Morality Systems are Dogshit

 

Recently I've been playing Knights of the Old Republic on Steam and as someone who doesn't really give two flying rat fucks about Star Wars, I'm having a really good time.  The game, however, features a morality system of the player either being a light side or dark side Jedi and what the game decides are light side actions and dark side actions are complete bullshit and this is a problem that has plagued games for a long time so I'm going to rant about it a little bit.

The first instance that got me really hard in Knights was when you get to the Wookie planet with the name I can't remember how to spell.  When you arrive there's some kind of trading company that has set up shop and is kidnapping and selling the native Wookies into slavery.  If you ask me, these are some pretty fucking bad people, but some time into a quest line you are given an option to kill a bunch of them or chase them away.  My attitude is that if you come into someones home turf and start selling them into slavery, you sort of forfeit your right to life on account of being a cunt, so the lightsabers and blasters came out and the party put them down.  Upon concluding the fight I was given Dark Side points.  Dark Side points, for killing invading slavers.  I think it has something to do with Jedi not killing people or something but come the fuck on, you can't just go up to people like that and say "um, excuse me, would you mind NOT enslaving a native race of forest people please?" and just expect them to agree, violence IS the answer here.  But even worse than that there's another quest later on, on a different planet, that involves investigating the murder of some women by some dude.  The way the quest is prestented to you, the situation seems pretty fishy (if you know, ha ha, pun intended) and it looks like the dude that's been arrested has been framed.  On your investigation you go to a hotel where you can question some witnesses and during the dialogue options you can choose to use your force powers to get more details out of a certain NPC.  Using your force powers in this way gets you fucking EVIL points.  Investigating the highly likely framing of an innocent man in a way that guarantees that justice can be served in the correct way is considered to be EVIL by Bioware.  This may be another Jedi thing that I'm unaware of but I remember Obi Wan or whatever in a new hope using the force to manipulate people like that and no one really blinked an eye when HE did it.  Either Bioware have a completely fucked sense of morality or the Jedi are fucking lame, either way it sucks.

But at the very least, in Knight's case, there's a discussion of the morality to be had.  Maybe I shouldn't be so quick to use brain magic to get secrets out of people, sure, fine, whatever, but in a lot of other games morality systems are just tacked on lame bits of shit that aren't engaging in any way.

Now I love Bioshock, it's a cool game but it really does highlight just how poorly thought out these things are.  In Bioshock, upon killing a Big Daddy you are granted a "moral choice" of infanticide or to not do that.  Killing the little girl nets you more points to buy plasmids with and not doing it gives you a bit less and a different ending.  The thing to consider though, is that Bioshock, even on hard mode, is piss easy and you can get everything you need by not killing them which makes the choice feel hollow.  The ONLY reason to kill little sisters in Bioshock is to either be edgy or because you specifically want to see the "bad" ending.  

Another big example of this is Mass Effect, a game that presents you with "moral choices" at various parts of the story but the only real options for each situation is to either be the literal reincarnation of Jesus Christ or to be the biggest ball-bag in the galaxy.  No way to be even a little bit moderate or level headed in any of these games.

Morality on a binary scale like this is a stupid, useless feature that feels like padding.  It's a lazy way for developers to claim their game has replay because you essentially have to play the game twice to see everything.  Really bad offenders in this category include things like Dante's Inferno where the game doesn't really change significantly either way, just do it once where you stomp a dude and once where you play DDR every so often.  

The truth of the matter is simple, it would take far too much work to put this into a game in a way that would actually be interesting or even a little bit realistic.  It would involve a great deal of skill in JUST the writing, let alone all the technical stuff that would then have to come from that to then put it in the game.  There are games that have come kind of close, like New Vegas, but really I can't think of a single game off the top of my head while writing that's had a morality system in it that doesn't just come off as lazy dogshit that only lets you play to extremes.  

Just don't fucking do it

Atomic Heart Hype

 

This is going to be a pretty short post but it's pretty rare for me to get hyped by an upcoming game so when I do I feel like I have to mention it.

Actually if I'm honest, Atomic Heart is a game I saw a couple of years ago via a trailer on YouTube and then forgot about.  Someone in my stream mentioned it and I just had to go and seek it out again.

 Game play wise it looks like pretty standard stuff, a Bioshock or Fallout type affair and since I really enjoy the first Bioshock, taking that game and giving it a Russian twist is more than welcome.  But what really got me interested was the striking visual style.  The overall setting looks like standard post-apocalypse but the things that inhabit the landscape and the indoor environments in that trailer look like some kind of abstract painting come to life.  Even if the game releases and ends up being bland open world bullshit, I'll probably enjoy exploring the world at the very least.

It reminds me of when I was younger and the I saw that Bioshock trailer for the first time

I suppose it's pretty clear that the developers of Atomic Heart are trying to imitate these old trailers with theirs and that's a good thing.  Hopefully their game will be just as interested as the first Bioshock was

Unfortunately though, there is no release date for Atomic Heart as far as I know.  It has a steam page with a big TBA on it but I'm OK with this.  I'd rather it take a long time and be a good game rather than have them rush it out and have another buggy mess on my hands.  I will be watching very carefully

No Punishment Is Boring

So recently I've been replaying Torchlight on PC, a hack and slash RPG on PC that plays basically the same as something like Diablo.  I quite enjoy this game but there's one thing that really irks me about the title is that the game is too easy.  It's not just Torchlight that's guilty of this but this is the one I've played most recently so I'll be using it as my example.

So Torchlight isn't by itself an easy game.  The game involves large amounts of enemies swarming you ALL the damn time and you have to utilize a decent amount of skills, planning and resource management if you want to make it through the dungeon.  However all of the challenge that the game poses is COMPLETELY pointless because death doesn't actually mean anything.  When you die you get to make a choice; come back where you fell for an exp/gold loss, start the floor over with a gold loss or go back to town for no penalty.  This sounds like a decent enough punishment but EXP is easy to accumulate, money rains down on you like a stripper in an expensive club and floors aren't actually all that big so even starting that over is more of a minor annoyance than anything else. Not only that but when you do come back everything that was dead stays dead, so even if you suck with some bone headed perseverance you can make it through any obstacle.

The game does feature some harder modes but these are all rendered pointless by the fact that the punishments for death don't actually matter and you can tell that the developers understand this with the inclusion of a hardcore mode.  Hardcore mode introduces perma-death to a character who dies but this is just jumping to the other side of the spectrum.  Perma-death is acceptable in a rougelike because you can, in a lot of them, clear the dungeon in one sitting.  Torchlight requires quite a few hours of play to get through so the idea of getting far and then losing all that progress  because you zoned out and didn't hit the heal fast enough sounds more annoying than anything else. 

Torchlight isn't the only game to do this, Bioshock being the other HUGE offender for this kind of thing.  You have this beautiful, atmospheric and immersive world and then you realize that none of it matters because you just INSTANTLY RESPAWN when you die and you lose a bit of money.  Again, money is so easy to get in that game that the penalty doesn't matter so it turns the big daddies from actual intimidating encounters to minor annoyance that needs dealing with.  Again you can turn off Vita Chambers if you do want more of a challenge but why can't the base game just be challenging rather than forcing me to turn on all these extra challenge modes if I don't want to be babied.

I don't dislike either of the games I've mentioned, I look at them quite fondly but this aspect of them is a frustrating blotch on what is otherwise a great gaming experience.  Going too far the OTHER way is also no good (Fuck you R-Type/Gradius) but that's another post for another time.  I'm not asking for every game to be Dark Souls but Jesus H give me SOME challenge.