"Moral choice" is a term thrown around a lot by developers these days, promising a game that will give you dilemmas, make you think, and introduce shades of grey. Let's face it, most of them fail and boil down to extreme black-and-white moralities that represent gameplay, not moral, choices. Dragon Age: Origins lead designer Mike Laidlaw believes Dragon Age is as close as you can get, with an "aggressively" moral grey area.
"We're trying to be a lot more grey than that, aggressively," he tells Destructoid. "Okay, the Blight is pretty much evil, it's out to destroy everything in its path and really there's not a whole lot of redeeming qualities to that as an agenda.
"But at the same time you have characters that have their own motivations, opportunities for you to be opportunistic, and maybe do something that's inherently evil but at the same time, a part of being a Grey Warden and carrying the fate of the world on your shoulders, maybe it's what you think you have to do. It's a choice you have to make.
"We're also trying to give you, I guess, a sense that the villains, the characters you're interacting with, they have real motivations for why they've done what they've done. So while it's very easy at first to go 'well clearly he's the bad guy,' as soon as you dig in deeper and the game certainly encourages you to do this, you tend to find there's more going on than just the surface."
The best villain is the one that thinks he's right, and I'm glad that's something BioWare understands. As for just how black-and-white Dragon Age turns out to be, we shall see. What I've seen of the game so far leads me to believe that, while the game still has a clear-cut good and evil, it'll be the closest to the Holy Grail of Morality that developers have ever gotten.
Contest:
9:20 AM on 09.09.2009
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Even if, the more coverage the better!
I hope everything is true what they said..... or it will be a disaster like Damnation or Prototype.
I've talked with head writer a few times, and he's brought up the fact that the writing team didn't like the idea of equal rewards for good/evil choices. Will be interesting to see if they pull it off.
You have no credit on this topic, Bioware. You're going to have to pay in cash.
Although Mass Effect suffered from the stupid meters, it was still entertaining thanks to the fact that the choices weren't always these epic moral dilemmas. Often, the decision wasn't between being good or evil, but between being a nice guy hero or a jerk hero. I've come to the conclusion that it's more fun to be a jerk than a villain. I hope Bioware got the memo.
It seems kind of simple. You let the player decide. Instead of making choices that are either all good or all bad, you let the player decide what actions he wants to take and what actions he doesn't The player can either betray his side for money, or not. He can save a puppy, or not. I really believe be letting the player simply opt out of any decision he doesn't want to make by giving him the choice of doing nothing, rather than giving a choice between all good or all evil, you have moral ambiguity where you can decide for yourselve exactly what kind of good and bad things you want to do.
Here's a good video talking about video game choices. The other related videos are interesting to watch as well.
The thing is, it's not simply about letting the player decide. To create a convincing moral grey area, you have to craft a situation where the player can sympathize with either choice and actually feels torn between them. Simply giving the player a choice is the easy part compared to writing a scenario where the player feels that choice matters.
Great, that has always made em mad in games, because in life sometimes evil things reward better and sometimes good things do. It's why i love saving those creatures in super metroid, it doesn't affect anything, but I felt better for it.
If the morality have the same color than the game than it will be VERY grey.
My favourite moral choice are ones like that. Where if you're good you have to follow the rules to stay that way taking away more devious choices but it's made up for by the good players being generally liked letting people give them more items and letting them use more resources whenever they like whereas evil players can just steal all of it and get shot down on sight.