TL;DR: The new Fable game removes the traditional good and evil morality system, focusing instead on a location-based reputation that changes with each settlement. Players won’t alter their appearance based on deeds but can customize their hero’s look with cosmetics and gear.
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. Just generally giving a shit about other people. 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 in a specific situation, 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 in the first place.
I’d put Witcher 3 and The Alters on the list. Both of them give you choices where it’s not really clear which is the “good” or “bad” one. And if you play through both, you find that neither is one-sided - everything has pros and cons, and even if you judged one option to be morally better in the moment, you still have to live with the negative as well as the positive consequences of your actions.
Maybe you could argue that those aren’t traditional morality systems, but for me, that’s why they work.
I think what you’re getting at here might be better expressed as “Moral choices are more interesting than morality systems.”
Life Is Strange doesn’t have a morality system of any kind, but it has, easily, some of the most interesting moral choices I’ve ever experienced in a video game. One of them doesn’t even affect the ending or later story beats (to my knowledge), and yet I literally had to put the controller down and walk away because I couldn’t make that choice… Both options were so unspeakably horrible, and yet the choice was obviously and urgently necessary.
Mass Effect actually has some really interesting moral quandaries, but they’re massively undercut by the need to force them into the game’s binary moral code, instead of just allowing them to be the complex problems that they are. Morality systems boil every choice down to an arbitrary position on an arbitrary axis.
The Witcher works because it simply presents you with situations and allows you to judge them for yourself. It doesn’t present you with a score card afterwards.
Yeah, I agree, and that’s what I was trying to get at with the last point. I think morality systems in the sense of a binary choice with a scorecard is exactly why those systems are unsatisfying. Real choices have complex consequences and games are more immersive when they show that versus when everything boils down to a simple “good” or “bad.”
The games that do moral choices well do still give you feedback - alternate endings or lasting changes in the world - but it’s not as simple as one number or slider showing a morality spectrum.
Imagine if any other kind of media did the same thing. Like, you’re reading a book, and every few pages there’s a footnote telling you what the protagonist’s current Paragon/Renegade score is based on the decisions they recently made. Would be a miserable experience.
God, I love KOTOR so much, but its consequences have been a fucking disaster for the entire RPG industry.