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Glad you approve Monti and as always you have left some valuable insight and really gave me the feedback I was looking for in my first blog.
Moral choice systems are a difficult thing simply because they're so God damned binary most of the time. Deus Ex: Human Revolution was less binary in its choices and more pragmatic; do you hang onto a crossbow because you never know what might happen in your next mission, or do you hand it over to an old friend to make sure a piece of garbage goes to prison? Do you knock out an officer of the law because he's guarding the police station's armory, and steal weapons and equipment from it, consequences be damned? And those are just the small choices, which can be as simple as choosing to go left or right.
The thing that I really enjoyed about Deus Ex: Human Revolution's moral system is that it's deliberately ambiguous. The player decides what's good and what's evil based on their own moral compass and acts accordingly. The game doesn't give you a binary choice and tell you which option is which, and that's a good thing. I've always felt that when gamers are asked to make choices, the circumstances and consequences of those choices should be as ambiguous as possible. ARMA 2 did this very well, with multiple missions and incidents in the campaign being influenced by decisions you make. In ARMA 2: Operation Arrowhead, there were even two completely different missions determined by whether you got shot down on a chopper flight or completed your mission. The important thing being they never tell you what result your decision, success, or failure will have on your future. It just happens dynamically.
That's really what I wanted out of the end of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I wanted it to end based on what I'd done, as opposed to my last act of the game being a selection from four buttons, and being told explicitly what each does. I imagine that would have been maddeningly difficult to program, though.
As a side note off the topic at hand, welcome to the C-Blogs! You should follow this up with an introductory C-Blog (I recommend you write it over the weekend, proofread it, and post it on Monday. There'll be more traffic then, and a lot of folks will want to welcome you to the community.) Standard fare is to tell a little about yourself, how you got into gaming, what some of your favorite games are, hobbies if you have any, and how you wound up at Destructoid. What you've got here isn't a bad start, though. Keep it up and don't get discouraged if there's a lack of feedback.
The thing that I really enjoyed about Deus Ex: Human Revolution's moral system is that it's deliberately ambiguous. The player decides what's good and what's evil based on their own moral compass and acts accordingly. The game doesn't give you a binary choice and tell you which option is which, and that's a good thing. I've always felt that when gamers are asked to make choices, the circumstances and consequences of those choices should be as ambiguous as possible. ARMA 2 did this very well, with multiple missions and incidents in the campaign being influenced by decisions you make. In ARMA 2: Operation Arrowhead, there were even two completely different missions determined by whether you got shot down on a chopper flight or completed your mission. The important thing being they never tell you what result your decision, success, or failure will have on your future. It just happens dynamically.
That's really what I wanted out of the end of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I wanted it to end based on what I'd done, as opposed to my last act of the game being a selection from four buttons, and being told explicitly what each does. I imagine that would have been maddeningly difficult to program, though.
As a side note off the topic at hand, welcome to the C-Blogs! You should follow this up with an introductory C-Blog (I recommend you write it over the weekend, proofread it, and post it on Monday. There'll be more traffic then, and a lot of folks will want to welcome you to the community.) Standard fare is to tell a little about yourself, how you got into gaming, what some of your favorite games are, hobbies if you have any, and how you wound up at Destructoid. What you've got here isn't a bad start, though. Keep it up and don't get discouraged if there's a lack of feedback.
@Thunder Monti,
Well done, sir. Your scathing retorts and grasp of knowledge and syntax is incredible. I'm honestly awestruck. Here, have a funny picture of Batman:
You can keep that.
Well done, sir. Your scathing retorts and grasp of knowledge and syntax is incredible. I'm honestly awestruck. Here, have a funny picture of Batman:
You can keep that.
I'm generally wary of moral systems in games. Since their inception they haven't really evolved much, and remain very black and white. I think that for "hardcore" gamers that will play the game ten time, it adds a lot of value. For me, it adds a lot of frustration that I don't get to experience all of a game's content unless I have 500+ hours to pump into it.
Also, @blindfire: I agree completely, when given a thinly veiled choice I make a decision as a gamer, not as a person. Deus Ex handled that really well with intentionally vague decision, but the whole "Okay, here are the endings! Pick one!" sounds really out of place.
Also, @blindfire: I agree completely, when given a thinly veiled choice I make a decision as a gamer, not as a person. Deus Ex handled that really well with intentionally vague decision, but the whole "Okay, here are the endings! Pick one!" sounds really out of place.
