Morality systems: how do you design an engaging mechanic?

[trickybus]

This post is inspired by my retrospection of Dishonored (2012), an Arkane Studios action-adventure game that heavily relies on its morality system to engage the player with the story and the setting.

While I did enjoy it overall, the heavy-handed and limiting nature of morality made my playthrough less spontaneous and more tedious than I liked. If I want to play an upstanding citizen to get the best ending, my toolkit is greatly diminished. No opportunity for creative takedowns or exploiting the surroundings to my advantage. I find this kind of railroading dull and uninspired yet it's common enough that I've come to expect it from any game that touts a morality system. To an extent, I understand that sacrifice for the greater good is a heroic trope that most likely influences the decision to impose on a player's agency but an explanation doesn't make the mechanic any more fun to engage with.

I suppose an add-on to the title question is in order: is there a way to make the "good" path fun and rewarding to play while still maintaining heroic tropes or is this an archaic form of design that needs to die out?

 

[Yousef Yousef]

Oh it’s quite funny you open up with Dishonored, I was about to do the exact same thing haha! Great minds do think alike, friend. But also I’d like gush about it a bit, cuz I beat it a few months ago for the first time, it instantly became a classic in my book. I did high chaos, and I’m hyped to play bioshock too as it seems to scratch a similar itch.

Now, back on topic, I personally seldom believe the system needs any complications. I frankly feel that so long as it manages to leave an impression + it’s tied to an engaging story, then it already fulfilled its purpose. Morality, in my opinion, doesn’t need a deep gameplay mechanic, but rather just make you feel weight for your actions, like what you did had an effect or at least told an interesting story.

I find inFamous very interesting for this reason, as in InFamous 1, Good Cole and Evil Cole behave in interestingly similar ways, because well, they’re the same person, duh! Which makes sense, right? They’re not cartoonishly different. Good Cole is somewhat apathetic and stand-off-ish, but is still a good guy, and Evil Cole is a massive dick, but not one you can’t sympathize with. It’s brilliant, if you ask me.

 

[Blue Buddha]

Games often seem to treat multiple choice morality systems as a static binary wherein only one of two absolutes can be supported. This is understandable enough, given the large amount of effort it would take just to implement two different sets of dialogue/event scenes/missions/etc that are mutually exclusive to each other, especially given that most players aren't likely to see both sets, but I think more of a morality gradient would better support emergent roleplaying in this context.

Personally I'm a big fan of Catherine's blunt force approach to split routes/morality, where in-between stages you'll have to just enter a confessional booth and answer questions like 'WOULD YOU CHEAT ON YOUR PARTNER, Y/N?'. It's genuinely hilarious to me how in-your-face it is with the good/bad options it presents, it's a shame that the game doesn't really meaningfully diverge based on route.

 

[LiberoVulpesLiberoVulpes's icon]

No game ever accounts for a pragmatic sociopath (me).

The whole point of a morality system should be that being good is overall more difficult and nets you far less than being evil, that's the point, to be good is to sacrifice, there is a perfect example of missing the point, Bioshock 2 with the little sisters, the fact they reward you later with overall far more resources kills the whole point, its transactional not moral, which is something many morality systems in games are, you are more inclined to pick them for your build rather than roleplaying (looking at you Bioware).

I like how Hero's Adventure Road to Passion does it, instead of just Good or Evil, your character is graded on 6 aspects, Benevolence, Righteousness, Propriety, Trustworthiness, Wisdom, and Courage, all of which either gain or lose points depending on your actions, you can go either -100 or 100, and you aren't locked in on going 100 or -100 on all. You gain bonuses and passives either way (although with some differences if its the positive or negative path), and some options do require you to have a certain amount of points in some of them, but, for the most part, you can do whatever you want, including but not limited to just getting numbers for your build.

 

[RageBurner]

There's no silver bullet for this, as we are dealing with a believable emulation of human nature itself; imagine trying to create a convincing facsimile of something we ourselves don't really understand.

Speaking generally, it needs to be an extremely broad and nuanced system, with all kinds of ramifications, big and small, and therein lies the endless complexity of it. As the old adage goes, the world isn't painted in blacks or whites, but endless shades of gray.

 

[Adachi_08]

I believe in Fable, it would be beneficial to be either going full good route or full evil. If you tried being somewhat neutral you wouldn't get too much stuff i think

 

[RanmyakuIchi's icon RanmyakuIchi RanmyakuIchi]

This is limited to games with a grander scale, like open world RPGs, but I feel morality mechanics work better when they're on a faction by faction basis. Doing good deeds with one faction demonizes you in the eyes of another, and there are certain advantages and disadvantages to both. Maybe you could befriend an Elven tribe that teaches you magic skills, but it causes you to lose standing with the Dwarven village that gives melee skills.

 

[dropsmegamega]

I always found morality systems like the one you describe archaic and anti-fun. Stuff like D&D worked because first of all morality was never about the best ending, but about roleplaying and player expression, so its less about forcing the player to play in a certain way and more about letting player play the way it better suits him and his character. Of course, giving unique options for good characters, like their own classes, weapons and dialogue options do make those playthroughs more interesting too.

 

[Retro Doomer]

They certainly managed a good morality system in Fallout 3 in my opinion and
the one in Dragon Age origin also was not that bad...was there even one ? I just remember you could play like a psycho if you really wanted to.

 

[SpcDaicon]

I think it boils down to the limitations of the medium.

Morality in the real world is something much more complex and much more nuanced than any game could ever be, so they tend to get simplified. There is only so much they can do on a game, so the options we are presented tend to be pretty obvious on their outcomes. It breaks the illusion of choice when you can tell how a choice will tip the scales on a arbitrary "good or evil" binary. You end up questioning "What's the ending I wanna get?" rather than "Is doing X the moral choice here?"

I think SMT has a very good morality system with their law-neural-chaos dinamic. Although sometimes the answer you give is obvious (again, there are limitation on what a game can do), their outcomes have more nuance than most games, specially in SMT Nocturne with the Reasons.

A good morality system should present the player not only with the questions themselves, but with the reasoning and consequences of their acts, having the moral judgement outside the game itself