182 réponses à ce sujet

[ZipZap2000]

I find people asking for mature content in general tend to be very immature.

As if to say "I want to feel like a grown up for once."

Catering to that section of the fanbase would be ruin.

[Ascari]

I think morality should be replaced with Deus Ex's social battles

[KaiserShep]

I find people asking for mature content in general tend to be very immature.
As if to say "I want to feel like a grown up for once."
Catering to that section of the fanbase would be ruin.

Pick the dialogue option with that curse word we just learned.

[Furisco]

I don't have time to give you the answer i want but that was a really interesting reading.

Good stuff.

[Furisco]

I find people asking for mature content in general tend to be very immature.

As if to say "I want to feel like a grown up for once."

Catering to that section of the fanbase would be ruin.

The Krogan talking about maturity. You just headbutt everything that stands in your way.

[skuid]

The main problem with the morality system in ME IMO is that it is set from a player point of view. That means your actions will shape how powerful your persuasion options will be (i.e. allowing persuasion options) but not how people should react.
That works when you have a reputation and that reputation allows you to persuade people, but it needs some modifiers to simulate how each person will react to certain reputation or even reaction for people that do not know nothing about you.

To solve this, my idea is to include some modifiers to the reputation system. What I mean with this is the following:

• A global morality system as before that goes from -1 to 1 (-1 renegade, 1 paragon). Each decision will modify this value.
• A local morality system that affect the current mission (or even another that affect only current conversation). It can go from -0.5 to 0.5 (or whatever other value depending on how much you want this value to alter the global). It is a modifier of the global reputation so your reputation for current mission (or conversation) will be global_rep * (1 + local_rep).
• Then to simulate how people react to certain reputation, each character could have a reputation alignment, again a value from -1 to 1. That means a character with a reputation alignment of -1 (pure renegade) will react to a pure paragon character as follow: player_rep * character_align the result will be -1 meaning he will totally oppose to anything you say. But if we add the local reputation, the character can be less opposed depending on your last choices.
• And finally to simulate the knowledge a certain character has about you, another modifier can be added that goes from 0 to 1 (no knowledge to total knowledge).

Putting it all together the reputation of the player will be global_rep * (1.0 + local_rep) * character_align * character_knowledge this formula gives a value between -1 (totally disagrees) and 1 (totally agrees) being 0 indiferent or ambivalent.

This system could also reward paragade and renegon players because they could persuade both renegade and paragon characters simply by saying what they want to hear in that conversation.

What do you think of this modification to the reputation system? Could it work better?

PD: sorry for the maths .

[thebigbad1013]

I would prefer if they just removed the Paragon/Renegade system altogether.

[ZipZap2000]

The Krogan talking about maturity. You just headbutt everything that stands in your way.

Its called evolution, welp. If you can't survive a Krogan headbutt you're a genetic dead end.

*Sips Ryncol*

[Ieldra]

I dislike morality systems for a fundamental reason: in order to work, someone has to define where on the scale certain actions should be put. In reality, there's a lot of disagreement about that. Morality differs between people, and for that reason, an approval system with scales for different characters and factions works better.

 

That, however, is not really a "morality" system, is it? In order to make a good morality system, it would need to be multi-dimensional. After all, there are different domains of morality, and in the case of conflicts, it's not possible to say if any decision you make is "good" or "evil" on a one-dimensional scale. Where, for instance, is the good or evil if you must sacrifice individuals other than you for a greater (uncontested) good (autonomy vs. community)? Where is it if in order to do justice, you must break a promise (fairness vs. loyalty)? One-dimensional systems will never be able to adequately map such situations, and in addition, the way Paragon and Renegade were implemented in ME promoted the delusional stance "Follow your heart and everything will be ok". There were no hard choices because everything worked out in the end if you did "the right thing" as defined by Bioware. Always. That's complete BS, and it would be complete BS even if I didn't disagree with the ME team's opinion of "the right thing" now and then. The good, after all, is empathically NOT always that which feels good.

 

IMO it's better to scrap morality systems altogether. I could make a system that adequately mapped your actions within certain tolerances, but it would be far too complicated to implement in a game. Better stick to approval systems. After all, in practice it's not important where your actions fall on some artificial scale, It's only important how people react to you. Why, for instance, would you get Renegade points if you sabotaged the genophage and nobody ever knew? An approval system can map your actions on characters' and factions' approval scale according to their preferences, which feels much more natural.

 

Edit:

There is even more of a problem: motivations are important to evaluate actions. A game will never be able to take your motivations into consideration unless it gives you a method to distinguish between different variants of the same action that vary only by motivation. If you sacrifice the Council in ME1, is that because you'll take every opportunity to further human interests, or because you think you can't afford to spare resources in a situation where losing may as well mean galactic extinction? 

[Joseph Warrick]

Meh. I had fun playing with the systems in place in all 3 games. I don't think this needs a lot of changing. Call me childish.

 

Persuade/Intimidate/Interruptions aren't mandatory. You can save Wrex in ME1 without using a special line. You can be persuasive or you can be more of a grunt. There are choices to make according to the character played. Not having access to a red line is like not having access to the Unstable Warp evolution because you didn't put points in it. Maybe design your character differently then?

 

I prefer the two meters to approval systems because I like to define the characters that way. I enjoy saying this Shepard is a paragade or in what way Mordin is a renegade, etc. I can't be bothered remembering who likes me tbh.

[KaiAdamori]

I think the Paragon/Renegade system will remain inherently contradictory as long as they use it as both a tone-based morality system (nice vs mean) and an ideological morality system (position A vs position . The two can be used separatly, but should never be crossed.

 

Tone-based morality is the worse one, in my opinion, because there is no logical consistency to it in terms of position or principle. 'Being nice' is always a matter of context, and suffers when actually pressed with complicated issues or viewpoints. When it gets tied into ideology, you get points of internal contradiction when 'nice' doesn't fit 'ideology'- such as Paragon Shepard's tendency to be an exemplar in justice and upholding the rules and opposing corruption, except when sympathetic friends needed the rules bent in their favor.

 

Ideological-based morality is more interesting to me. Some broad positions can be 'meaner' than others, but when there's a broad ideological position (such as ME's positions on Council politics- deference to fierce independence and skepticism), the tone can flip without making the player a hypocrite. If nuance makes you to favor tone over position... well, Paragade should certainly be for you.

 

But if you want any sort of ideological purity persuasion check- 'you must be this Paragon to be convincing'- the system should be consistent and have a clear idea of what it means to be 'Paragon' or 'Renegade.'

 

I think you hit the nail on the head! The tone of my PC, especially when you consider that many games like this, are now voice acted, is really important. Tone wasn't an issue in the past when dialogue was, particularly from the PC, was text based and not voiced. It was left to individual players to infer tone and two different people could read the same response but interpret in two completetly different ways.

 

I'm also more interested in the idealogical dilemmas, it just "floats my boat" so to speak, way more than tone. I don't envy developers nowadays, as what gamers expect (fully voiced dialogue for example) has introduced a greater need for complexity in development. I think we can underestimate how much more work that can be and how much easier it is to get it wrong. More complexity means more development time and more things to go wrong along the way.

 

I find people asking for mature content in general tend to be very immature.

As if to say "I want to feel like a grown up for once."

Catering to that section of the fanbase would be ruin.

 

Okay

While I can appreciate your personal opinion, I don't think it's so unusual or ruinous for a gamer who, like myself, has been gaming for so many years (25+yrs in my case) to hope to have content that is relateable for someone of my age. Gaming is very much in it's infancy, when placed next to other forms of media such as, tv & movies, let alone literature, art and music. Gaming hasn't been around long and it's only now that we find gamers of more mature years being present in the consumer market. I don't think it's beyond the realm of acceptable expectation that the medium cater, atleast in some degree for that part of the market. After all, none of us is getting any younger, so it would only make good financial sense to take into consideration the expecations of portion of the market that is only going to grow.

 

The main problem with the morality system in ME IMO is that it is set from a player point of view. That means your actions will shape how powerful your persuasion options will be (i.e. allowing persuasion options) but not how people should react.
That works when you have a reputation and that reputation allows you to persuade people, but it needs some modifiers to simulate how each person will react to certain reputation or even reaction for people that do not know nothing about you.

To solve this, my idea is to include some modifiers to the reputation system. What I mean with this is the following:

• A global morality system as before that goes from -1 to 1 (-1 renegade, 1 paragon). Each decision will modify this value.
• A local morality system that affect the current mission (or even another that affect only current conversation). It can go from -0.5 to 0.5 (or whatever other value depending on how much you want this value to alter the global). It is a modifier of the global reputation so your reputation for current mission (or conversation) will be global_rep * (1 + local_rep).
• Then to simulate how people react to certain reputation, each character could have a reputation alignment, again a value from -1 to 1. That means a character with a reputation alignment of -1 (pure renegade) will react to a pure paragon character as follow: player_rep * character_align the result will be -1 meaning he will totally oppose to anything you say. But if we add the local reputation, the character can be less opposed depending on your last choices.
• And finally to simulate the knowledge a certain character has about you, another modifier can be added that goes from 0 to 1 (no knowledge to total knowledge).

Putting it all together the reputation of the player will be global_rep * (1.0 + local_rep) * character_align * character_knowledge this formula gives a value between -1 (totally disagrees) and 1 (totally agrees) being 0 indiferent or ambivalent.

This system could also reward paragade and renegon players because they could persuade both renegade and paragon characters simply by saying what they want to hear in that conversation.

What do you think of this modification to the reputation system? Could it work better?

PD: sorry for the maths .

 

A mutlilayered system such as this would definately be a step in the right direction! I like it. I would definately like to see some kind of faction approval tracking taking place. It would lend more weight to choices.

 

I do think ME would benefit from a seperate approval rating for individuals and groups. I could get behind removing the morality aspect in favour of an influence one instead. This way, you get the dynamic character and world interactions and you can use to the story to pose moral questions instead. I'm starting to think that using the word morality so much is kind of distorting the initial point I was trying to make

 

I dislike morality systems for a fundamental reason: in order to work, someone has to define where on the scale certain actions should be put. In reality, there's a lot of disagreement about that. Morality differs between people, and for that reason, an approval system with scales for different characters and factions works better.

 

That, however, is not really a "morality" system, is it? In order to make a good morality system, it would need to be multi-dimensional. After all, there are different domains of morality, and in the case of conflicts, it's not possible to say if any decision you make is "good" or "evil" on a one-dimensional scale. Where, for instance, is the good or evil if you must sacrifice individuals other than you for a greater (uncontested) good (autonomy vs. community)? Where is it if in order to do justice, you must break a promise (fairness vs. loyalty)? One-dimensional systems will never be able to adequately map such situations, and in addition, the way Paragon and Renegade were implemented in ME promoted the delusional stance "Follow your heart and everything will be ok". There were no hard choices because everything worked out in the end if you did "the right thing" as defined by Bioware. Always. That's complete BS, and it would be complete BS even if I didn't disagree with the ME team's opinion of "the right thing" now and then. The good, after all, is empathically NOT always that which feels good.

 

IMO it's better to scrap morality systems altogether. I could make a system that adequately mapped your actions within certain tolerances, but it would be far too complicated to implement in a game. Better stick to approval systems. After all, in practice it's not important where your actions fall on some artificial scale, It's only important how people react to you. Why, for instance, would you get Renegade points if you sabotaged the genophage and nobody ever knew? An approval system can map your actions on characters' and factions' approval scale according to their preferences, which feels much more natural.

 

I understand what your saying. We all have different perspectives on a given situation. One need only look at the threads that discuss the krogan/genophage or the quarians/geth to see how divided people can be on a given situation in a game, aswell as the reasoning behind them. Hell, half the time I often find myself relating to both sides of an arguement. I'll often go for curing the genophage and reconciling the geth/quarians, but I can certainly see the points of view of those that are against those actions. I just tend to play a PC that wants to act out of hope for the future as opposed to fear of the future! As I say I get where you're coming from.

 

But it makes me think and question my choices, the motivations behind those choices and along the way I learn a little bit more about myself, the world and my place in it. Sure, BW (or anyother game developer) is going to be the one deciding, in the context of the games the create, what moral questions will be asked. But they do that with what themes will be incorporated in to their games aswell, what kind of characters they want to portray and what kind of relationships we, as players have these characters and sometimes you can learn just as much about our society and thereby ourselves, from those things as we do from, well , just about anything else.

 

I do think that in the future (of gaming) it may well be possible to simualte the kind of complexity, that you allude to being impossible. But it will never come around until developers start to work more concertedly towards it.  Such complexity doesn't spring up from of the ground fully formed without a foundation having been laid for it beforehand. Games (and computer systems in general) grow and evolve, each new innovation built ontop of those that came before, it's a surprisingly organic process. It just needs developers taking those steps towards refining and buiding until you get to the great place that I do think is possible.

 

If we were to completely do away with morality systems, I feel your just giving up on ever getting there because, you know, it's impossible. That would be a shame don't you think?

[Ieldra]

@KaiAdamori:

IMO it's not the morality systems that make, or should make, you think about your actions, but the situations themselves. As human beings, we tend to evaluate decisions on a moral scale anyway, we don't need to be motivated to do that. Do you think that the genophage decision would've  had any less impact if there were no Paragon or Renegade points to be gained? Or that disagreements between players would be any less passionate? I say we don't need a morality system. If characters in-game react to your actions, that should be enough to make you think even where the situations don't do that on their own.

 

I think if a system is used to map characters' actions, it should be one with more common ground. For instance, people may disagree about whether sabotaging the genophage cure is best for the galaxy in the long run, but on a scale of idealism vs. cynicism it can be more easily mapped. If Shepard asserts his authority in ME2, people may disagree about whether that's adequate or not but it can be easily mapped on a scale of "authoritarian vs. collaborative". So what I'd do is to make a list of pairs of opposing character traits, and have actions gain the player character points on a scale connecting those pairs, with one action being able to influence several scales. I've actually made such a list for ME2, I'll see if I can find it again.

 

This would mean actions can be adequately described, but the evaluation is still left to the player. The system doesn't suggest a "correct" choice. That may be not be so apparent in the examples I gave since those terms are already loaded, but that's misleading: If my decision to sabotage the genophage cure gained me "cynicism points", I'd find it adequately mapped. Tell me it's evil, however, and I'll object. 

 

That won't solve all problems though, since some of the traits will unavoidably be politically charged, which means there will be fights about adequate terminology. If you make a decision that benefits your species specifically, would it be adequate to get "racism points", for instance? Should it be "patriotism points" instead, since those two terms overlap strongly in the MEU? A less loaded term might be "species centrism" which would encompass both rational self-interest for a faction defined by species identity as well as more extreme attitudes, which avoids to suggest that there is a "good" end of the scale, if the opposing end has an equally neutral term.

 

I'd find such a system interesting, but it would also be rather complex to implement, and you have to ask if the very serious effort you must make to put actions adequately on several scales is worth the effect in the end. It is, however, the only system I can imagine right now I *would* accept as somewhat adequate. Anything less, and please don't bother. I'd rather have approval systems in that case. 

 

Edit:

Giving up on something that's undesirable in the first place is not a bad thing, and yes, I think that morality systems - defined as systems that evaluate your actions on a moral scale (as opposed to the more descriptive scales I proposed) defined by the developers - are undesirable. 

[KaiAdamori]

@KaiAdamori:

IMO it's not the morality systems that make, or should make, you think about your actions, but the situations themselves. As human beings, we tend to evaluate decisions on a moral scale anyway, we don't need to be motivated to do that. Do you think that the genophage decision would've  had any less impact if there were no Paragon or Renegade points to be gained? Or that disagreements between players would be any less passionate? I say we don't need a morality system. If characters in-game react to your actions, that should be enough to make you think even where the situations don't do that on their own.

 

I think if a system is used to map characters' actions, it should be one with more common ground. For instance, people may disagree about whether sabotaging the genophage cure is best for the galaxy in the long run, but on a scale of idealism vs. cynicism it can be more easily mapped. If Shepard asserts his authority in ME2, people may disagree about whether that's adequate or not but it can be easily mapped on a scale of "authoritarian vs. collaborative". So what I'd do is to make a list of pairs of opposing character traits, and have actions gain the player character points on a scale connecting those pairs, with one action being able to influence several scales. I've actually made such a list for ME2, I'll see if I can find it again.

 

This would mean actions can be adequately described, but the evaluation is still left to the player. The system doesn't suggest a "correct" choice. That may be not be so apparent in the examples I gave since those terms are already loaded, but that's misleading: If my decision to sabotage the genophage cure gained me "cynicism points", I'd find it adequately mapped. Tell me it's evil, however, and I'll object. 

 

That won't solve all problems though, since some of the traits will unavoidably be politically charged, which means there will be fights about adequate terminology. If you make a decision that benefits your species specifically, would it be adequate to get "racism points", for instance? Should it be "patriotism points" instead, since those two terms overlap strongly in the MEU? A less loaded term might be "species centrism" which would encompass both rational self-interest for a faction defined by species identity as well as more extreme attitudes, which avoids to suggest that there is a "good" end of the scale, if the opposing end has an equally neutral term.

 

I'd find such a system interesting, but it would also be rather complex to implement, and you have to ask if the very serious effort you must make to put actions adequately on several scales is worth the effort in the end. It is, however, the only system I can imagine right now I *would* accept as somewhat adequate. Anything less, and please don't bother. I'd rather have approval systems in that case. 

 

Edit:

Giving up on something that's undesirable in the first place is not a bad thing, and yes, I think that morality systems - defined as systems that evaluate your actions on a moral scale (as opposed to the more descriptive scales I proposed) defined by the developers - are undesirable. 

 

Agreed. I think your right in that perhaps the issue isn't so much one of morality. Not so much about the right and wong of the decisions we make in game but the how those decisions are played out, both in believeable character interaction and game world interaction/feedback. Having interactions, both in dialogue from NPC's and the PC be consistant and measured, without radical lurches in character demeanour/tone, and ingame world reception of the PC as a consequence of said choices. The morality bit can be handled by players, who can make their own judgement calls on such. provided the framework be in place via writing and story content on the part of developers.

 

I do agree with Skuid that the answer to the interactions aspect, particularly in regards to dialogue would be using a scaling system engineered to factions and where, appropriate individual npcs. I don't think this would be beyond the realm of possiblity, it has been done before and done fairly well. If then combined with flags for important choices (like a genophage-esque situation) along the lines you describe (as you say it would have be kept pretty tight or risk creep that would either dilute or outright break the system your trying to create) that adds greater or lesser weight to the aforemention faction based disposition, you start to get an interconnected consequence system, that doesn't try to tell the player what BW thinks the right thing to do is but what the NPC's of the universe your playing in feel is the right thing to do. That way you get the emersive interaction system that also allows for some meaningful impact from the choices we make, beyond, "Picked Blue/Red and gave them my spleen/put knee to their groin but the result is the same" scenario we have with ME's current system.

 

If some careful thought and decent voice acting, was employed to also deal with the issue of PC tone, I think I would be overjoyed.

 

BW could even keep the dialogue wheel in this stiuation (though I would like some more "middle ground" options on that damn wheel!) Much of the scaling and tracking would be done under the hood and you open up the chance for increased replayability in terms of different outcomes on different playthroughs.

 

The only problem with allowing that I guess, from the developers point of view, is sequelisation then becomes abit of a conundrum if they aren't willing to pick an endgame game state they unequivocally declare canon, trying to take all those differant choices into account for consequative title, I think is where many of the problems ME's story and design come from.

 

 

Sorry If i didn't articulate that very well, typing isn't my best form of communication

[Sylvius the Mad]

They made changes to the system with every game to try and make improvements...

Undocumented changes, which creates more problems than it solves.

The paragon and renegade icons were supposed to be informative when selecting dialogue options, but right at the start of ME2 it was clear that Paragon didn't mean what it had meant in ME1.

[Abramsrunner]

I want my renegade character main to take a lollipop from a little kid, pop the little animal balloons he has with him, flip him off, & then romance his mother. It's quite the epitome of being a renegade character I'd say.

[Sylvius the Mad]

Sure, BW (or anyother game developer) is going to be the one deciding, in the context of the games the create, what moral questions will be asked.

I don't think they do. They set the scenario, but we're in control of what moral questions we think are asked.

[Joseph Warrick]

I want my renegade character main to take a lollipop from a little kid, pop the little animal balloons he has with him, flip him off, & then romance his mother. It's quite the epitome of being a renegade character I'd say.

No, ME2 Mordin is. Try giving him **** on his loyalty mission.

[AlanC9]

Even if we end up agreeing that there's some problem which a morality system can help solve -- I still don't see what that would be-- it's not at all clear to me why we would want to conflate morality, or reputation, or whatever, with the PC's demeanor.

[ModernAcademic]

 

The problem I see with Mass Effect's morality system is that it is far too simplistic and, quite frankly, inconsistant. I almost always play Paragon, partly, because being a shining beacon of virtue, giving to the poor, tending to the sick and defending the weak just gives me warm feels. But also because, playing a renegade, means I have to be a pshychotic racist with a penchant for inexplicable violence and dispraportionate reactionism. Sure, some of the renegade interrupts in ME2/3 were awesome moments of badassery. But by and large I saw my renshep as an out and out lunatic, who really needed to get some help. Fast.

 

 

 

This sums up the whole problem pretty well. The morality system works based on a limited concept of morality itself: you're either good or bad, diplomatic or agressive take-charge, etc. It's the good, old manichaeism, which is too cartunesque for a 18+ video game.

 

This limits the player's capability of expressing his personality in the game. Ergo, it limits his capability of molding his Shepard.

 

One of the major reasons that attracts audiences to BW games is the possibility of customising their PC: the way she/he looks, his interaction with others, even his sense of humor. Coupled with work ethics and moral choices, those are all big features of the BW franchises. So by imposing a manichaeist system of choice, the player gets to have no real influence over his PC in the end.

 

 

 

Shepard is pretty much 90% defined by the devs and only 10% by the players. You don't choose whether she's/he's a workaholic or a more laid back Commander. You don't choose how he expresses his sexuality (the only way this is made clear in the game is when you've finally taken your LI to bed and a rare few comments you might get from your companions). You can't even choose what Shepard does in his free time (does he go to clubs, does he prefer to stay in bed and read, does he practise any sports?) or define what are her/his worst fears (would Shepard be claustrophobic or have a problem being near certain kinds of aliens?). All this shapes the character and translates into how he deals with personal problems, his style of command, how he relates to his companions and the outside world in general.

 

Even after you choose one of 3 possible backgrounds for Shepard (hero - survivor - ruthless commander), the choice doesn't really translate in any concrete or substancial change in how Shepard relates to others, nor does it define her/him in any significant way. Youmay act like a bully the entire game and this won't change how the dialogs with your companions are played or how NPCs will react to your presence during cutscenes. It's as if no one is not even marginally aware of the personality you've carefully crafted for Shepard.

 

Having to pick up either top line or bottom line in dialog wheels ends up being the only way the player gets to customise his PC at all. In the end, every player gets to play the same Shepard without noticing, The only difference is whether you prefer to solve your problems by talking or by intimidation.

 

 

 

The problem with implementing a more diversified system of choice is that there's only so much you can do to allow the player to explore multiple psychologies with his PC. A game simply can't cover all possible human behaviors without sacrificing the main plot. There are key moments in which the PC will follow a preset script regardless of how you customise her/him. But even so, those moments constitute only a small part of any game, which leaves a large amount of the game to be configured so as to allow the player to at least have the illusion of playing a truly customisable PC, where you can efficiently immerse yourself into that fictional world.

[MrFob]

Well,, most of the important points have been discussed on this page.

 

Suffice it to say that I also think the P/R system should be scrubbed in order to encourage the player to think about each decision individually, rather than to conform to a doctrine, provided by the game mechanics.

 

I do like DA's approval system though for two reasons:

1. It provides feedback to the player about their actions by modifying the behavior of certain NPCs or factions without necessarily making a grand statement about any singular decision and it is a good mechanic to give the player the illusion that their decisions have a real impact on the game world by impacting the people around the protagonist and their relationships.

2. This one is personal but often the approval system itself puts me in a moral dilemma for decisions that otherwise might be much more easy. I encountered a number of situations in the DA games where I knew what I wanted but I also knew it would reduce the approval of certain NPCs which I either wanted to like me or felt that I needed them as allies. Would I follow my own moral conviction or compromise for other (maybe more important in the long run) benefits? It's an extra layer of complexity to the decision making process which very much reflects something that commonly happens in the real world.

 

If an approval system is implemented, I would very much appreciate it if we could at least get the option to hide the numbers behind it. I don't want to see "Liara approval +10", I just want to experience the change in the interaction with these NPCs and/or factions. I loved how the decision who would become the next Divine in DA:I was a complex formula that took place entirely behind the scenes. All we'd see was the result and we could speculate what caused it (until they revealed the mechanics on the forums of course). That was great! Of course, this kind of subtlety needs quite a bit of careful balancing but I'd love to see more of it.

[KaiAdamori]

Even if we end up agreeing that there's some problem which a morality system can help solve -- I still don't see what that would be-- it's not at all clear to me why we would want to conflate morality, or reputation, or whatever, with the PC's demeanor.

 

Absolutely, and thats the point I and a few others have said. Demeanour or tone seems to be tightly tied right now with the paragon/renegade system and it doesn't really work. When one moment, my shep is calmly espousing co-operation and speaking with level headed sense, only to take on a sudden aggressive posture and start yelling at the npc I'm talking to, well, it just seems abit peculiar. Plus, IMHO male renshep does come across as an idiot. The difficulty is in the fact that dialogue is voiced and so an actor has to give a delivery based upon the script their given. Not enough thought on this front seems to go into the wild swing from one extreme to the other that I think is detrimental.

 

So taking demeanour and tone of delivery into account when constructing an influence based interaction system for the game wouldn't go amiss. Or get rid of the excessiveness of delivery. Thing with that is you lose some of the passion, I guess. The game industry still hasn't made up it's mind on whether voiced protagonists are better with a more nuetral tone through out or to go for the more empassioned, cinematic approach employed by ME. Oddly enough, it was never an issue in DA?

[AlanC9]

Oh, I think it was an issue in DAI, all right. A lot of players complained that the Inquisitor was "bland" compared to Shepard. I was on the opposite side; sometimes Shepard strikes me as being locked into being a posturing blowhard.

[Hazegurl]

The only thing I don't like is how red = bad = punished with less content (you lose in some way always) / blue = good = rewarded with more content (You win all the time).

 

I think to fix the "morality" system all they have to do is be less predictable with it and get rid of the persuasion checks based on it.  Persuasion should be tied to previous choices during the mission / previous games.  Not whether or not you hit enough reds and blues.

 

As for adding an approval system, I wouldn't mind it but not the way DA does it. If I can't kick a companion out, or have them up and bail on me for whatever reason, then it's a pointless system.  I don't care if my companion is just sitting somewhere stewing about a choice I made. I personally liked swkotor 2's way of having the crew become influenced by my PC just by being near him.  But I also would like it if some companions stood their ground and split if they didn't like the shifting mood of the crew.

 

As for maturity, I'm not looking for maturity in a game. Nuance is freaking boring and a game is supposed to be fun at the end of the day, if I want to have a play through of dancing badly and punching people in the face, while saving everyone's bacon then I don't see the problem with it either.

 

And yeah the Inquisitor was a snore fest.

[mopotter]

so, i guess that your criticism is flawed because i played paragon but in some moments gone to renegade...as me a lot of players. So you have enough liberty to personalize your Shepard. Can improve? of course.. but overall Mass Effect even on this aspect was, is, a very good game. Of Course i know the end could be done better, on that we all also agree, but 10 minutes don t define a game.

I did this a lot.  I took each situation and made decisions based on how I was playing the character. A couple of character were almost totally balanced.  In ME2 they couldn't get Jack and Miranda or Tali and Legion.  I loved it.  However, most of my characters were mixed with slightly more paragon but with some renegade in them and I think I had 1 renegade and 1 paragon just because I wanted to see what happened.  

 

One of my problems when I got to ME3 was the neutral/balance options seemed to disappear.    I'd like this back.  I liked having those 3 options. 

[BloodyMares]

The main problem with the morality system in ME IMO is that it is set from a player point of view. That means your actions will shape how powerful your persuasion options will be (i.e. allowing persuasion options) but not how people should react.
That works when you have a reputation and that reputation allows you to persuade people, but it needs some modifiers to simulate how each person will react to certain reputation or even reaction for people that do not know nothing about you.

To solve this, my idea is to include some modifiers to the reputation system. What I mean with this is the following:

• A global morality system as before that goes from -1 to 1 (-1 renegade, 1 paragon). Each decision will modify this value.
• A local morality system that affect the current mission (or even another that affect only current conversation). It can go from -0.5 to 0.5 (or whatever other value depending on how much you want this value to alter the global). It is a modifier of the global reputation so your reputation for current mission (or conversation) will be global_rep * (1 + local_rep).
• Then to simulate how people react to certain reputation, each character could have a reputation alignment, again a value from -1 to 1. That means a character with a reputation alignment of -1 (pure renegade) will react to a pure paragon character as follow: player_rep * character_align the result will be -1 meaning he will totally oppose to anything you say. But if we add the local reputation, the character can be less opposed depending on your last choices.
• And finally to simulate the knowledge a certain character has about you, another modifier can be added that goes from 0 to 1 (no knowledge to total knowledge).

Putting it all together the reputation of the player will be global_rep * (1.0 + local_rep) * character_align * character_knowledge this formula gives a value between -1 (totally disagrees) and 1 (totally agrees) being 0 indiferent or ambivalent.

This system could also reward paragade and renegon players because they could persuade both renegade and paragon characters simply by saying what they want to hear in that conversation.

What do you think of this modification to the reputation system? Could it work better?

PD: sorry for the maths .

Bravo. You did it. You made the perfect concept of a reputation system for RPGs.

As many have said, Morality system serves no purpose. You are not judged by your Morality. You are judged by your Reputation. The things you've done, the things you've said, the knowledge available to you, your title.

If we think about Paragade system as a Reputation system then Mass Effect 1 had the best concept of it. Your Charm/Intimidate skills help to deal with NPCs. But the main problem was that it was implemented poorly. From the dialogue alone it looked like people only were impressed/intimidated by your past (Sole Survivor, War Hero, Ruthless) and your Spectre status. And it makes sense in a dialogue but what doesn't make sense is how small these bonuses are to your overall score. They should've greatly increase those bonuses. If you're Ruthless, you've got 50% bonus to Intimidate. If you're a War Hero, you've got 50% to Charm. If you're Sole Survivor, it should be 25% bonus to both. Once you become a Spectre, another 25% bonus is given to your Charm / Intimidate skills. Once you do a major decision, you increase your bonus to a certain percentage and of course you could just put skill points to increase that percentage. This system would make a lot more sense for Shepard's character and give the player more flexibility. Player could upgrade only one skill tree and still be able to persuade characters both ways. Why do you need to upgrade Intimidate if you've got an intimidating reputation already?

Well, it was my thought on the game mechanics. If they decide to stick with Paragon/Renegade system then they need to rebrand it to Reputation, add the tone options to a dialogue wheel and decide at last what the Paragon and Renegade stand for and make these traits consistent.

But the best RPG option would be to scrap the Paragon and Renegade and stick to a reputation system that skuid proposed.