Morality meters: Fun mechanic, or annoying detail?

[Dracos]

That's an interesting consideration.

What makes it work is the many different venues in which rewards can meaningfully come.  XP, Gold, Items, Respect would almost be a little too few.  It's been tried with quests as well before, but the real thing is meaningfully different worthwhile rewards I would suspect, where good and evil points (if such silliness exists) are positive only values that rise as actions are taken (Mass Effect style) but are not considered a viable reward unto themselves. 

This also means 'No reward needed' dialogues should not exist.  They are non-constructive in that regard.  Getting additional points for whether or not you take treasure diminishes any result.  It should be the motive of how the quest is solved if it is going to be anything.

[Empyrean]

I think displaying Good or Evil points for the path chosen diminishes immersion by drawing the player's attention to "gamey" mechanics rather than keeping them engrossed in the game world.  If a player knows they did a good thing because they get +1 Good Guy Points, and they are seeking to max out on Good Guy Points, that's not a very good way to have them engaging the game world.  On the other hand, if the player does a good thing and there is some emotional payoff to reward the player for their actions, they become more involved in the game in a more positive way.  If the player does the Good thing because that's what they want to do and there aren't points to consider (or the player just doesn't care about them) then you can tell the designers are doing it right.

Mass Effect 2 is a good example of this.  I've played that game through from start to finish more than half a dozen times.  Modded the weapons to hell and back for more balance and replay value.  After playing a Paragon Shepard over and over, I decided to play a Renegade Shepard to see what it was like.  I made it about a third of the way through as a Renegade, but I just couldn't do it because I felt bad playing Shepard that way.  Even the prospect of seeing new content in a game I really like was not enough to keep me playing Shepard like a jerk.  I still shoot the gas line as a Paragon when the Krogan is rambling about how great he is, and regardless of what my intended alignment is there's no way in Hell that Tali is going to find out her father has died without getting a hug right then and there, because the emotional content of the game is a bigger deal than the points (and because I'm Commander Shepard, and this Tali is my favorite woobie on the Citadel).  Using separate gauges keeps me from feeling like I'm being punished for making the choices that I do, but the important thing is that the story and not the points are what drive my decisions as a player.

I'm undecided whether it's a good idea to use morality gauges and just keep them hidden from the player, though.  On one hand it doesn't distract from the game itself, but on the other it's still in the back of the player's mind.

Edit: Thinking about this a little more, I think it might be interesting to use points to denote your reputation for ruthlessness or for being a pushover.  If you peg the meter at "doormat" by always giving in to others, people might be more likely to try to exploit you but also might be more willing to approach you with requests that they would expect others to refuse.  A ruthless player might get requests to do things that are questionably legal (or outright illegal) and people would know not to try to double-cross you based on your reputation.  I think that would be a better system than just good and evil points because it brings more significance to your decisions down the line.

[Kaldrak]

Greetings everyone.

As Brian asked for someone who's played Dragon Age to comment, (Over 100 hours in Origins and 70 in DAII) I figured I'd add my own thoughts to this. In Origins, there simply wasn't a 'morality meter' per se. You're only choice was to save the world from the Archdemon, but how you go about doing it did open up some intriguing dilemmas. Mostly the choices weren't so much between good and evil, but rather a choice between mercy and ruthlessness. One of the earlier moments in the game after the origin story of my character was whether or not to spare a bunch of knights following the orders of their lord to kill the last of the Grey Wardens. The first time, I let them go, stipulating that they send a message to their master that I wasn't afraid of him, but the next time I took them all out with no real repercussions.

In Origins, and to a lesser extent in DAII, the only morality meters were your approval rating from your companions. Some of them were ruthless and approved of the harsher decisions you could make, while some were not. It made structuring a party around whichever plot point was coming next rather crucial if you knew which decisions were going to cost you a lot of approval from certain members. And one time, even when a party member wasn't there for the scene, he confronted my character afterwards at the party camp and I lost a ton of approval points talking my way out of it.

As for the rest of the world, mostly you could hear random NPC's having conversations about stuff you'd done, but there were no major confrontations about anything that I noticed. Your choices did directly effect what sort of resources you had available in the final battle, however and there were certain specializations you could only unlock by being a complete bastard.

And that's Origins. I won't go into DAII because in my personal opinion it was an inferior game to Origins in almost every respect. Still fun, just not as good.

For the original question? I'm somewhat ambivalent about morality meters and gauges. I do wish there was slightly more variety in the moral dilemmas game makers come up with for players to work through though. I mean, some nice middle ground between child killing and 'Savior of All' would be nice.

[Brian]

I agree that a gradient would be nice, but also understand the complexity involved.  Even in games without meters, your choices are typically binary.

Look at Bioshock.  Your morality choices are (exactly as you said), 'child killer' or 'savior of all'.  Admittedly, you can kill some Little Sisters and save some others, but generally, if you harvest instead of save (I've not actually done this myself; my understanding is that it just gives a less enjoyable ending), you get more ADAM.  But if you save, then the little sisters periodically leave you little stashes of ADAM and extra powerups anyway.

You can buy all of the powerups by saving the little sisters, and they give you some unique plasmids, and it gives you an ending cutscene -- that's probably actually a terrible example in hindsight, as that boils down to the 'good' route giving better rewards in pretty much all ways.

I'll leave it there because it's a contrast to:

Bioshock II.

The same save/harvest decision goes on, but there's also a secondary mechanic (ish) where there are plot NPCs that you can kill/not kill.  Instead of having just one ending, there's (I think) three variants, with one relatively neutral, one grimdark, and one relatively positive outcome.  But this time around, the kill/not kill decisions don't have any bearing on gameplay.  It's zone bosses in all cases, and you make the decision at the very end of dealing with them.

The save/harvest thing is binary, too -- harvest once, and that trips the flag.  No difference between that and harvesting all of them (as I understand it; I always go the 'good' route, anyway).


Long story short, complexity is complex, which is why everything ends up so simplified in games.

[Empyrean]

I think the reason choices tend to be binary is because of content constraints.  When faced with the option to have one dilemma with ten solutions or five dilemmas with two solutions, most games tend to go the second route, offering more choices that are a straightforward good/evil moral dichotomy rather than few opportunities to make choices but offering more varied outcomes.  I think gamers are very likely complain about a game that's only fifteen hours long, but are willing to give a pass to games that force you to choose between sainthood and eating babies.  Even if they have the same amount of content in the end, with a finer-grained moral system you see a much smaller part of the game on any one playthrough.  I think that for most players, length trumps replay value.  Not saying I agree with it, but I think that's what drives the design decision.

Dragon Age morality system was pretty much non-existent.  Actions had consequences on an individual basis, and all of your decisions were compartmentalized from the others.  Just because you did the "nice" thing and got the Elves and Werewolves to make peace with each other doesn't mean you can't desecrate the Urn of What's-Her-Face to unlock the berserker blood magic warrior class, or make a pact with a demon.  In the end the decisions you make determine which type of NPC redshirt army you get, and some ending narration stuff.  It works pretty well, with no morality score at all.

[KLSymph]

Is it better to make your choices and see the outcome?  Or do you like earning points to fill up your 'good guy' bar?

Coming into the topic late, and other people probably have more informed or in-depth opinions, but I just wanted to share my thoughts. To answer the original question, I would rather make choices and see the outcome, but that's a general expectation of playing a game versus say watching a movie.  Morality systems in games I've played don't really deliver that to me.  The whole morality concept in games tends to really not resonate.

I'm going to use the game Infamous and its sequel as a reference, since that's the most recent game I've played with a morality system central to the gameplay. In these games, you have a morality meter, and as the story goes along, at certain points or during special morality quests you will get a choice^TM between a blue option that makes you more of a Hero and a red option that makes you more Infamous. There are miscellaneous things that you can do in the sandbox that change your morality position, but only the choices extend how far between the extremes you can go. The only direct non-cosmetic difference morality makes is what branch of the tech tree you will unlock powers from; indirectly it also controls which morality quests you will take in the future as they come in pairs and taking one locks out the other.

This system doesn't resonate with me. This is just not what I think morality means. My moral dilemmas don't typically resemble the choice between going to Street A and taking a side-mission to help people out and going to Street B to enact an ugly rampage against the cops.  It doesn't resemble the choice between stopping poisonous sludge from entering the water supply by blowing the tank (and getting showered in the stuff) or short-circuiting the pump (poisoning more people in the short term).  I can't see these things as two opposing options that each equally raise my maximum morality by +1 in their respective directions.

Of course, the phrasing of Hero versus Infamous suggests that this is a reputation system.  Which is okay, in a way, since it would make more sense to say that those choices influence how people in the game world look at me than to say that the choices influence how moral I am, and it sort of explains why missions get locked out if not why they're arranged in exact pairs. But the definition of reputation also doesn't work when you think about it. Why does my saintly reputation prevent me from getting Hellfire Rockets to fight the Ice Titans menacing the public? It's not like I'll use them on civilians just because I have them.  Why does my reputation for wanton massacre force me to have a pasty-white gangbanger's appearance?  Wouldn't a normal, healthy complexion ease my efforts to walk undetected into public gatherings before indulging my thirst for blood and suffering?  If you want to restrict a player's access to particular powers, surely there must be a more sensible rationale than tying it to a morality system.

(Game spoilers follow!)

In both Infamous 1 and 2, ultimately the whole Hero/Infamous question fall down to a single choice near the end of the game, a mechanic that I've seen in many places and despise every time. I have to contrast that, though, with the actual endings in Infamous 2, which I think mattered a lot more on a moral level than the ultimate choice that led to them.

At the end of Infamous 2, you discover that in order to save humanity from an unstoppable plague that kills normal people, you must activate a device that cures the plague, but this cure will kill every super-empowered character, including yourself.  Alternatively, you can ally yourself with another (evil, sort of, but the important thing is he's been your looming enemy for most of the game) character who can empower some normal people, making them immune to the plague in the process, but not most of the population. If you are a Hero, you'll choose to fight the evil guy and save the bulk of humanity, and if you are Infamous, you will ally with the evil guy and save the empowered such as yourself and leave the rest to die. (You can also choose the opposite option, but apparently this requires you first grind morality tasks until you flip alignment, which I certainly never bothered to do).

Fine, whatever. My morality senses didn't really tingle at this choice, sort of like in Jedi Academy when I had to choose whether to kill Rosh Penin or spare him. I went with what the screen said I should do, given my morality position through the game run, and didn't think twice about it.  That's not a moral choice.  That's a "what ending do I want" choice.  For that matter, since you are so encouraged to focus on one moral extreme, it's not even that choice.

But after you go through the final battle, you're confronted with something rather different.

If you're a Hero, you now have the device that you've been hunting for throughout the game, thinking it will help you defeat your enemy and/or cure the plague. You are standing at the base of a cathedral, with camera showing the burning sky and the evil guy's giant form that you just beat. The device is in your hands. To defeat your enemy, avenge all of the people he killed, and save humanity, just press the four shoulder buttons to power it up.  And kill yourself.

Or if you're Infamous, you've allied with that evil guy. You're now on the roof of the same cathedral, and the device is being held by a single person, your best friend.  He's kind of an idiot, and you had a bit of a falling out for a while, but he's been with you through both games.  He can't be empowered, and he's already sick with the plague.  He has a gun, but even though both of you know that won't even slow you down, he'll resist you to the end, because he'll die either way.  All you have to do is press the right trigger a few times. And kill him.

And... suddenly I have a moral qualm about my actions. I don't really want to do either of these things.  I don't want to do good across an entire game just to cap it off by committing suicide for the sake of humanity.  And even if I've spent the game walking the city's streets sprinkling cluster grenades like some kind of a deranged flower girl, I don't really want to shoot my best friend over and over again, each time watching him stagger up a little lower than before until he can never get up again.

That's a moral... thing. It's not a moral choice.  You've already made your choices.  If you don't do anything, the game will sit there and wait.  Your friend will take shots, and they'll hurt, but you regenerate faster than he shoots as far as I can tell.  You're done with all the challenges.  All that's left is to take the trivial last step.  But it's not trivial for me, because I now had a moral dilemma.  I know that the last step has some moral value in the context of the story, and when I'm immersed in the story, it makes me pause.  In the end, I'll go through with it, but it's not like any of the moral choices in the game.

So why can't we spread the moral value through the rest of the game more?  Okay, it's the game climax and you can't have the player decide whether to kill himself or a major character all the time, but there's still that giant disconnect with this emotional sense of moral significance compared to the vapid and artificial morality in Infamous's actual morality system.  There just seems to be an importance in whether I believe I'm doing something right or wrong here that is simply absent everywhere else.

The morality of the endings resonated.  The morality of filling a meter to get new powers did not.  So let's have some more morality of the first sort and less of the second.

Also, I wanted to point out that Infamous 1's morality attempt was not remotely engaging. The endgame, regardless of your final morality decision^TM, was basically the same.  The one morality choice where they really tried to twist your emotions was whether to rescue a bunch of doctors (if you're a Hero) or your girlfriend (if you're Infamous) from a deathtrap. Unfortunately, this choice fails on a number of levels. I don't think people will, as a bloc, cheer for you if you save a bunch of doctors and leave your girlfriend to die, or vilify you for saving your girlfriend and leaving the doctors.  There's a lot of wiggle room in deciding whether those choices are moral, depending on individual sympathies.  Also, choosing to save your girlfriend is an Infamous act, but if you've been acting infamously during the run, your girlfriend has been treating you pretty poorly in her interactions (and wasn't shown treating you well in backstory references), so you don't really empathize with the character or the decision.  And lastly, either way the girlfriend dies, which has plot significance but severely undercuts any moral consequence to the choice.  Infamous 2 was way better in that regard.

tl;dr version: I wanted to write a review of Infamous when I played it, but I'm too busy (and/or lazy) to write stuff, and I hope this satisfies my moral obligation for contributing something to the board.

[Empyrean]

tl;dr version: I wanted to write a review of Infamous when I played it, but I'm too busy (and/or lazy) to write stuff, and I hope this satisfies my moral obligation for contributing something to the board.

You get +1 Good points.