Morality systems are easy to break anyway.
I would say its more that morality systems are hard to implement.
If you make simple system where you loose karma from stealing and gain karma from donating money for orphans player can exploit that system easy. You would need to figure some other system. One could be system where after stealing or donating a certain amount you get a status that permanently raises/lowers your karma. But it really cant be permanent either because it takes away from player agency. How would you turn those things to a points. I mean stealing last coin from beggar cant be same that stealing a coin from a millionare. Also this kind of karma system makes so the quests in the game are black and white. You cant make a quest where dooming 12 orphans to die saves thousands from a plague.
How to implement the karma? Everybody magically hating you for low karma is just unrealistic. Should karma effect only some random events and set story points? Sounds fine, but then devs need to implement that system to the storypoints and its not easy to do so without railroading the players. Like Paragon/Renegate in mass effect 2. It made it so everytime the opportunity came to choose from the two, it took away from the real choise and it became just desition to wich stat you want to raise. Also choosing neutral choice was never good option, because in the end game you need to have one or other stat high enough to get trough gated discussions. You could roleplay and choose what ever you feel right, but then some late game options are just locked from you.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 days ago
One might argue that KOTOR semi-ruined a generation of video games with morality systems. I’m one. I would argue that.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Yeah, I fucking detest the way morality systems in games work.
I don’t think they’re a fundamentally unworkable idea, but very few games have even come close to doing anything good with the concept.
Most just offer you two equal but different benefits, let you pick between them, and call that morality. See Bioshock. And the Mass Effect / KOTOR system always sucked because it punished you for going down the middle (ie, playing a complex character).
One of the only good morality systems I’ve ever seen is Metro 2033. For those who don’t know, the game has a secret personality tracker. It gives you points for taking actions that are pro-social. You get a lot of opportunities in the game to refuse benefits or give up resources to help others. You are never directly rewarded for this. It doesn’t do the bullshit where you give someone some food and they go “Here’s an old gun I had lying around.” Being kind costs you. It also measures the time you spend interacting with people, listening in on conversations, that kind of thing. By the end of the game, if you’ve played your character like someone who cares about other people, you get an opportunity to make a better choice, that leads to a better outcome. If you don’t, the choice is never presented to you at all, because the character you portrayed wouldn’t even think there was a choice to be made in that situation. It’s brilliant, and it completely solves the usual Deus Ex / Mass Effect “Three buttons” ending where nothing leading up to it matters. To be able to make the good ending choice you have to have played the kind of character who would be willing to make that choice.
TalkingFlower@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Then Kreia came and deconstruct the entire morality of Star Wars…
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
If only more people had heeded her message, we wouldn’t have ended up with the “morality” system of Infamous, where it was such a hard choice to either save these people or harvest their energy for your own gain. Decisions, decisions.
TalkingFlower@lemmy.world 1 day ago
“We all have our heroes. And when we watch them fall, we die inside. She made a choice once… and I did not.”
“It is such a quiet thing, to fall. But far more terrible is to admit it.”
With dialogues like these binary morality system just seems dumb.