So my younger brother spends some of his birthday money

MadassAlex

And comes home with Shadow Of The Colossus and The Witcher 2.

His training is complete.

Legionnaire

I spent some of my birthday money on inFAMOUS 2's hero edition. It cost me 139 dollars. This was nearly three weeks ago.

EB Games (who are normally horribly overpriced) had a sale on. I saw it for 89 dollars on Friday.

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MadassAlex

inFAMOUS 2

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There's your issue.

Jokes aside, I've only played the first. But I found it very limited, and the morality system the developers told us was so cool turned out to be very juvenile. Apart from that, there was nothing that separated it from other freeroam action games out there to my mind. Eventually, that game ended up being going through the motions for me.

$139 for the sequel to that game strikes me as major overkill, even for a special edition. $89 is okay for fans of the first, but I personally wouldn't dole out the cash until I saw it in the bargain bin.

Legionnaire

I only bought it because it was down from 200 and figured it wouldn't be going down for a while, plus I'd already been waiting a while.

Honestly, I liked the game, but it was pretty much just inFAMOUS 1 all over again. I felt it was a fairly major disappointment. Except the very ending cutscene for the good ending. The final set of boss fights was pretty average as well.

The first game was better, far as I'm concerned. Now I need to figure out if I'm going to spent 110 or 210 on Uncharted 3.

Icalasari

...Holy hell people sell games for THAT much!?

I find $60 is reaching the realm of expensive!

MillerCross

Australia is relatively far. So they have to account for the shipping.

 the morality system the developers told us was so cool turned out to be very juvenile.

>Morality system

>Video games

there's ye problem. 

(I liked Infamous, but it was because I didn't expect it to be anything but a really comic booky game, so stuff like the morality system did not bother me because it fit the game and its setting perfectly well)

MadassAlex

Generally, yeah, but so many games that include such things have better morality systems.

In fact, inFamous might have the worst morality system I've ever experienced.

MillerCross

Eh, I feel that morality systems should first compliment the game's setting and world and then be statements on morality. As such, Infamous' works well.

then again, I just played some tidbits here and there, so I could probably wrong. 

but the thing is, games can't simulate and create a morality system for a couple of reasons that we all know and have discussed before, so I feel that a morelity system should not pursue that and instead focus in making for either a better gaming experience and/or more entertaining and fitting one. 

MadassAlex

By the same token, games can't do anything to completeness. Every game mechanic is an abstraction of reality designed to evoke cause and result.

In any case, inFamous' morality system was awful because it forced extremes. The only way to unlock strong powers was to be very good or very evil, leaving no room for moral ambiguity or even personally disagreeing with the game. Even for video game morality systems, that's awful. There's plenty of games that have done waaaay better:

- Neverwinter Nights had the D&D Lawful/Chaotic Good/Neutral/Evil thing going on. That's a pretty good system.
- Mass Effect had Paragon and Renegade. Interestingly, in this case, they didn't cancel; you go up both paths simultaneously and unlock dialogue options for both as you progress. This is a really interesting way to do things and perhaps one of the more holistic approaches. 
- Knights of the Old Republic had Light/Dark sides of the Force, made more ambiguous by KotOR2 by Kreia.
- Fallout: New Vegas replaced overall morality with reputations amongst each faction, leaving the player to work out for themselves what was wrong or right.

So there's four other approaches as seen in video games. A little crude, perhaps, but grounds to work on. Yet inFamous doesn't even match them. It goes backwards, giving us a morality system that doesn't leave us in a position to question our actions, since it spells out very clearly the wrong and right things to do. Then it punishes us for failing to meet extremes by locking out upgrades and special powers. I can't think of a way to fail a morality system harder than that, perhaps apart from "kicking the puppy nets you Good points".

In reality, morality isn't simple. It might be a hurdle for games, but they have to represent that. That's what I liked about the examples above. Either they don't play it straight, or there's enough diversity of options that the linearity works.

What I don't understand, however, is why game designers insist on showing us where we are on the scale of morality. What if we knew there was a morality counter, but it was hidden from us? So we have to make the choices we think are right and just, but perhaps they rub some people the wrong way or cause certain things to happen. Real life is full of ambiguous choices, and ideally, a well-designed game should be, too. Because an ambiguous choice is the best one, and it cannot be a calculation for the benefit of your player character. You have to choose based on personal value, not on numbers.

Gelzo

I like the idea behind New Vegas' morality system, but I'm a little pissed that my reputation went down after I accidentally said something impolite.

MillerCross

Urm, Alex, you're missing the point there, man.

Infamous' morality system is not about being accurate representation of morality. And if it tried that, it failed. It just works under the same terms that most superhero fiction works under. There's good and there's evil. You know good because it flies around in a red cape and fights for truth, justice and the american way and you know bad because it cackles at the thought of cutting the throat of a puppy. 

As that's the intention, I don't think it fails at that. Of course, it's understandable if you don't like that approach on principle because it's not of your interest, but saying that it's bad because it doesn't represent morality in a realistical fashion it's kinda like complaining about dogs not being cats.

Anyway, I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I think the morality system that I've liked the most so far would be between GTA IV's and RDR's. Both of them never imply that our protagonists are good people for performing an occasional good deed (And most of the time, said good deeds are just relatively good), and in fact, in GTA, morally good decisions such as saving a random man's life barely affects gameplay at all. It's just that. A situation. Would you save the life of the man who tried to kill you? Some times, admittedly, good deeds come back to bite you. Which is why I wouldn't say it's entirely better, but I think it works as a good idea. 

RDR's one is basically like Mass Effec, in the sense that being a bandit does not preclude you can't perform good deeds and in fact, both of your reps (As a bad guy and a good guy can raise across the land) And it's also admittedly honest about the fact that Marston will never a complete good guy, as he will always perform dubious deeds.

MadassAlex

Even comic books aren't necessarily that morally unambiguous, though.

To use your example, inFamous reminds me of Silver Age morality in a 90s Darkier And Edgier work. Each element fails the other, as the morality system fails the anti-hero approach while the anti-hero approach makes the morality system unsuitable. It'd be more applicable to a game that takes the piss rather than a game that's trying to be taken seriously.

It also loses points in my book for giving the illusion of choice. Once you've chosen good or evil, you're set on that path because of how long it takes to reverse the meter. That means that once you've made that initial choice, further choices are actually calculations. That is, we know that if we've got evil points, then doing more evil things will gives us more of that and unlock further options. So we don't take choices as actual moral imperatives, we use the morality as a means to an end.

If nothing else, even at their simplest, moral choice systems should be about questioning the player and making the choice hinge on actual morality rather than calculable benefit. The moral choice system in inFamous forces caricature choice rather than anything that really represents morals, and I'd consider it a fairly insulting depiction of comic books if I was a comic writer or artist.

MillerCross

It also loses points in my book for giving the illusion of choice. Once you've chosen good or evil, you're set on that path because of how long it takes to reverse the meter. That means that once you've made that initial choice, further choices are actually calculations. That is, we know that if we've got evil points, then doing more evil things will gives us more of that and unlock further options. So we don't take choices as actual moral imperatives, we use the morality as a means to an end. 

Very, very, very, few games actually have the element of choice in it. Everything is calculated from a player perspective. Whether doing a bad deed gives you more power or whether doing a good deed unlocks X story path that you might not be able to access if performed a morally bad action, almost all actions in a morality system are not about "what would you do as a person in this situation?" so much as "what would you do as a gamer in this situation?"

Also, it bears mentioning that if we're going for the whole "Morality as in reality" angle, then you could simply say that good deeds don't undo bad deeds and as such, such a system wouldn't be entirely flawed, as it simulates a very important aspect of morality and is the fact that people will see you as a bad guy if you did a bad thing and won't easily buy that you're a good guy after that. The same is backwards, of course. 

but blah blah dunno how ifamous works, so i'm just arguing on hypothetical grounds and mere impressions, so. 

If nothing else, even at their simplest, moral choice systems should be about questioning the player and making the choice hinge on actual morality rather than calculable benefit. The moral choice system in inFamous forces caricature choice rather than anything that really represents morals, and I'd consider it a fairly insulting depiction of comic books if I was a comic writer or artist. 

I love superhero comics (Because we're not talking about the medium as a whole. Just a genre) as much as the next guy and evenn if the fairly simplistic morality we see today is a great improvement over the silver age, I'd argue that we still need to move even above the concept and morality under which the genre work these days. Such as Lex Luthor being a person of immense villainy without barely any redeeming traits. Hell, there are very few villains in superhero comics with redeeming traits or even good traits. And even the things that look like good traits tend to betray a psychosis or at least be not as entirely good as they seem (Luthor's "Humans are amazing" rhethoric barely holds any water when he's shown to be quite a misanthrope and a manipulator, for example)

MadassAlex

Also, it bears mentioning that if we're going for the whole "Morality
as in reality" angle, then you could simply say that good deeds don't
undo bad deeds and as such, such a system wouldn't be entirely flawed,
as it simulates a very important aspect of morality and is the fact
that people will see you as a bad guy if you did a bad thing and won't
easily buy that you're a good guy after that. The same is backwards, of
course.

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Mass Effect does something like this. Fallout: New Vegas doesn't use morality, but reputation amongst factions, so your moral position is actually subjective to the observer. So it's possible, and it's been done to an extent, so there are examples inFamous could've played off.

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Very, very, very, few games actually have the element of choice in
it. Everything is calculated from a player perspective. Whether doing a
bad deed gives you more power or whether doing a good deed unlocks X
story path that you might not be able to access if performed a morally
bad action, almost all actions in a morality system are not about "what
would you do as a person in this situation?" so much as "what would you
do as a gamer in this situation?"

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I don't think that's an excuse for a game to have a particularly horrible morality system, though. A good game designer should make such considerations anyway, which is where my argument for removing the visual counter for morality comes from. If you force the player to make tough calls without an obvious tangible benefit either way, I do believe they'll consider it on a different level.