Variety Friday: Moral Choices Need Repercussions

After over 5 weeks of variety-less Fridays, I’m Back!  This week I am going to focus on something mentioned in my Deus Ex review, which was how the moral choice of killing or disabling people didn’t have any repercussions, so I’m just going to broaden that into how moral choices in games need to have repercussions, or they are meaningless.

Now, first we must define what actually constitutes as a “Moral Choice”.  I would describe it as a choice which plays upon the morals of a person, usually without clear outcomes so they are solely up to the player.  You can find a lot of these within the Mass Effect series as well as Dragon Age: Origins.  Those games base their story on moral choices, right and wrong, and etc.  One thing Dragon Age did well was that many choices didn’t have obvious answers, and only at the end of the game did you get to see a glimpse of what came from them.

Now, on to one of my main examples, Deus Ex; the original game based moral choices on a simple two answer choice which was present throughout the entire game, and that was the choice between lethally killing people, or non-lethally taking them down.  Now at the beginning you were simply told “You shouldn’t kill them” and then you got to choose to take the advice, or ignore it.  But, later on certain people with certain values either liked that you didn’t kill them and gave you bonuses, while if you did kill a lot of enemies other people would believe you did what was right, while others would give you shit about what being a citizen really means.  For me it was that talk with the general-looking guy who mans the armory, he simply said that he remembered when being a good citizen came first, and that reminded me that people are people (even if they are made of polygons without fingers) and then I decided to play a bit more on the nice side.

But, this isn’t about my experiences, what’s important is how the moral choice was present throughout the whole game, and while it was essentially a choice of the player, the game rewarded you for taking certain actions, whether good or bad, which is a great way to make choices meaningful and still up to the player.  Now as I briefly mentioned in the Deus Ex: Human Revolution review, there were almost no repercussions to killing or disabling people.  Depending on the player this could still be a moral choice for them, but for others (such as myself) I found myself thinking “Why not just kill everyone?  It’s not like anything bad will happen and it’s much easier” and nothing bad did happen, not even one fuck was given, I even killed half of the Detroit PD and a minute later all was forgotten and no one cared, there wasn’t even any faction like/dislike type of stuff going on.

Now when no repercussions are added to moral choices, two main things occur; one is that the sense of realism and immersion into the world is hindered, because you know people should have an opinion and act upon some of your actions (for better or worse).  And two being that there is a big gap in the story.  For the players, killing an important person in the plot or sparing his life should have a big effect in the game, though in Human Revolution, there were two occurrences in which I didn’t hear a thing from either saved character through the whole rest of game.  For the player they don’t get to see if they did something good or bad, while also not being able to simply see a possible back story.  On the developer side, they missed great opportunities to give the player advantages and disadvantages for being merciful or not.  Now these points don’t just apply to Deus Ex but for all games, since a lot of story based games have moral choices.

A very different example is Catherine.  The moral choices are essentially in the form of what is the player’s opinion on cheating and marriage.  While many games directly relate to your choices, Catherine instead showed your overall choice play-out in the dialog, without actually giving the player an idea of what could come upon his choices, so the player knows something is happening, but doesn’t know what until later in the game.  If Catherine didn’t have moral choices, almost all of the story would be gone and it would simply be another game such as Super Meat Boy.  Games need moral choices to not only have players question themselves, but to provide deeper story.

Now back to Deus Ex, I brought up a problem now it is only fitting that I propose a possible solution.  One of the main characters, David Sarif (Adam Jenson’s boss, Adam being who the player plays as) is represented as an evil person through advertising, but is actually a very rational person with some very different beliefs, if they could have built upon those beliefs and leaned Sarif to one side or another (supporting lethality or non-lethality) it could have not only altered the story in that you could keep Sarif happy or do your own thing, he would be second guessing you since you talk to him a lot anyway.  If you did something he specifically didn’t like, he should give you shit about it, revoke a bonus or something, while also losing some trust in you.  Simply giving just one of the characters an opinion in morality could have drastically changed the game.  This is true for many games as well, sure you could keep characters neutral, or you could experiment with alignments and developers would probably find this brings a more satisfying experience.