How do we improve morality systems in games

how do we improve morality systems in games

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Ditch the black and white good/evil dichotomy and make decisions more grey. The Witcher games are a good example.

Evil needs to have options besides being a total cunt or not doing anything at all. More than not, evil isn't a viable or even fun option and if it is it's just comically evil. This is usually how comes have it work
>Good Option: +Reptuation +Reward +Quest
>Neutral Option: +Reward +Quest
>Evil Option: +Reputation, -+Reward

Rewards need to distributed properly, maybe develop some sort of good, evil, neutral exp system and Evil needs to have actual quest

Jap system is order and chaos. Its a little harder to tell which choices apply to them sometimes. For example in freedom is considered chaos so many choices that seem good to westerners are actually chaos. Catherine and shin magami games use this system

Make the choice more nuanced and don't quantify it with points or indicators, let people figure out the system instead of telling them that npcs noticed your choice or handing out renegade/paragon points etc

Also, make actual consequences.

TellTale is terrible at this, since 90% of the time, choices only change the order in which things happen.


Hell, even if you change the basic lethal/non lethal approach would be better.
It's easy to be a good guy if it always gives you extra XP just because you were able to "Talk it out" or sneak around or whatever (Like Deus Ex).
But what if all those people you only knocked out ended up being added to a pool of characters in a "Jail" state? Throughout the game, all those characters would be let out and had a chance of being added to the later levels, this time with heightened AI, since they've already encountered you before. They'd set up traps near vents and make non lethal almost impossible.
Or just go killing everyone. Again, easy enough, but then again, not everyone wants to deal with someone who has 200 dead bodies behind him.

Don't bother with them, give the player choices and don't try to make them inherently good or bad all the time.
If you really must make a morality system don't make the evil choice automatically ruin the game.
There are always the do-gooder factions that reward you and tongue your asshole for making the good choices, but hardly ever an underground/criminal/downright evil faction to reward your evil deeds. Maybe make the evil plotline lead to the best ending for once.

I think that system is a lot more interesting than good/evil but it still lacks depth. I like endings that are based on your actions, rather than an invisible point counter that determines which ending you get.

The third Valkyrie Profile game was quite good for this

The game didn't actually even tell you that there was a good route and you start the game with the game heavily pressuring you to betray your party members and be an asshole, and if you don't do the bad shit the game actively punishes you for it, giving you worse equipment, harder missions and if you ignore the 'sin' mechanic (which doesn't actually affect the ending sadly) then the game will actively put really powerful enemies in maps to try and force you to betray party members and kill them to power up your guy to deal with them.

But about halfway through the game if you have been being evil at all then the narrative is very dark and the protagonist goes off the rails to varying degrees depending on how much you killed your allies but if you go the whole game never doing it once then the narrative shifts to being a lot more positive compared to the rest of the game and the protagonist gives up on vengeance and is a moralfag for the final third or so of the game

I think it's a much better way of doing it where the game actively shits on you for a good portion for not being evil and it's the hardest route through the game but it leads to the most positive development/outcome of the story. Downside is that in this case there's basically three completely different routes through the game which is a lot more work than Bioware etc would do.

By not blatantly favouring one side.

I never game those games a look. That sounds cool as shit though. Checking it out now.

Source?

It rarely makes much sense though. Tactics Ogre for example chaos to neutral is basically just a scale of being kind and idealistic to cruel and pragmatic while in other games it could be the opposite or it could be like SMT where it's something completely different again.

I think they should avoid D&D based alignments honestly they have never been very clear

It just feels so weird, in some games where there is a giant over-arching quest/objective but there is also still a morality system. Like in fable 2. you could be a total evil faggot, eat baby chickens and kill your wife and shit, but it still ended up with "Oh okay, so you just shoot the old guy and game over."

There needs to be more games where you can just do a heel turn decision and be like "no, im supporting the villain now." or preferably you find the big bad, pull a captain phillips and become the villain. videogames are gay

Make it harder to go from openly good or evil to the opposite.

Make Lawful Evil a bigger thing again, rather than 'Lolsorandumb' Evil being the ongoing trope.

Don't make evil automatically the angry fighting decision

Make more diverse-alignment characters for each.

Stop making it where Lawful Good is actually evil, and Chaotic Good is 'underdog dindu nuffin' rebel group'. Seriously. Fuck thay trope.

Even games that allow you "Freedom" like Skyrim, just doesn't do it right.
Sure, you could be a Vampire Lord or a werewolf, but even if you go on a rampage, in 3 days they forget it happened and treat you the same as ever.
"My god. Is that Barnox the Vampire Lord?!"
"... NEVER SHOULD HAVE COME HERE!"

Do not make morality a concept at all. Focus on reputation and 'character' as a concept.

People have different opinions of different things. Some might like that you diffuse a situation with words. Some might think talking your way around people all the time is weaselly. There should be a number of people who have a lower opinion of your character because of that. Just like how people, even on your side, should ocassionally think you're fucked in the head for killing thousands.

Everyone loves to remind everyone else that "Honor" is stupid. But I never see this being applied in a broad scope. You have your player take a job and find out halfway through that you were lied to, and yet you swore to whatever god you were told to that you'd finish the mission if you accepted it so that when you find out you were duped; your . So your choice isn't necessary "The good one" and "The Bad one" it's "The one that you stick with" and "The one you decide you can't go through with it.". So you're either judged as a liar, or principled.

That kind of stuff would lead to a better interactive story. Not just good goodliness and evil badness.

Well first and foremost there shouldn't be any mechanic that compels you to be more good or more evil for the sake of greater benefits. That means you will have to start giving answers and making decisions you don't feel you identify with. The Mass Effect series was awful with this, making your ability to win key arguments dependent on how nice or mean you've been rather than picking the right options.

dump them entirely

make branching narrative (if you've even got to have it) a means for the player to calibrate their connection to the player character, whether it's crpg-style total control or something more limited. leave the "moral" implications of choices up to the audience. simply produce sensible, believable responses to player's actions - the second you label something Good or Evil or whatever, you risk severing player's connection to the world at basically no benefit whatsoever

i mean, i can definitely see something interesting in a system where the dissonance beteween player's sense of morality and that of the game's is actively exploited (e.g. ), but unless you're some preachy fucker carrying a heavyhanded message on your sleeve, having to tell the player what's "right" and "wrong" is at best over-telegraphing a more correct choice of action, and at worst outright telling player to fuck off, what you think doesn't matter

Just remove the need to have choices be identified as good or evil, and especially make the design of choices one that doesn't have its thought process be what choice should be good or bad. Just have choices which each have their own consequences. Give the player choice based upon his view of subjective concepts such as honor or utilitarianism so that there no best answer, only subjectively better ones depending on the ideology of the player.

Emulate Alpha Protocol in this respect. Make it so that actions and choice = consequence in every respect, making the player a dynamic cataclysm that shapes the story to his or her liking, be it morally or amorally motivated.

get rid of them

this was meant to be a stealth loli thread

What are they saying to her?

Altruism isn't impressive in a video game. Let people make their own decisions and do what they want, rather than following paladin or edgelord scripts to unlock certain morality system bonuses.

Source

>make actual consequences.
that would require that they create some kind of graph of interconnected variables, design all of the branches to have some story or gameplay value, script all of the branches, write and record all the lines of conversation for every variation, etc
does telltale look like the kind of developer that could push out that much content. is any developer willing to do that for a game that will sell at the same rpp as other games? doubt it

>how can you say that you love her if you won't even eat her poop?

Age of Decadence was pretty good at this. Although it compensated by being extremely short for an RPG.

Don't have them. I'm replaying Baldur's Gate 2 and there's a ton of shit I can imagine a +evil points pop up even if you're playing a moral fag.

You can make gameplay consequences that have more variation to coincide with a few narrative variations.

Take 5 paths.
Evil, bad, neutral, good, paragon

Each of those paths will have its own narrative, but gameplay elements showing how far down those paths you are. Evil, and the various degrees of being evil, would eventually bring out the hardest "good" characters to fight, or make it the hardest to avoid detection due to increased security/paranoia.
While being bad would have similar effects, but not nearly as severe.

I actually think D&D alignments make sense in their own context. Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos being tangible forces that pull on everything in the world. Which is important if you're pleading with an Angel to help you kill something, or trying to sell your soul for a benefit.

Yea, but then it seems silly.
I mean, I found it very weird that I could go Terminator 1 on the precinct in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and everyone just gave me a shake of their head, but then back to business as usual.

and that game would just end up as a string of
>npc glares/frowns/glances/smiles/cheers at you
events

edited Tomo-chan wa Onnanoko

No morality system doesn't mean no consequences. People should still get mad at you for stuff, but there shouldn't be dark knight skill trees or other autism.

No morality system.

Just faction loyalty. Don't have a thing saying "You did the good thing" or "you did the evil thing". Let the game's world and characters feel the affects of what your character did to them, and let the player contextualize their actions and its consequences themselves.

>betray party members and kill them to power up your guy to deal with them.

iirc you power up the party member you chose to sacrafice

by not making the good choices so obvious

By not showing points for it in any way. The best morality I've experienced in a video game was in SOMA. No dialogue wheel, no inFAMOUS or Mass Effect's pick blue or red. The decision was done through gameplay and could be completely missed.

That moment when you see a woman scan copied into a machine thinking she is living in digital paradise on the Ark when in reality she is stuck in a horrible world and you can plug her out by playing the game. The moment is not interrupted in any way, it's a seamless gameplay. Easy, simple, brilliant.

Don't push obvious options like good and evil. Let the player decide his own lesser of two weevils.* But most game devs and the playerbase doesn't care about great single player stories that question your decisions. Trophy collection statistics just show what the state of current gaming is in.

* youtube.com/watch?v=440l8poSQiA

Mass Effect Andromeda is trying to do this and all it got was a bunch of backlash for it

Stop treating morals with such massive black-and-white dichotomy while putting on an air of ambiguity and moral grayness

the fact that it was not only gives me faith in humanity
said by someone who faps to it

Don't make good always be hollywood leftist morality where you blatantly choose: "Save everyone and do nothing wrong". Sometimes not making compromises should lead to awful outcomes and going to evil route should be easier and more fun in some cases.

Choices should be hard, often not play out quite like planned and morally interesting.

You don't have them in the first place. An arbitrary good deed/bad deed counter is stupid and breaks immersion.

test

>Maybe make the evil plotline lead to the best ending for once.
Mask of the Betrayer, depending on your definition of best. A good character just ends the horrific curse forever and goes back home, an evil character masters the curse and uses it to become stronger than gods.

we got a god damned genius here.

Problem is most people need black and white and very clear answer for the consequences of their actions or they get confused and their interest shifts. Moral ambiguity is usually reserved for one important point in a game or in a game that is openly mocking that system like Farcry 4.

enjoy your ban

The way it works is that they are very powerful for the rest of the map but they die forever once the map finishes

Following their death the main character gets a new activatable power that he can use for the rest of the game, and are generally very overpowered

It's already perfect

Stop with the Good vs Evil shit

Make it Greed vs Selflessness. If you want to get all the stuff you should have to do some rotten or downright evil shit. Inversely, doing the right thing shouldn't make you a god for being a good boy. Basically good guy route needs to be harder as a whole and bad guy needs to be more rewarding.

Pic unrelated.

don't make it obvious that there is a choice. like if you're about to kill someone as oppose to sparing them, don't have a dozen of npcs chiming in with "if you kill him we'll never know the secrets, but if you spare him he might come back stronger later! make the decision, it's up to you!"

>If you want to get all the stuff you should have to do some rotten or downright evil shit
Why?

Give player option to do it lazy way that is evil or if they have the skill or patience, they can obtain everything even if they are good.

Also don't define them as greed and selflesness. Let the player's morality work for him.

Damn. Does it even have any doujins?

this could be good but it needs a good story behind as greed vs selflessness is a specific set of contrasting attitudes, and it doesn't let the player's morality work for him as says
have the selfless route kill the protagonist with some self sacrifice, surrounded by his friends and all that shit, infamous 2 did that, and have the greedy route end with the protagonist having conquered everything but sitting alone with his spoils of war, in the good route the player ends up frustrated by being underpowered and in the bad route the player ends up almost bored by the amount of power he gained