There are so many games today that implement some kind of moral choice system into basic gameplay. Games like Fable I and II, Dragon Age and Mass Effect 1 and 2 are the most noteworthy of candidates for such gameplay.
You’ve all seen how it works. You get a conversation or a physical decision you have to make and you can either take the nice route that will earn you goodwill points, the evil route that will learn you, well, evil points and the neutral route that will either earn you a bit of both or not do much of anything.
This is great, though anyone who has played any of the above games will have to admit that at least once they’ve chosen to be a complete and utter arse for the sake of simply seeing what happens. Sometimes it makes the people around you fear you and run around in a rather comic fashion (a la Fable), sometimes it doesn’t do much, but it will simply implement a different conversation (a la Mass Effect) or sometimes, in the best example of a moral choice system I’ve ever seen, members can actually leave your team for good, potentially changing the main storyline (a la Dragon Age).
Of course one thing I will never understand, something I perhaps will always cringe at both Peter Moleyneux and Bioware for, is the evil = ugly stance. In Mass Effect 2, choosing more Renegade conversation options will make your scars more prominent and will generally just make you look a bit hungover.
And here is where I get to my point: they’re entirely useless for the most part (Dragon Age excepted), these systems. I don’t know about other games, but when I make a bad moral choice, I want it to have ramifications on the plot, on my character’s outcome. I don’t want my character to be too vile to look at because I chose to turn away instead of help, but mysteriously have an entire team of faithful subjects willing to attend to my every whim.
In Fable II, I decided to play the evil route, by killing anything and everything in sight. I had horns, people fled in fear and children wept and the mere sight of me. However, deciding I was bored of all the screaming, I decided to adopt the moral route. You know what it took? One sizeable donation to a homeless guy sitting on a bridge. Within seconds, my good and purity bars had rocketed, I had a halo over my head and the same people, afraid only moments before, were lavishing me with compliments.
This really took me out of the game and made me wonder what the point of that was.
Whilst it’s quite enjoyable to play both Paragon and Renegade roles in Mass Effect 2, what makes the ‘visual’ consequences of the moral choice system so useless in my book, is that for a certain amount of minerals you can simply buy a machine that gets installed in the Medical Bay that will remove your scars permanently, and no amount of Renegade conversation or actions will ever bring them back. It’s pricey, but if you ‘grind’ for minerals when you’ve got a minute, you’ll have enough in no time.
