First off, I'm talking about American RPGs. JRPGs don't have morality systems because they are glorified rail-shooters where you get to circle an area in the hopes of leveling up to make things easier later, and the obligatory airship you always get around 2/3rd through that lets you travel to every city in the game for a scavenger hunt. Rubbish.
American RPGs draw more from a D&D heritage than anything else, and therefore let you create a character and actually role play the. Except, the choices they give you for your character's morality aren't really choices.
This is what a normal morality system for a video game looks like, along with the corresponding bonuses that arrive with it:
Gripe 1: No depth whatsoever.
Gripe 2: You are rewarded in the game for being either an angel or a demon.
Gripe 3: You can't have a late-game conversion of morality due to events of the story line (oh noes! My master was evil. Maybe I should turn good and lose all my bonuses with no chance of getting to the other end!)
Here is how this plays out:
Early on in the game, you see an orphaned girl who is dying of thirst. Her mother was killed by bandits and they left her there to die. You are presented with the following options:
A) Stab the baby in the head then rape it's corpse
B) Give her food, water, and all of your worldly possessions so it can live a rich and fulfilling like on a beach house in Maui.
Really? Why are the options so extreme? And why are they so polarizing? Why can't I sell it into slavery? Why can't I just kill the bandits and be done with it?
Choices in life just aren't that simple. Sometimes we do good things for evil purposes, and evil things for good reasons.
A simple way to deepen these games would be to make a 2nd axis:
The archetypes listed are solely for a point of reference for what kind of characters generally fall into these types. You don't get any bonuses for going in any direction, you don't get any status upgrades or cool auras. Instead, your direction chooses the type of gameplay you receive. Lets say, for example, you start off the game by helping a village who is being overrun by bandits. You can:
A) Kill all the bandits for the village and return their plunder.
B) Kill all the bandits, take the plunder, then demand ransom from the village
C) Attempt to stop the bandits from doing what they are doing without killing any that aren't required
D) Overthrow the bandit leader and take control of their gang.
Each of these options will move your character in one direction. The more you move in one direction, the more the game directs towards quests that fit into your preferred play style. If you like to control things from behind the scenes, the more you get 'deceiver' type quests. The more you like to fight for vengence, the more you get vigilante-type quests, etc, etc. Each action you take will give you either a + or - to your intentions and actions score. Certain actions (torching a village) would add more than others (not helping a beggar.)
You don't need to change the main quest at all, you just need to give people different ways to solve the puzzles in them. They can use brute force, they can use sly tactics, or enlist allies, whatever. You can play the game you want to, and are rewarded for it by having the game move more in your direction. If you don't wish to choose a direct path, you can always hop around a bit and stay in the middle without being penalized. You simply get to play the game you want to play, and someone else can play the game they want to play. The end results would be similar, though I'm sure you can work different endings in based on your actions throughout the game.
If you wanted to change morality during the game, you could. It wouldn't be quick, but the more you decide to take action into your own hands, or to do the right thing, the more times you would be given the opportunity to change. What's more, it would feel more natural than suddenly stopping your skull-fucking and begin giving all your money to the poor.
This system does require a lot more mini-quests, but the nice thing is that since you won't be getting them all the first time you play, it adds a lot of replay factor.
Ideally, you could even add a 3rd axis, though I don't know what that would be exactly. If you could figure out a way to do actions vs. motives vs. morality, that might work, but would require a lot of work in terms of identifying how you classify actions.
Besides linear RPGs, a system like this would be really interesting for MMORPGs. Currently, most use a race/class system with a couple hundred 'factions' that you can gain or lose points with. Nothing you do actually matters except for a few quests and being killed on sight for being the wrong faction in a town controlled by them. That is so simplistic it's almost insulting. In a system that tries to create a real game world, I think there should be a better way to do it.
I thought that Fallout 3 did a decent job of bridging this gap. There is still an incentive to play as a "good" character most of the time, however some areas are considerably easier if you're evil. You also get Achievements specific to leveling up as certain alignments. You can also easily change your alignment - almost too easily, in my opinion. Some "followers" are only available at certain alignment levels as well.
ReplyDeleteElder Scrolls: Oblivion was more or less similar. The issue there was you couldn't really enter any towns while evil, because the guards would attack you. However, it was easy to engage in morally questionable activities provided only certain NPCs were aware while still maintaining the facade of being a "good" character.