Moral Choices In Video Games, And Choice Systems In General
 

Moral choices are cool if they're used as alternate gameplay paths, but they need to be flexible (with Infamous you lost all of your good powers if you turned evil, and vice versa, without xp refund). But moral choices need to be more in depth and varied, unlike Fallout 3 where your choices are 1. Help everybody 2. Kill everybody once you've gotten everything possible out of them 3. Help or kill as it serves you best.

So yeah, moral choices aren't necessary, but they could be awesome if done right.

I generally like being made to make moral decisions in games, but the problem that I have is that those choices are too limited in general. Whenever presented with options in a game I'm usually able to come up with an option that would better serve the situation but to no avail because it isn't one of the three or four options the devs came up with. For instance: In Fable III you're give an option towards the end of the game on how to decorate your castle -good guy motif or bad guy motif. But it turns out there's a war going on and you're trying to scrape up cash to pay for an army, and my first thought before the options were presented was to strip the interior of the castle and sell the goods to the highest bidder. No such luck for the people of Albion, I'm afraid. I can't think of other examples off the top of my head right before work, but I think you guys know what I mean. I'd like to see a system that somehow rewards creativity and resourcefulness, but I'm pretty sure that's asking an awful lot just in terms of lines of code written. Not to mention all of the work that would have to go into the creative end of things.

This is pretty much the entire reason I've replayed Dragon Age multiple times but have only played KotoR once. In DA your moral choices are generally justifiable regardless of which way you go depending on whether you prefer a more 'do it right or not at all' or 'the ends justify the means' approach. Such as is it worth making golems if it means enslaving the spirits of dwarves? The golems are going to be much more useful in stopping the blight/clearing the deep roads, and might save far more lives than they could cost, but on the other hand you're enslaving living beings to control rods for, basically, eternity.

On the other hand, KotoR was:
NPC: Get my cat down from a tree!
Option 1: Ok! And don't bother giving me a reward.
Option 2: No.
Option 3: I have eaten your cat, and killed your family, now give me all your money.

It was basically impossible for me to play dark side without feeling like some kind of comical caricature of evil as opposed to actually feeling like anything remotely important or believable.

TBH, this was my favorite thing about playing dark side in KotOR.

Also, <3 the alignment system in SMT games.

If I had played it first it'd probably have been ok, but I did light side first, so doing all the same stuff but as a comical caricature didn't really appeal to me.

The fact that I also did guardian first and consular is much slower to start, with the whole burning through FPs like it's going out of style thing, didn't help either.

I'm sure there would have been more offense taken, or perhaps just creepiness factor, if you were ALLOWED to show the death of children in games head on.

Would you have so easily harvested Adam from the little sisters if you got to watch them get drained into a raisin-y husk as they screamed for you not to harvest them?

The answer is yes. Damn kids.

It also might have been better if you didn't end up getting more Adam by not killing them.

There's no actual moral choice if the 'good' response is also the 'tactically best' response.

Yeah, I didn't even hesitate to go after the evil options and see how horrible things could get.

Or even some game play change...like you have the scent of dead little sister on you, so all Big Daddies aggro on detection.

I mean I know that's still not morality, and more tactics, but it would have been something.