The Two Sides of the Force

***Update***
After a discussion on gamedev.net forum here about this I have reached a new conclusion about the morality as a game mechanic.

The best implementation would be in a sandbox type game filled with lots of factions, each with its own agenda. The player has also its own agenda, and its actions are not labeled by the game itself as being good/evil, but by the factions the player interacts with. This way the player can play the game as it sees fit, without being compelled to go all the way good or all the way evil. I personally think the Mount & Blade game series provide an environment that implements a concept similar to my conclusion.
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Ever since the Dungeons & Dragons rule system, players could chose the alignment of their character as part of the game’s “Morality” system. Back then it was a combination of factors leading to about 9 possible combinations, sometimes even more.

In the first D&D installments on the PC, the best games at the time were coming from a single great company: BioWare. Titles like Baldour’s Gate, Icewind Dale and Planescape Torment are still considered today some of the best RPGs out there.

Over time, the great minds of Bio Ware thought that it is pretty dull to have your alignment set in stone at the start of the game, so they designed a new morality system in which your alignment is established during gameplay, based on your choices and decisions. They also found the perfect setting for this: the Star Wars universe, and so the Knights of the Old Republic series was born. For the ones who didn’t play these great games, based on your good or evil actions, you would lean more towards one of the two sides of the force, slowly becoming a Jedi Knight or a Sith Lord, gaining more and more powers specific to one of the two possible paths.

However, there is an inherent flaw in this system.The more powerful abilities of either side of the force were at the end of the spectrum, so in order to get them, you would have to choose one side and stick with it, and choose early. This was not a hard choice because most players would start the game with a clear target in mind, to either become a great Jedi or a cruel Sith, but this is because of the setting (Star Wars) of the game, not of the game’s design itself. If you would not decide early which way to take and do both good and evil actions and decisions along the way, you would soon find your character overpowered by pretty much any enemy in the game. You would have a bit of both sides, but a weak efficiency overall, and you would have to rely mostly on the other, more specialized, party members to all the job for you. By having to choose early on which path to take, this system becomes useless, collapsing into the D&D alignment choosing style we saw in BioWare’s early games.

A lot of developers realized these problems and tried to deal with them in various ways.

I was playing Sucker Punch’s Infamous these days and they have a similar system too. You are forced to choose one side and stick with it, no matter your personal opinions regarding one decision or another, if you want to get either Champion or Infamous rank and get the most badass abilities. While this adds to a bit of replayability and adds to the attitude of the citizens around you, it makes the game more impersonal. Once you go one path, you are forced to stick with your decision to get the best out of it. If you would play with balanced decisions (like a normal person would if it would be in the character’s shoes), you would completely miss two or three of the most important attacks in the game, as you wouldn’t be able to get neither the good side version, nor the evils side one.

So overall I think it was a bad decision to implement the system into the game this way. Sure it is not a big problem if you miss two abilities, you can still finish up the game as it is, so it is not as important as the system built in KOTOR games, but still, better just keep the citizen’s attitude and look of the character and drop the gameplay stuff that depends on it. The player can chose what it feels right in a certain situation, not think “OK, now I desperately need that ability, so I have to let all cops in the police station die”, that won’t cut it.

BioWare guys evolved the system even more in their Mass Effect series (great games by the way). Now the system is way better in these games. It measures the good side and evil side independently, so the player can take any decisions it feels are right for the given situation. More than this, the impact of these measurements is not game breaking anymore. What they do is they unlock more dialog options that allow the story to progress in a more varied fashion, but you can go through without them. I think this is the best implementation so far for such a system, as it is considered a bonus over all the other gameplay elements, not a core system of the game.

What do you think about it and how would you implement such a system?