somehow. How about this? If you're not killing sisters, you get very little ADAM and thus don't have the skills to do crowd control using the fire/ice spells, right? Well if the game senses that it's getting too tough for you/there are too many enemies for you to handle, it will spawn in a friendly big daddy (sent by crazy lady) who comes and pummels everyone's heads in. Just sometimes of course, so you can't rely on it or anything. But you know you have friends willing to help you, because you've helped them.

See, it can be balanced well, if you try. I think I'd have to agree that one path shouldn't be unforgivingly difficult. But if you can get creative....

I'd try to steer clear of killing the player at the end wherever possible (unless it's in a fashion related to a performance based 'bad ending' like I mentioned with Resi) because (like I sated with my criticism of your suggested evil ending) it'll just end up being frustrating for players to put that much effort into surving the trials of Rapture and obtain power/weapons only to be killed by events in a cutscene you can't do anything about (need I mention Fallout 3's ending and why that enraged so many people?), putting in a timer at the end and your suggestion of a Big Daddy protector also bring to mind the criticisms I had of other people's (very creative and interesting) ideas, they could result in a lot of depth and complexity to the game but ultimately it would very easily just end up being either horrifically unbalanced (as it did in The Suffering) or horribley complex and hard to follow or keep track of.

Your suggestion of the Big Daddy would only really be useful for players who are seriously struggling at the game, which would probably just come to be a sign of how that particular alignment probably needs it's difficulty curve to be re-evaluated, if being good means the player has to rely on the computer saving them then we have a problem, if the player doesn't need to be saved then they aren't benefiting from their choices anyway (thus negating the point of giving them this 'guardian angel' in the first place) so you'd still be effectively punishing them for 'picking the wrong alignment' and thus still encouraging metagaming/munchkinism.

While it would be possible to create a system that would be balanced and still simple and approachable enough for the average player to actually use to it's best effect it's exteremely unlikely that will happen (we'd definately see a lot of failures in the attempt of that before we start seeing any real successes).

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

How about we drop the karma thing all together and make the decision based around the reward and how much easier it is on either side. A "good" choice should be a sacrifice to the player, or make something more difficult. An "evil" choice should give a great reward, or make something easier.

This makes way more sense than the current system of "You did something good! Here have something for your troubles!"