Explosive Zombie
Banned
So, I'm in lots of cringe-inducing Facebook groups where the level of discourse is below that of people who get permanently banned from here and someone made the assertion that the first moral choices in video games were in Fable: The Lost Chapters. This is obviously a ridiculous thing to say but in my quest to figure out the first game to truly have morality choices I came up empty through the Google machine and decided to just counter with the earliest example I could think of at the time, the original Fallout from 1997. This lead me to realize I wanted to know the history of moral choices in gaming and if GAF had insight into it I wasn't able to discern using Google.
While I don't think it's necessary the game judges you for your choices (like Fallout's karma system) I do think the choices should have some sort of moral undercurrent to them. For instance when I was recently playing Wasteland 2, one of the first choices you're given is between two settlements under attack, this is to make the game different on subsequent plays, it has no bearing on the morality of your character which you go for, both are in dire need.
I think some of the games that handle it most interestingly were games like Mass Effect and Fallout games because you had to rank up and earn the ability to make certain choices at all. Without requisite speech, for instance, you can't settle some disputes without violence. Fallout 3 had this constantly, I walk outside and a guy is begging for water but I have none on me... unfortunately he doesn't die because I wait to do it, these guys asking for water seem to just exist as a free karma boost and your actions have no real consequences. Similar to the leaky pipes in Megaton, you need a repair skill to deal with them but nothing happens if you never do. It is the moral thing to equip yourself to do these but there is no lost morality for not doing them. Then there's the infamous bomb in Megaton, where you need explosives skill to disarm it or you can just blow it up. This sequence became somewhat emblematic of the Bethesda Fallout games, people loved that one of the biggest settlements in the game, full of quests, could be wiped out. That said... there's very little grey morality here, you're either evil or good. BioShock would be criticized for its moral choices that boil down whether or not you think it's okay to murder small children for your own personal gain. But, the complexity of the moral choice isn't at issue for me, just whether or not it matters. I always felt BioShock's simplistic moral choices was part of the idea behind the game, since it's a meta-commentary on your lack of choice in video games so the brief different endings serve its purpose.
Moral choices often do hamper game endings, though games without moral choices can often end just as abruptly or unsatisfactory games with moral choices can be notorious for reconciling your different choices with walls of text instead of really seeing the consequences of your actions. I would prefer more games with morality didn't truly end and let you continue to exist in the world you'd created for good or ill. With GaaS ramping up we probably will see more of this, it'd be interesting to see new content drops for RPGs that had to be multi-faceted to account for the different endings people could get, I feel like it'd be something we've never seen before? Fallout 4 had SOME things in its bigger DLCs that sort of mattered based on what you did in the main game... but not a whole lot and they deal with the making a sequel to a game with choices problem by picking a new time period, location, main character, etc. I'd really like to see more games forced to create divergent path sequels from the outset based on past choices from a prior game.
TLDR - To sum up, I'm wondering how you all feel about moral choice systems, how they function and of course... if you know where they began in gaming?
While I don't think it's necessary the game judges you for your choices (like Fallout's karma system) I do think the choices should have some sort of moral undercurrent to them. For instance when I was recently playing Wasteland 2, one of the first choices you're given is between two settlements under attack, this is to make the game different on subsequent plays, it has no bearing on the morality of your character which you go for, both are in dire need.
I think some of the games that handle it most interestingly were games like Mass Effect and Fallout games because you had to rank up and earn the ability to make certain choices at all. Without requisite speech, for instance, you can't settle some disputes without violence. Fallout 3 had this constantly, I walk outside and a guy is begging for water but I have none on me... unfortunately he doesn't die because I wait to do it, these guys asking for water seem to just exist as a free karma boost and your actions have no real consequences. Similar to the leaky pipes in Megaton, you need a repair skill to deal with them but nothing happens if you never do. It is the moral thing to equip yourself to do these but there is no lost morality for not doing them. Then there's the infamous bomb in Megaton, where you need explosives skill to disarm it or you can just blow it up. This sequence became somewhat emblematic of the Bethesda Fallout games, people loved that one of the biggest settlements in the game, full of quests, could be wiped out. That said... there's very little grey morality here, you're either evil or good. BioShock would be criticized for its moral choices that boil down whether or not you think it's okay to murder small children for your own personal gain. But, the complexity of the moral choice isn't at issue for me, just whether or not it matters. I always felt BioShock's simplistic moral choices was part of the idea behind the game, since it's a meta-commentary on your lack of choice in video games so the brief different endings serve its purpose.
Moral choices often do hamper game endings, though games without moral choices can often end just as abruptly or unsatisfactory games with moral choices can be notorious for reconciling your different choices with walls of text instead of really seeing the consequences of your actions. I would prefer more games with morality didn't truly end and let you continue to exist in the world you'd created for good or ill. With GaaS ramping up we probably will see more of this, it'd be interesting to see new content drops for RPGs that had to be multi-faceted to account for the different endings people could get, I feel like it'd be something we've never seen before? Fallout 4 had SOME things in its bigger DLCs that sort of mattered based on what you did in the main game... but not a whole lot and they deal with the making a sequel to a game with choices problem by picking a new time period, location, main character, etc. I'd really like to see more games forced to create divergent path sequels from the outset based on past choices from a prior game.
TLDR - To sum up, I'm wondering how you all feel about moral choice systems, how they function and of course... if you know where they began in gaming?
