When Pat said "I think the average person doesn't want to be cruel for no reason, even to fictional characters" I was both surprised and a good bit relieved to hear it from him.
@@cyberninjazero5659 Well I mean... It's GTA... your playing a criminal, the game isn't tracking you being good or evil and half the point of the game is just do whatever in this parody of America as a video game. Sims even more so since your literally playing God and can just reset things whenever you want.
@@cyberninjazero5659 Also the part where that's half the point of the game. Like the actual story in GTA facilitates you doing crime. The Sims meanwhile is not open world or 3rd person but a God game where you fuck with your dolls in your play house. These dolls can just emote.
Disco Elysium does have a line in the loading screens where it's like "Hey, don't be afraid to be a little crazy. You're a cop. People are willing to tolerate a lot of things from people with authority."
Even Kim encourages you to be a little crazy during interviews every now and then, since it can catch people off guard during interviews and lead to different lines of inquiry that you wouldn't have considered otherwise.
My favorite thing about Bioshock morality is, Ken Levine said he regretted how poorly he felt he handled it, and they made the canon ending in Burial at Sea DLC for Infinite "Jack saves all the Sisters" because nobody ever chooses the bad ending lol.
Well that's the point, Jack was the only soul and slave of Rapture who chose kindness despite being lied to, manipulated and made a slave by his genetics (and by someone who was at the time considered one of the bottom feeding European ethnicities) and quite literally delivered innocents from Rapture
The second ending where you harvest is purely a game play thing to get more Adam so I sort of understand where he's coming from. I'm the type of guy who goes for all endings if I can so I like the Rescue ending for story reasons.
maybe if the game was actually difficult in any meaningful way the prospect of harvesting the little sisters for MORE POWER would actually have some weight. the fact the game gives you infinite respawns and you can just throw yourself an unlimited amount of times and kill an encounter through sheer attrition is silly
I like watching Sseth's review on Fable because he talks about how the morality system tells you that Divorcing your wife is numerically worse than sacrificing her to dark gods to reverse your aging.
You can always tell who has never been through a divorce proceeding when these types of topics come up. Its pretty much the real life version of hollowing.
Yes but the question the morality poses is do you need it or are you just simply hoarding it, taking advantage of the situation by killing people you are allowed to kill, you are the protagonist fighting an enemy you oppose in more than just a survival situation, you are also philosophical opponents, basically the game calls you out for being no better than the raider or fascist you just killed, that idea is hammered home when the “good” ending is killing the Dark Ones needlessly
@@manticorephoenix So in a post apocalyptic survival scenario, you’re an evil asshole for conserving resources and not letting anything you find go to waste. Yup that makes sense
@@LordPyro25 No, you're an evil asshole if you go out of your way to kill people who you could have spared just to take resources you don't need, and to watch innocent children starve rather than give them a single bullet. Yes the "Enemies" in the game are communists and nazi's, but they are still human beings trying to find stability and structure in a world that has lost that entirely, and you're evil if you go out of your way to murder them when you could have snuck past, just to take more of those resources that you're most likely stocked up on anyway.
@@LordPyro25 post apocalyptic survival scenario where you the protagonist plays a member of a law enforcement faction, you are not a random Vault dweller given moral carte Blanche just because you disagree with the opinions of a different faction, you are a person who is an environment where humans are dwindling and a finite resource even shorter than the bullets, if you kill everyone that disagrees with you, like the fascists, what does that make you, an evil asshole I’d say, the game calls you out for being a hypocrite, but I understand not everyone wants that level of honesty
@@LordPyro25 on a more simple note to counter your simple dismissive comment, if someone that doesn’t like you murdered you or someone you know for the cash in your wallet, you might not be too eager to hear their “it’s what my character would do” bullshit backstory while your dying
Pat already explained this in the Kotor LP when he said the "good" morality should be more difficult because a good person would take the harder path if it was the right thing to do. And harder doesn't mean "less fun".
This has been talked about to death, but its also why the system in Dishonored sucks so much. They essentially locked you into an ending based on your playstyle. "Do you like combat and action? Well fuck you, here's the bad ending, chump. What do you mean we heavily incentivized combat with all the cool combat toys? You could have just ignored half the game mechanics to get the good ending, you know. Of course the good ending is less fun, thats what "good" means, right? Less fun."
@@tylerlackey1175 Kinda dumb response ngl, the point is that to get the good ending (Which hilariously enough, many people want) it forces you out of about 90% of the incredibly fun to use tools, gadgets and animations that make the game very enjoyable.
@@bigh99267 what a disingenuous thing to say (no surprise it's a reddit-tier argument) you can definitely still kill people and do whatever cringey nonsense you want to do and still get low chaos. In fact I'm pretty sure there's an exact percent of the amount of enemies you can kill before going past low chaos. The fact that you stomp your feet and LIE and pretend you can only choke people out means you've lost all credibility You are a redditor. Not a human.
@@bigh99267 they give you cool stuff like grenades, razor blade mines, a gun you can deck out with enough upgrades to make it a semi auto monster but all I can remember non lethal having is tranq bolts. Even most of the powers are lethal or used to dispose of corpses.
Bioware Morality Choices Paragon: "I will kill you quickly" +5 blue points Neutral: "I will kill you" Nothing Renegade: "I will kill you painfully" +5 red points
"Help, I think me baby is sick!" Paragon: "Screw the war, I'm dropping everything to help you." +5 Blue Neutral: "That sucks, I'm sorry." Renegade: "Pragmatism demands that I eat your baby." +5 Red
Also props to Infamous where the different moral alignments are literally different types of builds, neither of which is better than the other. Evil is more focused on AOEs and mass chaos and collateral damage which can be beneficial in a lot of situations where you're fighting a lot of enemies at once, Good has more of a focus on precision and control over doing direct damage to enemies which can be better in some situations like boss and miniboss battles.
I do like how the Good alignment powers reflect you being much more focused and in control over your actions while the Evil alignment is much more chaotic where you goof around with your powers and end up with a lot of collateral damage in the way. It may be unintentional, but it's a good example of ludonarrative synchronicity, where the narrative and gameplay merge together.
@@cyberninjazero5659 The one thing Im torn on in Infamous 1 is that the final decision you make before the finale locks to you to one path and you can't switch to the opposite Karma from there on. Was it just if you did the evil choice or did both choices lead to that?
@@leithaziz2716 Just Evil. The logic is pretty air-tight if you choose to nuke a city to get more power that's irreversibly Evil but if you chose not to that's just basic humanity. Though since the thing goes off anyway I wish you got to be juiced up by it in the Good Path (Yet another reason Evil is more fun in InFamous 1)
@@cyberninjazero5659 Fair enough. If we're speaking Evil path exclusivly, then I do like how the game punishes you for that since nuking the city is crossing a line too far. I just thought that the same would happen on the good path but it locks you to good. If it did that, then I'd be annoyed. But yeah, for Evil path, it makes total sense.
I like the morality system of Papers Please, because the repercussions of moral choices are so varied. Helping out strangers can mean failing your family. Doing your job properly can actually hinder you, and in one ending, your naivity in following your duty gives you a premature ending. There are a lot of grey areas and I love it.
@@sirlenemodesto2665 for what I've heard the only reason Second Son was a thing was to sell PS4's. It's been years but I don't remember it being a bad game, I think they moved on and maybe sequels can pop up every time a new playstation launch
@@cyberninjazero5659 oh sorry I forgot to say games. But speaking of the first game I was fond of both the clean yellow outfit that was indeed so cool that all the sequels got them as pre order bonus and the the walking black and grey zombie. Like seriously I remember being pissed when I first played it because the loses his old outfit
@@ricardomiles2957 If I remember correctly most people did not like the new mc and powers but it was a good InFamous game. Atleast that is what I remember, still don't get why it died
One of my favourite morality systems is probably SW:TOR's attempt at adapting the Light side/Dark side dichotomy to being a member of the full dark side Sith Empire. Where "light side" becomes pragmatic/noble evil and "dark side" becomes frothing lunatic. In an early quest on the Sith Empire homeworld, a mid level manager on an architecture project warns you that his boss is abusing his power and torturing and killing the slaves for fun, which really slows down the process. The dark side resolution to this sidequest is "hey that sounds like a good time, can I get in on this torturing slaves for fun racket?" and the light side resolution is "This is an outrage! We'll never get our monument of great evil done in time without slave labour!" and then you go kill his boss and promote the quest giver to oversee the project.
i remember i played for a while back in the day and i distinctly remember whatever the sith tank class was called started with you interrogating prisoners and getting moral choices on what to do with them, and if you went full dark side and killed them all your trainer would basically call you an idiot for wasting potential assets
I still think Silent Hill 2's morality system is yet to be beat. Its so simple, James' actions in gameplay, how you treat Maria, or how you take care of yourself in terms of health being what ultimately decides the ending is just so fucking radical
It's kind of what Metro was TRYING to go for, but it was a little too nuanced, for something that already had "how many times did you look at the letter from your wife, totally referencing how guilty James feels" to its detriment, haha. 'Do it in this few saves' is also an interesting one that pins on the player though.
I really like "invisible" morality systems in general. Where the game isn't flagging moments with a big "choose a red or blue option to gain good or bad morality points," but passively noting whether you tipped a street kid a money-bullet, or ignored him. If course, that assumes that the actions being judged make sense--as the boys describe with their "stealing vs looting" discussion. I always forgive the Bioshock 1 morality system, though, for the simple fact that it didn't muck around with half measures. You juiced a little girl who was crying and begging you not to, just to get a small amount of loot? Bam, straight to evil ending. No pat on the back for only juicing half the little girls, you fricken psychopath.
I recall in Bioshock 2 that if you killed only a couple of the Little Sisters, you can get a unique choice at the end, where you can choose between the neutral ending or the bad ending.
You know what I honestly think is the worst; background romance checks. Dragon's Dogma for being a great game, has a huge problem with it choosing who your character is into. "What? You gave copious gifts to (X NPC)? Did their sidequests with the best outcome possible? You even gave them that item that is basically an engagement ring, that is specifically stated that you and this person are bound for the rest of your lives? Too bad, you talked to the blacksmith too much. Enjoy. Fucker."
@@harlannguyen4048 I'm not really sure how the neutral ending works or is unlocked in 2. Do you just die in the process or does something happen that causes it?
@@vahlok1426 i fucking know right who thought it was a good idea what if i want to be single!! And you cant romance you pawn the one person you want to romance cause you made him/her into your waifu!?
My favourite thing about the Mass Effect morality system, is they have quick time for Renegade only and Paragon only. So you can do a random deed without losing out on the other. 'Shephard is amazing, she's always nice to everyone and chooses to save lives. She did kill that one guy surrendering though but forget about that.'
Is overlord the worst with that dissonance? The lead up is always so angry and sympathetic to David that I’m sure Shep just suddenly pivoting to “Oh okay you can keep him then” is jarring as hell
I'll never get over beating Metro last light, getting the bad end, finding out there was a GOOD ending, and then realizing looking at the point system that i had tanked my karma by being a fucking teen and going through the strip club scene and getting too many lap dances.
@@shadowrobot7708 I believe I saw it in a steam guide on the morality system, in the release version of Metro:LL. It said that "purchasing a lap dance is -1" or something.
The last take from Pat is an interesting one, because while KOTOR 1 may be incentivising you to always stick with a certain option morally and that may be considered a bad morality system, that is literally the point that Kreia is making in the second game, the force seems to be incentivising you to always be one thing or another instead of making decisions with your own reasoning and logic. In a very meta way, the game is incentivising you to be a bad guy in KOTOR 1 because that's literally what the dark side does, it corrupts people.
Then Kreia's whole point is that The Force itself is a very evil thing because it forces people to fight over and over the same thing. There's no running from it, the Jedi and Sith WILL clash, billions with vanish because of crazy super weapons and wars. There's no real peace, just rebuilding for the next conflict.
@@ExeErdna That is exactly it, that is why she wants to kill it permanently. To her she is literally trying to kill a parasitic god thing that affects and influences all living things, she wanted to effectively erase 99.9% of life in the galaxy for the chance that the .1% has a chance at true freedom and are able to shape their own destiny.
@@philosophos4893 this is such an example of reaching in the conflict design based on Force concept. Alternativery, Crea could help light side win and there will be no need to do anything because everyone will be happy - WAY less cumbersome than the original task. Sith are literally instigators of conflict every time - without them there is no global conflict and no bad side to the Force. Any attempt to turn dark side vs light side on its head is so weird and illogical. What is this "true freedom" concept - there are already races that are unaffected by force, and they behave the same as others - force is just something that enhances existing features (worldview, etc) - only dark side takes control. This is the point concepts like these miss - Light side and Dark side are not meant to be equal - lately they have been made to appear so as a byproduct of having to create balanced storylines for games and some other media, but dark side is literally wrong side, it is meant to be powerful so that i could be defeated through rising to embody the light side, because it is inner's best self amplified.
@@T1Slam The reason Kreia doesn't help "the light side" is because there is no "light side" there is the force and the dark side of the force. She used to be a master Jedi, then she was a lord of the Sith, then she was nothing stripped away from the force. She was a historian, and saw that the force seems to be a living thing that takes control of people's lives, it influences them subtly so that it can achieve this "balance". Trillions have died before "The Chosen One" brought "Balance" to the force. Kreia saw this happen throughout history time and time again, Sith will always rise again because of the teachings of the Jedi, it is inherent to their ideology and code. She wanted to kill force because she wanted those who survived to have a real life without the force influencing their lives.
2:35 Regarding the ending of Metro 2033, the bad ending is canon not because few players discovered a good ending. And because of the book, the game was a play adaptation of the book. upd: sorry about my english, i rare write in english.
This is why Yahtzee said he is making his next game in a way that the player just chooses their character's personality at the start (from a selection of 9 personalities). The dialog, and which party members get along with you best, are all based on that initial choice. Kind of like the "bastard slider" Woolie describes.
I thought of that idea as well. I'm interested to see how it works in a real game. It makes you think about what the point of dialog choices actually is in games.
Also when talking about the Bioshock morality problem: Prey has a similar scenario where you are given the option to either spare a criminal or kill him to harvest exotic material. This is a legit morality choice because: 1. Sparing him gives you a password to get into a room that there are like 3 ways to easily get into without the password, which means you virtually don't get a real reward for sparing him, and 2. The amount of exotic material you get for killing him is FUCKING INSANELY MASSIVE and exotic material is EXTREMELY valuable because it can be straight up used to craft neuromods once you find the recipe for that and are basically a shitton of free levels to your RPG elements. In the end your personal feelings about your in game actions are the ONLY reason to spare him.
In a simplified way, that what's morality and ethics is supposed to be. Did you ever realized that you can, at almost any given moment face scenarios like that daily if you deal with enough people? But in real life NORMALLY people don't think about their "stats and materials for crafting"
I would also add that it's heavily implied that many prisoners used to harvest exotic material on Talos 1 are actually innocent. If you look at his rap sheet he'll admit that at least some of it is true, but it's never made plain whether or not he was actually guilty of everything on the list.
Heh, exotic materials are not really *rare* per se. You get boatloads of it pretty early on if you get the xenologist perk. I can only see the murder as mildly useful if you decide to go for the 100% alien powers 0% human powers achievement. An achievement that would mostly require you to rely on scanning to get powers anyways
Is pretty much like the "do you really need that ammo?" Situation, sure something as trivial and that has much more value in the potential of being used is dumb but that's the idea. Ok, we are disagreeing hard here, but do you really need to to insert needles in my soldier's penis?
The "you can kill him but you cant torture him" argument seems logical to me if im being honest. Ever heard of a mercy kill? Don't stoop to your enemies' level.
@@gloomsi Some morons do it, no idea why. Thankfully, it's always been a very minority thing, but some people will self-censor basically any word. Fucking say it with your chest, boys: *Fuck Nazis*
Too many morality systems work on a binary and morality is not like that. Always stuck as either Golden age Superman or Eric Sparrow. It's part of why I always interpreted the paragon/renegade system of mass effect to be more of a personality system than a moral one, which is why it always annoyed me that you don't get points for neutrality. There's way to much emphasis on morality being expressed through hard numbers.
Another weird choice of Bioshock's morality system was that it gave you instant confirmation that sparing the Little Sisters was the right decision. Before the very first time you get to choose a LS's fate, Atlas seems like he's got a point: he says that becoming a LS is a one-way process and that Tennenbaum saying otherwise is just a desperate attempt to sooth her own guilt-ravaged conscience, and as unsavory as it might be harvesting them means a far better chance of saving Atlas' family. But...then Tennenbaum gives you a plasmid that lets you _instantly_ turn any LS from a spooky demon child into a normal little girl. So even before the twist when you still have every reason to think that a good man's family is in danger (and before you know that you ultimately get more ADAM for sparing them), you have absolute and immediate confirmation that you are choosing to kill an innocent child you could have otherwise saved. One possible fix for this? Just take away the rescue plasmid, and make the source of ADAM be the unrefined stuff in their syringe. Have Tennenbaum say something about how they're conditioned to return to her if they lose their syringes, and that's where she has the means of undoing the process. Then you could spend the game all the way up until you reach Tennenbaum's base wondering if she was telling the truth.
I remember in Fallout 3 convincing Tenpenny to let extremist ghouls who then kill everyone (mostly a bunch of racist assholes but also including a really nice washed up radio star who as far as I can tell did nothing wrong) into the tower gives you good karma, but stealing "weird meat" from the shack of FUCKING CANNIBALS who you've ALREADY KILLED IN SELF DEFENSE with the express purpose of using them to fertilize anti-rad fungus to HELP KIDS NOT DIE OF RADIATION POISONING gives you bad karma. Modern Fallout game's morality systems are FUCKED.
Well, in Metro case, it's more like "Do you need it? Take it. You don't need it for now? Leave it so OTHER people who'll go this way may take it if they need it". The Metro resources are way more slim in lore then it is shown in videogame.
@@teacakes6861 That makes even less sense then. Wouldn't you take these resources and give them to the people at the place you live? I will admit that I never played one of these games but don't you stay in a communal place? Why are you going to leave supplies hoping someone that isn't a murderous psychopath picks these supplies up INSTEAD. Also don't you use ammo as money in those games?
@@RavenCloak13 you use specialized ammo as money, but about halfway through each shop's stop popping up so it just becomes normal ammo. In the games you never "go back to the place you live" you're always heading further and deeper into the shit. So effectively your taking supplies AWAY from civilization when you loot. Looting in the games is also just treated as a necessary evil, but ONLY when its necessary. In the metro theres no afterlife so if you die and your ghost isnt eaten by an anomaly you just stay at the site of your death forever. Imagine watching someone defile your corpse for supplies they didnt even need. Itd be like being robbed by jeff bezos.
@@ImaTroper Eh not really. I'm dead and can't interact with the world just being stuck there? Rather someone use what's left. Not to mention I can't really call that defiling when they dead and this isn't the Egyptian afterlife so they couldn't take it anyway. Though if what another comment explained is true then if Heaven and Hell were nuked (which also explains that they were real and thus a lot of implications there) then that means no way those supplies are surviving normally either. Might as well take them since they are going to go to waste other wise. Never knew about the Heaven and Hell being nuked though.
Surprised nobody is talking about Overlord's "morality" system. You aren't a good guy no matter your choices, just whether you're a destroyer of worlds or tyrant of the land.
That's really the second game's morality system, the first game's is more about practicality vs being an evil dick for selfish reasons. The vast majority of the "good" decisions are just things that make sense in the long term: let the people have their food back, don't burn down the whole place to kill one enemy, don't let elves go extinct instead of just grabbing money, go with the smart woman instead of the hot one because she's good with strategy and a valuable asset, give the people one last chance instead of punishing them for doubting you because the guy they were afraid of was legitimately terrifying to most people until you kill him, you don't really have much use for the elve's statue so they can have it. You're BETTER than all the former heroes, because you were one. You were probably the most selfless one since you tried to take the last overlord out in a sacrifice play, although oberon (The other one that was more tragic than villain) at least offered to go after you. I don't know why the whole practical vs being an evil selfish dick approach appeals to me so much, but it lets me care more about my overlord than the second game did, which was just mind control or destroy everything.
@@MrAsaqe I hate when stories say “The protagonist is the bad guy fighting good guys” then coward out by making the Good guys either just as bad as the protagonist or worse. At that point the protagonist is not a villain at best he’s an Anti-Hero, at worst he’s practically the hero.
@@Broomer52 Technically the narrative may still work if they were good guys once while the evil overlord never was good to begin with since at least if they realize the shit they got themselves into from complacency or pragmatic decisions becoming ruthless they could shape up and take the lessons to heart while the evil overlord doesn't care. But by then it's probably too little too late for them
There is one game which I feel like needs mentioning but it's too obscure for that. Soul Sacrifice. A PS Vita exclusive Monster Hunter clone. You play as a mage and fight demonic shit along the way, and as the name suggests you sacrifice a lot of shit along the way including your organs. It is the same cartoonishly extreme bipolar system where you either EAT PEOPLE or redeem their souls, no matter how fucked up they might be. But there is a catch. The roles are reversed. Throughout the whole game you are told you are supposed to eat people because that's how things go and redeeming them makes you a bad guy.
I remember when I was playing ME2 for the first time, hadn't realized how binary the game is with the choices and their benefits. So I'm on Okeer's recruit mission, and I found the mercenary who goes and explains the war that's going on, and I offered to heal him for being an idiot. He tried to call reinforcements on me, and I took the Renegade interrupt to shoot him. Mark Meer did a really good job with how Shepard goes from "Listen I really don't need to help you but I'll do it as the right thing to do" to "My patience is short for enemies, so if you want to intentionally antagonize me, you're the one paying."
Can't you kinda just paragon or renegade whichever crew member you want as long as you stay consistent? Play miranda renegade then play jacob paragon for example.
11:32 I don't remember where I heard it but, it struck me as correct. In almost all games the "evil choice" is only there so that the player can feel good for not choosing it. The devs know 80 to 90 percent of players are going to go down the "good" path but, they will feel even better if there was at least the temptation of "evil".
18:50 Disco does sort of have this in the form of one of the loading screen tip that says that people won't mind too much when you say outrageous things. The problem is that the player doesn't know that applies to their internal dialogue as well.
Thankfully New Vegas made negative karma basically irrelevant: you did a naughty? Just go shoot some fiends for a bit. Its basically impossible to have negative or even neutral karma if you don't go around killing indiscriminately or stealing. Stealing is basically a non-issue because loot is plentiful and valuable, so there's few reasons to ever steal
12:00 -- I think you can make the evil path being the 'quick, fun' path if the hero route is the hard but slow road. Being good is its own reward -- just make being a scumbag super profitable.
What undertale does so well is that it directly ties morality into gameplay. There is no button prompt that decides the ending for you, instead you simply play the game and set pieces are set up in the background based on your unconscious decisions. That's why there are 25 different endings, but most players will only get three: neutral, pacifist, and genocide in that order. The first is simply playing the game as intended, then actively trying to make everyone happy, then actively trying to kill everyone. It's simply the natural progression of how we think and tackle problems that the game exploits through its mechanics.
Undertale is pretty unique because it doesn't offer outright rewards for choosing one route over another either. Its strength comes almost completely from how well it gets you attached to its characters. It manipulates the player into feeling genuine guilt for their actions should they choose to satiate their own curiosity instead of being nice and going Pacifist (once they understand the mechanics, at least). The only "rewards" I can think of in Genocide routes are Undyne and Sans' fights, plus the knowledge of having achieved another ending + bonus ending (even though these are very, VERY BAD endings!). Smartly, Undyne's fight is placed halfway through the run, just soon enough to make you hope that you'll get another good fight like that (even though it's still horrifying) and Sans' is at the very end, which could make the whole grind feel like it's been "worth it" to some. Outside of that though, Genocide is a grind-filled chore with less humor, less fun and fufilling battles, almost no puzzles and barten overworld maps. But that's kind of facinating, isn't it? You just _have_ to see more of it, because even if Genocide is dark as hell and everyone hates your guts (except Papyrus), you're most likely intrigued at that point. Whether Genocide is worth it or not is really up to the player and how much empathy they're capable of feeling, perhaps even moreso than Pacifist. If a player feels no empathy then they could easily play all routes without limits. Undertale basically tricks you into punishing yourself emotionally for making violent decisions, turning _you, personally_ into its morality system rather than limiting your drops or locking away any skill trees.
I think NV has the excuse that the reputation system more or less supercedes the karma system. It still plays a part, but it's minor compared to how it was in 3 and especially to rep.
That Fallout example Pat mentioned is straight up wrong though lol. Looting corpses is never a karma loss, and if the person who owns the item has Evil or Very Evil karma you don't lose Karma. The red text is there to denote stealing more than anything.
My problem is that the 'morality' system in metro isn't about doing good its about learning more about the world around you, also I don't think there is a looking body thing because I got the good ending while looting every single body. Killing doesn't really punish you unless the enemies are only defending themselves or their family. Again I'm not 100% sure but still metro is my fav for morality for the main point that I experienced = "you kill who you have to, take what you need, but you must understand what you are doing or else you're just like the people you're hurting"
It's also hard to judge the Metro games since the originals versus the Redux versions heavily changed a lot of the morality moments. The original did have a lot of very obtuse moments, but Redux smoothed them out for the most part. I was afraid I was gonna get the bad end, but I still got the good ending despite killing loads of enemies (mostly the Nazis, cause fuck em). maybe nobody truly knows how it works, cause it's certainly an enigma
Here's a "nice" morality system: SMT IV. While in general it annoys me because you only have chaotic or lawful choices and in order to be neutral you need to be equal parts an authoritive snitch and amoral psychopath. SMT IV's neutral ending requires the points from your choices to be between the threshold of chaotic and lawful but the final choice before being thrown to one of the three routes is a hard binary choice between chaos and law that puts many points into the alignment of your choice. This means that if you had been a mostly neutral person then you will be thrown outside to one of the alignments by the end, so what you need to do is to be leaning to one alignment and at the final choice choose the other alignment. Yes, you need to be chaotic and at the end make a hard lawful choice that contradicts what you have been doing and saying so far. As a bonus, in order to know your current alignment there's an npc that will comment on your current state("you are crazy, dude" for chaos, "you are so polite" for Law). But this charachter will stop being available to check like 10 hours before you make that final choice, so after a point if you want to be neutral you will have to play things by ear.
I fucking hated 4’s. 4’s the greatest example of how fucking wrong you can design one. Once you know the generic secret that the Jedi and sith in this analogy are both bad endings you just pick the options to be grey if you’re lucky it works for you. You’re options just suck and personal expression dies immediately.
@Total Destruction which really doesn't work, because the choices they throw at you are moral choices. The game's framing of Centrism being the "most moral" in game that could very easily be read as Class-Conflict (which I honestly wish it stuck to it's guns on this one) while framing the oppressed Proletariat as unhinged and evil and corrupted (secondarily portraying demons as vampiric monsters while also portraying them as sentient beings, which definitely has some implications 😬) and their monarch, racist (they literally refer to anyone living in Tokyo as "unclean") oppressors as being equally bad is fucking silly. I'd honestly be more okay with it if EVERY ending was a Bad Ending and they committed to the bleak, nihilistic tone the other endings have, but their favoritism for the super awesome Japanese Divinities means they can't call you out for being an indecisive coward, and instead reward you with the Good Ending because you "stayed to your path" (by completely flip-flopping your morality in nonsensical ways) This is without getting into the uncomfortable antisemitism levied at the Law alignment in these games, which could be fixed by branching out to other predominant religions (WHICH THEY'VE DONE). I love this series, and I really love IV's style, soundtrack, and even it's characters, but they can't get over their favoritism, and that goes for almost every Mainline MegaTen (I, II, SJ, and V partially excluded).
The rise of morality systems feels like a misstep in the evolution of videogames. Look at Fallout or Deus Ex: the lack of explicitly "good" and "bad" player decisions actually makes the earliest titles far more nuanced rpgs than the most recent installments.
The witcher is the best type, the bad or good endings are based on how you treat the characters that are vital to tthe story. Not just "ohhh no, geralt you killed 200 bandits you a bad person bro". Like, let me kill or be nice when I want to, the world is shit already if this many things are trying to kill me.
@@RipOffProductionsLLC "Don't worry that those people might be just as bad as the people you killed. Nah, it's fine. Don't give some of these supplies to the people you live with in the Metro's."
You wanna know what sucks worse about the Metro morality system? In the redux version of 2033, at least on consoles, the endings are broken. I got near maximum good karma, but still got the ending where you nuke the Dark Ones, and this happens every time. That said, I am proud to say I got the best ending of Last Light on my first try.
@@Samm815 I remember plain as day getting slammed with the bad end after going through the trouble of getting all the positive karma I could. Looked online after trying again and again to trigger the good end, and found a topic that stated that the end state was in fact, at least at the time, broken and only the bad end would trigger.
Did you remember to shoot the laser box? I also recall getting the bad ending, but that was because I forgot I had to shoot the targeting system at the end =/
I always thought Bioshock 2 had an interesting use of its morality system narratively, as while the mechanics directly affect the player, the mortality changes are more based on Eleanor's views and interpretations than Subject Delta. This way, it allows the player to have any number of reasons for making their choices (further helped by the ambiguity behind Delta's character), with the moral outcomes being handled through Eleanor at the end. Thus, the game's mortality system is more about the impact your choices can have on others instead of how they impact you, which is further highlighted due to the parental nature of Delta and Elenor's relationship.
Its crazy that Woolie mention how Disco Elysium should ease you into the crazier choices when one of the loading screen texts literally tells you "You should pick the crazier choices because people feel obligated to respect authority figures"
During the fight with miranda and jack you can still smooth things over after if you fail both checks. Even if you have full paragon or renegade somebody can still die random in the suicide mission. Opinion and mood can vary greatly depending on the situation.
I haven't played Bioshock 1 but I have played Minerva's Den, and I really like the morality system it had there, where you don't *just* choose to kill or spare the Little Sisters for ADAM, but you rather you have an option to be their Big Daddy for a bit and defend them as they collect ADAM for you. You could kill them straight when you get them, or take the hard route of fighting for them, spending resources as you do so to get it without killing them... OR if you want to be an absolute monster and maximize your ADAM you be their big daddy until the collect all the Adam they can get and you harvest them. Storywise Minerva's Den has one ending but however you take it the ending lands so you're making the choices not for ending quality but for morality and interesting and difficult gameplay in and of itself. The Big Sister thing is a bit dicey though, they're a boss fight that spawns once all the little sisters are gone *period,* whether you spare them or harvest them. I do agree that them only appearing if you kill them would have been the most sensical choice, but that would mean that players taking the more difficult human option would miss out on an entire enemy type. The logic of it being "they hunt those who collect tons of ADAM as a last line of defense" does make a good amount of sense and highlight the hypocrisy/absurdity of Rapture's philosophy in "oh you can do whatever, no one will stop you, but also I must must must remain in control and prevent others from getting more powerful than me."
I always think of ME3 and the mission for the cure. I purposely act as renegade up until the option to shoot Mordin just because it's more dramatic to have Shepard ay least struggle with the idea.
*Renagade* was, but the problem was that to unlock Renegade options (bottom left) you also had to pick the (bottom right) options where you deliberately go out of your way to be a petty dickhead purely for its own sake.
The most complicated morality system I've seen was Ultima IV, where you had to keep track of 8 different virtue meters that would occasionally interfere with each other. It was an interesting take on morality, at least, highlighting that sometimes you have to make tradeoffs between one good and another good.
The worst morality systems are the one where reality changes beyond the choice you made. For example, in InFamous 1 there was a point where you had to choose between saving your girlfriend and saving a group of people. If you saved the group of people, your girlfriend dies, but if you tried to save her instead, it turns out she was in the group that you ignored and she dies anyway. It's these kind of things that make the "choices don't matter" complaint so prominent in games with morality systems.
You know what would have made that scene cool. If instead of your choice in the moment deciding where she is, it's decided based on your morality up to that point. If you have been evil the whole game she is in the group, and the other is an imposter. If you have been good she is the one alone. That way it's more like the villain is predicting your behavior. If you save her as the good guy, it's a jab at how fragile your heroism is. If you save the group as the villain it can be painted as a redemption story, or the protagonist out smarting the villain or something.
Okay but if all I wanted was to get the ending that was canon then I'd just go read the Metro novels. If the morality system in these games is so unwieldy and hard to parse that you can accidentally get the canon ending even if you're deliberately going for the other one to the point of occasionally consulting a guide like I did, then it's fair to critique it.
What I like in FTL is that the morality is pure flavor. There are no multiple endings or character relationships to juggle, it's just a matter of making it to the end. But the game is hard as shit and unless you're playing on easy, can be very stingy with resources. You want more? Refuse surrenders from enemy ships. Loot supplies that could either be a useful weapons cache or vaccines meant for refugees. I think it says something about the conflict you're a part of that the best way to go about it is to be a scumbag war criminal.
Playing Warframe. Doing The War Within quest. The Elder Grineer Queen is getting away. Do I...? Sun: let her go. Neutral: kill her myself Moon: let Teshin kill her. My understanding: "Slurm Queen over there has been pulling at my homeboy like a puppet on a string this whole time, it's only right that he gets the honors." _(Pick Moon option, my character _*_Commands Teshin to kill the Elder Queen, using the power of her dax command staff that I stole from her to free him to compel him to do it against his will.)_* Me: Wha- No! I didn't want it to go that way at all!! _Dammit, Canada!!_
Can a game with multiple endings, just straight up, tell me how its morality system works after I beat it once, so I don't have to worry about that after the first play trough?
Infamous just straight up tells you what your options are and how you boost your morality. The issue is that you really rob the story of its strength by going the "evil" route because it's not setup in a way where both paths are simillarly compelling. Evil Cole/Delsin is just a one-dimensional dick for the sake of it, meanwhile, the good route feels the most realised. The big exception is the ending of Infamous 2 where both choices are compelling and make sense for Cole to make. I really like that one. (big Infamous fan here)
@@leithaziz2716 normally, at least in the way I see it specially back then is that devs normally see the evil route to be in the same vibes of these videos of people playing Telltale games and being an asshole, with the good ending being the intended one, resulting in the story normally being better in good routes.
I've got a fun one, especially since Pat mentioned paladins. Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, both fun games, but you can so easily screw yourself over if you play a paladin, monk or any class that has an alignment restriction. Kingmaker, just locks you out of decisions completely. Sorry, you're not a neutral alignment so you have to choose one tribe to commit genocide against even though it's very obvious both tribes have been played against each other by the current arc villain and tricked into having their war. But the big, big issue is that they took the classic alignment system from DnD/Pathfinder and put it on a circle instead of a grid. So, lawful is each, chaos west, good north and evil south. Then the circle is cut into pie slices for each alignment with a small circle in the center for true neutral. So here's where it gets fun. Every good decision you make moves you north on the chart. Also, you have a bunch of dialog choices just randomly talking to people. Like not major decisions that impact anything, but just how you talk to your friends where you'll be given dialog choices that are marked as good, evil, lawful or chaotic. So anyway, I'm playing a paladin, a party member was having a hard time, so I chose to be supportive, the good actions. As a result, it moved my little alignment dot north out of the lawful good section and into the neutral good section, causing me to lose my powers because I was nice to a friend when they needed someone. But it gets better. I got my powers back about 15 minutes later. Not by buying an atonement scroll... But I got an event running the crusade where there were a bunch of sick kids. There was the good option to work on treating them, and a lawful option to just kill them all to eliminate the risk of the plague spreading. So after losing my powers for being nice to a friend, I gained them back for killing a bunch of sick kids which dragged me back into lawful. Like, I feel like child murder, even if you're worried about an illness spreading should pretty much be an automatic fall for paladins, but with how the game works it just gave me my powers right. For an extra kicker, a lot of the lawful choices in the game treat all crimes are equal and are clearly lawful evil actions. So to play a lawful good paladin you may need to randomly execute people for minor crimes, or even if they're the victim to keep yourself in the lawful area. Sure, this person was possessed by an evil spirit that drove them crazy, but they're still guilty of desertion for not reporting in to their commander. So, after defeating the evil spirit that was manipulating them the lawful action is to murder them on the spot. It gets even more fun/insane in Wrath of the Righteous if you follow the Aeon Mythic Path, which is a lawful neutral path that cares about maintaining the natural order. It starts off simple enough other than treating all crimes as evil so better be ready to execute or jail people for the most minor crimes. But, at one point in a certain chapter, you spend a lot of time among demons, who are always chaotic evil. Because it's within the natural balance of the universe for demons to be chaotic evil, you instead now have to look for ways to punish anyone with a lawful or good alignment for going against the natural order.
I didn't get far into Wrath before putting it aside for later due to the rather janky Crusade system, but this entry's change to how they handle alignment was pretty jarring. I kind of respect it for forcing players to consider the situation and the consequences of an action and not just its alignment effect, but on the other hand I would NOT want to play an alignment-restricted character type in this game! The most glaring issue I ran into is that 90% of Lawful dialogue options amount to 'The rules would allow us to kill / jail / torture / whatever this probably innocent person so we should do so immediately!'. They code and tag the alignment options on a binary scale (Lawful or Chaos, Good or Evil, or Neutral) but still write them for an actual alignment like the previous game (Lawful Evil, Chaotic Good, etc) because it's actually impossible to write a nuanced reaction to a complex situation without placing the character on a specific point on the alignment chart. You can't write just 'Good' or 'Chaotic' or 'Lawful' options, you always end up more specific, even if that's specifically in the middle somewhere. It's possible by simplifying the mechanical implementation of alignment throughout the game, they have actually reduced the ability to play cohesive characters. I've suspected for awhile that a 'proper' Paladin playthrough could be hilariously unethical, and the story of someone having to execute plagued children instead of treating them in order to get their powers back has certainly confirmed that.
And this is why is why the only way DnD alignments works is playing on tabletop. The only setting in which if the DM makes a sensibly stupid decision on what alignment to make certain actions, such as in your example, you can look at them dead in eye and OOC ask em what on earth are they thinking
@@defonoteleazar4998 I feel like the alignment shits could work if it was only tied to major decisions and not literally every little conversation. Like big story moments, like if you at the super big thing that happens at mythic tier 7 (avoiding saying what in case anyone reading worries about spoilers) I feel choosing demon, lich, or swarm should pretty much be grounds for an alignment shift. Though, I was doing an interesting experiment to see if I can do the demon route as a paladin without falling. The answer is yes, but I have to fail one tier quest, making my max tier 9. But still, it's really messed up that killing a bunch of sick kids made Iomodea like me again and give me my powers back.
@@Stromko I mostly wanted to play a paladin and go the demon route to see if it was possible to complete it without falling. Little did I know I would fall for being too good and not for, you know doing demon things. You can murder as many people as you want as long as you're polite in conversation. Unrelated, there was a patch that came out I want to say about a week ago that fixed a lot of stuff in crusade system. Game is still far from perfect. But.... It's Owlcat. It took them a year to get Kingmaker running properly.
To be fair, the cannon ending to Metro 2033 is that way because it's like that in the original novel. Good points, but I disagree on the morality system being bullshit. It makes it difficult to get the good ending, yeah, but that's the point. It isn't easy being the good guy.
Ok but even bioshock did that with some semblance of intelligence. What metro appears to constitute as “being a good guy” is fucking dumb if you decide to nuke this world you’re a pacifist in because you kept going to strip clubs.
Id argue SMT games are pretty good because they always personify the route with a representative that you appeal to. Plus it works well if you play according to your own beliefs in your first run.
The representatives are always pretty great as a mirror of yourself. The issue the series has is the conflation of ideology and morality, and the series punishing you for leaning strongly either way, because they're always dark, bad endings, while the route where you didn't commit to any ideal or even solid morals is almost always The Good Ending. I really hate the neutral routes in these games, because they're always obtuse, nonsensical, and such a huge cop-out. I do, however, like that Nocturne punishes you for not taking any sides (not even Lucifer) by essentially calling you a wimp and dooming you to wander an empty world, no doubt littered with the corpses of those who stood in the way of... nothing.
God I want to see one of these two doing a full LP of Alpha Protocol with its "morality" system of inter-personal interactions. Because Mike Thorton's Professional/Suave/Aggressive is amazing for dialogue.
Yeah, for my money that's probably the best "morality" system. Not silly polar extremes on an arbitrary one dimensional cosmic sliding scale, but a set of approaches that can have differing consequences depending on how other people are inclined to react to them. There's even the provision for switching it up wildly and still making sense, since the protagonist is described as good at putting up a front to manipulate people. It's up to your interpretation how much is his real personality and how much is stringing people along, and both befriending people and angering them can have positive results, there are no real wrong choices and the game doesn't condescend one or another way of doing things (Go lethal? It tracks your kills in 'orphans created'. Nonlethal? It tracks the enormous lifelong medical costs you've inflicted on people with all those broken bones and cracked skulls).
at first I was confused about that 92% paragon stat for mass effect because renegade shepard isn't even that bad in the first game. they're just an asshole maverick who likes to solve problems through threats and violence. but then I played it through again and realised just how little the dialogue choices actually affect your morality. you can be a super nice guy to everyone or you can be a space racist and it doesn't matter. the most significant factor on your morality is quest outcomes. the dialogue that does affect your morality typically only gives you 2 points. quests can grant you dozens of points. so you can be a renegade asshole in dialogue but still quite easily end up largely paragon because you did a bunch of side quests and you chose paragon solutions. simply doing the side quests on feros, as any rpg player would, grants you 32 paragon points all together. not gunning down the colonists at the end of feros nets you another 32 paragon points. not killing the rachni queen on noveria is 24 paragon points. completing the quarantine quest on noveria is another 24 paragon points. not killing wrex on virmire gets you 28 paragon points. another 12 paragon points for the virmire side quests. 28 paragon points for saving the council. plus, the most popular origins for shepard give you a paragon head start. that's half a paragon bar without any dialogue choices. the problem is that dedicating to a 100% renegade playthrough means cutting quests short and being a murdering monster. it only gets worse as you get further into the series. I bet later mass effect games are even more skewed towards paragon because renegade shepard can get comically evil, sith lord style.
Im honestly not sure that checking if you needed ammo shit is true considering all I did was A: not kill the cultists in the first area, B: I forget what you do in the 2nd area and C: you just again not kill people on either side and im pretty sure I got the good ending.
That sounds like Exodus, and they really simplified the system for that game. It actually took me three playthroughs before I was able to trigger the bad ending.
13:45 Tyranny. In basically every game, being "evil" or "immoral" amounts to being "cruel" or "violent" or "psychotic." Not difficult to avoid being that. In Tyranny? You are a high ranking member of an army in service of an evil god. Hell, more than that, you're a damn judge and lawyer. Being "good" in that game is fucking difficult, harrowing, and morally challenging. My first playthrough of Tyranny was one of the most important playthroughs of any gave I've ever had. I thought I was being smart. Placating the commanders, working my way up the chain of command, prepared for my golden moment to change the game from within, betray the army and save the world. That moment never came. The game flat out implied that I wasn't being brave or patient, I was being safe. Comfortable. That my instinct to obey authority figures was stronger than my sense of right and wrong. By endgame on playthrough 1, I was all "Oh, but I wasn't being sincere in my heart!" And the game had the balls to go "Cool bro, nobody gives a shit what's in your heart. You've been a GREAT leader in this evil army the whole time. Showed real initiative, a hard worker. Good job! Hail Kyros!" I hated it. It made me miserable. Made me question my own relationship to power and evil in the real world. Made me realize how banal evil can be; the evil of complicity and obedience. Only after a day or two did the power of what happened really hit me. And then I went back in, ready to find a way to tear down the Overlord's army for real. Truthfully, I think Pat would hate a system that actually demanded attentiveness and self reflection to be good. Maybe I'm wrong, but Pat seems to value clarity and transparency in game systems more-so than the story those systems can tell, or the emotional impact of being surprised.
IMO the problem with Metro's morality system is that the Good Points threshold to get the good ending is pretty strict, to the point where I made all the obvious "good" decisions like donating to beggars, saving people, etc., and I was even loosely following a guide to get some of the more obscure stuff for both my playthroughs of the first two games and *still* managed to get the bad ending both times. I understand what the games are going for artistically with that choice, but from an "actually playing the game" standpoint it still isn't great.
Favorite Renegade interrupt from ME2 is actually the "How about goodbye." Line from the window toss, just because it comes right the fuck outta nowhere in that mission and everything else gets played super straight and serious as if that didn't just happen.
Looting does not give you bad ending in Metro serie. It's when you killing every enemy you came across and skip their conversation. For Metro serie "Good" moral point is given when you help people, learn about other people and that include your enemy. You didn't even need to spare all enemy.
God, as soon as I started Mass Effect 1 and realized that you needed to hit certain thresholds in order to even respond with either paragon or renegade options made edit my save in all 3 games to give me max paragon and renegade just so I wouldn't have to worry about that shit. ME2 goes so much farther that I'm really glad I did.
I actually like how the morality was done....on paper. They failed in implementation. First of all both way to play the game are fun in their own way. Second it does not change just the ending. Dialogue and events would change If you play low Chaos. The main problem is the game tells you about the moral system in the very beginning. That was a mistake. They should've let you play through the game as a mass killer, no mention of how to go low Chaos. Then you finish the game and you get told how the system works and that there is a secret, not "good", but secret ending, that depends on making the game harder on yourself. Also they should've made it clear just what constitutes Low Chaos. The game leaves it vague and that is a mistake. In short you can kill people, you just need to leave at least half of the people in the level alive and do the side quests to remove your targets without killing them.
The fact that corpse looting isnt more critizised in games is wild if you think about it. Corpse looting is in reality like a maximum scumbag thing to do.
I think maybe my favorite morality system in a game is actually a really old CRPG, Ultima 4. So you're not winning that game if you don't play 'good', but it tracks your morality not with one meter, but like 8 that are all related to different Virtues that you're trying to embody. So in that game, you're going on what is supposed to be a spiritual journey to embody 8 Virtues to become the 'Avatar'. Every virtue is its own meter that tracks your actions. Honesty, you need to be honest when paying blind shopkeepers that you can underpay, and not steal from people in towns. Compassion, you need to not attack non-evil creatures like wildlife and let them run from encounters, and you can give money to beggars. Valor, you need to not run from combat against evil enemies, especially if you're at full health. Justice has some overlap, with not stealing, paying bling shopkeeps, not killing innocent people/wildlife, etc. Sacrifice, you need to donate blood to healers, but you can also gain it by falling in battle. Honor again has a bit of overlap of not cheating shopkeepers and donating to beggars, but also relates to solving quests. Spirituality you gain by meditating and speaking to a Seer, but you lose it if you meditate with the wrong mantra at a shrine. Humility is the last one, and when talking to NPCs you need to actually respond humbly to NPCs. All of them are pretty simple and have some overlap, but it's a fun and interesting system where you actually notice and feel the way you're behaving and have to make an effort to be a good person and embody all of them. You CAN be evil and go against all of them and do awful stuff, you'll just never get the ending of the game.
I remember reading a game design article discussing a faction based morality system wherein there is no good and evil, but there is good for this faction and/or bad for that faction. So you could, for example, help the dwarves harvest a forest and gain good dwarf points and bad elf points.
The example stuck the most with me was a police station mission in Desu Ex Human Revolution. You need to infiltrate it and steal some info. But the place is not some kind of evil base of bad guys, it's normal police station. So even tho there weren't any repercussions for just killing everyone (Sarif chastises you for being too loud and reckless, but that's it. Which in a way reinforces that he is still a megacorp billionaire who just needs things done and doesn't really care about others) in the station, it felt wrong to do so. And that line of thinking, that most enemies are just doing their job or happened to be in a bad situation and don't deserve a fate of being torn apart by a unstoppable cyborg assassin, persisted throughout the whole game. I've forced myself to be stealthy, patient and slow instead of easily annihilating everything in my path with no second thought. And the game didn't really punish or judge me for either options much, left me with my own conciseness.
The Paragon/Renegade system in ME2/3 is indeed pretty bad. You're basically leveling up your goodness or badness like a stat, and if one of those stats is high enough you get a "win conversation" button that is NECESSARY for a lot of moments. The worst part of it is that there's never a moment where the "win conversation" button isn't available for Paragon or Renegade. There are specific Paragon or Renegade choices, but the important conversation wins? You just need to have been a big enough butt or a big enough angel.
I thought that you had to purposely check all the bodies to get the good ending. I did that and I got the good karma points. Also, all the karma points does is make the ending available, because there is something you need to do to get that ending.
Fable 2 will always have my favorite morality system. I actually felt a hero/villain with how the people, economy and my dog and my own bodies metamorphosis reacted to me.
A man has been sitting outside my house eating tofu for three hours and when I asked him to leave he glowed red and bought my house, it wasn't for sale, I'm penniless from the skyrocketing rent, and they're still eating tofu.
@@activityzone353 HA! You just discribed my Fable 2 character. Just add that store goods were damn near free and people would be required to sniff my farts daily.
Pat would sacrifice resources if it meant he could save the little girl. But he wouldn't sacrifice his fun. That little girl better hope saving her doesn't lock Pat out of any game mechanics.
I remember what set me off about Fallout 3's morality system. The aftermath of getting the ghouls into Tenpenny Tower. Tenpenny Tower doesn't let ghouls in and it turns out it was only like two people really against ghouls being allowed in. If you do the work to allow ghouls in, the two people that didn't want them are kicked out and I think never heard of again. After this the leader of the ghouls starts the kill the human residents one by one as you play. When confronted, he essentially says, "Well they were all still secretly racist and they would have turned on us eventually." If you kill the leader at this point, you get negative karma. This almost made me quit the game.
But is tenpenny secretly right though? It's a new world. His the tower is his. He keeps it with strength. The ghouls are dead. The living dead. The humans in the tower at least have a future.
@@shadowreaverrising1753 my problem was getting negative karma for killing someone that openly admitted to killing every human in the tower because he assumed they were all secretly racist. There was no pitched battle. He one by one killed each of them over time and dumped their bodies in the basement.
I wish I quit the game sooner tbh. As if that quest and the one where you get positive karma for helping a woman roofie a guy wasn't bad enough, the ending is one of the worst narrative conclusions to a story I've ever seen. There's a reason this game and Mass Effect 3 are pretty much the only games with a postlaunch DLC to retcon the ending.
@@shadowreaverrising1753 For one thing, ghouls aren't zombies raised from the dead in the Fallout setting, they're just people that have been exposed to high levels of the setting's magic radiation and been given longevity (implied immortality in some cases), a skin condition, and possibly a predisposition toward going feral as a result. For another, the game essentially has 3 morality systems, and all of them side with the ghouls and against Tenpenny and the residents of his tower. All of the residents dying by Roy's hand* is considered a good thing. Fallout 3's writers, not being as smart as they thought they were, were trying to make them a metaphor for oppressed minorities and ran headfirst into the classic fantasy problem of racism against fictional fantasy races with genuine physical differences to humans not being compatible with actual racism for obvious reasons. *there's another option where you personally release feral ghouls into the tower to slaughter the residents which is considered evil, but that's because of the cruelty of the choice rather than because of the residents dying
A hidden old morality system I liked was in Chrono Trigger. The whole festival you do at start that you don't think much of is counting what you do. So if be a dick it will be brought up in a trial later. Mind not any major consequence from recollection, but love how if you play like a jerk they detail it all. If play well they try making crap that doesn't hold up😅
Fallout could have had a great moral dilemma for the player with the cannibal perk; you should gain huge amounts of exp and boosts when eating a body but you'd lose karma and social status--instead you still lose the karma and people hate you and all you gain for eating someone is like 5 HP, it's super useless
Nazis can go to heck. But, not torturing any...thing shouldn't be a moral dilemma! Just because someone is a monster doesn't mean you have to play as a war criminal. Also, in Dishonored you can mind control people, time stop, distract enemies, etc. Dishonored also rewards you more substantially at the end of a mission when you choose the non-lethal stealth routes Everyone has a different taste. How much one enjoys something is subjective.
I always find it more fun if the choices you're given aren't obviously good or evil. If both choices possibly result in something scary/shitty, then I don't even care if I get a reward, because I get to watch something cool unfold. I also like when a questline's story alters via a choice, rather than a questline end in a choice that feels like, "pick a hand: Good points + this item, or bad points + this item?"
In SWTOR i was a bounty hunter and decided to be evil on the starter planet and see how far i can take. A hut hired me to kill an engineer but he hid out in a build filled with robots he repurposed to defend him. i broke in killed all the robots defending him until i made it to the target. He begged for his life and offered to pay me what hut would pay to let him live, so i aggreed, took his money and killed him anyway, then cut his head off and put it in a bag. I then went to the cantina his wife worked at and droped her husbands severed head in front of her say "oops" then left. evil choices in star wars games are nuts.
I´d like to point out that there are non-lethal takedowns and alternative stealth run paths in ALL metro games and looting bodies DOES NOT in fact affect the morality system on ANY of the games.
Infamous does it really well imo. It's really non-intrusive, you just change your playstyle a bit. The problem with dishonored is that they don't really give you fun alternatives to the lethal options. In Infamour or Kotor you have cool powers on both ends so it's fun to play both styles.
There is totally a non-lethal takedown in metro. And for all that complaining that the fun way to play gets you the bad ending in Dishonored, I thought he’d appreciate that playing the normal way gets you the ending from the book at least a little
InFAMOUS has one of the best choices IMO, which the basis of is "good but hard VS evil but easy" You have the choice in 2 of raiding a compound to save an ally. You can do this, have to fight through the guards... OR you can ram a truck filled with explosives through the front door, which means you encounter less guards when you fight through the guards.
Has there ever been a game where all moral choices you could make for a character were at the start and the game progressed based on that. Like where you establish before the game even starts how this character would react to things and the game just plays out differently based on that?
3:00, I love morality systems because they always come off as exactly what they are. An extremely prissy, privileged person's idea of what is right in wrong. But not even in our world, in fantasy land, literally a white collar guy whose never gotten in a fight judging wasteland warriors doing mad max shit. And apparently they find silly things like "wholesale murder is totally fine, but looting what I consider more bullets than you 'need' is straight up "evil". . . It's just so silly when at the end the game tries to judge you from some ivory tower made of a 12 year old's idea of morality. I just really wonder what the though process behind that even is? You should leave some behind for the next guy so he can loot them and shoot you in the ass when he catches up? What?
Hale's Shep works fine as a mix if you draw a specific line between your crew and your enemies. She can be a saint to her allies and ruthless to her enemies and that can be rationalized just fine I'd say. Being kinda topsy turvey makes a certain amount of sense when you have insane responsibility and power thrust on you in an insane situation which 2 and 3 def qualify as.
I want a morality system that just determines what your values are, without condemning. Like, if you steal from companies, you become selfish, but if you give the stolen goods to people you become collectivist. If you shoot slavers, you become egalitarian but also more militant. That stuff
I just want a morality system where not only is neutral an option, but is also realistically the path of least resistance, as there should be consequences for going too good or too evil or such (e.g. a hostage being killed cause you refused to murder a bad guy in some sort of Batman-like code, being chased out of cities for multiple repeated atrocities, characters losing trust in you for being too inconsistent with tasks, characters easily manipulating you for being too trustworthy, etc.). And in the case of Star Wars, I WANT TO HAVE THE OPTION TO BE A GREY JEDI, fuck the Jedi and the Sith, let me take them both on as a lightning-throwing diplomat trying to avoid large-scale wars.
Idk about the earlier Fallout games, but stealing from Slavers in Fallout 3 doesn't reduce Karma, it just makes them hostile if you get caught. (I hope I'm not wrong about this, I played Fallout 3 fairly recently and don't want to redownload it again)
18:15 That's a simple fix instead of "Opt In/Opt Out" make it "Think About it/Forget About it" although I've heard there are mutually exclusive thoughts where if you Opt into one thing you can't even get the thought for another
Even if generic blue/red morality systems are bad, the one thing they do get right is they encourage consistent behavior. Once you make your first blue or red choice, you're almost guaranteed to keep making blue or red choices regardless of context for the rest of the game. I replayed Dragon Age: Origins a few weeks ago, which is notable for not having any dialogue tracking mechanics, and when you know ahead of time that certain items or boons are a result of specific dialogue choices then you start to realize that the lack of any system rewards complete sociopathic behavior where you are CONSTANTLY changing your entire personality depending on who you're talking to. For example, I made a Cousland that I decided early on I would roleplay to be a devout believer of the Chantry and yet every time I talked to Morrigan I wouldn't hesitate to betray my roleplaying decisions because I knew that certain dialogue options had +1 approval behind them and the other ones didn't. Intrinsic rewards like the satisfaction of properly roleplaying a character are way too easy to temporarily discard when you have to balance them against extrinsic rewards like shop discounts, magical items or party member approval.
When it comes to bigger, more traditional games, I think that The Witcher series always did a good job with its morality systems. In TW1, there rarely was a "good" option to pick, so you were generally able to play Geralt in a way that made sense to you and the consequences felt fair. TW2 is a bit more hit and miss, but when it hits it hits hard. Again, there are few "good" options to pick and the consequences are generally felt long afterwards. TW3 has morality options with better and worse outcomes, but in order to get the slightly less terrible outcomes you actually have to understand the world around and makes choices that make sense. You don't just press the blue text option and receive the good ending. All in all, The Witcher games are good examples of morality systems that forces the player to put themselves in a situation and make a decision that, based on what they know, seems to result in a desired situation.
![The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons [Linked] - Part 8 - The Diving Master](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/hYbF2ThI2eA/mqdefault.jpg)
When Pat said "I think the average person doesn't want to be cruel for no reason, even to fictional characters" I was both surprised and a good bit relieved to hear it from him.
This just in Pat unaware that both GTA and the Sims exist in new Crazy Talk outbreak
@@cyberninjazero5659
Well I mean... It's GTA... your playing a criminal, the game isn't tracking you being good or evil and half the point of the game is just do whatever in this parody of America as a video game. Sims even more so since your literally playing God and can just reset things whenever you want.
Pat's got a degree in this, I should hope he knows
@@RavenCloak13 I think it's more about Story vs Lack of story Third Person Open World games in Particular I think just have people let loose
@@cyberninjazero5659
Also the part where that's half the point of the game. Like the actual story in GTA facilitates you doing crime. The Sims meanwhile is not open world or 3rd person but a God game where you fuck with your dolls in your play house. These dolls can just emote.
Disco Elysium does have a line in the loading screens where it's like "Hey, don't be afraid to be a little crazy. You're a cop. People are willing to tolerate a lot of things from people with authority."
Even Kim encourages you to be a little crazy during interviews every now and then, since it can catch people off guard during interviews and lead to different lines of inquiry that you wouldn't have considered otherwise.
@@Wintd1 yeah like when harrier try to chicken titus and the boys by threatening suicide, they didn't see that shit coming, on god.
@@areallybigdwarf4560 WE SURE SHOWED THEM
that explains why everyone so nice, deep down they actually want to put me in a Guillotine.
Sometimes it’s alright to fail a check every now and then.
My favorite thing about Bioshock morality is, Ken Levine said he regretted how poorly he felt he handled it, and they made the canon ending in Burial at Sea DLC for Infinite "Jack saves all the Sisters" because nobody ever chooses the bad ending lol.
Well that's the point, Jack was the only soul and slave of Rapture who chose kindness despite being lied to, manipulated and made a slave by his genetics (and by someone who was at the time considered one of the bottom feeding European ethnicities) and quite literally delivered innocents from Rapture
Pssh..I absorbed every one of those needle wielding munchkins my first time playing the game. Worth it
The second ending where you harvest is purely a game play thing to get more Adam so I sort of understand where he's coming from. I'm the type of guy who goes for all endings if I can so I like the Rescue ending for story reasons.
maybe if the game was actually difficult in any meaningful way the prospect of harvesting the little sisters for MORE POWER would actually have some weight.
the fact the game gives you infinite respawns and you can just throw yourself an unlimited amount of times and kill an encounter through sheer attrition is silly
I like watching Sseth's review on Fable because he talks about how the morality system tells you that Divorcing your wife is numerically worse than sacrificing her to dark gods to reverse your aging.
You can always tell who has never been through a divorce proceeding when these types of topics come up. Its pretty much the real life version of hollowing.
What part of "Until Death Do Us Part" do you NOT understand?
Well you see Fable is based on England, were you need to have a license to divorce .
@@OCMOOO You mean loicence, right?
@@Serahpin oi m80
"Did you need that Ammo?"
In a WORLD where AMMO IS MONEY. What a dumb question
Yes but the question the morality poses is do you need it or are you just simply hoarding it, taking advantage of the situation by killing people you are allowed to kill, you are the protagonist fighting an enemy you oppose in more than just a survival situation, you are also philosophical opponents, basically the game calls you out for being no better than the raider or fascist you just killed, that idea is hammered home when the “good” ending is killing the Dark Ones needlessly
@@manticorephoenix So in a post apocalyptic survival scenario, you’re an evil asshole for conserving resources and not letting anything you find go to waste. Yup that makes sense
@@LordPyro25 No, you're an evil asshole if you go out of your way to kill people who you could have spared just to take resources you don't need, and to watch innocent children starve rather than give them a single bullet. Yes the "Enemies" in the game are communists and nazi's, but they are still human beings trying to find stability and structure in a world that has lost that entirely, and you're evil if you go out of your way to murder them when you could have snuck past, just to take more of those resources that you're most likely stocked up on anyway.
@@LordPyro25 post apocalyptic survival scenario where you the protagonist plays a member of a law enforcement faction, you are not a random Vault dweller given moral carte Blanche just because you disagree with the opinions of a different faction, you are a person who is an environment where humans are dwindling and a finite resource even shorter than the bullets, if you kill everyone that disagrees with you, like the fascists, what does that make you, an evil asshole I’d say, the game calls you out for being a hypocrite, but I understand not everyone wants that level of honesty
@@LordPyro25 on a more simple note to counter your simple dismissive comment, if someone that doesn’t like you murdered you or someone you know for the cash in your wallet, you might not be too eager to hear their “it’s what my character would do” bullshit backstory while your dying
Pat already explained this in the Kotor LP when he said the "good" morality should be more difficult because a good person would take the harder path if it was the right thing to do.
And harder doesn't mean "less fun".
This has been talked about to death, but its also why the system in Dishonored sucks so much. They essentially locked you into an ending based on your playstyle.
"Do you like combat and action? Well fuck you, here's the bad ending, chump. What do you mean we heavily incentivized combat with all the cool combat toys? You could have just ignored half the game mechanics to get the good ending, you know. Of course the good ending is less fun, thats what "good" means, right? Less fun."
@@matrix3509 "I have to play the game differently to get a different result, REEEEEEE!!!"
reddit, not even once
@@tylerlackey1175 Kinda dumb response ngl, the point is that to get the good ending (Which hilariously enough, many people want) it forces you out of about 90% of the incredibly fun to use tools, gadgets and animations that make the game very enjoyable.
@@bigh99267 what a disingenuous thing to say (no surprise it's a reddit-tier argument) you can definitely still kill people and do whatever cringey nonsense you want to do and still get low chaos. In fact I'm pretty sure there's an exact percent of the amount of enemies you can kill before going past low chaos. The fact that you stomp your feet and LIE and pretend you can only choke people out means you've lost all credibility
You are a redditor. Not a human.
@@bigh99267 they give you cool stuff like grenades, razor blade mines, a gun you can deck out with enough upgrades to make it a semi auto monster but all I can remember non lethal having is tranq bolts. Even most of the powers are lethal or used to dispose of corpses.
Bioware Morality Choices
Paragon: "I will kill you quickly" +5 blue points
Neutral: "I will kill you" Nothing
Renegade: "I will kill you painfully" +5 red points
Choke this baby in front of its mother, or just leave it alone, in the dark, content that YOU didn't kill the baby.
The example you reference is from 3 and they actually just drop the neutral response all together.
Well, this example was purposely a joke.
"Help, I think me baby is sick!"
Paragon: "Screw the war, I'm dropping everything to help you." +5 Blue
Neutral: "That sucks, I'm sorry."
Renegade: "Pragmatism demands that I eat your baby." +5 Red
Also props to Infamous where the different moral alignments are literally different types of builds, neither of which is better than the other.
Evil is more focused on AOEs and mass chaos and collateral damage which can be beneficial in a lot of situations where you're fighting a lot of enemies at once, Good has more of a focus on precision and control over doing direct damage to enemies which can be better in some situations like boss and miniboss battles.
I do like how the Good alignment powers reflect you being much more focused and in control over your actions while the Evil alignment is much more chaotic where you goof around with your powers and end up with a lot of collateral damage in the way. It may be unintentional, but it's a good example of ludonarrative synchronicity, where the narrative and gameplay merge together.
I think Evil was more fun in the first game by a large margin. But they were just figuring things out. 2 onwards was better balanced
@@cyberninjazero5659 The one thing Im torn on in Infamous 1 is that the final decision you make before the finale locks to you to one path and you can't switch to the opposite Karma from there on. Was it just if you did the evil choice or did both choices lead to that?
@@leithaziz2716 Just Evil. The logic is pretty air-tight if you choose to nuke a city to get more power that's irreversibly Evil but if you chose not to that's just basic humanity. Though since the thing goes off anyway I wish you got to be juiced up by it in the Good Path (Yet another reason Evil is more fun in InFamous 1)
@@cyberninjazero5659 Fair enough. If we're speaking Evil path exclusivly, then I do like how the game punishes you for that since nuking the city is crossing a line too far. I just thought that the same would happen on the good path but it locks you to good. If it did that, then I'd be annoyed. But yeah, for Evil path, it makes total sense.
I like the morality system of Papers Please, because the repercussions of moral choices are so varied. Helping out strangers can mean failing your family. Doing your job properly can actually hinder you, and in one ending, your naivity in following your duty gives you a premature ending. There are a lot of grey areas and I love it.
The best morality system is in the InFamous games because you get rad looks in both ends of the spectrum
Infamous 2*
InFamous 1 had the best powers be locked to evil to the point it wasn't even a competition
Talking about InFamous what happened to the series? Did Second son kill it?
@@sirlenemodesto2665 for what I've heard the only reason Second Son was a thing was to sell PS4's. It's been years but I don't remember it being a bad game, I think they moved on and maybe sequels can pop up every time a new playstation launch
@@cyberninjazero5659 oh sorry I forgot to say games. But speaking of the first game I was fond of both the clean yellow outfit that was indeed so cool that all the sequels got them as pre order bonus and the the walking black and grey zombie. Like seriously I remember being pissed when I first played it because the loses his old outfit
@@ricardomiles2957 If I remember correctly most people did not like the new mc and powers but it was a good InFamous game. Atleast that is what I remember, still don't get why it died
One of my favourite morality systems is probably SW:TOR's attempt at adapting the Light side/Dark side dichotomy to being a member of the full dark side Sith Empire. Where "light side" becomes pragmatic/noble evil and "dark side" becomes frothing lunatic.
In an early quest on the Sith Empire homeworld, a mid level manager on an architecture project warns you that his boss is abusing his power and torturing and killing the slaves for fun, which really slows down the process. The dark side resolution to this sidequest is "hey that sounds like a good time, can I get in on this torturing slaves for fun racket?" and the light side resolution is "This is an outrage! We'll never get our monument of great evil done in time without slave labour!" and then you go kill his boss and promote the quest giver to oversee the project.
i remember i played for a while back in the day and i distinctly remember whatever the sith tank class was called started with you interrogating prisoners and getting moral choices on what to do with them, and if you went full dark side and killed them all your trainer would basically call you an idiot for wasting potential assets
I still think Silent Hill 2's morality system is yet to be beat. Its so simple, James' actions in gameplay, how you treat Maria, or how you take care of yourself in terms of health being what ultimately decides the ending is just so fucking radical
It's kind of what Metro was TRYING to go for, but it was a little too nuanced, for something that already had "how many times did you look at the letter from your wife, totally referencing how guilty James feels" to its detriment, haha.
'Do it in this few saves' is also an interesting one that pins on the player though.
I really like "invisible" morality systems in general. Where the game isn't flagging moments with a big "choose a red or blue option to gain good or bad morality points," but passively noting whether you tipped a street kid a money-bullet, or ignored him. If course, that assumes that the actions being judged make sense--as the boys describe with their "stealing vs looting" discussion.
I always forgive the Bioshock 1 morality system, though, for the simple fact that it didn't muck around with half measures. You juiced a little girl who was crying and begging you not to, just to get a small amount of loot? Bam, straight to evil ending. No pat on the back for only juicing half the little girls, you fricken psychopath.
"Why I can't get a good life I just killed ONE of the 8 years olds!!!"
I recall in Bioshock 2 that if you killed only a couple of the Little Sisters, you can get a unique choice at the end, where you can choose between the neutral ending or the bad ending.
You know what I honestly think is the worst; background romance checks.
Dragon's Dogma for being a great game, has a huge problem with it choosing who your character is into.
"What? You gave copious gifts to (X NPC)? Did their sidequests with the best outcome possible? You even gave them that item that is basically an engagement ring, that is specifically stated that you and this person are bound for the rest of your lives? Too bad, you talked to the blacksmith too much. Enjoy. Fucker."
@@harlannguyen4048 I'm not really sure how the neutral ending works or is unlocked in 2. Do you just die in the process or does something happen that causes it?
@@vahlok1426 i fucking know right who thought it was a good idea what if i want to be single!! And you cant romance you pawn the one person you want to romance cause you made him/her into your waifu!?
My favourite thing about the Mass Effect morality system, is they have quick time for Renegade only and Paragon only. So you can do a random deed without losing out on the other.
'Shephard is amazing, she's always nice to everyone and chooses to save lives. She did kill that one guy surrendering though but forget about that.'
Is overlord the worst with that dissonance? The lead up is always so angry and sympathetic to David that I’m sure Shep just suddenly pivoting to “Oh okay you can keep him then” is jarring as hell
“Well to be fair, the way she killed that guy was SUPER COOL!”
I'll never get over beating Metro last light, getting the bad end, finding out there was a GOOD ending, and then realizing looking at the point system that i had tanked my karma by being a fucking teen and going through the strip club scene and getting too many lap dances.
THOSE STRIPPERS NEED INCOME TOO!
The metro games sound like they’re written be a self righteous douche with a comically puritan view of morality.
I can't find a source for this. Are you sure it makes you lose a moral point? I checked the wiki and it doesn't say anything about that.
@@shadowrobot7708 I believe I saw it in a steam guide on the morality system, in the release version of Metro:LL.
It said that "purchasing a lap dance is -1" or something.
@@redgunnit That is so funny.
The last take from Pat is an interesting one, because while KOTOR 1 may be incentivising you to always stick with a certain option morally and that may be considered a bad morality system, that is literally the point that Kreia is making in the second game, the force seems to be incentivising you to always be one thing or another instead of making decisions with your own reasoning and logic. In a very meta way, the game is incentivising you to be a bad guy in KOTOR 1 because that's literally what the dark side does, it corrupts people.
Then Kreia's whole point is that The Force itself is a very evil thing because it forces people to fight over and over the same thing. There's no running from it, the Jedi and Sith WILL clash, billions with vanish because of crazy super weapons and wars. There's no real peace, just rebuilding for the next conflict.
@@ExeErdna Yes, Kreia makes it very clear she thinks it's bullshit.
@@ExeErdna That is exactly it, that is why she wants to kill it permanently. To her she is literally trying to kill a parasitic god thing that affects and influences all living things, she wanted to effectively erase 99.9% of life in the galaxy for the chance that the .1% has a chance at true freedom and are able to shape their own destiny.
@@philosophos4893 this is such an example of reaching in the conflict design based on Force concept. Alternativery, Crea could help light side win and there will be no need to do anything because everyone will be happy - WAY less cumbersome than the original task. Sith are literally instigators of conflict every time - without them there is no global conflict and no bad side to the Force.
Any attempt to turn dark side vs light side on its head is so weird and illogical. What is this "true freedom" concept - there are already races that are unaffected by force, and they behave the same as others - force is just something that enhances existing features (worldview, etc) - only dark side takes control.
This is the point concepts like these miss - Light side and Dark side are not meant to be equal - lately they have been made to appear so as a byproduct of having to create balanced storylines for games and some other media, but dark side is literally wrong side, it is meant to be powerful so that i could be defeated through rising to embody the light side, because it is inner's best self amplified.
@@T1Slam The reason Kreia doesn't help "the light side" is because there is no "light side" there is the force and the dark side of the force. She used to be a master Jedi, then she was a lord of the Sith, then she was nothing stripped away from the force. She was a historian, and saw that the force seems to be a living thing that takes control of people's lives, it influences them subtly so that it can achieve this "balance". Trillions have died before "The Chosen One" brought "Balance" to the force. Kreia saw this happen throughout history time and time again, Sith will always rise again because of the teachings of the Jedi, it is inherent to their ideology and code. She wanted to kill force because she wanted those who survived to have a real life without the force influencing their lives.
2:35 Regarding the ending of Metro 2033, the bad ending is canon not because few players discovered a good ending. And because of the book, the game was a play adaptation of the book. upd: sorry about my english, i rare write in english.
This is why Yahtzee said he is making his next game in a way that the player just chooses their character's personality at the start (from a selection of 9 personalities). The dialog, and which party members get along with you best, are all based on that initial choice. Kind of like the "bastard slider" Woolie describes.
I thought of that idea as well. I'm interested to see how it works in a real game. It makes you think about what the point of dialog choices actually is in games.
Also when talking about the Bioshock morality problem:
Prey has a similar scenario where you are given the option to either spare a criminal or kill him to harvest exotic material.
This is a legit morality choice because:
1. Sparing him gives you a password to get into a room that there are like 3 ways to easily get into without the password, which means you virtually don't get a real reward for sparing him, and
2. The amount of exotic material you get for killing him is FUCKING INSANELY MASSIVE and exotic material is EXTREMELY valuable because it can be straight up used to craft neuromods once you find the recipe for that and are basically a shitton of free levels to your RPG elements.
In the end your personal feelings about your in game actions are the ONLY reason to spare him.
In a simplified way, that what's morality and ethics is supposed to be. Did you ever realized that you can, at almost any given moment face scenarios like that daily if you deal with enough people? But in real life NORMALLY people don't think about their "stats and materials for crafting"
I would also add that it's heavily implied that many prisoners used to harvest exotic material on Talos 1 are actually innocent. If you look at his rap sheet he'll admit that at least some of it is true, but it's never made plain whether or not he was actually guilty of everything on the list.
I always spared him. I was unwilling to kill someone who wasn't a direct threat to me.
Or do what I did, spare him to get the password then reload a save and then kill him to get the material lol
Heh, exotic materials are not really *rare* per se. You get boatloads of it pretty early on if you get the xenologist perk. I can only see the murder as mildly useful if you decide to go for the 100% alien powers 0% human powers achievement. An achievement that would mostly require you to rely on scanning to get powers anyways
Woolie: "You can shoot that ***i, but you can't torture him haha" - wait isn't that how war crimes work?
Is pretty much like the "do you really need that ammo?" Situation, sure something as trivial and that has much more value in the potential of being used is dumb but that's the idea. Ok, we are disagreeing hard here, but do you really need to to insert needles in my soldier's penis?
The "you can kill him but you cant torture him" argument seems logical to me if im being honest. Ever heard of a mercy kill? Don't stoop to your enemies' level.
we really censoring the word nazi now? what?
@@gloomsi Some morons do it, no idea why.
Thankfully, it's always been a very minority thing, but some people will self-censor basically any word.
Fucking say it with your chest, boys: *Fuck Nazis*
@@Revan058
It's also because sometimes they do just delete comments that have certain words in it without you knowing. Nazi might have been one.
Too many morality systems work on a binary and morality is not like that. Always stuck as either Golden age Superman or Eric Sparrow.
It's part of why I always interpreted the paragon/renegade system of mass effect to be more of a personality system than a moral one, which is why it always annoyed me that you don't get points for neutrality.
There's way to much emphasis on morality being expressed through hard numbers.
Another weird choice of Bioshock's morality system was that it gave you instant confirmation that sparing the Little Sisters was the right decision. Before the very first time you get to choose a LS's fate, Atlas seems like he's got a point: he says that becoming a LS is a one-way process and that Tennenbaum saying otherwise is just a desperate attempt to sooth her own guilt-ravaged conscience, and as unsavory as it might be harvesting them means a far better chance of saving Atlas' family.
But...then Tennenbaum gives you a plasmid that lets you _instantly_ turn any LS from a spooky demon child into a normal little girl. So even before the twist when you still have every reason to think that a good man's family is in danger (and before you know that you ultimately get more ADAM for sparing them), you have absolute and immediate confirmation that you are choosing to kill an innocent child you could have otherwise saved.
One possible fix for this? Just take away the rescue plasmid, and make the source of ADAM be the unrefined stuff in their syringe. Have Tennenbaum say something about how they're conditioned to return to her if they lose their syringes, and that's where she has the means of undoing the process. Then you could spend the game all the way up until you reach Tennenbaum's base wondering if she was telling the truth.
I remember in Fallout 3 convincing Tenpenny to let extremist ghouls who then kill everyone (mostly a bunch of racist assholes but also including a really nice washed up radio star who as far as I can tell did nothing wrong) into the tower gives you good karma, but stealing "weird meat" from the shack of FUCKING CANNIBALS who you've ALREADY KILLED IN SELF DEFENSE with the express purpose of using them to fertilize anti-rad fungus to HELP KIDS NOT DIE OF RADIATION POISONING gives you bad karma.
Modern Fallout game's morality systems are FUCKED.
Were they really racists assholes if it turns out that yes the ghouls are murderers and completely trash the tower afterwards?
@@Bourikii2992 YEAH IT'S A REALLY BAD MESSAGE isN'T IT
@@Bourikii2992 "Are they really racists if they're right?"
I mean that just moves the responsibility up to the writer WHO DECIDED TO MAKE THEM RIGHT.
"Do you really need all that ammo? You don't understand...that ammo is the hopes and dreams of the dead, and you can't use that!"
Well, in Metro case, it's more like "Do you need it? Take it. You don't need it for now? Leave it so OTHER people who'll go this way may take it if they need it". The Metro resources are way more slim in lore then it is shown in videogame.
@@teacakes6861
That makes even less sense then. Wouldn't you take these resources and give them to the people at the place you live? I will admit that I never played one of these games but don't you stay in a communal place? Why are you going to leave supplies hoping someone that isn't a murderous psychopath picks these supplies up INSTEAD. Also don't you use ammo as money in those games?
@@RavenCloak13 you use specialized ammo as money, but about halfway through each shop's stop popping up so it just becomes normal ammo.
In the games you never "go back to the place you live" you're always heading further and deeper into the shit. So effectively your taking supplies AWAY from civilization when you loot.
Looting in the games is also just treated as a necessary evil, but ONLY when its necessary. In the metro theres no afterlife so if you die and your ghost isnt eaten by an anomaly you just stay at the site of your death forever. Imagine watching someone defile your corpse for supplies they didnt even need. Itd be like being robbed by jeff bezos.
Starving children in the Metro could have eaten those bullets.
@@ImaTroper
Eh not really. I'm dead and can't interact with the world just being stuck there? Rather someone use what's left. Not to mention I can't really call that defiling when they dead and this isn't the Egyptian afterlife so they couldn't take it anyway.
Though if what another comment explained is true then if Heaven and Hell were nuked (which also explains that they were real and thus a lot of implications there) then that means no way those supplies are surviving normally either. Might as well take them since they are going to go to waste other wise.
Never knew about the Heaven and Hell being nuked though.
Surprised nobody is talking about Overlord's "morality" system. You aren't a good guy no matter your choices, just whether you're a destroyer of worlds or tyrant of the land.
Hampered by the fact your enemies the so called forces of good was as bad as you are
That's really the second game's morality system, the first game's is more about practicality vs being an evil dick for selfish reasons. The vast majority of the "good" decisions are just things that make sense in the long term: let the people have their food back, don't burn down the whole place to kill one enemy, don't let elves go extinct instead of just grabbing money, go with the smart woman instead of the hot one because she's good with strategy and a valuable asset, give the people one last chance instead of punishing them for doubting you because the guy they were afraid of was legitimately terrifying to most people until you kill him, you don't really have much use for the elve's statue so they can have it. You're BETTER than all the former heroes, because you were one. You were probably the most selfless one since you tried to take the last overlord out in a sacrifice play, although oberon (The other one that was more tragic than villain) at least offered to go after you.
I don't know why the whole practical vs being an evil selfish dick approach appeals to me so much, but it lets me care more about my overlord than the second game did, which was just mind control or destroy everything.
@@MrAsaqe I hate when stories say “The protagonist is the bad guy fighting good guys” then coward out by making the Good guys either just as bad as the protagonist or worse. At that point the protagonist is not a villain at best he’s an Anti-Hero, at worst he’s practically the hero.
@@Broomer52 Technically the narrative may still work if they were good guys once while the evil overlord never was good to begin with since at least if they realize the shit they got themselves into from complacency or pragmatic decisions becoming ruthless they could shape up and take the lessons to heart while the evil overlord doesn't care. But by then it's probably too little too late for them
There is one game which I feel like needs mentioning but it's too obscure for that.
Soul Sacrifice. A PS Vita exclusive Monster Hunter clone. You play as a mage and fight demonic shit along the way, and as the name suggests you sacrifice a lot of shit along the way including your organs. It is the same cartoonishly extreme bipolar system where you either EAT PEOPLE or redeem their souls, no matter how fucked up they might be. But there is a catch. The roles are reversed. Throughout the whole game you are told you are supposed to eat people because that's how things go and redeeming them makes you a bad guy.
Loved it, unfortunately lost my vita with it a long time ago
I remember when I was playing ME2 for the first time, hadn't realized how binary the game is with the choices and their benefits.
So I'm on Okeer's recruit mission, and I found the mercenary who goes and explains the war that's going on, and I offered to heal him for being an idiot. He tried to call reinforcements on me, and I took the Renegade interrupt to shoot him. Mark Meer did a really good job with how Shepard goes from "Listen I really don't need to help you but I'll do it as the right thing to do" to "My patience is short for enemies, so if you want to intentionally antagonize me, you're the one paying."
Can't you kinda just paragon or renegade whichever crew member you want as long as you stay consistent? Play miranda renegade then play jacob paragon for example.
11:32 I don't remember where I heard it but, it struck me as correct. In almost all games the "evil choice" is only there so that the player can feel good for not choosing it. The devs know 80 to 90 percent of players are going to go down the "good" path but, they will feel even better if there was at least the temptation of "evil".
18:50 Disco does sort of have this in the form of one of the loading screen tip that says that people won't mind too much when you say outrageous things. The problem is that the player doesn't know that applies to their internal dialogue as well.
Thankfully New Vegas made negative karma basically irrelevant: you did a naughty? Just go shoot some fiends for a bit. Its basically impossible to have negative or even neutral karma if you don't go around killing indiscriminately or stealing. Stealing is basically a non-issue because loot is plentiful and valuable, so there's few reasons to ever steal
12:00 -- I think you can make the evil path being the 'quick, fun' path if the hero route is the hard but slow road. Being good is its own reward -- just make being a scumbag super profitable.
What undertale does so well is that it directly ties morality into gameplay. There is no button prompt that decides the ending for you, instead you simply play the game and set pieces are set up in the background based on your unconscious decisions. That's why there are 25 different endings, but most players will only get three: neutral, pacifist, and genocide in that order. The first is simply playing the game as intended, then actively trying to make everyone happy, then actively trying to kill everyone. It's simply the natural progression of how we think and tackle problems that the game exploits through its mechanics.
Undertale is pretty unique because it doesn't offer outright rewards for choosing one route over another either. Its strength comes almost completely from how well it gets you attached to its characters. It manipulates the player into feeling genuine guilt for their actions should they choose to satiate their own curiosity instead of being nice and going Pacifist (once they understand the mechanics, at least). The only "rewards" I can think of in Genocide routes are Undyne and Sans' fights, plus the knowledge of having achieved another ending + bonus ending (even though these are very, VERY BAD endings!).
Smartly, Undyne's fight is placed halfway through the run, just soon enough to make you hope that you'll get another good fight like that (even though it's still horrifying) and Sans' is at the very end, which could make the whole grind feel like it's been "worth it" to some. Outside of that though, Genocide is a grind-filled chore with less humor, less fun and fufilling battles, almost no puzzles and barten overworld maps. But that's kind of facinating, isn't it? You just _have_ to see more of it, because even if Genocide is dark as hell and everyone hates your guts (except Papyrus), you're most likely intrigued at that point.
Whether Genocide is worth it or not is really up to the player and how much empathy they're capable of feeling, perhaps even moreso than Pacifist. If a player feels no empathy then they could easily play all routes without limits. Undertale basically tricks you into punishing yourself emotionally for making violent decisions, turning _you, personally_ into its morality system rather than limiting your drops or locking away any skill trees.
Games like Undertale put the Endingtron-5000 out of work. How is he gunna feed his kids?
@@lolbuster01 he's just gotta pick the "all of my kids are well fed" ending, duh
I think NV has the excuse that the reputation system more or less supercedes the karma system. It still plays a part, but it's minor compared to how it was in 3 and especially to rep.
That Fallout example Pat mentioned is straight up wrong though lol. Looting corpses is never a karma loss, and if the person who owns the item has Evil or Very Evil karma you don't lose Karma. The red text is there to denote stealing more than anything.
My problem is that the 'morality' system in metro isn't about doing good its about learning more about the world around you, also I don't think there is a looking body thing because I got the good ending while looting every single body. Killing doesn't really punish you unless the enemies are only defending themselves or their family. Again I'm not 100% sure but still metro is my fav for morality for the main point that I experienced = "you kill who you have to, take what you need, but you must understand what you are doing or else you're just like the people you're hurting"
It's also hard to judge the Metro games since the originals versus the Redux versions heavily changed a lot of the morality moments. The original did have a lot of very obtuse moments, but Redux smoothed them out for the most part. I was afraid I was gonna get the bad end, but I still got the good ending despite killing loads of enemies (mostly the Nazis, cause fuck em). maybe nobody truly knows how it works, cause it's certainly an enigma
@@moonpoff6456 yeah I'd say it'd up to each individual player for how they think it works. Weird but it's an amazing game either way
Here's a "nice" morality system: SMT IV. While in general it annoys me because you only have chaotic or lawful choices and in order to be neutral you need to be equal parts an authoritive snitch and amoral psychopath. SMT IV's neutral ending requires the points from your choices to be between the threshold of chaotic and lawful but the final choice before being thrown to one of the three routes is a hard binary choice between chaos and law that puts many points into the alignment of your choice. This means that if you had been a mostly neutral person then you will be thrown outside to one of the alignments by the end, so what you need to do is to be leaning to one alignment and at the final choice choose the other alignment. Yes, you need to be chaotic and at the end make a hard lawful choice that contradicts what you have been doing and saying so far. As a bonus, in order to know your current alignment there's an npc that will comment on your current state("you are crazy, dude" for chaos, "you are so polite" for Law). But this charachter will stop being available to check like 10 hours before you make that final choice, so after a point if you want to be neutral you will have to play things by ear.
I don't count SMT alignments as morality systems. It's more about your ideology.
I fucking hated 4’s. 4’s the greatest example of how fucking wrong you can design one. Once you know the generic secret that the Jedi and sith in this analogy are both bad endings you just pick the options to be grey if you’re lucky it works for you. You’re options just suck and personal expression dies immediately.
@Total Destruction which really doesn't work, because the choices they throw at you are moral choices.
The game's framing of Centrism being the "most moral" in game that could very easily be read as Class-Conflict (which I honestly wish it stuck to it's guns on this one) while framing the oppressed Proletariat as unhinged and evil and corrupted (secondarily portraying demons as vampiric monsters while also portraying them as sentient beings, which definitely has some implications 😬) and their monarch, racist (they literally refer to anyone living in Tokyo as "unclean") oppressors as being equally bad is fucking silly.
I'd honestly be more okay with it if EVERY ending was a Bad Ending and they committed to the bleak, nihilistic tone the other endings have, but their favoritism for the super awesome Japanese Divinities means they can't call you out for being an indecisive coward, and instead reward you with the Good Ending because you "stayed to your path" (by completely flip-flopping your morality in nonsensical ways)
This is without getting into the uncomfortable antisemitism levied at the Law alignment in these games, which could be fixed by branching out to other predominant religions (WHICH THEY'VE DONE).
I love this series, and I really love IV's style, soundtrack, and even it's characters, but they can't get over their favoritism, and that goes for almost every Mainline MegaTen (I, II, SJ, and V partially excluded).
@@Squiddy0912 please never give your interpretation of a games themes ever again lmao
That's because SMT4 is a shit game. Generally the neutral route in other SMT games is way less stupid.
The rise of morality systems feels like a misstep in the evolution of videogames. Look at Fallout or Deus Ex: the lack of explicitly "good" and "bad" player decisions actually makes the earliest titles far more nuanced rpgs than the most recent installments.
You still had the system for Fallout it just didn't matter.
The witcher is the best type, the bad or good endings are based on how you treat the characters that are vital to tthe story. Not just "ohhh no, geralt you killed 200 bandits you a bad person bro". Like, let me kill or be nice when I want to, the world is shit already if this many things are trying to kill me.
"Did you need that ammo and supplies, in the post apoc hellscape world?" Who the fuck else is gonna use it???
"no, you have enough, leave it for someone less fortunate then you to loot later."
@@RipOffProductionsLLC
"Don't worry that those people might be just as bad as the people you killed. Nah, it's fine. Don't give some of these supplies to the people you live with in the Metro's."
You wanna know what sucks worse about the Metro morality system? In the redux version of 2033, at least on consoles, the endings are broken. I got near maximum good karma, but still got the ending where you nuke the Dark Ones, and this happens every time.
That said, I am proud to say I got the best ending of Last Light on my first try.
well those are the cannon endings so it's fine.
Really? I got the good end.
@@Samm815 I remember plain as day getting slammed with the bad end after going through the trouble of getting all the positive karma I could. Looked online after trying again and again to trigger the good end, and found a topic that stated that the end state was in fact, at least at the time, broken and only the bad end would trigger.
Did you remember to shoot the laser box?
I also recall getting the bad ending, but that was because I forgot I had to shoot the targeting system at the end =/
@@jannekaukua9542 only the good ending gives you that choice. With the bad ending Artyom wakes up when the missiles are already launching.
I always thought Bioshock 2 had an interesting use of its morality system narratively, as while the mechanics directly affect the player, the mortality changes are more based on Eleanor's views and interpretations than Subject Delta. This way, it allows the player to have any number of reasons for making their choices (further helped by the ambiguity behind Delta's character), with the moral outcomes being handled through Eleanor at the end.
Thus, the game's mortality system is more about the impact your choices can have on others instead of how they impact you, which is further highlighted due to the parental nature of Delta and Elenor's relationship.
Its crazy that Woolie mention how Disco Elysium should ease you into the crazier choices when one of the loading screen texts literally tells you "You should pick the crazier choices because people feel obligated to respect authority figures"
No Pat, the bad ending is not the cannon one because no one could got the good one. It's because the games are following the books.
During the fight with miranda and jack you can still smooth things over after if you fail both checks.
Even if you have full paragon or renegade somebody can still die random in the suicide mission.
Opinion and mood can vary greatly depending on the situation.
I haven't played Bioshock 1 but I have played Minerva's Den, and I really like the morality system it had there, where you don't *just* choose to kill or spare the Little Sisters for ADAM, but you rather you have an option to be their Big Daddy for a bit and defend them as they collect ADAM for you. You could kill them straight when you get them, or take the hard route of fighting for them, spending resources as you do so to get it without killing them... OR if you want to be an absolute monster and maximize your ADAM you be their big daddy until the collect all the Adam they can get and you harvest them. Storywise Minerva's Den has one ending but however you take it the ending lands so you're making the choices not for ending quality but for morality and interesting and difficult gameplay in and of itself.
The Big Sister thing is a bit dicey though, they're a boss fight that spawns once all the little sisters are gone *period,* whether you spare them or harvest them. I do agree that them only appearing if you kill them would have been the most sensical choice, but that would mean that players taking the more difficult human option would miss out on an entire enemy type. The logic of it being "they hunt those who collect tons of ADAM as a last line of defense" does make a good amount of sense and highlight the hypocrisy/absurdity of Rapture's philosophy in "oh you can do whatever, no one will stop you, but also I must must must remain in control and prevent others from getting more powerful than me."
What you're saying applies to the base game as well, though it has 3 endings instead of 1.
Bioshock 2 kicks ass, everyone should play that game.
That's because Bioshock 2 improved literally everything from the fist game. The "Morality system" included.
Mass Effect 1’s Renegade was “Quick efficient get the mission done… but also space racism.”
I always think of ME3 and the mission for the cure. I purposely act as renegade up until the option to shoot Mordin just because it's more dramatic to have Shepard ay least struggle with the idea.
*Renagade* was, but the problem was that to unlock Renegade options (bottom left) you also had to pick the (bottom right) options where you deliberately go out of your way to be a petty dickhead purely for its own sake.
Obligatory “Spacism”
The most complicated morality system I've seen was Ultima IV, where you had to keep track of 8 different virtue meters that would occasionally interfere with each other. It was an interesting take on morality, at least, highlighting that sometimes you have to make tradeoffs between one good and another good.
The worst morality systems are the one where reality changes beyond the choice you made. For example, in InFamous 1 there was a point where you had to choose between saving your girlfriend and saving a group of people. If you saved the group of people, your girlfriend dies, but if you tried to save her instead, it turns out she was in the group that you ignored and she dies anyway. It's these kind of things that make the "choices don't matter" complaint so prominent in games with morality systems.
You know what would have made that scene cool. If instead of your choice in the moment deciding where she is, it's decided based on your morality up to that point.
If you have been evil the whole game she is in the group, and the other is an imposter.
If you have been good she is the one alone.
That way it's more like the villain is predicting your behavior.
If you save her as the good guy, it's a jab at how fragile your heroism is.
If you save the group as the villain it can be painted as a redemption story, or the protagonist out smarting the villain or something.
*you get the canon ending if you play normally*
Pat: this is the worst morality system
Pat: you need to tell me which ending I get for each action so I can pick my ending rather than think about my ethics.
but the canon ending ends on a sour note...I don't like that!
Okay but if all I wanted was to get the ending that was canon then I'd just go read the Metro novels. If the morality system in these games is so unwieldy and hard to parse that you can accidentally get the canon ending even if you're deliberately going for the other one to the point of occasionally consulting a guide like I did, then it's fair to critique it.
Morality systems can be so hard because a lot of it depends on writing but also having two sides may make it limiting in gameplay and story
What I like in FTL is that the morality is pure flavor. There are no multiple endings or character relationships to juggle, it's just a matter of making it to the end. But the game is hard as shit and unless you're playing on easy, can be very stingy with resources. You want more? Refuse surrenders from enemy ships. Loot supplies that could either be a useful weapons cache or vaccines meant for refugees. I think it says something about the conflict you're a part of that the best way to go about it is to be a scumbag war criminal.
Silent hill 2 I feel was a good example of an invisible system to give you different endings.
Playing Warframe. Doing The War Within quest. The Elder Grineer Queen is getting away. Do I...?
Sun: let her go.
Neutral: kill her myself
Moon: let Teshin kill her.
My understanding: "Slurm Queen over there has been pulling at my homeboy like a puppet on a string this whole time, it's only right that he gets the honors."
_(Pick Moon option, my character _*_Commands Teshin to kill the Elder Queen, using the power of her dax command staff that I stole from her to free him to compel him to do it against his will.)_*
Me: Wha- No! I didn't want it to go that way at all!! _Dammit, Canada!!_
Can a game with multiple endings, just straight up, tell me how its morality system works after I beat it once, so I don't have to worry about that after the first play trough?
On these parameters, the Infamous game did well
Infamous just straight up tells you what your options are and how you boost your morality. The issue is that you really rob the story of its strength by going the "evil" route because it's not setup in a way where both paths are simillarly compelling. Evil Cole/Delsin is just a one-dimensional dick for the sake of it, meanwhile, the good route feels the most realised. The big exception is the ending of Infamous 2 where both choices are compelling and make sense for Cole to make. I really like that one. (big Infamous fan here)
@@leithaziz2716 normally, at least in the way I see it specially back then is that devs normally see the evil route to be in the same vibes of these videos of people playing Telltale games and being an asshole, with the good ending being the intended one, resulting in the story normally being better in good routes.
Akibas trip does this neat thing when you beat it once they start telling you what dialogue leads to whos ending
I think the one of the issues I have with metro is that it's morality is not clear enough.
I've got a fun one, especially since Pat mentioned paladins. Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, both fun games, but you can so easily screw yourself over if you play a paladin, monk or any class that has an alignment restriction. Kingmaker, just locks you out of decisions completely. Sorry, you're not a neutral alignment so you have to choose one tribe to commit genocide against even though it's very obvious both tribes have been played against each other by the current arc villain and tricked into having their war.
But the big, big issue is that they took the classic alignment system from DnD/Pathfinder and put it on a circle instead of a grid. So, lawful is each, chaos west, good north and evil south. Then the circle is cut into pie slices for each alignment with a small circle in the center for true neutral.
So here's where it gets fun. Every good decision you make moves you north on the chart. Also, you have a bunch of dialog choices just randomly talking to people. Like not major decisions that impact anything, but just how you talk to your friends where you'll be given dialog choices that are marked as good, evil, lawful or chaotic. So anyway, I'm playing a paladin, a party member was having a hard time, so I chose to be supportive, the good actions. As a result, it moved my little alignment dot north out of the lawful good section and into the neutral good section, causing me to lose my powers because I was nice to a friend when they needed someone.
But it gets better. I got my powers back about 15 minutes later. Not by buying an atonement scroll... But I got an event running the crusade where there were a bunch of sick kids. There was the good option to work on treating them, and a lawful option to just kill them all to eliminate the risk of the plague spreading. So after losing my powers for being nice to a friend, I gained them back for killing a bunch of sick kids which dragged me back into lawful. Like, I feel like child murder, even if you're worried about an illness spreading should pretty much be an automatic fall for paladins, but with how the game works it just gave me my powers right. For an extra kicker, a lot of the lawful choices in the game treat all crimes are equal and are clearly lawful evil actions. So to play a lawful good paladin you may need to randomly execute people for minor crimes, or even if they're the victim to keep yourself in the lawful area. Sure, this person was possessed by an evil spirit that drove them crazy, but they're still guilty of desertion for not reporting in to their commander. So, after defeating the evil spirit that was manipulating them the lawful action is to murder them on the spot.
It gets even more fun/insane in Wrath of the Righteous if you follow the Aeon Mythic Path, which is a lawful neutral path that cares about maintaining the natural order. It starts off simple enough other than treating all crimes as evil so better be ready to execute or jail people for the most minor crimes. But, at one point in a certain chapter, you spend a lot of time among demons, who are always chaotic evil. Because it's within the natural balance of the universe for demons to be chaotic evil, you instead now have to look for ways to punish anyone with a lawful or good alignment for going against the natural order.
I didn't get far into Wrath before putting it aside for later due to the rather janky Crusade system, but this entry's change to how they handle alignment was pretty jarring. I kind of respect it for forcing players to consider the situation and the consequences of an action and not just its alignment effect, but on the other hand I would NOT want to play an alignment-restricted character type in this game!
The most glaring issue I ran into is that 90% of Lawful dialogue options amount to 'The rules would allow us to kill / jail / torture / whatever this probably innocent person so we should do so immediately!'. They code and tag the alignment options on a binary scale (Lawful or Chaos, Good or Evil, or Neutral) but still write them for an actual alignment like the previous game (Lawful Evil, Chaotic Good, etc) because it's actually impossible to write a nuanced reaction to a complex situation without placing the character on a specific point on the alignment chart. You can't write just 'Good' or 'Chaotic' or 'Lawful' options, you always end up more specific, even if that's specifically in the middle somewhere.
It's possible by simplifying the mechanical implementation of alignment throughout the game, they have actually reduced the ability to play cohesive characters. I've suspected for awhile that a 'proper' Paladin playthrough could be hilariously unethical, and the story of someone having to execute plagued children instead of treating them in order to get their powers back has certainly confirmed that.
And this is why is why the only way DnD alignments works is playing on tabletop. The only setting in which if the DM makes a sensibly stupid decision on what alignment to make certain actions, such as in your example, you can look at them dead in eye and OOC ask em what on earth are they thinking
@@defonoteleazar4998 I feel like the alignment shits could work if it was only tied to major decisions and not literally every little conversation. Like big story moments, like if you at the super big thing that happens at mythic tier 7 (avoiding saying what in case anyone reading worries about spoilers) I feel choosing demon, lich, or swarm should pretty much be grounds for an alignment shift. Though, I was doing an interesting experiment to see if I can do the demon route as a paladin without falling. The answer is yes, but I have to fail one tier quest, making my max tier 9.
But still, it's really messed up that killing a bunch of sick kids made Iomodea like me again and give me my powers back.
@@Stromko I mostly wanted to play a paladin and go the demon route to see if it was possible to complete it without falling. Little did I know I would fall for being too good and not for, you know doing demon things. You can murder as many people as you want as long as you're polite in conversation. Unrelated, there was a patch that came out I want to say about a week ago that fixed a lot of stuff in crusade system. Game is still far from perfect. But.... It's Owlcat. It took them a year to get Kingmaker running properly.
To be fair, the cannon ending to Metro 2033 is that way because it's like that in the original novel.
Good points, but I disagree on the morality system being bullshit. It makes it difficult to get the good ending, yeah, but that's the point. It isn't easy being the good guy.
Ok but even bioshock did that with some semblance of intelligence. What metro appears to constitute as “being a good guy” is fucking dumb if you decide to nuke this world you’re a pacifist in because you kept going to strip clubs.
@@Neogears1312 wat
Id argue SMT games are pretty good because they always personify the route with a representative that you appeal to. Plus it works well if you play according to your own beliefs in your first run.
The representatives are always pretty great as a mirror of yourself.
The issue the series has is the conflation of ideology and morality, and the series punishing you for leaning strongly either way, because they're always dark, bad endings, while the route where you didn't commit to any ideal or even solid morals is almost always The Good Ending.
I really hate the neutral routes in these games, because they're always obtuse, nonsensical, and such a huge cop-out.
I do, however, like that Nocturne punishes you for not taking any sides (not even Lucifer) by essentially calling you a wimp and dooming you to wander an empty world, no doubt littered with the corpses of those who stood in the way of...
nothing.
There is a non lethal takedown in Metro Last Light, though
God I want to see one of these two doing a full LP of Alpha Protocol with its "morality" system of inter-personal interactions. Because Mike Thorton's Professional/Suave/Aggressive is amazing for dialogue.
Yeah, for my money that's probably the best "morality" system. Not silly polar extremes on an arbitrary one dimensional cosmic sliding scale, but a set of approaches that can have differing consequences depending on how other people are inclined to react to them. There's even the provision for switching it up wildly and still making sense, since the protagonist is described as good at putting up a front to manipulate people. It's up to your interpretation how much is his real personality and how much is stringing people along, and both befriending people and angering them can have positive results, there are no real wrong choices and the game doesn't condescend one or another way of doing things (Go lethal? It tracks your kills in 'orphans created'. Nonlethal? It tracks the enormous lifelong medical costs you've inflicted on people with all those broken bones and cracked skulls).
at first I was confused about that 92% paragon stat for mass effect because renegade shepard isn't even that bad in the first game. they're just an asshole maverick who likes to solve problems through threats and violence. but then I played it through again and realised just how little the dialogue choices actually affect your morality. you can be a super nice guy to everyone or you can be a space racist and it doesn't matter.
the most significant factor on your morality is quest outcomes. the dialogue that does affect your morality typically only gives you 2 points. quests can grant you dozens of points. so you can be a renegade asshole in dialogue but still quite easily end up largely paragon because you did a bunch of side quests and you chose paragon solutions.
simply doing the side quests on feros, as any rpg player would, grants you 32 paragon points all together.
not gunning down the colonists at the end of feros nets you another 32 paragon points.
not killing the rachni queen on noveria is 24 paragon points.
completing the quarantine quest on noveria is another 24 paragon points.
not killing wrex on virmire gets you 28 paragon points.
another 12 paragon points for the virmire side quests.
28 paragon points for saving the council.
plus, the most popular origins for shepard give you a paragon head start.
that's half a paragon bar without any dialogue choices. the problem is that dedicating to a 100% renegade playthrough means cutting quests short and being a murdering monster. it only gets worse as you get further into the series. I bet later mass effect games are even more skewed towards paragon because renegade shepard can get comically evil, sith lord style.
Im honestly not sure that checking if you needed ammo shit is true considering all I did was A: not kill the cultists in the first area, B: I forget what you do in the 2nd area and C: you just again not kill people on either side and im pretty sure I got the good ending.
That sounds like Exodus, and they really simplified the system for that game.
It actually took me three playthroughs before I was able to trigger the bad ending.
13:45 Tyranny.
In basically every game, being "evil" or "immoral" amounts to being "cruel" or "violent" or "psychotic." Not difficult to avoid being that.
In Tyranny? You are a high ranking member of an army in service of an evil god. Hell, more than that, you're a damn judge and lawyer. Being "good" in that game is fucking difficult, harrowing, and morally challenging. My first playthrough of Tyranny was one of the most important playthroughs of any gave I've ever had.
I thought I was being smart. Placating the commanders, working my way up the chain of command, prepared for my golden moment to change the game from within, betray the army and save the world. That moment never came. The game flat out implied that I wasn't being brave or patient, I was being safe. Comfortable. That my instinct to obey authority figures was stronger than my sense of right and wrong.
By endgame on playthrough 1, I was all "Oh, but I wasn't being sincere in my heart!" And the game had the balls to go "Cool bro, nobody gives a shit what's in your heart. You've been a GREAT leader in this evil army the whole time. Showed real initiative, a hard worker. Good job! Hail Kyros!" I hated it. It made me miserable. Made me question my own relationship to power and evil in the real world. Made me realize how banal evil can be; the evil of complicity and obedience.
Only after a day or two did the power of what happened really hit me. And then I went back in, ready to find a way to tear down the Overlord's army for real. Truthfully, I think Pat would hate a system that actually demanded attentiveness and self reflection to be good. Maybe I'm wrong, but Pat seems to value clarity and transparency in game systems more-so than the story those systems can tell, or the emotional impact of being surprised.
IMO the problem with Metro's morality system is that the Good Points threshold to get the good ending is pretty strict, to the point where I made all the obvious "good" decisions like donating to beggars, saving people, etc., and I was even loosely following a guide to get some of the more obscure stuff for both my playthroughs of the first two games and *still* managed to get the bad ending both times. I understand what the games are going for artistically with that choice, but from an "actually playing the game" standpoint it still isn't great.
Favorite Renegade interrupt from ME2 is actually the "How about goodbye." Line from the window toss, just because it comes right the fuck outta nowhere in that mission and everything else gets played super straight and serious as if that didn't just happen.
Looting does not give you bad ending in Metro serie. It's when you killing every enemy you came across and skip their conversation.
For Metro serie "Good" moral point is given when you help people, learn about other people and that include your enemy.
You didn't even need to spare all enemy.
God, as soon as I started Mass Effect 1 and realized that you needed to hit certain thresholds in order to even respond with either paragon or renegade options made edit my save in all 3 games to give me max paragon and renegade just so I wouldn't have to worry about that shit. ME2 goes so much farther that I'm really glad I did.
I actually like how the morality was done....on paper. They failed in implementation.
First of all both way to play the game are fun in their own way.
Second it does not change just the ending. Dialogue and events would change If you play low Chaos.
The main problem is the game tells you about the moral system in the very beginning. That was a mistake. They should've let you play through the game as a mass killer, no mention of how to go low Chaos. Then you finish the game and you get told how the system works and that there is a secret, not "good", but secret ending, that depends on making the game harder on yourself. Also they should've made it clear just what constitutes Low Chaos. The game leaves it vague and that is a mistake. In short you can kill people, you just need to leave at least half of the people in the level alive and do the side quests to remove your targets without killing them.
The fact that corpse looting isnt more critizised in games is wild if you think about it. Corpse looting is in reality like a maximum scumbag thing to do.
I think maybe my favorite morality system in a game is actually a really old CRPG, Ultima 4. So you're not winning that game if you don't play 'good', but it tracks your morality not with one meter, but like 8 that are all related to different Virtues that you're trying to embody. So in that game, you're going on what is supposed to be a spiritual journey to embody 8 Virtues to become the 'Avatar'. Every virtue is its own meter that tracks your actions.
Honesty, you need to be honest when paying blind shopkeepers that you can underpay, and not steal from people in towns.
Compassion, you need to not attack non-evil creatures like wildlife and let them run from encounters, and you can give money to beggars.
Valor, you need to not run from combat against evil enemies, especially if you're at full health.
Justice has some overlap, with not stealing, paying bling shopkeeps, not killing innocent people/wildlife, etc.
Sacrifice, you need to donate blood to healers, but you can also gain it by falling in battle.
Honor again has a bit of overlap of not cheating shopkeepers and donating to beggars, but also relates to solving quests.
Spirituality you gain by meditating and speaking to a Seer, but you lose it if you meditate with the wrong mantra at a shrine.
Humility is the last one, and when talking to NPCs you need to actually respond humbly to NPCs.
All of them are pretty simple and have some overlap, but it's a fun and interesting system where you actually notice and feel the way you're behaving and have to make an effort to be a good person and embody all of them. You CAN be evil and go against all of them and do awful stuff, you'll just never get the ending of the game.
I remember reading a game design article discussing a faction based morality system wherein there is no good and evil, but there is good for this faction and/or bad for that faction. So you could, for example, help the dwarves harvest a forest and gain good dwarf points and bad elf points.
The example stuck the most with me was a police station mission in Desu Ex Human Revolution. You need to infiltrate it and steal some info. But the place is not some kind of evil base of bad guys, it's normal police station. So even tho there weren't any repercussions for just killing everyone (Sarif chastises you for being too loud and reckless, but that's it. Which in a way reinforces that he is still a megacorp billionaire who just needs things done and doesn't really care about others) in the station, it felt wrong to do so. And that line of thinking, that most enemies are just doing their job or happened to be in a bad situation and don't deserve a fate of being torn apart by a unstoppable cyborg assassin, persisted throughout the whole game. I've forced myself to be stealthy, patient and slow instead of easily annihilating everything in my path with no second thought. And the game didn't really punish or judge me for either options much, left me with my own conciseness.
The Paragon/Renegade system in ME2/3 is indeed pretty bad. You're basically leveling up your goodness or badness like a stat, and if one of those stats is high enough you get a "win conversation" button that is NECESSARY for a lot of moments.
The worst part of it is that there's never a moment where the "win conversation" button isn't available for Paragon or Renegade. There are specific Paragon or Renegade choices, but the important conversation wins? You just need to have been a big enough butt or a big enough angel.
And it has to be basically max rank in one direction, you can’t do this by half measures you don’t get anything
Yeah it kills roleplay.
I thought that you had to purposely check all the bodies to get the good ending. I did that and I got the good karma points. Also, all the karma points does is make the ending available, because there is something you need to do to get that ending.
Fable 2 will always have my favorite morality system. I actually felt a hero/villain with how the people, economy and my dog and my own bodies metamorphosis reacted to me.
A man has been sitting outside my house eating tofu for three hours and when I asked him to leave he glowed red and bought my house, it wasn't for sale, I'm penniless from the skyrocketing rent, and they're still eating tofu.
@@activityzone353 Wait didn’t that kill all the guards? Why does everyone think he’s goods good now because he played the lute?
@@kneeofjustice9619 Simple, "Musicians are hot, there's no way he's evil, he's just misunderstood" and other defending the bad guy logic.
@@activityzone353 HA! You just discribed my Fable 2 character. Just add that store goods were damn near free and people would be required to sniff my farts daily.
It could be argued killing a raider in fallout helps the world, where as stealing from them only benefits you personally
Pat would sacrifice resources if it meant he could save the little girl.
But he wouldn't sacrifice his fun. That little girl better hope saving her doesn't lock Pat out of any game mechanics.
It does come down to the problem if videos games being treated as nothing more than entertainment products.
I remember what set me off about Fallout 3's morality system. The aftermath of getting the ghouls into Tenpenny Tower.
Tenpenny Tower doesn't let ghouls in and it turns out it was only like two people really against ghouls being allowed in. If you do the work to allow ghouls in, the two people that didn't want them are kicked out and I think never heard of again. After this the leader of the ghouls starts the kill the human residents one by one as you play. When confronted, he essentially says, "Well they were all still secretly racist and they would have turned on us eventually." If you kill the leader at this point, you get negative karma. This almost made me quit the game.
But is tenpenny secretly right though? It's a new world. His the tower is his. He keeps it with strength. The ghouls are dead. The living dead. The humans in the tower at least have a future.
@@shadowreaverrising1753 my problem was getting negative karma for killing someone that openly admitted to killing every human in the tower because he assumed they were all secretly racist. There was no pitched battle. He one by one killed each of them over time and dumped their bodies in the basement.
@@XShrike0 you were labeled a double crosser. You turned on an ally.
I wish I quit the game sooner tbh. As if that quest and the one where you get positive karma for helping a woman roofie a guy wasn't bad enough, the ending is one of the worst narrative conclusions to a story I've ever seen. There's a reason this game and Mass Effect 3 are pretty much the only games with a postlaunch DLC to retcon the ending.
@@shadowreaverrising1753 For one thing, ghouls aren't zombies raised from the dead in the Fallout setting, they're just people that have been exposed to high levels of the setting's magic radiation and been given longevity (implied immortality in some cases), a skin condition, and possibly a predisposition toward going feral as a result. For another, the game essentially has 3 morality systems, and all of them side with the ghouls and against Tenpenny and the residents of his tower. All of the residents dying by Roy's hand* is considered a good thing. Fallout 3's writers, not being as smart as they thought they were, were trying to make them a metaphor for oppressed minorities and ran headfirst into the classic fantasy problem of racism against fictional fantasy races with genuine physical differences to humans not being compatible with actual racism for obvious reasons.
*there's another option where you personally release feral ghouls into the tower to slaughter the residents which is considered evil, but that's because of the cruelty of the choice rather than because of the residents dying
A hidden old morality system I liked was in Chrono Trigger. The whole festival you do at start that you don't think much of is counting what you do. So if be a dick it will be brought up in a trial later. Mind not any major consequence from recollection, but love how if you play like a jerk they detail it all. If play well they try making crap that doesn't hold up😅
Fallout could have had a great moral dilemma for the player with the cannibal perk; you should gain huge amounts of exp and boosts when eating a body but you'd lose karma and social status--instead you still lose the karma and people hate you and all you gain for eating someone is like 5 HP, it's super useless
IJI handles it's "morality" system excellently and implements it similarly to undertale.
Nazis can go to heck.
But, not torturing any...thing shouldn't be a moral dilemma!
Just because someone is a monster doesn't mean you have to play as a war criminal.
Also, in Dishonored you can mind control people, time stop, distract enemies, etc. Dishonored also rewards you more substantially at the end of a mission when you choose the non-lethal stealth routes
Everyone has a different taste. How much one enjoys something is subjective.
I always find it more fun if the choices you're given aren't obviously good or evil. If both choices possibly result in something scary/shitty, then I don't even care if I get a reward, because I get to watch something cool unfold. I also like when a questline's story alters via a choice, rather than a questline end in a choice that feels like, "pick a hand: Good points + this item, or bad points + this item?"
In SWTOR i was a bounty hunter and decided to be evil on the starter planet and see how far i can take. A hut hired me to kill an engineer but he hid out in a build filled with robots he repurposed to defend him. i broke in killed all the robots defending him until i made it to the target. He begged for his life and offered to pay me what hut would pay to let him live, so i aggreed, took his money and killed him anyway, then cut his head off and put it in a bag. I then went to the cantina his wife worked at and droped her husbands severed head in front of her say "oops" then left. evil choices in star wars games are nuts.
I love Swtor...
I like the idea of several voice takes of a game, for the sake of giving the character a few set personalities to filter responses through.
The best morality system is dragon's dogma where if you choose the wrong option you get straight to a game over screen
I love how the title of this video gave me no indication as to which game they might have been referring to but I still knew it was Metro.
In Metro 2033 you get a positive morality boost if you interact with Artyom's guitar...
I´d like to point out that there are non-lethal takedowns and alternative stealth run paths in ALL metro games and looting bodies DOES NOT in fact affect the morality system on ANY of the games.
Ya Pat sounds like he only talked to a guy who played og metro for 1 hour.
Infamous does it really well imo. It's really non-intrusive, you just change your playstyle a bit.
The problem with dishonored is that they don't really give you fun alternatives to the lethal options.
In Infamour or Kotor you have cool powers on both ends so it's fun to play both styles.
There is totally a non-lethal takedown in metro. And for all that complaining that the fun way to play gets you the bad ending in Dishonored, I thought he’d appreciate that playing the normal way gets you the ending from the book at least a little
InFAMOUS has one of the best choices IMO, which the basis of is "good but hard VS evil but easy"
You have the choice in 2 of raiding a compound to save an ally. You can do this, have to fight through the guards... OR you can ram a truck filled with explosives through the front door, which means you encounter less guards when you fight through the guards.
Has there ever been a game where all moral choices you could make for a character were at the start and the game progressed based on that. Like where you establish before the game even starts how this character would react to things and the game just plays out differently based on that?
Don't think so, but lots of old (or retro) isometric RPGs let you make choices in creation that follow through the whole story.
3:00, I love morality systems because they always come off as exactly what they are. An extremely prissy, privileged person's idea of what is right in wrong. But not even in our world, in fantasy land, literally a white collar guy whose never gotten in a fight judging wasteland warriors doing mad max shit. And apparently they find silly things like "wholesale murder is totally fine, but looting what I consider more bullets than you 'need' is straight up "evil". . . It's just so silly when at the end the game tries to judge you from some ivory tower made of a 12 year old's idea of morality.
I just really wonder what the though process behind that even is? You should leave some behind for the next guy so he can loot them and shoot you in the ass when he catches up? What?
Hale's Shep works fine as a mix if you draw a specific line between your crew and your enemies. She can be a saint to her allies and ruthless to her enemies and that can be rationalized just fine I'd say.
Being kinda topsy turvey makes a certain amount of sense when you have insane responsibility and power thrust on you in an insane situation which 2 and 3 def qualify as.
I want a morality system that just determines what your values are, without condemning. Like, if you steal from companies, you become selfish, but if you give the stolen goods to people you become collectivist. If you shoot slavers, you become egalitarian but also more militant. That stuff
I just want a morality system where not only is neutral an option, but is also realistically the path of least resistance, as there should be consequences for going too good or too evil or such (e.g. a hostage being killed cause you refused to murder a bad guy in some sort of Batman-like code, being chased out of cities for multiple repeated atrocities, characters losing trust in you for being too inconsistent with tasks, characters easily manipulating you for being too trustworthy, etc.). And in the case of Star Wars, I WANT TO HAVE THE OPTION TO BE A GREY JEDI, fuck the Jedi and the Sith, let me take them both on as a lightning-throwing diplomat trying to avoid large-scale wars.
Idk about the earlier Fallout games, but stealing from Slavers in Fallout 3 doesn't reduce Karma, it just makes them hostile if you get caught.
(I hope I'm not wrong about this, I played Fallout 3 fairly recently and don't want to redownload it again)
18:15 That's a simple fix instead of "Opt In/Opt Out" make it "Think About it/Forget About it" although I've heard there are mutually exclusive thoughts where if you Opt into one thing you can't even get the thought for another
Even if generic blue/red morality systems are bad, the one thing they do get right is they encourage consistent behavior. Once you make your first blue or red choice, you're almost guaranteed to keep making blue or red choices regardless of context for the rest of the game. I replayed Dragon Age: Origins a few weeks ago, which is notable for not having any dialogue tracking mechanics, and when you know ahead of time that certain items or boons are a result of specific dialogue choices then you start to realize that the lack of any system rewards complete sociopathic behavior where you are CONSTANTLY changing your entire personality depending on who you're talking to.
For example, I made a Cousland that I decided early on I would roleplay to be a devout believer of the Chantry and yet every time I talked to Morrigan I wouldn't hesitate to betray my roleplaying decisions because I knew that certain dialogue options had +1 approval behind them and the other ones didn't. Intrinsic rewards like the satisfaction of properly roleplaying a character are way too easy to temporarily discard when you have to balance them against extrinsic rewards like shop discounts, magical items or party member approval.
When it comes to bigger, more traditional games, I think that The Witcher series always did a good job with its morality systems. In TW1, there rarely was a "good" option to pick, so you were generally able to play Geralt in a way that made sense to you and the consequences felt fair. TW2 is a bit more hit and miss, but when it hits it hits hard. Again, there are few "good" options to pick and the consequences are generally felt long afterwards. TW3 has morality options with better and worse outcomes, but in order to get the slightly less terrible outcomes you actually have to understand the world around and makes choices that make sense. You don't just press the blue text option and receive the good ending.
All in all, The Witcher games are good examples of morality systems that forces the player to put themselves in a situation and make a decision that, based on what they know, seems to result in a desired situation.