[General Discussion] Best 'justice system' or 'checks and balances'

Originally Posted by Terminus

The Mass Effect morality system is pretty bad to be honest. So what if you go good or evil, it only earns you points for use to access some talents and powers as well as achievements.

Sorry, not bad, but horrid.

Its questionable to even call what Mass Effect uses "morality" anyhow. Morality is defined by social rightness and wrongness. You could arbitrarily assign the Paragon / Renegade meters on opposite ends of a right / wrong scale, but that's not how they are represented in game. The ties at best are weak and implied between them due to their relationships in response trees. You can even end the game as a maxed out dual Paragon-Renegade.

The good / evil bit is a similar logic, as few of the Renegade choices are "evil" and only minimal Paragon choices are "good". At best they might be something like law / chaos, but even that's a stretch. Maybe "helpful" vs "dick" if they insist on being opposed.

On the results of the system, Mass Effect gave you additional conversation options, additional methods of resolving situations, the ability to bypass quests, and powers. That's about as much as most systems do. It didn't give you as many as KotOR, but few do. There's also the promise (we'll see how real it is) of multi-game interactions. The next further step is to offer fully branching stories for in-game choices. Not many do that as its just too much work without some procedural way of making those stories.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Quote:

The great thing about the current and future generation of consoles and PCs is that the extra processing power means not only can they chuck a lot more polygons around the screen at once but they can cope with more calculations in terms of AI.

They have been saying this since the days of the first Playstation. Heck, some even delivered. Medal of Honor, for example, which made some cool leaps with enemies who would respond to your different attacks, not just mindlessly charge or strafe.

That said, these improvements are rarely capitalized on, because its not where companies are willing to spend their money. Its harder to sell AI in ads, and its risky to depend on good reviews or word of mouth. To make decent AI, they also have to find someone who actually understands AI principles, and can code it well. These people are less prevalent than the graphics folks as it doesn't have as many natural segues from other areas, and its harder to do right. Plus, AAA's already cost so much these days, they'd rather just stick Bob down the cube farm on it, since he's already coding stuff.

Quote:

Don't get me wrong, I like Mass Effect but it ain't exactly an rpg is it?

How is it not an RPG? You take on the role of a character and play him, making choices that affect how he develops. They may not be as expansive as KotOR, but they exist. Almost all JRPGs can be culled with a similar logic. Even Fallout, one of the classic "RPGs", had pretty minimal effect from good/evil choices. I'd like to play an RPG that's got the freedom of live RP, but we're not there.

There's nowhere I can't reach.