Ever since I heard about the moral choice system in BioShock (through ZP, no less) I have been curious about the different endings in games. Well, I just finished Star Wars: TFU and I was wondering...

Has anyone ever thought they could design a really good moral choice system for a game? I heard STALKER was ok, but honestly, any ideas on how to really work morals into games?

Marcosco:
Ever since I heard about the moral choice system in BioShock (through ZP, no less) I have been curious about the different endings in games. Well, I just finished Star Wars: TFU and I was wondering...

Has anyone ever thought they could design a really good moral choice system for a game? I heard STALKER was ok, but honestly, any ideas on how to really work morals into games?

The Witcher, Planescape Torment and Deus Ex are the only games I've played that have offered moral choices beyond good, indifferent and evil. The witcher in particular gets props for giving the player hard choices.

I thought the moral system in "The Witcher" being kinda nice, with the whole good/evil thingy replaced with shades of grey. That doing "evil" things is not necessarily all evil, and "good" things often unspectacular. Sets things in perspective.
EDIT: Heheh, seems I and the previous poster thought the same things at the same time:)

I've heard people complain that you couldn't be a complete bastard in "Mass Effect", which perhaps is true, but it DOES let you be pretty rude and very Machiavellian. Just because you can't kill everyone you meet in cold blood, it's not restrictive - no other game I've seen has given you the choice to support "patriotic" (i.e. xenophobic, to put it kindly) political parties, AND killing off the galaxy's ruling body, with the extra option of installing an incompentent and probably easily manipulated puppet governor. Even though my main Shepard is the savior of the universe and champion of the downtrodden, I look forward to explore all avenues of the sequels. It was definitely a step forward in morality choices for Bioware, no matter how you look at it.

The problem with the "moral system" several games use is that there are no midpoints. You're either the kind of tree hugging hippie that would make old ladies call you a pussy, or you're a spawn of pure evil whose heart is so dark it can create black holes... In theory a dynamic "morals" system shouldn't be hard to apply, but it does give a lot of work. For each possible "route" a character could take (pure good, pure evil, "meh", 3/4 good, 3/4 evil, 1/4235 good....etc) you'd need to make a different piece of storyline, including cutscenes, story development, possibly maps, navigation points for AI....etc...

It's not "complicated" to do, just requires a lot of work and a huge commitment.

Decoy Doctorpus:

The Witcher, Planescape Torment and Deus Ex are the only games I've played that have offered moral choices beyond good, indifferent and evil. The witcher in particular gets props for giving the player hard choices.

I agree on The Witcher. It was quite liberating, in a way; you could do what you thought was right and have things crashing down around you because of it, and sometimes the other way around... Which made for a very good time, in my opinion...

Now for Deus Ex, I felt that the moral choices were mostly quite clear-cut, even though there were many to be made. The only choices that were in the grey areas never really had a chance to pan out, since they only happened at the end of the game

I think Knights of the Old Republic, and Even Mass Effect did very good jobs of presenting the player with some fairly hard choices. How the played into the ending of the stories was a little meh for me.

I'm quite excited to see how Fable II will do.

tijuanatim:
I think Knights of the Old Republic, and Even Mass Effect did very good jobs of presenting the player with some fairly hard choices. How the played into the ending of the stories was a little meh for me.

I'm quite excited to see how Fable II will do.

Knights of the Old Republic seemed like a no-brainer to me when it came to moral choices; either you made a Dark Side decision and people ended up getting maimed or killed, or you made a Light Side decision where people became better-off and happy.

There really wasn't any decision in the game that strayed from the rules I mentioned above, was there?

Moral choices are a nice idea on paper but the don't very often work. Developers always find a way of making one choice better than the other with various incentives.

In Bioshock you got the choice of harvesting or saving all the little sisters. But in the end your choice is affected by whether you want more Achievement points or more ADAM.

And in Grand Theft Auto 4,

I think morals just aren't working in videogames. Maybe if someone can implement them better, it'd be okay. But for the moment linear stories are ruling supreme, because the writers don't have to account for player actions, animators don't have to do the same cutscenes five times over, voice actors don't have to record three times the dialouge, and programmers don't have to code for all those variables.

fable offered u the choice between being the evilest bastard around or the mightiest champion of the church

Which is worse Crazy-J?

And the problem with fable wasn't that you were either hitler or a saint. You really weren't since you could be somewhere in the middle on your alignment meter. You have a lot of choices so you could do some evil some good. It was that each individual moral choice had 2 options with no middle ground. At the end of the game I thought "wait, why the fuck isn't this an option" way before I made the choice. I thought "why couldn't I keep the sword the way it is right now, and it just be weaker than it would if I picked the evil choice".

Decoy Doctorpus:

The Witcher, Planescape Torment and Deus Ex are the only games I've played that have offered moral choices beyond good, indifferent and evil. The witcher in particular gets props for giving the player hard choices.

Deus Ex, it was quite refreshing to be asked "this this or that?" insted of "Good, evil or arsehole?".

I've only played Deus Ex: IW, but I have heard it said that there was a dead set "evil" group in the first. The second only had diffrent view points.

probably not to make a good moral choice system you need multiple story lines which is just to much work for game devs.

There are some good examples of the "moral choices" concept in games. But, as this becomes a more common theme in games ("Moral choices" is quickly becoming like the new QTE in terms of how common they are) I'm left disappointed more often.

Simply put, most games approach this all wrong. The Witcher did it well, the older Fallouts did it pretty well, and the Bioware games ain't bad, but most examples of moral choices are absolutely terrible. For one, in most of them your ONLY choices are "Holy Saint of Christ" or "Satan-worshiping baby-eater." I'm looking at you, Bioshock. The game was much more simplistic than advertised in this regard. Your choice is either "Be nice" or "SLAUGHTER THE LITTLE GIRLS AND EAT THEM!!!!"

Then you have a lot of games where evil means being a total cock. In Mass Effect and KOTOR, you aren't really evil...Most of the time your "Dark Side choices" are more about being a jerk-off instead of a villain. I wish more games let you be evil without being nothing more than a petty thug.

More games need to be like The Witcher, where your choices are shades of gray. The concept of moral choices is often wasted potential because you are either completely black or completely white. Or, simply put, you aren't so much being evil as you are being a mere bully stealing lunch money.

Another thing is that, often times, your choices have little effect on the story beyond moving some arbitrary meter left or right. The Witcher was great in this regard too. Your choices actually MEANT SOMETHING, and sometimes the repercussions wouldn't appear until much later down the road.

My point is that, in most games, the "moral choices" concept is too simplistic. It is all black and white, or your choices have little effect on what is actually happening.

Whether an action is moral or not is relative.

If you see the kid you are babysitting under the water in the tub, are you going to check and see if he's ok or ignore him because you think he's playing?

If your neighbor, who asked you to keep his shotgun while he was out of town and made you promise to give it back to him, comes to your door trying to get it back saying he's going to kill his wife and kids; do you give it to him? You did promise you would.

The whole point is that something that is ethical to one may not necessarily be ethical to someone else. Relative things cannot be accurately portrayed in video games because it is on the basis of the developer whether a choice is good or evil.

GI JOE: 'Knowing is half the battle!'

But on a more serious note, I don't think we need Morals in video games. If kids can't develop them off their parents/guardians/peers, than why would video games be any different?

Moral choices in one player games are just a system used to give replay value. True moral choice games are online RPGs where how you treat the ones around you has infinate reprocusions on how your experience changes. There's nothing wrong with moral choices in games, they add great replay value to a game you have fallen in love with. But if you want complex variables in a game, computer programming will never match the replay of human emotions and reasoning. That's why RPGs "suck" compared to MMORPGs.... if WoW was 1 player it would of been looooooooooong forgotten by now.

fable 2's looks promising but Im not getting my hopes up because well you know peter Moligu

To fall back on the argument "repercussions show later in the game", I would like to say that Bioware did a fair job with Jade Empire as well.
There was this one quest wherein you had the choice to give a girl a real medicine or a painkiller for her leg, after that you got some really direct choices: either get the right amount of money back(neutral), no money(tree-hugging good), a bit less money(quite nice of you) or more money than you spent on the medicine/painkiller(*evil*). Now this is already an example on how there is not just a black and white choice, but it gets better.
Later in the game the village you and that girl live in is under attack. Whether you gave her the painkiller or the medicine determines whether she lives or not, since she has to be in shape to fight off the bandits. Gets even better :)
Even later in the game you can stumble upon one of her relatives, and then you have the delightful choice of telling him what happened to the girl.

I know it's not life-changing and doesn't have anything to do with the main storyline or affects it in any way, but It did cheer me up because it was the first time I saw that one of my actions had more than just an immediate consequence.

There's another example from Jade Empire but I won't bother you with that right now partially because it's faded a bit :)

The Bioware games don't really have good moral choices. As mentioned a few times, you're either Ghandi or Pol Pot. Occasionally you could be somewhere in the middle like Heather Mills.

Gxas:
Whether an action is moral or not is relative.

If you see the kid you are babysitting under the water in the tub, are you going to check and see if he's ok or ignore him because you think he's playing?

If your neighbor, who asked you to keep his shotgun while he was out of town and made you promise to give it back to him, comes to your door trying to get it back saying he's going to kill his wife and kids; do you give it to him? You did promise you would.

The whole point is that something that is ethical to one may not necessarily be ethical to someone else. Relative things cannot be accurately portrayed in video games because it is on the basis of the developer whether a choice is good or evil.

I agree with this. Which is why it shouldn't be a "moral choice" system, between "good" and "evil" but a simple choice system. Yo are given a situation and you can come up with your own solution, it may be moral or immoral, depends on your definition.

Knight Templar:

Decoy Doctorpus:

The Witcher, Planescape Torment and Deus Ex are the only games I've played that have offered moral choices beyond good, indifferent and evil. The witcher in particular gets props for giving the player hard choices.

Deus Ex, it was quite refreshing to be asked "this this or that?" insted of "Good, evil or arsehole?".

I've only played Deus Ex: IW, but I have heard it said that there was a dead set "evil" group in the first. The second only had diffrent view points.

Yes...there technically -is- a main villain and group, however, they aren't the ones you'd think of first and only really come to the fore later in the game. That said, the NSF aren't exactly saints either. Hell, not to spoil it, but the group -you're- working for at the start isn't really all that noble as it turns out.

The problem with morals in many games is that its a false choice, I mean sure, TFU gave us a great story about one man's redemption from the dark side, but it never factored into the gameplay. The only thing you could do in that game was kill people, it wasn't a choice between killing for good or evil, either way it came out the same, it was just hack and slash. Another thing about the moral system is that as often as not there is no benefit to being on either side of the moral compass. You're either good, or you're evil. Oftentimes, its just a hook to get you through one more playthrough because you want to see it from the opposite side of the Karma. That said, I'm really optimistic about Fallout 3, which promises some real skill perks as incentive to playing either side. In short summation, I feel that developers could be doing more to get gamers more involved in the emotionality of being good, evil or neutral.

I find morals in games to be very interesting because I can test my morality (which is something I rather enjoy) against situations I would likely never encounter in real life. In other words, it goes toward answering that timeless question, "What would you have done?"

If there's one thing missing from most games involving morality, it's balance. Most people aren't paragons of virtue or harbingers of malice, they're somewhere in between. Balance is also lacking in the consequences department. There are situations in which your choices can affect the outcome, and yet there are just as many situations in which your morality won't affect the outcome one single bit.

I think it's difficult to impliment morals in free choice games unless the player decides to play to his or her morals, iirc when the testers were playing Fable 2 they had a decision to give up some money to save a family which most of them did, when they changed it to you can save them but you will be scarred permanently a lot of players let them die,
you can't get around the fact that players will always treat it like a game and so their real life morals will be different.

Decoy Doctorpus:
Planescape Torment

The addition of chaotic vs. order is so simple yet so brilliant

Oddworld: Abe's odyssey, did morals pretty well I think.
The choices was pretty simple: save mudokon friends or kill/abandon mudokon friends.
Throughout the game, you either don't think about that choice that much and either just save them because you feel like it of kill them because it's funny.
Then at the end of the game, there's 2 alternative endings depending on what you did.

Thing is to me, when given these ethical(which may be a better word to use than moral, but i'm nitpicking)choices, I feel almost...condescended to. I'd like to play a game that first of all doesn't use strings of blatantly obvious diametrics and pass them off to me as 'ethical choices'. That's not an actual ethical choice, at least not in my estimation, just more of a 'loosing of the rules'. I'm going to try NOT to beat that dead horse at this time.

The second thing I'd love to see as far as ethical choices in games go, is a departure from reward or reprimand for the choices made. Not saying that depending on my choice that the world should remain stagnant, but in the actual mechanics of the game, i should not be rewarded any differently for making one choice over another. No special items, no running 'moral-o-meter'...nothing like that. Keep the effects of my choice to character relations.

Finally, I'd LOVE to play a game which I actually have to THINK about my decisions, based on the context of the knowledge that i have been given(up to the point of the choice) in game. I want to actually pause before i make a potentially game-changing decision. I WANT my ethics challenged! I don't want an easy out handed to me; make me actually work to stay consistent with my ethical code in-game. Oh, and make it stick. Like in Fallout(2?), if you kill kids, you're ALWAYS a child-killer, no matter how much good you do.

Err, in Enchanted Arms this happens.

You know, I'm not sure why I put that in spoiler marks seeing that it's painfully obvious. The first time you see Toya after the Queen takes him you can tell its coming. Much like how you can tell who the Mystery Man is the first time you see the back of his head. And who was to blame for all the Resistance fiasco.

far crys two's ocording to pc magazine uk is very good

jamanticus:

Knights of the Old Republic seemed like a no-brainer to me when it came to moral choices; either you made a Dark Side decision and people ended up getting maimed or killed, or you made a Light Side decision where people became better-off and happy.

There really wasn't any decision in the game that strayed from the rules I mentioned above, was there?

Some of the (Force)Persuade options were surprising, what would and would not get you Dark Side Points as far as getting your way with people. I got the feeling that Force Persuade was more likely to get you Dark Side points than regular Persuade was, even if the result was the same.

But I've only played it once, so I could be wrong.

+++++

What would be *really* interesting is if you could pick you *own* moral system. In other words, if in character generation you picked between choices like 'if you had to save a baby or a senior citizen from certain death, which would you save (or would you flip a coin, or even save neither)?' AND THEN you would become more or less 'moral' depending on how you acted compared to how you answered the hypotheticals.

I disdain moral choice in games and everything about it. Sure, I enjoy the dialogue in games like KotOR and Mass Effect but otherwise I'm still painfully playing with the knowledge that my choices have almost little to no effect and the only difference is who I kill and what CG ending I get.

"Man she's like, so evil, she's like the Emporer!"
"Yeah! 'Cept with Better Tits!"

"Yeah! And that other girl, she's so sweet, like Mother Theresa!"
"Yeah! 'Cept with Better Tits!"

-Evil Woman.

Anyway, i actually love the choice of adding moral choice into the games we play.
It offers a direction in gameplay and story-telling that most older games just simply forgot about.

I mean yeah i know most(if not all) "RPG-wannabe" games are doing it now.

But i'm also in complete agreement with anyone who said there doesn't seem to be much middle ground when it comes to games like this.

Which is a shame, which is what has got me so interested in (Oh yeah, Archemetis is mentioning it again!) Fable 2.
Seeing as they seem to be taking a deeper look into choice system.
At least from what i've read.
Which is good, means someone is going in the right direction.
of course it still remains to be seen whether they haven't "screwed up" this one too.
Although, despite its flaws Fable wasn't a gigantic flop.

But anyway!
With other games, like KOTOR, Jade Empire, Mass Effect and countless others that likely i haven't even heard of.
I don't often see it actually affect anything other then the type of gameplay style and ending scene.

I mean, assumedly in KOTOR (because i just COULDN'T bring myself to play it for too long)
When you play it all dark sidey you get a "bad ending" to celebrate it?
and vise versa if you play good.
But throughout Gameplay (for what i saw) no one ever responded to your life-style choice...

Say you've played the game as the most collossal arsehole on legs, does anyone try to avoid you if you walk too close to them? do they start whispering in little groups about the rumours they've heard of your bastardry?

I didn't see anything.

I mean in Jade Empire, you might get a piece of Dialogue (i think) but that's it.
In KOTOR everyone just got on with their ordinary NPC lives.
Mass Effect,