I talk about morality systems in RPGs, often called alignment or karma meters. I talk about how I used to do them, and what my thoughts are now about how they should be implemented.
A complementary system to moral alignment and faction reputation is global reputation. It was a system in Morrowind that essentially represented your level of fame as a hero in the world. Do heroic things and the word gets out, which results in NPCs responding differently to you over time as you become a celebrity. I loved this system because it felt rewarding to be celebrated for your deeds, and it made the world feel more dynamic too.
The problem with that system was that if you accidentally back stabbed someone in the wilderness, where no one was around or would ever be around, your reputation would end up heavily impacted. Because of this I personally prefer the Darklands implementation, it had faction (church, Medicci, etc), local (towns, villages) and global (World) reputations. You could do good or bad things for a faction but it would require more direct impact in the population to actually matter for the Town and even if the Town loved or hated you, it would require the total input of MANY towns (or explicit actions that would shape in one way or another a sector of Germany) to matter for the global reputation. Furthermore if you did favors for the Church and later on you committed some crimes in the Town, once you found yourself at the stake, a representative of such Church could come in and let you walk scot-free (with catches I won't spoil here).
@@georgeweissmann9095 That's a game that will test your endurance since its mechanics (and keyboard layout) are indeed very outdated, but still if you can survive the Character Creation (seek a guide, like, for the love of Azura SEEK one!) you might end up having an amazing experience. Also have the Copy Protection card next to you since the primitive DRM can pop-in at random. Oh and if the Midi Music and Sound effects feel wrong to you (thanks to Microsoft going ballistic with their bad implementation of Midi in Windows) you can brute force the OPL/Sound Blaster versions by renaming some files, I think the GOG forum has a guide for it.
My favourite system is in Mount and Blade: Warband, where you had a seperate reputation going from -100 to +100 with: -every single lord/noblewoman you could meet in the world -every single faction -every single town and village This made it so that you could become a hero in one town and hated in another, or you could be a hero among villagers but all the lords would hate you (or vice versa). Sometimes it would be impossible to please everyone and your relationship would go into the minus; if for example you did a lot of dirty work for a dishonourable lord. This would make it so that the town he rules over hates you but the lord himself adored you. Make the wrong people angry and they would send bandits after you when in their territory. Seperate from all that, there was an honour rating. This rating would go up when, for example, you let defeated lords go free after a battle. It would go down when you attacked helpless peasants or assassinated a money lender. In turn, the honour rating would affect your relation with honourable lords over time. A player could choose to forego a lot of benefits in exchange for honour, which, as the word got out into the world, would increase your relationship with other honourable lords and pay off in the long run. Then there was also a renown system, which would go up as you won difficult battles or perform mighty tasks. As it rose, more lords would recognize your name and you could lead more people. The reason I think this system was really good, is because it combined personal relationships with different globally effective stats, creating a varied yet across the board consistent reputation system.
I would love to see a reputation system where your status is not immediately known. Like maybe you've done a lot of work for the Orc boss, and orcs who recognize you are your ally, but if you're not wearing your signature brooch or whatever, most orcs won't recognize you. I would also love a system where your reputations "spreads" over time. You might piss off a guild in the big city, but the guild in another city doesn't know about that yet, and it won't know about it until the news "travels" to them.
Fallout 3: kill a raider? no karma loss steal item from dead raider's house? karma loss never made sense to me. also the fact that you can blow up Megaton in an evil plot that would make Hitler blush, but give enough water to beggars and you can reach sainthood level of karma. I think one way to remedy this would be that certain evil acts will limit your karma permanently so that it never goes above Evil or maybe Neutral.
Tenpenny also has the other hilarious one with the Ghouls. If you convince Tenpenny to let them in, after some time they wipe out all the humans. If you kill the ghouls even after they betray everyone's trust and kill 10+ people? Bad karma! Even after asking the leader directly and finding the bodies. It's so silly, it must have been an oversight.
@@President_Dave I was actually playing it last night, and if you do the unmarked quest to find the Naughty Nightwear, get confronted by Lug-Nut, and then just shoot him, you get positive karma. Dude says "hey, that's mine, I paid for it", you say "nah" and _murder him_, and it's.. a good act? Fucking wild. Fallout 2 has a similar issue with the Hubologists. I walked in and just opened fire, mass shooter style. I got karma for every kill. The game was telling me yeah, these people are so fucking evil that walking in and going full No Russian on people peacefully minding their business, actually a paladin move. What's their crime? Uh, weird science cult I guess.
I agree with you. It's great to watch the man responsible for some of my greatest moments in gaming talk about what makes things tick behind the scenes.
Just earlier this week I tried out the demo for an Australian-developed CRPG set in post-apoc outback (titled "Broken Roads") that tried to chart out its morality system as a radial compass, with the quadrants being (in clockwise order) "humanism", "nihilism", "machiavellianism", & "utilitarianism". Regardless of any other thoughts that went through my mind by the end of that demo, I figure that this upload is exactly the kind of place where mentioning it for people to take a look at would make a lot of sense.
The balance issue you had developing Arcanum reminds me a lot of a problem New Vegas had where there could be stretches of road full of raiders attacking you that quickly gave you Good Karma.
I guess you could solve that by creating subfactions at least for raiders and have them fight each other. Instead of good karma you just ingratiate yourself with the rival. Even if it's only two raider factions who hate each other, you'll always get brownie points from one, and it'll be challenging to kill them both. Honestly surprised we haven't seen a major RPG have their factions dynamically war with one another. I guess Skyrim tried but it was very stale.
Morality in NV at least feels like it barely matters, I wouldn't be surprised if they were forced to keep it in by Bethesda so they just stripped it back a bunch. They, rightfully, made rep much more important.
Oblivion had a very funny one that was basically hidden/bugged. Check out Rimmy's "Oblivion's Incredible Hidden Mechanic" if you haven't, the goblin wars are very funny. Not super "dynamic", once you know they just go to steal a stick, but it was a cool attempt.
Fable had a lot of the exact kind of "systemic" good vs. evil mechanics that Tim's talking about, and in practice they worked precisely as the Arcanum team predicted: You could deliberately change your alignment in ways that didn't really feel authentic.
That balance issue you found is also present on Fallout New Vegas. I found it impossible to finish with anything other than Very Good Karma, because virtually everything that attacks you is evil.
RDR1 despite not being an RPG had a good system for it's genre of games, which is having Honor and Fame meter. These two systems in different combinations made you either famous as a good guy or as a bad guy, if you're good you will be always greeted by NPCs and they will lower their prices for you, but locations with bandits will like you less, and vice versa.
@@trolltalwar I would say it could qualify as an rpg. Rockstar wants to make rpgs but without the systems traditionally associated with rpgs and with pre-defined characters
F2 had a good system. A general reputation (karma) that you could really tank by becoming a slaver etc or you could become a general hero. Then all towns had their own reputations. New Vegas also did this and it worked well again even if karma in New Vegas was less clear and less important than in f2 but the reputations for different factions were more varied and complex. Entertaining video as usual tim.
Resolve Beyond The Beef in a good way, but at the last step a companion picks a fight with the unconscious NPCs and they all wake up with a massive fight ensuing and the farmer dude giving me a shotgun so I could get my guns back from the cloak room behind the croupier, my first Wild Child reputation
I remeber being really confused when Cass called me out for being evil in FNV. I didn't think I had done anything terrible until I remembered that I was stealing everything that wasn't nailed down and was looking for a crowbar for everything that was. No one ever saw me steal, but somehow Cass thought I was a monster. And all it took to fix it was clearing out vault 3 of Fiends. Morality systems are weird.
You hit the nail on the head with "People end up Googling how to respond to dialogue." Cyberpunk 2077 ties its secret ending to how much an individual (Johnny Silverhand) likes your dialogue choices. And it's extremely random what may or may not increase his perception of you. Because I knew I wanted the secret ending going in, and because I knew it was basically random, I sort of "ruined" my playthrough of the game feeling frozen and forced to Google how I should respond to Johnny at every turn. I would have much preferred give my honest reactions to him, but the way this "morality" system worked sort of made organic interactions a non-starter. I loved Cyberpunk, but that was an unfortunate consequence of how they chose to implement their morality.
Yeah, I had to look it up too, it was a bit of a shame. I think maybe they should've just tied that ending to if you've completed Johnny's side story, instead of that plus stroked his ego and never called him out. I like it in theory, it suits his character that he'd only warm to you if you basically be a yes man to his nonsense, but yeah in practice it doesn't end up being organic. You look it up and follow a guide, which defeats the point. Reminds me of Dean Domino in a way, from Fallout New Vegas's Dead Money DLC. You have to similarly stroke his ego if you want him to stay friendly; basically never call him out, never mock him, never make a joke at him. With most characters you have to be openly hostile but with Dean, if you make him feel the tiniest bit insecure he resents you basically for the rest of the DLC. Cool, but yeah bit punishing.
Seems like CD Projekt Red repeated their stupid ending mechanics of "The Witcher 3" in "Cyberpunk 2077". It's not that the system itself is (get N out of M decisions right) is fundamentally broken, but which choice is marked as the "correct" one within "The Witcher 3" is infuriatingly bad. The game is so mature in many aspects and extremely well-made in parts, but the decision rating system is so dumb, I get irritated every time I'm reminded of it. Haven't played "Cyberpunk 2077" yet because my experience with the "The Witcher 3" told me to be extremely cautious with anything coming from that developer. I won't touch it before it becomes available for a bargain price.
I will now ramble about morality systems, which I’ve never understood the appeal of: I feel like what the system is trying to accomplish is so much more complicated than can be accounted for. For example, IRL, I think it’s more likely you’ll find enemies and allies within _any_ faction, rather than treating factions as one monolithic whole. Of course there are trends, and nationality/war/racism are different, but still. For a more ragtag setting, I feel like a “fear gauge” and “honesty gauge” would be closer approximations to reality - e.g. NPC is thinking “Should I flee in terror at the sight of you?” or “Will you cheat me?” Even attacking on sight is unlikely unless you’re brandishing your weapon, the guards know your face, or they intensely hate your species/race/etc. You could simulate rumors, potentially - but even then, people only take rumors so seriously imo. Maybe an NPC will bring it up as a question, or say something humorous. Otoh, some info is more direct, like “Watch out for that asshole with the silly hat, shoot on sight!” But then you just swap silly hats and you’re fine! It’s just so complicated, hard to do justice, but possible I suppose. Btw, identity is itself a serious problem for communities - this is why Odo’s race are so powerful in DS9. I’m sure there’s a game in there somewhere 😛
I think a valuable element of a morality system, even a deeply flawed one, is that a player may chose to consider their actions a lot more. I myself find any kind of morality system preventing me from having huge drift in what kinda character i chose to play, bringing me back to considering what my character would do as a person in this world instead of what me, a person irl playing a video game would wanna do to get the best loot or skip a section i dont like.
I was really fascinated by this. Great topic. What's chaotic good to some people can be seen as chaotic evil by others. It's always fun to see where different games place the weight.
I always cared more about my reputation with other factions in Fallout New Vegas over my "mortality". I incidentally did download a mod (bug fix) that reduced karma increases for killing feral ghouls. It allows me to keep my character neutral if I want.
How are minimum system requirements decided for a game? And related to that, how do you decide what computer hardware to design for games given the wide variety of pc specs?
I've never been into the morality concepts of RPGs. In most fun RPGs, the world is already pretty evil. So being evil is essentially not standing out in that world - fitting in. On top of this, I always feel bad when I take advantage of or hurt people that don't deserve it. Even artificial people. Even if I know I can reload, I still feel bad exploring an option like this. And lastly, I crave challenges more than anything else, and the evil choice is almost always an easier solution. It's usually the only reason someone would choose evil - because its faster or easier from their point of view. So I rarely ever explore the evil side of morality in games. And I don't think I'm unique in this. However, there is something to be said about having a choice in the first place. A morally good choice is only good if you can do something bad instead. Even if good players don't choose bad options, the existence of the bad choice still serves a purpose. It's just that all of that hard work to implement evil that some players will never see.
I believe that moral systems work better in games with a manichaean view of things. For example, the Fable saga, which leans more towards comedy, I don't think Fable succeeds entirely in its approach, but it's one of the few times I've seen a moral system effectively implemented. Something that would amuse me greatly, probably already exists but I'm not aware of it, is a neutral path where if your morality is very neutral, you unlock Solomon-like dialogue options and decisions that leaning more towards sharp criticism and clearly showing they are anything but neutral, yet it's amusing to see the absurdity of them. I find faction reputation systems more intriguing and offering a lot of room for experimentation. I would like to see a sci-fi RPG or one set in the present day world that explores reputation systems from the perspective of how that reputation spreads. Through social media or the internet, there could be people who distort it for good or bad, creating missions around that. It could also be a field for experimenting with concepts like Guy Debord's society of the spectacle and add an extra layer of depth. Or maybe not, I don't know, just tossing out ideas that may or may not be silly.
One more benefit to the faction/reputation system that you didn't touch on is that it also (imo) drastically improves how players engage in each *specific situation* rather than having them simply define a pre-set answer for themselves when they start the game. People start a game with a morality system, they start a character. If it's a DnD like game they'll decide "Okay, I'm Chaotic Good", or if it's not they'll say "Okay, I'll do a Light Side/Paragon/Open Palm" playthrough this time. And then anytime the game gives them a question, they give the pre-set response from their alignment without any need to think. I'm light side so I'll help this guy, I'm chaotic good so I'll charge in without waiting for the Queen's reinforcements. Etc. Obviously no or few games want players to simply do this for every choice, but for most people I've seen it removes all nuance. They just do whatever they decided to do at character select. Going against that or changing direction might nerf or outright brick your character. The ONLY time I've ever roleplayed a changing alignment was across the entire BG1->ToB trilogy, which gave a but me leeway because of importing. Having a reputation system instead is "I'm a good guy... but screw these guys", or "I'm a bastard but I'm no slaver!" Type ideas.
I've been thinking about how to improve Mass Effect's morality system for YEARS. The bigger issue with morality systems isn't defining the alignment of the choice, but what the outcome is. In Mass Effect, the intent seems to be a choice between "ruthless" or "there's always a better way." Ostensibly, ruthless characters accept less risk to have a better chance at a faster positive outcome, and paragon characters risk the outcome or take the harder path to do the most good. Unfortunately the reality of Mass Effect was; being paragon was just objectively the best choice, and being renegade was just your character being an asshole or needlessly cruel. The morality system im defining for a future game leans more into making what I feel the original intent was for Mass Effect's morality. Mainly, paragon options have bad outcomes sometimes, and renegade has positive ones. And there would be a spectrum. Mass Effect really was either a goodie two shoes or a maniac, so having options to do miner ruthless things or miner benevolent things allows the player to be ruthless or benevolent based on their personal relationship with a situation or character. The ultimate overall goal is to make the "morality" of situations contrast with the reality of situations, and make the choices more about how principled or unprincipled you're willing to be in a cruel world. Obviously players like to optimize the best choice for the best outcomes and will just Google the right choices, but that's usually because the outcomes lack spectrum similar to the choices. One day I'll figure out the perfect system, where there's choices you hate to make but will for greater good, or choices you'll make even knowing the horrible outcome, just because you're unwilling to tarnish your soul.
Hey Tim, I'm in the middle of creating an RPG that borrows the world map vibe from Fallout, aiming for that mix of semi-open world, random encounters, and areas that load as you discover them. I've got my story and factions down, but the world map? That's where I'm hitting a wall. Figuring out where to place factions, picking out landmarks, and planning out how the game unfolds and reveals itself is trickier than I expected. Fallout really nailed guiding players smoothly from the start, through a tutorial village, all the way to the first vault, in a left-to-right journey that just worked. I see what they did and why it worked, but trying to map out my own game with all these ideas for POIs and factions is overwhelming. I'm curious, how did Fallout 1 tackle setting up its landmarks, towns, danger zones, and all that? How did they plan the distances and the whole content gating. Was the story locked so that you knew exactly the player's journey, or was it more of an organic process along the way. Any insight would be super helpful. Thanks a lot for all your inspiring videos.
Morality systems are great. I like to use them on Tim videos to find out who is the hero and who is the villain. Turns out Tim is quite the renegade, but he's well balanced out by his paragon doggo.
Thank you very much for your answer and going in depth with your previous experience and solutions. To hopefully clear up the vagueness about "moralities" - this is what I worked through in my TTRPG & RPG. Your conclusion of Reputations with likes & dislike is what I aimed at actually. In my system, every group have their own perspective of what is good and evil based at first from their Attributes (Strength likely tied to success, empathy to generosity, etc.) - this is variable/optional of course. By increasing our own "objective good" through specifically related actions (such as "create a situation with a winner a looser " for success morality, or "share resources from above down below" for generosity morality), you heal your insanities and resentments (two kinds of ailments out of eight in total that I have) - there are ways to make sure to not force players' will. - This creates REALLY interesting behaviors in players and NPCs, and makes them believable & immersive. They also will value things differently, money isn't as appreciated by warriors maybe, but prowess of strength probably much more. - My "Alignment" system only used positive/neutral terms for its 2x4 axis. For your alignment about People: Others - Myself & Distinction - Union (or Good-Evil & Chaos-Order from D&D) For your alignment about Things: Beauty - Utility & Magic - Technic (from Arcanum!) Thanks again!
I prefer reputation systems, every time you choose violence or is associated with violence, your reputation for violence goes up, every time you lie, your trustworthyness goes down, every time you help the powerless, your reputation for benevolence goes up...etc etc... In this way, you can have your reputation mirror your playstyle, and maybe you can actively try to create a reputation that you do not deserve.... The good/evil thing becomes to philosophically flat and uninteresting. I hate trying to do something interesting, misjudging a dialogue option, be forced into a fight, and now i'm evil.... Yay for roleplaying!
The first RPG that I remember having a karma system is Ultima IV. I don't know if it is the first game to ever have something like this, but it appears to be the first one that was influential. The first three Ultima games and other RPGs of the time were basically murderhobo simulators that had no consequence for attacking NPCs in towns aside from having guards attack the player, and typically by the late game, the player could easily defeat the guards (except in Ultima II, where each town has one annoying indestructible guard). Ultima IV was a reaction against this - a player who behaved according to normal RPG conventions of the time would not get very far. The karma system in Ultima IV makes more sense than a generic good/evil karma system, as it has eight specific virtues, each with its own karma meter. Player choices in conversations with NPCs and various other actions cause these meters to go up and down. For example, giving money to beggars increases compassion, while having the entire party flee from the combat screen during a fight with evil monsters reduces valor. Reaching enlightenment in the eight virtues is the main point of the game, so the player needs to avoid doing things that would reduce karma and needs to figure out actions to actively increase it. The karma system works for this game, but I think it works because it is tied to the core concept of the game and because each of the eight virtues is specific and can be understood more easily than generic good vs. evil. As a general rule, I would agree that reputation systems are preferable, as it is easier for the player to figure out which actions a faction may like or dislike than it is for the player to discern the game's definition of good vs. evil. Daggerfall has a complex reputation system that mostly operates under the hood, out of the immediate sight of the player. It applies to numerous factions and to certain important NPCs, and the player's reputation with any NPC is calculated based on which factions that NPC belongs to. Furthermore, there is a system of alliances, so changing reputation with one faction has an effect on reputation with allied factions too. It seems like reputation systems in recent games are highly simplified by comparison; it would be nice to see intricate systems similar to those found in Daggerfall return to gaming.
Fallen London is the GOAT for reputation systems. The game has literally hundreds of reputation meters and stats that interact with each other in crazy and unpredictable ways
I've watched a few videos that deconstructs the issue of morality systems in games, and the biggest takeaway I found was that the quickest way to neuter any sense of thematic impact of morality in your game's narrative, is to hyper define it in game systems and terms. Making a moral decision in a game, and seeing the world's impact of consequences, is FAR more impactful an experience than "5 more points towards the dark side".
Great video and definitely some things I never would have considered regarding morality. Tim, I've been watching your videos nonstop the last week and would love to see something on the business development side since you've been in the industry so long. I started a new role last week to help a Colombian indie studio win outsourcing development contracts from US/Europe based studios. I respect how difficult this role will be given the state of the industry. Cost of labor down here is obviously much cheaper yet there are extremely skilled programmers in the company. They recently put out Cris Tales in 2021 and have an upcoming remake of Lunar Lander published by Atari soon to be released. Thanks for your work both in the industry and with this series of videos!
There's been much talk about games not evolving as they should, that we're still playing games as they were 15 years ago or more. What do you think games should be doing now, and what should they be doing in the near future?
One of the most remembered moral choices for me was the dragon age, inquisition when to had to slaughter the bull’s mercenary band in order for him to stay loyal to the qun. I actually started to like the guys so…
When I think of morality systems I'm always pulled back to Start Wars KotR 1&2. Star Wars gets away with the Force kinda tracking type actions arbitrarily as a third party so it's not technically faction related. But then you got characters in your face talking about the real world ramifications. Like saving a lady from slavery, Force says GOOD! Kreia gives you a lecture that makes you wonder if it really was. Even in an open form free thought game like dungeons and dragons morality gets hard to wrestle with. I have a particular respect and fascination with a video game that can capture that complexity.
I really liked the way Kotor 2 often gives you the option to motivate a choice you made, so based on your intent you would then gain light or dark side points. Like when you talk to Atris about the mandalorian wars, you have lots of options to define the motivations that lead your character to that choice, you could even decide that the exile regrets going to war, and based on your responses you would gain different points
From my experiences, the factional reputation system seems to get the right effect 75% of time, efficiently. Best cost value ratio for sure. Though, I've played around with the idea of having a database of "Karma" events that have "Actor, Subject, Event, and Scope" information. For example, Player insults NPC 1 with the scope being NPC 1's friends. When NPC 1's friends do a query to see how they react to the player, it'll pick up that event that the player insulted NPC 1 and color their opinion. Trying out a few experiments, it has the potential to model very complicated dynamics of interactions in the world. Something that could be done with a relational database and queries run against it. Trouble is that developing and testing the model on a computer is deceptively effort intensive. One of those, "This would be totally cool... if I could have a few years just dedicated to hammer it out."
The unforseeable action thing I'm reminded of is the ONE Outer Worlds quest I failed which was to save Jameson on Roseway, but I didn't know that if you do literally anything else, you will find him dead, and by the time I found out, the last non-auto save was so far back it wasnt worth re-doing. I literally had to Google to find out if he could EVER be saved.
One thought I had near the end of this, kind of backing up the conclusion you more or less come to, is that the “original” system in the genre: alignment in D&D begins as basically a factional system. In OD&D and Basic a character can be aligned with law or chaos but those are factions, not moralities. Over time those morph into more morality systems and the 9 point one we know now but in the beginning it’s like whose side are you on? Not like who are you morally.
I use Notoriety (scale of 1 to 10 (start at 1) for HOW well know you are and Reputation for if you are known for being NICE or HARSHLY CRUEL on a scale of 1 to 10 (start in the middle at 5).
"People googling the responses for good endings to everything" Metro 2033 really leaned into that, having to double-check every good and bad karma point to make sure you had enough right at the end of the game
I think Fable made a well done morality system by allowing their world to not be taken as seriously as other role playing games. Most players will choose what makes sense in the story, so by making their world less important, it gives the player a setting in which being evil can be enjoyed without robbing the story experience. I also think morality systems can work in settings where the morality being measured isn't necessarily good/evil, but instead a character caught between two worlds. Sleeping Dogs did this (although not executed well iirc) for its setting of an undercover cop caught between duty and friends.
Wouldn't a solution to the system you've described be to cap the amount of Good/Evil you can gain by the alignment of the creature you've killed? If you kill a rat and they're -10, you can never go beyond +10. This way, to be more and more good, you need to do greater and grander things. Also it solves an issue where you can be "too evil" to ever be good - if the most evil creature in your game is -100, you can always only be equal to them or better, so killing them still gives you a bit of karma back.
This doesn't fix the problem of becoming evil by murdering a family and then killing monsters in a random dungeon to become good again though. That was the main issue he described in arcanum. There was never a problem with being "too evil" there was a problem with being "too good", as it was too easy to undo any horrible action by doing what you causally do in RPGs, attack enemies.
@averageaf4321 I was referring directly to the issue Tim mentioned, which was walking around the world getting tons of good karma just by playing the game. What you're describing is an issue inherent with most morality system. My fix would be to disregard good/evil deeds if they're sufficiently below your good/evil value. So, if you're -100, doing things that are +10 would not affect your score - you'd need to do something equally or more good to start flipping.
@@yaginku yeah, I mean it sounds great when you say it in a text based comment like that, it would be my first suggestion too. Tim and his team I'm sure capped values, messed with numbers, distributions of enemy alignments, etc. It all sounds really cool and fun on paper, and totally makes my inner nerd want to create a system for all of it lol. However, remember he said they started with this idea in 1998 and it finally got changed in 2001. That's about 3 years they had to experiment with this idea and in the end they decided to change it. I'd be utterly surprised if no one suggested an idea similar to yours in all that time. Just to be clear, I'm not saying it's impossible to make work. However, I think the whole point of that explanation was Tim's way of showing just how difficult a good idea can be to put into practice. They loved this idea but couldn't get it to work after 3 years of trying, I guarantee they thought about it and tweaked it for way more hours than you or I have as viewers. Again, I don't want to be a downer. I hope you make a game with that mechanic and it's awesome! I'd play it for sure! But the truth is no one has successfully made a game like that, largely because of the reasons Tim said
@@averageaf4321 I know there's a difference between design on paper and implementation, I've been working as a game designer for over 7 years. The point of my comment wasn't to suggest Tim didn't iterate on the feature. In fact, it would be cool to hear how that feature was iterated.
@@yaginku yeah he talked very briefly about how it was iterated upon. I would be curious to see what they did as well. Sorry I made such assumptions, I see too many comments that say "I would simply do x, y, or z to fix everything in your game". My fault 😅 that's MY pet peeve as a designer
Full agree, reputations are better, the only ones worth adding are universal fame, for the big stuff that can be titles different people and groups view differently but they all can know the degree of, like how big a hero you are how much you've killed, if you're recognized by a signature weapon or armor. And internal reputation, in games where you can build a personality with traits and perks it'd be cool if your character would judge themself, like in a fantasy world if you're a cleric how well do you follow your religion, in an apocalypse, do you have some moral rule you won't break? you have a boost if you roleplay your beliefs and stick to them, but can suffer debuffs from doing things you hate yourself for with possibly options to change beliefs as you progress.
Karma & morality systems are one of the most intriguing things about video games they allow you to do things you otherwise could or couldn’t do there are a lot of people who wanna do crazy stuff they could never get away with or save n be the hero they wish they could be n that’s where karma is so great at allowing us that escapism in games. To me when I play “RPGS” like elder scrolls it’s never the same as fable it’s so morally grey. fallout is the king of morality in video games the wasteland is the typa place where it feels very rewarding and good to help folk. N on the other hand ur totally free to go cause as much anarchy and chaos as you want to the point where it borderline treads on wow I feel bad turn off the game reload the save what have we done XD n everything in between ontop of rewarding you for building your character in so many different ways I really will make many karma specific perks, karma specific companions. Lots of ways u can use skills in both ways do u want to do something Malicious and evil with explosives or help diffuse a bomb and save lives. Speech is the most interesting to me where I think making silver tongued devil characters that know how to press buttons n get under folks skin with speech is something only new Vegas really got into u know or use speech to start a revolution those r the things that make karma so sweet and fallout is the perfect game for this I cannot think of any game that even comes close to how great it was implemented into fallout.
The TTRPG Pendragon defined several religions coming with their own set of good/evil things (pagan, christian, wotan virtues).It's not so much factions but philosophical systems that you can design however you want if it's not a historical(ish) setting. The point is instead of defining the effect of an action for each faction, you said what trait that action affected (the list was: Chaste / Lustful, Energetic / Lazy, Forgiving / Vengeful, Generous / Selfish, Honest / Deceitful, Just / Arbitrary, Merciful / Cruel, Modest / Proud, Pious / Worldly, Prudent / Reckless, Temperate / Indulgent, Trusting / Suspicious, and Valorous / Cowardly) and you'd get +or- to your moral system based on its values (pagans were lusftul, christians were chaste, so they same action was as either good or evil depending on who you spoke to). So you could create very easily a new moral system and add it to the game by just saying which traits were vitues and vices (which is what happened as expansions were added to the game). It was more systemic than what you are describing, but you could always say that these traits are ambiguous and not everybody would agree on what's good or not, then what's deveitful or honest may also be discussed.
Great videos, i love listening them. As a gamer i agree. I dont like carma in games because for example if you steal from the faction that in your eyes is really bad you still gest negative carma, but if you steal from faction that is good you are punished the same. Faction reputations are very fullfilling to the point when i replay the game i have in my mind okay i want this factions to like me and others to hate me, also it is really immersive.
Here's perhaps an interesting topic for a future video: "End Variant Choosing Mechanics": How should a game determine what ending the player should get / deserves? I'd love to hear your opinion on the particular mechanics used in "The Witcher 3". There are a limited number of choices one has to make during the game which determine (by using simple addition of "good" choices and a threshold value) the ending. For some of these choices the "preferred" choice just does not make any sense to me at all. In a number of cases a player who wants to act responsibly and rationally will be punished by the rating system and may end up getting a bad ending. I don't want to get into spoilers here, but I could explain, if needed. "The Witcher 3" is obviously a remarkable game and I had to think of it watching this video because the game handles moral ambiguity very well and also deals with moral uncertainty. What may appear as a kind act (to a single entity) may actually turn out to be of great detriment to a lot of people. I liked it a lot that not everything may turn out to be what it appears to be. However, the end choice mechanics completely spoiled the whole game for me. I hate it with my guts. Only by chance, I stumbled upon the criticality of some choices and was very frustrated that the game wanted one to pander to the mood of a spoiled brat at times, instead of being someone encouraging the spoiled brat to grow into a more balanced person. Again, I would love to hear your take on that, but if it is too touchy of a subject, perhaps talk about mechanics for choosing end variants in general.
Reputation by faction is my favorite way to do it, and I have Arcanum to thank! Specifically the Ogre Island mission chain. I was one of those players who tried to kill the guy at the end, only to find out he was good-aligned. Sure, now I look back and see ways that can be plausible, but like you said, it's not a good experience when the consequences aren't apparent. For further reading on faction systems, I'd suggest Freelancer, which ironically also released in 2001. It did a fantastic job, but only if you chose to explore it.
EverQuest had a really fantastic morality system, and I think came to a similar conclusion of what you've said: Very faction based, reactive more to groups of mutually interested people as opposed to just you are more good or more bad. The context of an MMO of course matters a lot in that decision, and killing in that context DOES align you more to one side or the other, though usually it's several factions down and one or two up. Good and Evil existed as a base starting point, but then you could be a neutral human class and still walk over to dark elf's evil town and SOME people weren't kill on sight to you, or you could work hard to make a faction like you again. It made for a world that felt more alive than the binary morality nearly every MMO has had since, and I think a core part of why people still go back to it.
New Vegas, at least before Josh Sawyer fixed it with his rebalance patch, was a great example of this issue. I once played a Legion aligned courier, who wasn't really that all evil, just completely ruthless. He acted idealistically but used horrific methods. That meant he killed a lot of people and refused to do many quests because in his mind only people whose odds of success were unreasonably stacked against them deserved to be helped, he wasn't gonna be an errand boy and weaken the wasteland by making everyone reliant on him. He also hated the NCR because he saw them as morally bankrupt. He chopped up probably hundreds of NCR soldiers and even some civilians when they attacked him in retaliation. So he wasn't a madman, but he certainly was psychopathic, even though everything he did he did for what he perceived to be the greater good. So yeah, he was pragmatic evil I'd say. Spent 90% of the game at Very Good karma because I killed more bandits than fluffy bunnies. Even FERAL GHOULS give good karma. Can you imagine EVIL FERALS? What do they do when we're not watching, sell drugs to children? My pacifist character barely got there by the end of the game because most of the good karma you get is from genocide. I much prefer the reputation system, even if it's harder to balance and I always end up beloved by everyone in every game I play, so the end result is always the same.
9:45 Played Pillars 1 & 2, currently, finally :P , playing Tyranny (as currently as in taking a small break from playing Tyranny to watch this vid) and man those that issue resonate with my biggest grief with Tyranny so far even though I'm enjoying it very much! 😅
I like the idea of global and faction reputations being turned into complementary systems. Like using Fallout as an example: You should get some positive reputation with Shady Sands for solving their radscorpion problem, but it shouldn't have a big global effect since nobody in Junktown or The Boneyard is really going to care that you did something in a cave somewhere. On the other hand, joining the BOS should have a big global effect because everybody's going to see you walking around in their armor and sporting some advanced weapons. Evidence/suspicion should also influence some of the negative things. To use Tim's thieves' guild example: if you do a great job stealing things and leave no evidence it was you, there shouldn't be negative rep with the town if nobody knows it was you. But if you're leaving evidence behind, you should get a negative rep since you're suspected as the thief who's been taking things and might have even killed a guard.
The problem with karma meters in games is that they necessarily remove any ambiguity or grey area from the morality of your universe. You can agonize over your choices all you like, but as soon as that "Your karma decreased!" message pops up, you know that oh, okay, I guess not saving the trapped adventurers because doing so would cause a local farming community to fall into ruin was the Objectively Wrong thing to do. Faction reputations work around the problem by grounding them in something objective - it doesn't matter why you did something or if you can argue that it was an overall good or bad thing to do, these people still don't like you for doing it. Companion favorability is more tricky, because instead of an overall general outlook from a bunch of people, it's how much one person who is currently present likes your actions, which means that *why* you took that action should matter more, and developers often fail to give players the chance to explain or justify their choices to them - you just get the "companion disapproves" popup and the conversation moves on. A classic example is the hard and callous Morrigan from Dragon Age: Origin, who disapproves of the PC choosing to help the weak - even when that thing is "defend the town we want to recruit into our army from the undead". She (and the writers) assume the player is doing it to be a hero and so Morrigan disapproves, and there's no chance given to say "I just want the reward" or "We need to keep our allies alive".
I wonder if it would be worth it to track relationships individually (along multiple axes since like/dislike is kind of boring) and then have those trickle to connected relationships a few levels deep. Say there's a person you help, you gain some number of points with them. Some fraction of those points shift over to every immediate connection they have - say guild, town, romantic partner. Maybe you do this another layer deep, so some fraction of the fraction goes to every member of the guild and a different guild that the romantic partner is part of. Maybe every neighbouring town is connected, so they each get a fraction of the fraction as well. I figure if you're helping/hindering a lot of people that are closely related one way or another, that could lead to some organic changes on a larger scale. The tricky thing would be making sure that people who are directly opposed aren't directly linked, since it could be a bit silly to be a famous thief that somehow made the town guards big fans. Perhaps rather than trickling the scores, you would trickle the action at some reduced impact. So someone likes that you did something and tells their friends, but maybe not every friend is cool with what you did. Lots of interesting food for thought from this video!
It's funny that reason you changed the system in Arcanum ended up being a problem in New Vegas with its karma, it's just really hard to be evil because of Fiends and Feral Ghouls.
So for the first time I decided to play not only a rather evil character in fallout. Eventually i became a murder hobo and murdered entire towns depending on the level i could. When i was on my way back from the glow i was stopped by a bounty hunter he said he was hired due to all my evil acts. I ended up blinding him to the point he couldn't fight i think it broke but i was able to steal his weapon and armor off of him. It was by far the biggest surprise i had ever seen.
Interesting that the early Arcanum morality system of "killing something less evil than you is evil" is kind of how left vs right politics works today. I think it was smart to reject that appealing simplification. It's actually a *really* hard problem, because the morality of any action is highly contextual.
I have a related philosophical question that's been bothering me for a while. How come in videogames roleplaying as a good character is easier than as an evil one, when in real life it's the opposite? In life we have to go out of our way to do good, but in videogames we have to go out of our way to do evil, because the good option is almost always better (more beneficial to the player) in every way and the only reason someone would choose the evil option is curiousity. There are no meaningful sacrifices to make and thus no moral choice. Why do we have to roleplay as sadist-murderers to be evil, instead of rationally choosing not to do good because it's easier?
Mostly because video games and RPGs especially are mostly power fantasy and morality tales. In real life yes being a good person is often less profitable and more difficult than being a jerk, but when people play games they generally don't like being "forced" to be evil. They want to be the hero, and they want to follow the path of least resistance as well. Honestly it's hard to think of any game where the objectively "good" path isn't also considered the default "primary" path through the game. Tyranny is the only one that inmediately comes to mind and even then it's questionable how much objective "good" you are doing by supporting the rebel faction or just outright opposing Kairos given differing motivations you might have for either. It doesn't help that the villains of a story tend to be the primary catalyst for the plot happening in the first place and causing the trouble that the player will have to resolve, sort of by default placing them opposed to the "bad guys".
I quite often play "evil" characters with very high Charisma in CRPGs because I enjoy gaming the morality/reputation and conversation systems. I like to see how awful I can be and still have everyone love my character. However, I prefer not to kill NPCs unless it's some sort of requirement. It's been a long time since I played it but I recall getting the NPCs to really like me despite some very questionable actions in Arcanum.
Morality is a subjective judgement, stealing for example is typically frowned upon but that doesn't make it objectively bad. To give Fallout 4 more credit (because I can and will continue to do so) Morality being tied to a followers characterisation is so much more dynamic and immersive than the game constantly telling you off for accidentally picking up a bottle cap in someone's home despite the fact no one was there to witness it. Cait in particular likes it when you do things most people don't, but her Likes evolve over the time you get to know her as an example she will like it when you do drugs before you complete her loyalty quest but afterwards (for spoiler reasons) she dislike and maybe even hate it when you continue to use drugs going so far as to rightfully call you a hypocrite. Building my character around my friend group is a subtle way to roleplay.
i think faction reputation is a better idea as well in general but that arcanum rep system would work better imho if instead of a single dimensional line where balance leans on one(evil) or the other (good) side, it were a 2D graph that keeps tabs on your actions at different points in time - that really ultra evil action you did in the past is still there, no amount of saved puppies or kittens wont change that maybe that ultra evil act will attract attention of someone evil-you gain cloud by that guy, but gain neg rep at good guys that had a thing going on there and you threw a wrench in his plans by being evil that will create a 2D graph of your actions as you go through the game
It's also the same reason why I don't like the Humanity/Path/Road system in "Vampire: The Masquerade" for example where you have to follow a strict code and without it you're just nothing more than a mindless beast which is where the whole entire "Personal Horror" theme doesn't work at all in practice.
I think the most annoying thing about moral alignment is it sometimes goes against quest design. As in sometimes you cannot engage with quests as that gives you good karma and perhaps I want to do a bad karma play through which somehow includes eradicating a town, destroying a major faction, and making people hostile with zero replacements for those losses. Now I get it you can’t have your cake and eat it too, but I believe there should be equal opportunity to engage with quests for both evil and good playthroughs.
The paranoia system of The Thing (PS2) was great. NPC would not trust you unless you took a blood test. Off button, paranoid, neutral, trust each NPC was on the scale somewhere
One of the dumbest things in a game was I think in an expansion to BG II. The villain from BG 1 says if you were raised like him you would have done all he did too. If you disagree your alignment is hard set to evil from this stupid conversation lol Now if you were raised as a cannibal maybe you would be one too, maybe not once exposed to normal people. But there would still be no reason you would become a supervillain trying to overthrow the world or universe or whatever he was doing. You do have responsibility for your actions and it's amazing to me many people totally disagreed.
I think the only time I've seen a binary morality system really work well is with Mass Effect 1 where it wasn't really about good or evil but instead representing if your character is going to act as a *paragon* of the ideals you've sworn to uphold as a Spectre, being cautious about using your power as judge jury and executioner. Or a *renegade* like Saren, the antagonist, who gets the job done the simplest and safest way, even if it hurts others, as well as using your position for personal gain. It sorta fell apart in the 2nd/3rd game though where you are no longer a Spectre (in 2) and Saren is no longer an antagonist to contrast your actions against.
New Vegas has probably the worst Karma system I've interacted with since you could do a complete pacifist run and endup as evil; as stealing things (even from factions deemed as evil) always results in negative karma but very few quest choises award good karma aside from KILLING Fiends.
I played Fallout 1 and 2 through to the end dozens of time over my life, and I must say I never ever ever cared about the karma system apart from a curiosity closer to the end of the game to see my stats. Similar to the number of creatures killed. Didn't care one bit.
10:05 spoiler alert Why does Cass have a quest marker over her head... Bringing Cass to the Van Graffs... Reload the save... Might have let the bomb guy into the Silver Rush
i remember when i played fallout 3 and i my run i killed everyone who gave me lip and i was a so good it was unbelievable so much so i nuked the town for Tenpenny and i was merely neutral so i just gave some water to bums and i was good again
Something that always bugs me in morality systems is when small acts accumulate to wipe out bigger ones. If I burn down a tavern, it shouldn't matter how many cats I save from trees, etc.
Love your videos. How will you balance the output from selfless vs selfish decisions. Often the selfish will aquire more money from direct actions but in my experience the selfless gets better overall bonuses from positive npc relations and items ect. So both as my general playstyle but also my read on the best payoff pushes me towards an almost altruistic playstyle. Shouldn't selflessness mean a harder experience, but with a more positive ending? I mean, is it really selflessness if there are no negative consequences. That said, I hate when pixels are mad or disappointed in me, so I usually do good in any case
Ooo. I like the idea of a selfless vs selfish system, not of morality, per se, due to the fact that moralism...well, look at politics today. lol "Your side is evil!" "No, your side is evil!" :p (Ugh.) For some reason, that scene from Tim Burton's Batman between Batman and the Joker always comes to mind when I look over that way. "You made me!" "You made me, first." "I say, you made me. You gotta say I made you. I mean, how childish can you get?" Selfless vs selfish, otoh, has some real potential. As much as we might want to be selfless, we sometimes have to be "selfish", at least in the sense of self-care. Reminds me of that Lily Watson quote: "“If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” I can easily envision a RPG exploring that idea.
I think faction reputation and loyalty are better systems to work with. Loyalty is a better fit for individual characters than faction reputation, you can easily create interesting drama by having a character who is loyal to you but obviously disagrees with what you do in the moment.
Hi Tim, what's your take on immersive sims or games that aren't rpgs but have too mamy rpg features to just be considered a regular action game? (ill define immersive sim as its a kinda general term: I mean games that (usually) tell a linear story but encourage specializing in different playstyles via perk trees or whatever it be. eg like prey dishonored gloomwood kinda og Thief)
So what if you are more good than something else that is good? Why is that considered evil, but when you are more evil than something else that is evil its also considered evil? Shouldn't you in the first example become more good?
11:41 and I guess if you are stuck with a morality system (like star wars light / dark side or karma) then the choices have to be *so clearly* good or evil that it's not debatable which is which. That would lead to a comically good Vs evil choice with little depth
I mean if you really want to follow this thought process to the end of the line, instead of good and evil you should have an entire tree of "virtues." The whole reason the trolley problem doesn't feel right is because it sacrifices a sense of justice or fairness for that greater good. People like to pin virtues against vices, and while that is interesting, classically it is more about pitting virtues against other virtues.
Faction reputation adds consequences and stakes. A global morality seems to either be inconsequential flavor or overly restrictive. In either case, I find there's often a sense that the NPCs are omnipotent, which is un-immersive to me. Like, how the heck does this random NPC in a completely different area and different faction know what I did with another faction in another area and has an opinion about it? I would be okay with difficulty of passing deception checks being related to global reputation, but NPCs shouldn't have access to unrealistic knowledge. But having NO consequences to being a murder hobo or being a white knight is more annoying than having somewhat unrealistic consequences.
This still doesn't seem to solve the Arcanum problem, mentioned in the beginning, though. You could kill people from a faction and make the faction hate you and then you could kill the enemies of the faction and then the faction will start liking you, just like that. Or you could kill an innocent person from a faction and then give $1000 to a beggar from the same faction and again, your reputation would be fixed. I think the solution here is in the proportion. A good act, redeeming evil, should give you very little, just like breaking things is easier than making them. You could say that one innocent person would cost 10,000 monsters or something like that. Harsh but more accurate.
I think people's "good" and "evil" acts just never really cancel each other out. People can effectively have a high "evil" status while simultaneously having a high "good" status. People may be willing to work with someone with a bad history if they also do a lot of good things but their reputation for having done "bad" things remains and will still effect people's trust no matter how much the "good" deeds outweigh the "bad". Exactly what "good" and "evil" are is essentially just a matter of opinion so it is more effective to keep track of exactly what acts a person has done and then let characters individually decide which of those acts was good or bad. Reputation is more like a list of traits than a credit score. How much good someone does for society as a whole is often not what people use to determine if someone is a "good" person.
Ogre Battle March of the Black Queen probably had the worst morality system i've seen in a game. When unit that was higher level killed a lower level unit it moved its alignment toward evil. So even if a literal angel from heaven was killings an evil spirit murdering innocent civilians if the angel was too strong it would be seen as an evil act by the game mechanics lmfao.
That game's got a weird system since there's the CHA and ALI stats, and you need CHA to change into any class, even the evil ones, but evil characters will lose all their CHA before they can upgrade classes 99% of the time. So you'll get evil characters stuck in like tier 2 classes when good characters will be able to keep upgrading to better classes.
And in The Outer worlds? I think that it's a little confusing that the in the reputation menu you can see how much they like you and how much they dislike you. It's something like "They like you a 50% and dislike you a 30%" that means that they like me a 20%?
That system was to distinguish the situation you describe, where the player has done a lot of things they liked (50%) and also several things they didn't (30%), from the situation where the player has done just some things they like (20%). In the latter, they like you a little, where in the former their feelings are mixed and they are unsure about you.
Isn't better to just show the final reputation score? In this case +20%? I mean, a single bar that has two maximum values (-100 and 100) and that starts on the middle sounds more clear, for me at least.
@@CainOnGames I get what you mean, with a single bar it will "the same" a regular +20% and a +40% and -20%. Well, i don't know how it would be more clear, maybe a simple bar displaying the general reputation score with a text saying "Neutral" or other states and then an option that allows the player to see the reputation on a more complex way showing both scores with all the things that the player did to gain/lose reputation like quest, killing NPCs, helping other factions, donating stuff, etc. There is not a correct answer for sure, each one has their own ups an downs.
I think it is fundamentally futile to gauge the player's intent, so the classic moral compass is flawed, and it usually forces extremes anyway. It is also a bad idea to balance by +1/-1, oh you want a neutral rating and you just helped someone? Here smash this baby into the pavement. If you absolutely do a compass, you should have it move into alignment with actions of that end, and move out of that with any other action, with majority being a huge neutral area in the middle. I also think the player should be able to explain why they did something, many games only have stupid good and cartoonish evil only.
I actually like the reputation system you see in Fallout One a lot better. I like when the game tracks objective things, I hate it when it tries to track philosophical things like good or evil, especially in a game where the choices are meant to be complex. You put the choices in front of the player and let him decide what's good and evil. Having Fallout Jesus tell you that what you did is evil is lazy and annoying and defeats the purpose of having complex choices.
You would only need one. Assuming your idea of "satan" is everything opposite to "jesus", you don't really need to track them separately since they are just the same but inverted. Tracking things separately is only needed when it is things are not just a simple opposite of the other, when factions could agree on some stuff but disagree on others.
@@elio7610 from the top of my head, "satan" won't judge you for doing good things, and "jesus" won't approve killing anyone (maybe turn a blind eye on self defense assuming you have a "mission") So say you have a quest to save hostages. "Jesus" would like you completing this mission, but only a fixed amount (for saving only), but "satan" would approve you killing everyone you have to kill.
"Hi everyone. It's me, Tim" just feels like home now. Thanks again for these Tim. They are wonderful.
Tim the Enchanter
A complementary system to moral alignment and faction reputation is global reputation. It was a system in Morrowind that essentially represented your level of fame as a hero in the world. Do heroic things and the word gets out, which results in NPCs responding differently to you over time as you become a celebrity. I loved this system because it felt rewarding to be celebrated for your deeds, and it made the world feel more dynamic too.
The problem with that system was that if you accidentally back stabbed someone in the wilderness, where no one was around or would ever be around, your reputation would end up heavily impacted. Because of this I personally prefer the Darklands implementation, it had faction (church, Medicci, etc), local (towns, villages) and global (World) reputations.
You could do good or bad things for a faction but it would require more direct impact in the population to actually matter for the Town and even if the Town loved or hated you, it would require the total input of MANY towns (or explicit actions that would shape in one way or another a sector of Germany) to matter for the global reputation. Furthermore if you did favors for the Church and later on you committed some crimes in the Town, once you found yourself at the stake, a representative of such Church could come in and let you walk scot-free (with catches I won't spoil here).
@@PointReflex I bought Darklands over Christmas but haven't installed it yet. You've just convinced me to give it a go.
@@georgeweissmann9095 That's a game that will test your endurance since its mechanics (and keyboard layout) are indeed very outdated, but still if you can survive the Character Creation (seek a guide, like, for the love of Azura SEEK one!) you might end up having an amazing experience.
Also have the Copy Protection card next to you since the primitive DRM can pop-in at random. Oh and if the Midi Music and Sound effects feel wrong to you (thanks to Microsoft going ballistic with their bad implementation of Midi in Windows) you can brute force the OPL/Sound Blaster versions by renaming some files, I think the GOG forum has a guide for it.
I'd say it is like Fable's renown meter. Which is sepate from good/evil meter
It also affected quest outcomes and processes, sometimes, which was awesome!
My favourite system is in Mount and Blade: Warband, where you had a seperate reputation going from -100 to +100 with:
-every single lord/noblewoman you could meet in the world
-every single faction
-every single town and village
This made it so that you could become a hero in one town and hated in another, or you could be a hero among villagers but all the lords would hate you (or vice versa). Sometimes it would be impossible to please everyone and your relationship would go into the minus; if for example you did a lot of dirty work for a dishonourable lord. This would make it so that the town he rules over hates you but the lord himself adored you. Make the wrong people angry and they would send bandits after you when in their territory.
Seperate from all that, there was an honour rating. This rating would go up when, for example, you let defeated lords go free after a battle. It would go down when you attacked helpless peasants or assassinated a money lender. In turn, the honour rating would affect your relation with honourable lords over time.
A player could choose to forego a lot of benefits in exchange for honour, which, as the word got out into the world, would increase your relationship with other honourable lords and pay off in the long run.
Then there was also a renown system, which would go up as you won difficult battles or perform mighty tasks. As it rose, more lords would recognize your name and you could lead more people.
The reason I think this system was really good, is because it combined personal relationships with different globally effective stats, creating a varied yet across the board consistent reputation system.
I would love to see a reputation system where your status is not immediately known. Like maybe you've done a lot of work for the Orc boss, and orcs who recognize you are your ally, but if you're not wearing your signature brooch or whatever, most orcs won't recognize you. I would also love a system where your reputations "spreads" over time. You might piss off a guild in the big city, but the guild in another city doesn't know about that yet, and it won't know about it until the news "travels" to them.
STEAL bullets from bandit? -5 karma, kill bandit? +5 karma
i never played game with correctly made morality system
Eugh, Karma flagged items in Powder Ganger camps.
Fallout 3:
kill a raider? no karma loss
steal item from dead raider's house? karma loss
never made sense to me. also the fact that you can blow up Megaton in an evil plot that would make Hitler blush, but give enough water to beggars and you can reach sainthood level of karma. I think one way to remedy this would be that certain evil acts will limit your karma permanently so that it never goes above Evil or maybe Neutral.
Tenpenny also has the other hilarious one with the Ghouls.
If you convince Tenpenny to let them in, after some time they wipe out all the humans.
If you kill the ghouls even after they betray everyone's trust and kill 10+ people? Bad karma!
Even after asking the leader directly and finding the bodies.
It's so silly, it must have been an oversight.
@@President_Dave So Hitler was a corrupt capitalist.
@@President_Dave I was actually playing it last night, and if you do the unmarked quest to find the Naughty Nightwear, get confronted by Lug-Nut, and then just shoot him, you get positive karma. Dude says "hey, that's mine, I paid for it", you say "nah" and _murder him_, and it's.. a good act? Fucking wild.
Fallout 2 has a similar issue with the Hubologists. I walked in and just opened fire, mass shooter style. I got karma for every kill. The game was telling me yeah, these people are so fucking evil that walking in and going full No Russian on people peacefully minding their business, actually a paladin move. What's their crime? Uh, weird science cult I guess.
I always look forward to these videos even though i have 0 interest in making games its just interesting to hear Tim ramble about.
I enjoy the thought process behind the different video topics.
Once I get my life back together I will continue working on my little project...
I agree with you. It's great to watch the man responsible for some of my greatest moments in gaming talk about what makes things tick behind the scenes.
Just earlier this week I tried out the demo for an Australian-developed CRPG set in post-apoc outback (titled "Broken Roads") that tried to chart out its morality system as a radial compass, with the quadrants being (in clockwise order) "humanism", "nihilism", "machiavellianism", & "utilitarianism". Regardless of any other thoughts that went through my mind by the end of that demo, I figure that this upload is exactly the kind of place where mentioning it for people to take a look at would make a lot of sense.
thanks, sounds interesting. a literal moral compass :D
The balance issue you had developing Arcanum reminds me a lot of a problem New Vegas had where there could be stretches of road full of raiders attacking you that quickly gave you Good Karma.
Or, even more pervasively, feral ghouls.
I guess you could solve that by creating subfactions at least for raiders and have them fight each other. Instead of good karma you just ingratiate yourself with the rival. Even if it's only two raider factions who hate each other, you'll always get brownie points from one, and it'll be challenging to kill them both. Honestly surprised we haven't seen a major RPG have their factions dynamically war with one another. I guess Skyrim tried but it was very stale.
There's mods for Skyrim that fix the reputation system.
Morality in NV at least feels like it barely matters, I wouldn't be surprised if they were forced to keep it in by Bethesda so they just stripped it back a bunch.
They, rightfully, made rep much more important.
Oblivion had a very funny one that was basically hidden/bugged.
Check out Rimmy's "Oblivion's Incredible Hidden Mechanic" if you haven't, the goblin wars are very funny.
Not super "dynamic", once you know they just go to steal a stick, but it was a cool attempt.
Fable had a lot of the exact kind of "systemic" good vs. evil mechanics that Tim's talking about, and in practice they worked precisely as the Arcanum team predicted: You could deliberately change your alignment in ways that didn't really feel authentic.
That balance issue you found is also present on Fallout New Vegas. I found it impossible to finish with anything other than Very Good Karma, because virtually everything that attacks you is evil.
Yeah, without modding you'd have to go postal in a town every once in a while to keep your karma down
RDR1 despite not being an RPG had a good system for it's genre of games, which is having Honor and Fame meter. These two systems in different combinations made you either famous as a good guy or as a bad guy, if you're good you will be always greeted by NPCs and they will lower their prices for you, but locations with bandits will like you less, and vice versa.
A fair argument can be made that red dead redemption is an rpg, or atleast that it has strong rpg elements
@@trolltalwar well, elements yes
@@lepersonnage371 still though, the game ended feeling way more like an rpg than just "gta in wild west"
RDR + FNV seems like the perfect morality system combo
@@trolltalwar I would say it could qualify as an rpg. Rockstar wants to make rpgs but without the systems traditionally associated with rpgs and with pre-defined characters
F2 had a good system. A general reputation (karma) that you could really tank by becoming a slaver etc or you could become a general hero. Then all towns had their own reputations. New Vegas also did this and it worked well again even if karma in New Vegas was less clear and less important than in f2 but the reputations for different factions were more varied and complex.
Entertaining video as usual tim.
Resolve Beyond The Beef in a good way, but at the last step a companion picks a fight with the unconscious NPCs and they all wake up with a massive fight ensuing and the farmer dude giving me a shotgun so I could get my guns back from the cloak room behind the croupier, my first Wild Child reputation
@@pnutz_2 lol you monster!
I remeber being really confused when Cass called me out for being evil in FNV. I didn't think I had done anything terrible until I remembered that I was stealing everything that wasn't nailed down and was looking for a crowbar for everything that was.
No one ever saw me steal, but somehow Cass thought I was a monster. And all it took to fix it was clearing out vault 3 of Fiends.
Morality systems are weird.
You hit the nail on the head with "People end up Googling how to respond to dialogue." Cyberpunk 2077 ties its secret ending to how much an individual (Johnny Silverhand) likes your dialogue choices. And it's extremely random what may or may not increase his perception of you. Because I knew I wanted the secret ending going in, and because I knew it was basically random, I sort of "ruined" my playthrough of the game feeling frozen and forced to Google how I should respond to Johnny at every turn. I would have much preferred give my honest reactions to him, but the way this "morality" system worked sort of made organic interactions a non-starter. I loved Cyberpunk, but that was an unfortunate consequence of how they chose to implement their morality.
Yeah, I had to look it up too, it was a bit of a shame. I think maybe they should've just tied that ending to if you've completed Johnny's side story, instead of that plus stroked his ego and never called him out. I like it in theory, it suits his character that he'd only warm to you if you basically be a yes man to his nonsense, but yeah in practice it doesn't end up being organic. You look it up and follow a guide, which defeats the point.
Reminds me of Dean Domino in a way, from Fallout New Vegas's Dead Money DLC. You have to similarly stroke his ego if you want him to stay friendly; basically never call him out, never mock him, never make a joke at him. With most characters you have to be openly hostile but with Dean, if you make him feel the tiniest bit insecure he resents you basically for the rest of the DLC. Cool, but yeah bit punishing.
Seems like CD Projekt Red repeated their stupid ending mechanics of "The Witcher 3" in "Cyberpunk 2077". It's not that the system itself is (get N out of M decisions right) is fundamentally broken, but which choice is marked as the "correct" one within "The Witcher 3" is infuriatingly bad. The game is so mature in many aspects and extremely well-made in parts, but the decision rating system is so dumb, I get irritated every time I'm reminded of it. Haven't played "Cyberpunk 2077" yet because my experience with the "The Witcher 3" told me to be extremely cautious with anything coming from that developer. I won't touch it before it becomes available for a bargain price.
I will now ramble about morality systems, which I’ve never understood the appeal of:
I feel like what the system is trying to accomplish is so much more complicated than can be accounted for. For example, IRL, I think it’s more likely you’ll find enemies and allies within _any_ faction, rather than treating factions as one monolithic whole. Of course there are trends, and nationality/war/racism are different, but still.
For a more ragtag setting, I feel like a “fear gauge” and “honesty gauge” would be closer approximations to reality - e.g. NPC is thinking “Should I flee in terror at the sight of you?” or “Will you cheat me?” Even attacking on sight is unlikely unless you’re brandishing your weapon, the guards know your face, or they intensely hate your species/race/etc.
You could simulate rumors, potentially - but even then, people only take rumors so seriously imo. Maybe an NPC will bring it up as a question, or say something humorous. Otoh, some info is more direct, like “Watch out for that asshole with the silly hat, shoot on sight!” But then you just swap silly hats and you’re fine! It’s just so complicated, hard to do justice, but possible I suppose.
Btw, identity is itself a serious problem for communities - this is why Odo’s race are so powerful in DS9. I’m sure there’s a game in there somewhere 😛
I think a valuable element of a morality system, even a deeply flawed one, is that a player may chose to consider their actions a lot more. I myself find any kind of morality system preventing me from having huge drift in what kinda character i chose to play, bringing me back to considering what my character would do as a person in this world instead of what me, a person irl playing a video game would wanna do to get the best loot or skip a section i dont like.
I was really fascinated by this. Great topic. What's chaotic good to some people can be seen as chaotic evil by others. It's always fun to see where different games place the weight.
I always cared more about my reputation with other factions in Fallout New Vegas over my "mortality". I incidentally did download a mod (bug fix) that reduced karma increases for killing feral ghouls. It allows me to keep my character neutral if I want.
How are minimum system requirements decided for a game? And related to that, how do you decide what computer hardware to design for games given the wide variety of pc specs?
I've never been into the morality concepts of RPGs. In most fun RPGs, the world is already pretty evil. So being evil is essentially not standing out in that world - fitting in. On top of this, I always feel bad when I take advantage of or hurt people that don't deserve it. Even artificial people. Even if I know I can reload, I still feel bad exploring an option like this. And lastly, I crave challenges more than anything else, and the evil choice is almost always an easier solution. It's usually the only reason someone would choose evil - because its faster or easier from their point of view. So I rarely ever explore the evil side of morality in games. And I don't think I'm unique in this. However, there is something to be said about having a choice in the first place. A morally good choice is only good if you can do something bad instead. Even if good players don't choose bad options, the existence of the bad choice still serves a purpose. It's just that all of that hard work to implement evil that some players will never see.
I believe that moral systems work better in games with a manichaean view of things. For example, the Fable saga, which leans more towards comedy, I don't think Fable succeeds entirely in its approach, but it's one of the few times I've seen a moral system effectively implemented. Something that would amuse me greatly, probably already exists but I'm not aware of it, is a neutral path where if your morality is very neutral, you unlock Solomon-like dialogue options and decisions that leaning more towards sharp criticism and clearly showing they are anything but neutral, yet it's amusing to see the absurdity of them.
I find faction reputation systems more intriguing and offering a lot of room for experimentation. I would like to see a sci-fi RPG or one set in the present day world that explores reputation systems from the perspective of how that reputation spreads. Through social media or the internet, there could be people who distort it for good or bad, creating missions around that. It could also be a field for experimenting with concepts like Guy Debord's society of the spectacle and add an extra layer of depth. Or maybe not, I don't know, just tossing out ideas that may or may not be silly.
One more benefit to the faction/reputation system that you didn't touch on is that it also (imo) drastically improves how players engage in each *specific situation* rather than having them simply define a pre-set answer for themselves when they start the game.
People start a game with a morality system, they start a character. If it's a DnD like game they'll decide "Okay, I'm Chaotic Good", or if it's not they'll say "Okay, I'll do a Light Side/Paragon/Open Palm" playthrough this time.
And then anytime the game gives them a question, they give the pre-set response from their alignment without any need to think. I'm light side so I'll help this guy, I'm chaotic good so I'll charge in without waiting for the Queen's reinforcements. Etc.
Obviously no or few games want players to simply do this for every choice, but for most people I've seen it removes all nuance. They just do whatever they decided to do at character select. Going against that or changing direction might nerf or outright brick your character. The ONLY time I've ever roleplayed a changing alignment was across the entire BG1->ToB trilogy, which gave a but me leeway because of importing.
Having a reputation system instead is "I'm a good guy... but screw these guys", or "I'm a bastard but I'm no slaver!" Type ideas.
I've been thinking about how to improve Mass Effect's morality system for YEARS.
The bigger issue with morality systems isn't defining the alignment of the choice, but what the outcome is.
In Mass Effect, the intent seems to be a choice between "ruthless" or "there's always a better way." Ostensibly, ruthless characters accept less risk to have a better chance at a faster positive outcome, and paragon characters risk the outcome or take the harder path to do the most good.
Unfortunately the reality of Mass Effect was; being paragon was just objectively the best choice, and being renegade was just your character being an asshole or needlessly cruel.
The morality system im defining for a future game leans more into making what I feel the original intent was for Mass Effect's morality. Mainly, paragon options have bad outcomes sometimes, and renegade has positive ones.
And there would be a spectrum. Mass Effect really was either a goodie two shoes or a maniac, so having options to do miner ruthless things or miner benevolent things allows the player to be ruthless or benevolent based on their personal relationship with a situation or character.
The ultimate overall goal is to make the "morality" of situations contrast with the reality of situations, and make the choices more about how principled or unprincipled you're willing to be in a cruel world.
Obviously players like to optimize the best choice for the best outcomes and will just Google the right choices, but that's usually because the outcomes lack spectrum similar to the choices.
One day I'll figure out the perfect system, where there's choices you hate to make but will for greater good, or choices you'll make even knowing the horrible outcome, just because you're unwilling to tarnish your soul.
Hey Tim, I'm in the middle of creating an RPG that borrows the world map vibe from Fallout, aiming for that mix of semi-open world, random encounters, and areas that load as you discover them. I've got my story and factions down, but the world map? That's where I'm hitting a wall. Figuring out where to place factions, picking out landmarks, and planning out how the game unfolds and reveals itself is trickier than I expected. Fallout really nailed guiding players smoothly from the start, through a tutorial village, all the way to the first vault, in a left-to-right journey that just worked. I see what they did and why it worked, but trying to map out my own game with all these ideas for POIs and factions is overwhelming. I'm curious, how did Fallout 1 tackle setting up its landmarks, towns, danger zones, and all that? How did they plan the distances and the whole content gating. Was the story locked so that you knew exactly the player's journey, or was it more of an organic process along the way. Any insight would be super helpful. Thanks a lot for all your inspiring videos.
Morality systems are great. I like to use them on Tim videos to find out who is the hero and who is the villain. Turns out Tim is quite the renegade, but he's well balanced out by his paragon doggo.
Thank you very much for your answer and going in depth with your previous experience and solutions.
To hopefully clear up the vagueness about "moralities" - this is what I worked through in my TTRPG & RPG. Your conclusion of Reputations with likes & dislike is what I aimed at actually.
In my system, every group have their own perspective of what is good and evil based at first from their Attributes (Strength likely tied to success, empathy to generosity, etc.) - this is variable/optional of course.
By increasing our own "objective good" through specifically related actions (such as "create a situation with a winner a looser " for success morality, or "share resources from above down below" for generosity morality), you heal your insanities and resentments (two kinds of ailments out of eight in total that I have) - there are ways to make sure to not force players' will.
- This creates REALLY interesting behaviors in players and NPCs, and makes them believable & immersive. They also will value things differently, money isn't as appreciated by warriors maybe, but prowess of strength probably much more.
- My "Alignment" system only used positive/neutral terms for its 2x4 axis.
For your alignment about People: Others - Myself & Distinction - Union (or Good-Evil & Chaos-Order from D&D)
For your alignment about Things: Beauty - Utility & Magic - Technic (from Arcanum!)
Thanks again!
I prefer reputation systems, every time you choose violence or is associated with violence, your reputation for violence goes up, every time you lie, your trustworthyness goes down, every time you help the powerless, your reputation for benevolence goes up...etc etc... In this way, you can have your reputation mirror your playstyle, and maybe you can actively try to create a reputation that you do not deserve.... The good/evil thing becomes to philosophically flat and uninteresting.
I hate trying to do something interesting, misjudging a dialogue option, be forced into a fight, and now i'm evil.... Yay for roleplaying!
The first RPG that I remember having a karma system is Ultima IV. I don't know if it is the first game to ever have something like this, but it appears to be the first one that was influential. The first three Ultima games and other RPGs of the time were basically murderhobo simulators that had no consequence for attacking NPCs in towns aside from having guards attack the player, and typically by the late game, the player could easily defeat the guards (except in Ultima II, where each town has one annoying indestructible guard). Ultima IV was a reaction against this - a player who behaved according to normal RPG conventions of the time would not get very far.
The karma system in Ultima IV makes more sense than a generic good/evil karma system, as it has eight specific virtues, each with its own karma meter. Player choices in conversations with NPCs and various other actions cause these meters to go up and down. For example, giving money to beggars increases compassion, while having the entire party flee from the combat screen during a fight with evil monsters reduces valor. Reaching enlightenment in the eight virtues is the main point of the game, so the player needs to avoid doing things that would reduce karma and needs to figure out actions to actively increase it. The karma system works for this game, but I think it works because it is tied to the core concept of the game and because each of the eight virtues is specific and can be understood more easily than generic good vs. evil.
As a general rule, I would agree that reputation systems are preferable, as it is easier for the player to figure out which actions a faction may like or dislike than it is for the player to discern the game's definition of good vs. evil. Daggerfall has a complex reputation system that mostly operates under the hood, out of the immediate sight of the player. It applies to numerous factions and to certain important NPCs, and the player's reputation with any NPC is calculated based on which factions that NPC belongs to. Furthermore, there is a system of alliances, so changing reputation with one faction has an effect on reputation with allied factions too. It seems like reputation systems in recent games are highly simplified by comparison; it would be nice to see intricate systems similar to those found in Daggerfall return to gaming.
Fallen London is the GOAT for reputation systems. The game has literally hundreds of reputation meters and stats that interact with each other in crazy and unpredictable ways
Nice isn't always good.
I appreciate your channel so much.
To listen to a person who can reason and make fine distinctions!
So refreshing!
I've watched a few videos that deconstructs the issue of morality systems in games, and the biggest takeaway I found was that the quickest way to neuter any sense of thematic impact of morality in your game's narrative, is to hyper define it in game systems and terms.
Making a moral decision in a game, and seeing the world's impact of consequences, is FAR more impactful an experience than "5 more points towards the dark side".
Great video and definitely some things I never would have considered regarding morality.
Tim, I've been watching your videos nonstop the last week and would love to see something on the business development side since you've been in the industry so long. I started a new role last week to help a Colombian indie studio win outsourcing development contracts from US/Europe based studios. I respect how difficult this role will be given the state of the industry. Cost of labor down here is obviously much cheaper yet there are extremely skilled programmers in the company. They recently put out Cris Tales in 2021 and have an upcoming remake of Lunar Lander published by Atari soon to be released. Thanks for your work both in the industry and with this series of videos!
There's been much talk about games not evolving as they should, that we're still playing games as they were 15 years ago or more. What do you think games should be doing now, and what should they be doing in the near future?
One of the most remembered moral choices for me was the dragon age, inquisition when to had to slaughter the bull’s mercenary band in order for him to stay loyal to the qun. I actually started to like the guys so…
When I think of morality systems I'm always pulled back to Start Wars KotR 1&2. Star Wars gets away with the Force kinda tracking type actions arbitrarily as a third party so it's not technically faction related. But then you got characters in your face talking about the real world ramifications. Like saving a lady from slavery, Force says GOOD! Kreia gives you a lecture that makes you wonder if it really was. Even in an open form free thought game like dungeons and dragons morality gets hard to wrestle with. I have a particular respect and fascination with a video game that can capture that complexity.
I really liked the way Kotor 2 often gives you the option to motivate a choice you made, so based on your intent you would then gain light or dark side points. Like when you talk to Atris about the mandalorian wars, you have lots of options to define the motivations that lead your character to that choice, you could even decide that the exile regrets going to war, and based on your responses you would gain different points
From my experiences, the factional reputation system seems to get the right effect 75% of time, efficiently. Best cost value ratio for sure.
Though, I've played around with the idea of having a database of "Karma" events that have "Actor, Subject, Event, and Scope" information. For example, Player insults NPC 1 with the scope being NPC 1's friends. When NPC 1's friends do a query to see how they react to the player, it'll pick up that event that the player insulted NPC 1 and color their opinion. Trying out a few experiments, it has the potential to model very complicated dynamics of interactions in the world. Something that could be done with a relational database and queries run against it. Trouble is that developing and testing the model on a computer is deceptively effort intensive. One of those, "This would be totally cool... if I could have a few years just dedicated to hammer it out."
The unforseeable action thing I'm reminded of is the ONE Outer Worlds quest I failed which was to save Jameson on Roseway, but I didn't know that if you do literally anything else, you will find him dead, and by the time I found out, the last non-auto save was so far back it wasnt worth re-doing. I literally had to Google to find out if he could EVER be saved.
One thought I had near the end of this, kind of backing up the conclusion you more or less come to, is that the “original” system in the genre: alignment in D&D begins as basically a factional system. In OD&D and Basic a character can be aligned with law or chaos but those are factions, not moralities. Over time those morph into more morality systems and the 9 point one we know now but in the beginning it’s like whose side are you on? Not like who are you morally.
I use Notoriety (scale of 1 to 10 (start at 1) for HOW well know you are and Reputation for if you are known for being NICE or HARSHLY CRUEL on a scale of 1 to 10 (start in the middle at 5).
"People googling the responses for good endings to everything" Metro 2033 really leaned into that, having to double-check every good and bad karma point to make sure you had enough right at the end of the game
I think Fable made a well done morality system by allowing their world to not be taken as seriously as other role playing games. Most players will choose what makes sense in the story, so by making their world less important, it gives the player a setting in which being evil can be enjoyed without robbing the story experience.
I also think morality systems can work in settings where the morality being measured isn't necessarily good/evil, but instead a character caught between two worlds. Sleeping Dogs did this (although not executed well iirc) for its setting of an undercover cop caught between duty and friends.
Wouldn't a solution to the system you've described be to cap the amount of Good/Evil you can gain by the alignment of the creature you've killed? If you kill a rat and they're -10, you can never go beyond +10. This way, to be more and more good, you need to do greater and grander things. Also it solves an issue where you can be "too evil" to ever be good - if the most evil creature in your game is -100, you can always only be equal to them or better, so killing them still gives you a bit of karma back.
This doesn't fix the problem of becoming evil by murdering a family and then killing monsters in a random dungeon to become good again though.
That was the main issue he described in arcanum. There was never a problem with being "too evil" there was a problem with being "too good", as it was too easy to undo any horrible action by doing what you causally do in RPGs, attack enemies.
@averageaf4321 I was referring directly to the issue Tim mentioned, which was walking around the world getting tons of good karma just by playing the game. What you're describing is an issue inherent with most morality system.
My fix would be to disregard good/evil deeds if they're sufficiently below your good/evil value. So, if you're -100, doing things that are +10 would not affect your score - you'd need to do something equally or more good to start flipping.
@@yaginku yeah, I mean it sounds great when you say it in a text based comment like that, it would be my first suggestion too. Tim and his team I'm sure capped values, messed with numbers, distributions of enemy alignments, etc. It all sounds really cool and fun on paper, and totally makes my inner nerd want to create a system for all of it lol.
However, remember he said they started with this idea in 1998 and it finally got changed in 2001. That's about 3 years they had to experiment with this idea and in the end they decided to change it. I'd be utterly surprised if no one suggested an idea similar to yours in all that time.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying it's impossible to make work. However, I think the whole point of that explanation was Tim's way of showing just how difficult a good idea can be to put into practice. They loved this idea but couldn't get it to work after 3 years of trying, I guarantee they thought about it and tweaked it for way more hours than you or I have as viewers.
Again, I don't want to be a downer. I hope you make a game with that mechanic and it's awesome! I'd play it for sure! But the truth is no one has successfully made a game like that, largely because of the reasons Tim said
@@averageaf4321 I know there's a difference between design on paper and implementation, I've been working as a game designer for over 7 years.
The point of my comment wasn't to suggest Tim didn't iterate on the feature. In fact, it would be cool to hear how that feature was iterated.
@@yaginku yeah he talked very briefly about how it was iterated upon. I would be curious to see what they did as well. Sorry I made such assumptions, I see too many comments that say "I would simply do x, y, or z to fix everything in your game". My fault 😅 that's MY pet peeve as a designer
Full agree, reputations are better, the only ones worth adding are universal fame, for the big stuff that can be titles different people and groups view differently but they all can know the degree of, like how big a hero you are how much you've killed, if you're recognized by a signature weapon or armor.
And internal reputation, in games where you can build a personality with traits and perks it'd be cool if your character would judge themself, like in a fantasy world if you're a cleric how well do you follow your religion, in an apocalypse, do you have some moral rule you won't break? you have a boost if you roleplay your beliefs and stick to them, but can suffer debuffs from doing things you hate yourself for with possibly options to change beliefs as you progress.
Karma & morality systems are one of the most intriguing things about video games they allow you to do things you otherwise could or couldn’t do there are a lot of people who wanna do crazy stuff they could never get away with or save n be the hero they wish they could be n that’s where karma is so great at allowing us that escapism in games. To me when I play “RPGS” like elder scrolls it’s never the same as fable it’s so morally grey. fallout is the king of morality in video games the wasteland is the typa place where it feels very rewarding and good to help folk. N on the other hand ur totally free to go cause as much anarchy and chaos as you want to the point where it borderline treads on wow I feel bad turn off the game reload the save what have we done XD n everything in between ontop of rewarding you for building your character in so many different ways I really will make many karma specific perks, karma specific companions. Lots of ways u can use skills in both ways do u want to do something Malicious and evil with explosives or help diffuse a bomb and save lives. Speech is the most interesting to me where I think making silver tongued devil characters that know how to press buttons n get under folks skin with speech is something only new Vegas really got into u know or use speech to start a revolution those r the things that make karma so sweet and fallout is the perfect game for this I cannot think of any game that even comes close to how great it was implemented into fallout.
We need these videos as podcast episodes on spotify!
The TTRPG Pendragon defined several religions coming with their own set of good/evil things (pagan, christian, wotan virtues).It's not so much factions but philosophical systems that you can design however you want if it's not a historical(ish) setting. The point is instead of defining the effect of an action for each faction, you said what trait that action affected (the list was: Chaste / Lustful, Energetic / Lazy, Forgiving / Vengeful, Generous / Selfish, Honest / Deceitful, Just / Arbitrary, Merciful / Cruel, Modest / Proud, Pious / Worldly, Prudent / Reckless, Temperate / Indulgent, Trusting / Suspicious, and Valorous / Cowardly) and you'd get +or- to your moral system based on its values (pagans were lusftul, christians were chaste, so they same action was as either good or evil depending on who you spoke to).
So you could create very easily a new moral system and add it to the game by just saying which traits were vitues and vices (which is what happened as expansions were added to the game).
It was more systemic than what you are describing, but you could always say that these traits are ambiguous and not everybody would agree on what's good or not, then what's deveitful or honest may also be discussed.
Great videos, i love listening them. As a gamer i agree. I dont like carma in games because for example if you steal from the faction that in your eyes is really bad you still gest negative carma, but if you steal from faction that is good you are punished the same. Faction reputations are very fullfilling to the point when i replay the game i have in my mind okay i want this factions to like me and others to hate me, also it is really immersive.
I'm working on a karma system for a round based first person horror investigation game. Thank you for sharing your wisdom!
Here's perhaps an interesting topic for a future video: "End Variant Choosing Mechanics": How should a game determine what ending the player should get / deserves? I'd love to hear your opinion on the particular mechanics used in "The Witcher 3". There are a limited number of choices one has to make during the game which determine (by using simple addition of "good" choices and a threshold value) the ending. For some of these choices the "preferred" choice just does not make any sense to me at all. In a number of cases a player who wants to act responsibly and rationally will be punished by the rating system and may end up getting a bad ending. I don't want to get into spoilers here, but I could explain, if needed. "The Witcher 3" is obviously a remarkable game and I had to think of it watching this video because the game handles moral ambiguity very well and also deals with moral uncertainty. What may appear as a kind act (to a single entity) may actually turn out to be of great detriment to a lot of people. I liked it a lot that not everything may turn out to be what it appears to be. However, the end choice mechanics completely spoiled the whole game for me. I hate it with my guts. Only by chance, I stumbled upon the criticality of some choices and was very frustrated that the game wanted one to pander to the mood of a spoiled brat at times, instead of being someone encouraging the spoiled brat to grow into a more balanced person. Again, I would love to hear your take on that, but if it is too touchy of a subject, perhaps talk about mechanics for choosing end variants in general.
Reputation by faction is my favorite way to do it, and I have Arcanum to thank! Specifically the Ogre Island mission chain. I was one of those players who tried to kill the guy at the end, only to find out he was good-aligned.
Sure, now I look back and see ways that can be plausible, but like you said, it's not a good experience when the consequences aren't apparent.
For further reading on faction systems, I'd suggest Freelancer, which ironically also released in 2001. It did a fantastic job, but only if you chose to explore it.
10:00 100% agree. I am tired of having to have a wiki open just so i can know what the consequences of my actions are
EverQuest had a really fantastic morality system, and I think came to a similar conclusion of what you've said: Very faction based, reactive more to groups of mutually interested people as opposed to just you are more good or more bad. The context of an MMO of course matters a lot in that decision, and killing in that context DOES align you more to one side or the other, though usually it's several factions down and one or two up. Good and Evil existed as a base starting point, but then you could be a neutral human class and still walk over to dark elf's evil town and SOME people weren't kill on sight to you, or you could work hard to make a faction like you again.
It made for a world that felt more alive than the binary morality nearly every MMO has had since, and I think a core part of why people still go back to it.
New Vegas, at least before Josh Sawyer fixed it with his rebalance patch, was a great example of this issue. I once played a Legion aligned courier, who wasn't really that all evil, just completely ruthless. He acted idealistically but used horrific methods. That meant he killed a lot of people and refused to do many quests because in his mind only people whose odds of success were unreasonably stacked against them deserved to be helped, he wasn't gonna be an errand boy and weaken the wasteland by making everyone reliant on him. He also hated the NCR because he saw them as morally bankrupt. He chopped up probably hundreds of NCR soldiers and even some civilians when they attacked him in retaliation. So he wasn't a madman, but he certainly was psychopathic, even though everything he did he did for what he perceived to be the greater good. So yeah, he was pragmatic evil I'd say.
Spent 90% of the game at Very Good karma because I killed more bandits than fluffy bunnies. Even FERAL GHOULS give good karma. Can you imagine EVIL FERALS? What do they do when we're not watching, sell drugs to children?
My pacifist character barely got there by the end of the game because most of the good karma you get is from genocide.
I much prefer the reputation system, even if it's harder to balance and I always end up beloved by everyone in every game I play, so the end result is always the same.
9:45 Played Pillars 1 & 2, currently, finally :P , playing Tyranny (as currently as in taking a small break from playing Tyranny to watch this vid) and man those that issue resonate with my biggest grief with Tyranny so far even though I'm enjoying it very much! 😅
I like the idea of global and faction reputations being turned into complementary systems. Like using Fallout as an example: You should get some positive reputation with Shady Sands for solving their radscorpion problem, but it shouldn't have a big global effect since nobody in Junktown or The Boneyard is really going to care that you did something in a cave somewhere.
On the other hand, joining the BOS should have a big global effect because everybody's going to see you walking around in their armor and sporting some advanced weapons.
Evidence/suspicion should also influence some of the negative things. To use Tim's thieves' guild example: if you do a great job stealing things and leave no evidence it was you, there shouldn't be negative rep with the town if nobody knows it was you. But if you're leaving evidence behind, you should get a negative rep since you're suspected as the thief who's been taking things and might have even killed a guard.
The problem with karma meters in games is that they necessarily remove any ambiguity or grey area from the morality of your universe. You can agonize over your choices all you like, but as soon as that "Your karma decreased!" message pops up, you know that oh, okay, I guess not saving the trapped adventurers because doing so would cause a local farming community to fall into ruin was the Objectively Wrong thing to do. Faction reputations work around the problem by grounding them in something objective - it doesn't matter why you did something or if you can argue that it was an overall good or bad thing to do, these people still don't like you for doing it.
Companion favorability is more tricky, because instead of an overall general outlook from a bunch of people, it's how much one person who is currently present likes your actions, which means that *why* you took that action should matter more, and developers often fail to give players the chance to explain or justify their choices to them - you just get the "companion disapproves" popup and the conversation moves on. A classic example is the hard and callous Morrigan from Dragon Age: Origin, who disapproves of the PC choosing to help the weak - even when that thing is "defend the town we want to recruit into our army from the undead". She (and the writers) assume the player is doing it to be a hero and so Morrigan disapproves, and there's no chance given to say "I just want the reward" or "We need to keep our allies alive".
I wonder if it would be worth it to track relationships individually (along multiple axes since like/dislike is kind of boring) and then have those trickle to connected relationships a few levels deep. Say there's a person you help, you gain some number of points with them. Some fraction of those points shift over to every immediate connection they have - say guild, town, romantic partner. Maybe you do this another layer deep, so some fraction of the fraction goes to every member of the guild and a different guild that the romantic partner is part of. Maybe every neighbouring town is connected, so they each get a fraction of the fraction as well.
I figure if you're helping/hindering a lot of people that are closely related one way or another, that could lead to some organic changes on a larger scale. The tricky thing would be making sure that people who are directly opposed aren't directly linked, since it could be a bit silly to be a famous thief that somehow made the town guards big fans. Perhaps rather than trickling the scores, you would trickle the action at some reduced impact. So someone likes that you did something and tells their friends, but maybe not every friend is cool with what you did.
Lots of interesting food for thought from this video!
Totally agree.
And ideally, most times, it is best that the player has a clue how their actions will affect Reputation (not always, depends).
It's funny that reason you changed the system in Arcanum ended up being a problem in New Vegas with its karma, it's just really hard to be evil because of Fiends and Feral Ghouls.
So for the first time I decided to play not only a rather evil character in fallout. Eventually i became a murder hobo and murdered entire towns depending on the level i could. When i was on my way back from the glow i was stopped by a bounty hunter he said he was hired due to all my evil acts. I ended up blinding him to the point he couldn't fight i think it broke but i was able to steal his weapon and armor off of him. It was by far the biggest surprise i had ever seen.
Interesting that the early Arcanum morality system of "killing something less evil than you is evil" is kind of how left vs right politics works today. I think it was smart to reject that appealing simplification. It's actually a *really* hard problem, because the morality of any action is highly contextual.
Great (one man) discussion!
I have a related philosophical question that's been bothering me for a while. How come in videogames roleplaying as a good character is easier than as an evil one, when in real life it's the opposite? In life we have to go out of our way to do good, but in videogames we have to go out of our way to do evil, because the good option is almost always better (more beneficial to the player) in every way and the only reason someone would choose the evil option is curiousity. There are no meaningful sacrifices to make and thus no moral choice. Why do we have to roleplay as sadist-murderers to be evil, instead of rationally choosing not to do good because it's easier?
Mostly because video games and RPGs especially are mostly power fantasy and morality tales. In real life yes being a good person is often less profitable and more difficult than being a jerk, but when people play games they generally don't like being "forced" to be evil. They want to be the hero, and they want to follow the path of least resistance as well. Honestly it's hard to think of any game where the objectively "good" path isn't also considered the default "primary" path through the game. Tyranny is the only one that inmediately comes to mind and even then it's questionable how much objective "good" you are doing by supporting the rebel faction or just outright opposing Kairos given differing motivations you might have for either. It doesn't help that the villains of a story tend to be the primary catalyst for the plot happening in the first place and causing the trouble that the player will have to resolve, sort of by default placing them opposed to the "bad guys".
Hi, Tim, it's us, everyone
I quite often play "evil" characters with very high Charisma in CRPGs because I enjoy gaming the morality/reputation and conversation systems. I like to see how awful I can be and still have everyone love my character. However, I prefer not to kill NPCs unless it's some sort of requirement. It's been a long time since I played it but I recall getting the NPCs to really like me despite some very questionable actions in Arcanum.
Morality is a subjective judgement, stealing for example is typically frowned upon but that doesn't make it objectively bad. To give Fallout 4 more credit (because I can and will continue to do so) Morality being tied to a followers characterisation is so much more dynamic and immersive than the game constantly telling you off for accidentally picking up a bottle cap in someone's home despite the fact no one was there to witness it. Cait in particular likes it when you do things most people don't, but her Likes evolve over the time you get to know her as an example she will like it when you do drugs before you complete her loyalty quest but afterwards (for spoiler reasons) she dislike and maybe even hate it when you continue to use drugs going so far as to rightfully call you a hypocrite. Building my character around my friend group is a subtle way to roleplay.
i think faction reputation is a better idea as well in general
but that arcanum rep system would work better imho if instead of a single dimensional line where balance leans on one(evil) or the other (good) side, it were a 2D graph that keeps tabs on your actions at different points in time - that really ultra evil action you did in the past is still there, no amount of saved puppies or kittens wont change that
maybe that ultra evil act will attract attention of someone evil-you gain cloud by that guy, but gain neg rep at good guys that had a thing going on there and you threw a wrench in his plans by being evil
that will create a 2D graph of your actions as you go through the game
It's also the same reason why I don't like the Humanity/Path/Road system in "Vampire: The Masquerade" for example where you have to follow a strict code and without it you're just nothing more than a mindless beast which is where the whole entire "Personal Horror" theme doesn't work at all in practice.
Hello Tim Cain, what do you think about the Fallout Magic the Gathering cards and decks releasing soon? Do you play MtG?
I think the most annoying thing about moral alignment is it sometimes goes against quest design. As in sometimes you cannot engage with quests as that gives you good karma and perhaps I want to do a bad karma play through which somehow includes eradicating a town, destroying a major faction, and making people hostile with zero replacements for those losses. Now I get it you can’t have your cake and eat it too, but I believe there should be equal opportunity to engage with quests for both evil and good playthroughs.
The paranoia system of The Thing (PS2) was great.
NPC would not trust you unless you took a blood test.
Off button, paranoid, neutral, trust each NPC was on the scale somewhere
One of the dumbest things in a game was I think in an expansion to BG II. The villain from BG 1 says if you were raised like him you would have done all he did too. If you disagree your alignment is hard set to evil from this stupid conversation lol Now if you were raised as a cannibal maybe you would be one too, maybe not once exposed to normal people. But there would still be no reason you would become a supervillain trying to overthrow the world or universe or whatever he was doing. You do have responsibility for your actions and it's amazing to me many people totally disagreed.
Very interesting video!!
I think the only time I've seen a binary morality system really work well is with Mass Effect 1 where it wasn't really about good or evil but instead representing if your character is going to act as a *paragon* of the ideals you've sworn to uphold as a Spectre, being cautious about using your power as judge jury and executioner. Or a *renegade* like Saren, the antagonist, who gets the job done the simplest and safest way, even if it hurts others, as well as using your position for personal gain.
It sorta fell apart in the 2nd/3rd game though where you are no longer a Spectre (in 2) and Saren is no longer an antagonist to contrast your actions against.
6:53 FNV PTSD kicks in..
New Vegas has probably the worst Karma system I've interacted with since you could do a complete pacifist run and endup as evil; as stealing things (even from factions deemed as evil) always results in negative karma but very few quest choises award good karma aside from KILLING Fiends.
New Vegas focuses on reputation anyway, the karma system is mostly pointless and just a remnant from Fallout 3.
I played Fallout 1 and 2 through to the end dozens of time over my life, and I must say I never ever ever cared about the karma system apart from a curiosity closer to the end of the game to see my stats. Similar to the number of creatures killed. Didn't care one bit.
10:05 spoiler alert
Why does Cass have a quest marker over her head...
Bringing Cass to the Van Graffs...
Reload the save...
Might have let the bomb guy into the Silver Rush
i remember when i played fallout 3 and i my run i killed everyone who gave me lip and i was a so good it was unbelievable so much so i nuked the town for Tenpenny and i was merely neutral so i just gave some water to bums and i was good again
Something that always bugs me in morality systems is when small acts accumulate to wipe out bigger ones. If I burn down a tavern, it shouldn't matter how many cats I save from trees, etc.
Love your videos.
How will you balance the output from selfless vs selfish decisions.
Often the selfish will aquire more money from direct actions but in my experience the selfless gets better overall bonuses from positive npc relations and items ect.
So both as my general playstyle but also my read on the best payoff pushes me towards an almost altruistic playstyle.
Shouldn't selflessness mean a harder experience, but with a more positive ending?
I mean, is it really selflessness if there are no negative consequences.
That said, I hate when pixels are mad or disappointed in me, so I usually do good in any case
Ooo. I like the idea of a selfless vs selfish system, not of morality, per se, due to the fact that moralism...well, look at politics today. lol "Your side is evil!" "No, your side is evil!" :p (Ugh.) For some reason, that scene from Tim Burton's Batman between Batman and the Joker always comes to mind when I look over that way. "You made me!" "You made me, first." "I say, you made me. You gotta say I made you. I mean, how childish can you get?"
Selfless vs selfish, otoh, has some real potential. As much as we might want to be selfless, we sometimes have to be "selfish", at least in the sense of self-care. Reminds me of that Lily Watson quote: "“If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” I can easily envision a RPG exploring that idea.
I think faction reputation and loyalty are better systems to work with. Loyalty is a better fit for individual characters than faction reputation, you can easily create interesting drama by having a character who is loyal to you but obviously disagrees with what you do in the moment.
Hi Tim, what's your take on immersive sims or games that aren't rpgs but have too mamy rpg features to just be considered a regular action game? (ill define immersive sim as its a kinda general term: I mean games that (usually) tell a linear story but encourage specializing in different playstyles via perk trees or whatever it be. eg like prey dishonored gloomwood kinda og Thief)
I only have 3 things to say on this: Junktown, Killian, Gizmo...
King Arthur: Knight's Tale uses Tyranny/Righteousness and Christian/Old Faith axes
So what if you are more good than something else that is good? Why is that considered evil, but when you are more evil than something else that is evil its also considered evil? Shouldn't you in the first example become more good?
Because that is the difference between good and evil, for the game. It’s evil to kill anything good.
But how would a Druid Cyborg react? 😂
11:41 and I guess if you are stuck with a morality system (like star wars light / dark side or karma) then the choices have to be *so clearly* good or evil that it's not debatable which is which. That would lead to a comically good Vs evil choice with little depth
I mean if you really want to follow this thought process to the end of the line, instead of good and evil you should have an entire tree of "virtues." The whole reason the trolley problem doesn't feel right is because it sacrifices a sense of justice or fairness for that greater good. People like to pin virtues against vices, and while that is interesting, classically it is more about pitting virtues against other virtues.
Caves of Qud: "Disliked by tortoises for dishonoring one of their kin."
I tend to prefer a reputation system over a morality system.
Hi Tim, I was wondering if you have any recommendations for good books on game engine design
Faction reputation adds consequences and stakes. A global morality seems to either be inconsequential flavor or overly restrictive. In either case, I find there's often a sense that the NPCs are omnipotent, which is un-immersive to me. Like, how the heck does this random NPC in a completely different area and different faction know what I did with another faction in another area and has an opinion about it? I would be okay with difficulty of passing deception checks being related to global reputation, but NPCs shouldn't have access to unrealistic knowledge. But having NO consequences to being a murder hobo or being a white knight is more annoying than having somewhat unrealistic consequences.
This still doesn't seem to solve the Arcanum problem, mentioned in the beginning, though. You could kill people from a faction and make the faction hate you and then you could kill the enemies of the faction and then the faction will start liking you, just like that. Or you could kill an innocent person from a faction and then give $1000 to a beggar from the same faction and again, your reputation would be fixed.
I think the solution here is in the proportion. A good act, redeeming evil, should give you very little, just like breaking things is easier than making them. You could say that one innocent person would cost 10,000 monsters or something like that. Harsh but more accurate.
I think people's "good" and "evil" acts just never really cancel each other out. People can effectively have a high "evil" status while simultaneously having a high "good" status. People may be willing to work with someone with a bad history if they also do a lot of good things but their reputation for having done "bad" things remains and will still effect people's trust no matter how much the "good" deeds outweigh the "bad". Exactly what "good" and "evil" are is essentially just a matter of opinion so it is more effective to keep track of exactly what acts a person has done and then let characters individually decide which of those acts was good or bad. Reputation is more like a list of traits than a credit score. How much good someone does for society as a whole is often not what people use to determine if someone is a "good" person.
Ogre Battle March of the Black Queen probably had the worst morality system i've seen in a game. When unit that was higher level killed a lower level unit it moved its alignment toward evil. So even if a literal angel from heaven was killings an evil spirit murdering innocent civilians if the angel was too strong it would be seen as an evil act by the game mechanics lmfao.
That game's got a weird system since there's the CHA and ALI stats, and you need CHA to change into any class, even the evil ones, but evil characters will lose all their CHA before they can upgrade classes 99% of the time. So you'll get evil characters stuck in like tier 2 classes when good characters will be able to keep upgrading to better classes.
And in The Outer worlds? I think that it's a little confusing that the in the reputation menu you can see how much they like you and how much they dislike you. It's something like "They like you a 50% and dislike you a 30%" that means that they like me a 20%?
That system was to distinguish the situation you describe, where the player has done a lot of things they liked (50%) and also several things they didn't (30%), from the situation where the player has done just some things they like (20%). In the latter, they like you a little, where in the former their feelings are mixed and they are unsure about you.
Isn't better to just show the final reputation score? In this case +20%?
I mean, a single bar that has two maximum values (-100 and 100) and that starts on the middle sounds more clear, for me at least.
@@NoTAdrian115 How would the player understand why 20% sometimes reported as Mixed and sometimes as Friendly?
@@CainOnGames I get what you mean, with a single bar it will "the same" a regular +20% and a +40% and -20%.
Well, i don't know how it would be more clear, maybe a simple bar displaying the general reputation score with a text saying "Neutral" or other states and then an option that allows the player to see the reputation on a more complex way showing both scores with all the things that the player did to gain/lose reputation like quest, killing NPCs, helping other factions, donating stuff, etc.
There is not a correct answer for sure, each one has their own ups an downs.
I think it is fundamentally futile to gauge the player's intent, so the classic moral compass is flawed, and it usually forces extremes anyway. It is also a bad idea to balance by +1/-1, oh you want a neutral rating and you just helped someone? Here smash this baby into the pavement. If you absolutely do a compass, you should have it move into alignment with actions of that end, and move out of that with any other action, with majority being a huge neutral area in the middle.
I also think the player should be able to explain why they did something, many games only have stupid good and cartoonish evil only.
Hi everyone, it's me, Tim.
I actually like the reputation system you see in Fallout One a lot better. I like when the game tracks objective things, I hate it when it tries to track philosophical things like good or evil, especially in a game where the choices are meant to be complex.
You put the choices in front of the player and let him decide what's good and evil. Having Fallout Jesus tell you that what you did is evil is lazy and annoying and defeats the purpose of having complex choices.
I hated the morality system in F.O.3 but new vegas nailed it.
What Microsoft is waiting for to buy Vampire the Masquerade licence and give the development to Obsidian????
So basically all I have to do is to make a "Jesus" faction and a "Satan" faction in my game and track their reputation separately 🤔
You would only need one. Assuming your idea of "satan" is everything opposite to "jesus", you don't really need to track them separately since they are just the same but inverted. Tracking things separately is only needed when it is things are not just a simple opposite of the other, when factions could agree on some stuff but disagree on others.
@@elio7610 from the top of my head, "satan" won't judge you for doing good things, and "jesus" won't approve killing anyone (maybe turn a blind eye on self defense assuming you have a "mission")
So say you have a quest to save hostages. "Jesus" would like you completing this mission, but only a fixed amount (for saving only), but "satan" would approve you killing everyone you have to kill.