#morality systems

I haven’t finished the game whatsoever, so this is going to be nature spoiler free!

You have two choices when it comes to every single “citizen” (is. People who aren’t immediately trying to kill you): let them live, or drink their blood and kill them. Killing them, in two of the three modes of the game, is the most efficient way of leveling up, but it also can destroy entire districts because, for example, if you kill all the doctors then no one can get treatment. But there’s a good reason to get that extra xp: enemy difficulty ratchets up very quickly, and it can become very difficult to defeat bosses if you’re not acquiring xp through murder.

This is what your character needs to survive.

Personally, I think it would be very cool to have a game where the “easy” path (killing people) turns the game into functionally resource management—keeping the world from falling into chaos while also gaining power through blood—while the “difficult” path (not killing people) is a much more linear experience. (And I’m not just talking about Undertale!)

And then, of course, there’s the reverse, which I feel like is much less common, where killing people is actually the much more difficult path, and not murdering is the apparent path of least resistance but where there are long-term consequences.

For those who have successfully scrubbed HP from their brains, the Unforgivable Curses are three exceedingly taboo spells. One inflicts pain on people, one mind-controls them, and one just kills them. Using these curses doesn't automatically mark someone as Unforgivably Evil, but it's at best a sign of mortal desperation.

The reason I bring this up is that the aforementioned Gamergater announced that the new Hogwarts game would let you cast the Unforgivable Curses—and emphasized the fact that the game wouldn't "judge" you for your actions.

The game isn't out, so we can't say for certain what that means. But there definitely won't be any sort of morality system, and it sounds like there won't be meaningful consequences to using Unforgivable Curses in public. Unless the devs change course after being criticized for that design decision.

I also kinda wonder how the Unforgivable Curses would work from a gameplay standpoint. They're basically the literary equivalent of a Useless Useful Spell, specifically the kind that would break the game/narrative if it affected the big bad enemies. Every workaround I can think of to this issue would be kinda hilarious...or frustrating, if I still cared about the Harry Potter universe for its own sake.

The biggest problem with most morality systems, especially a binary system like good/evil or light/dark, is that it pushes gamers to pick one extreme from the beginning and usually punishes any approach that isn’t. This means that you tend to reduce players to either super big bad evil character and super nice pure good character, with anything in between being visibly and obviously suboptimal. Front-loading decisions like that causes two very large problems: 

You’re forcing the player into a decision that will inform the rest of the game when the player has the least amount of context to make that decision

You ensure that any future moral decisions to make are decreased in importance because the early morality choice pushes the player to go in one specific direction

Since most games with morality systems tend to be RPGs, this hurts the player’s ability to role play. The player is hindered from making nuanced decisions that would actually decide what he thinks the character would do in this situation, and instead incentivizes choosing the shortest path to an offered reward. Morality is something almost every human associates with on a deep level. We are taught very early what is right and what is wrong, so we automatically immerse ourselves when presented with such decisions. By making it a gameplay decision, we can actually pull the player out of that immersion by making it too “video gamey”. The decision adds an artificial layer to the decision-making process, which pushes you further away from thinking about it as if the character would. Maybe your character is thinking about destroying the alien race or subjugating it, but now you’re thinking about how close you are to the +5% discount at vendors if you make one of the choices, or +10% to damage against good-aligned enemies in the future. By forcibly separating the player’s perspective from the character’s, it hurts the immersion factor in what should otherwise be a reasonably important moral decision.

What it really means is that designers need to figure out just what the morality system is for. Star Wars titles tend to lean on the light and dark side of the force, which works for a property that has a clearly defined heroic and villainous side. In such a way, a morality system makes sense - you literally gain more power with the force as you push yourself further and further toward the polar extreme. It would make sense to have a binary morality system in this case. If there is no higher power that adheres to some sort of moral code and the morality is more self-enforced, this sort of system generally wouldn’t be as believable, and would serve break immersion, rather than help reinforce it. However, this clearly can’t apply to every game. Plenty of games exist in a setting where morality is a concept and not a literal force acting on the game world. 

A real morality system is hard to build without falling into the usual development pitfalls like the prototypical binary good/evil system with tiered rewards along the way. This is why many games have moved away from them - they don’t really help push the game in the direction the directors want to go, at least not from a player mindset perspective. Building a really strong morality system requires a lot of supporting content and design nuance. That’s a tall order when so many systems in the past have fallen flat, and it requires a design director with a real clear vision for what sort of morality she wants to emulate and how it would actually work at a systems level. It isn’t impossible by any means, but it is difficult. That’s why we haven’t seen them.

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(Image information: “Sagus Cliffs at Dawn,” by Chang Yuan)

The website Polygon is reporting that Torment: Tides of Numenera has met its Kickstarter funding goal of just under a million dollars within its first twenty-four hours of being launched. Developer inXile entertainment (the second word is not capitalized) also launched a successful Wasteland 2 Kickstarter last year, which more than tripled its funding goal. As of this writing, there have been five $10,000 contributions to the project, but for individuals without quite that much money to spend, a digital copy of the game is available for $25 or, in limited amounts (with over 10,000 current backers), for only $20. The game will be compatible with Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux and will not contain DRM.

The Kickstarter entry mentions that the game’s alignment system does not take the form of a simple good-evil system but instead comes in the form of “Tides,” unseen forces in the game’s setting that essentially serve as groupings of smaller moral concepts. These Tides have been given symbolic colors “based on how [the Tides] appear to correspond with emotional and psychological reactions” (“What are the Tides?”). The Gold Tide, for example, represents empathy, charity, compassion, and sacrifice, but because the Tides focus on actions and not motivations, selfish donation can be included under the Gold Tide along with altruism.

The Tides also play a role in determining your character’s Legacy, depending on what Tides you manipulate the most (“What Do You Mean by My Legacy?”), and various items will respond differently based on the personality and characteristics you’ve determined for yourself through your actions. Going beyond a simple moral feedback, these Legacies will also play a role in gameplay: some “can change the very structure of your body, giving you superhuman powers: the ability to read the past in the minds of the dead, for instance, or a nearly supernatural affinity with weapons.”

Torment fans will be pleased to note that many personnel who worked on the original game are returning for its spiritual successor, including Mark Morgan, who composed the original game’s music and is also doing the music for Wasteland 2. (More information on that title can be found here.)

Off the Record

I didn’t care for the original Planescape: Torment on the whole, as the setting and plot, unique as they were, seemed to have some glaring plot holes. The characters and their interactions, however, were far and away the star of the show. A chaste succubus, an artificial construct who somehow develops a personal identity, a wisecracking skull, and a handsome but sharp-tongued lady rogue, among others, made for quite the compelling cast. The original game’s biggest problem for me was that it simply did not have enough combat for my tastes, such that your main character’s stats seemed to get more use in dialogue than they did in actual fighting, and I’m hoping that will be different here.

The Tides make me think of the five Colors in the card game Magic: The Gathering, in that each Color also tends to represent a number of various themes, such as Blue often standing for intelligence (which, appropriately enough, I misspelled and had to correct), aquatic life, and perhaps even trickery, while Black’s love of power and ambition stands in stark contrast to White’s preference of order and righteousness. These also make me think of an obscure RPG called Soulbringer, which also had a wheel of five colors, each of which would become bigger as the player used spells from one of the colors. (The problem here was that each color had a contrasting color that shrank, so ideally you were supposed to use a balancing act or become weak to certain elements: in a game with finite resources, I found myself relying on the Fire-type healing spell for most of my health restoration, and as such I was never able to beat one particular boss who used powerful Earth-type attacks.)