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

Imagine if they'd put in an accurate depiction of a real world justice system into GTA, it would be one of the most boring games ever. The whole premis of the game is that you're a criminal and you go around committing crime. If they'd set it up so that if any NPC saw you commit a crime they'd call the police and then you'd be wanted for that crime until such a time as you were caught, under went a trial and then served a jail penalty for it, you'd basically only be able to commit a few petty crimes before having to get the fuck out of the city, possibly the country if you killed someone.

The reason there is a cut down, unrealistic version of the legal system in GTA is the same reason that there isn't a realistic simulation of bullet wounds and other injuries or the weight of carrying weapons. I mean, if you started up a new game of GTA, walked across a road without looking for any cars that might be coming and got hit, would you rather lose a bit of health and carry on or spend 6 weeks in hospital recovering from a broken leg? Would the game be better if instead of carrying missile launchers and machine guns and pistols and shotguns and literally a ton of ammo for them, you could only carry a single gun and a couple of clips and even then, be careful of who saw you carrying them?

GTA has never set out to portray realism. It's a pseudo-realistic game within it's own world which has it's own laws, both legal and physical. If you want super-realism, go play a Tom Clancy game where a hit from a sniper rifle means game over. Even Rainbow and Ghost Recon make some allowances for realism in that you don't spend hours doing paperwork after each mission and getting shot but surviving doesn't mean a medical discharge from the army.

As Krel said, GTA has a very good balance system in that blatant criminality does have consequences, rather annoying ones often and those consequences make you think about how to approach the mission. If you're looking to assasinate someone, do you snipe off a rooftop where nobody can see you or just walk up to them in the street with a shotgun? Obviously, most people go for the easier option of the sniper rifle. Of course the games normally dictate how you go about each task to set up a scripted police chase or whatever but that's the whole point of the game. Getting away from teh police is as much a part of GTA as killing mobsters and if you made it super-realistic, it'd be the most boring game ever made. You simply can't make a game about being a criminal and make criminality heavily penalised, that'd be retarded.

The only games that would ever bother to have a set of legal rules in place in the game world are rpgs that allow you to choose your path and even then, concessions are made to make being a bad guy as much fun as being a good guy. Ultima VIII kills you when you commit a crime because the Avatar is supposed to be a good guy. Ultima VII handles breaking the law far better than VIII, rather than killing you straight up, the guards will come running and try to kill you and even then, only if there's a witness.

I would say that Oblivion's system isn't that good either as the penalty for commiting crime is a small amount of gold or a jail stay that only reduces your skills a tiny amount. I recently finished the game and despite being a real evil bastard all the way through, I only went to jail once and nobody minded me becoming Arch-Chancellor of the Mages guild and the hero of the entire country. Far better is something like KOTOR where being evil actually affects how people speak to you, the missions available and even your appearance. Hell, if you're really evil in the first one you can get banned from an entire planet! The only thing it lacked was the option to fight your way in anyway.

I think you're missing the point that games essentially need to be fun or nobody would ever play them.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

The main failing of Mass Effect's system is that previous acts have absolutely no effect on future ones. You can go through the game telling every alien you meet that they're scum who ought to be wiped off the face of the galaxy and the blue woman will still suck your dick if you're nice to her. Alternatively you can spend the entire game telling everyone to be nice to aliens and then at the end, change your mind and set up the humans as masters of the universe. The whole thing's so disconnected it's laughable.

Whilst it annoyed a few people, GTA expanded their itinery of choices by adding the dating sim in the most recent version. When the phone rings, do you take time out from what you were doing to go on a date and keep the lawyer woman sweet so you can still clear your wanted stars with a phone call or do you blow her off, risk losing the ability but save the ten minutes it'd take to get a taxi to her house (Who ever drove anywhere in GTAIV?), take her out then get back to where you were.

I think you're perhaps muddling up morality and choice in games. All games (All the good ones anyway) feature an element of choice with rewards and risks to weigh up as a result. Do you take the thin shortcut in Burnout and risk stacking it or do you go the long way round, probably not crash but lose some time? Do you give Sora the sword and get better attack skills or the shield and have better defence? Do you use a breaching charge on the door and risk alerting all the terrorists that might be in the next room or do you stealth in through the window and take everyone out using a silenced pistol?

Obviously some games feature more choice than others and some games have more of a gains and losses mentality than a risk or reward thing. By using a different gun in Halo you're never going to miss out on anything, you're just choosing how to minimise the risk and facilitate the easiest killings. In KOTOR however, by choosing a specific path you are often closing off others, denying you the rewards you might have got from them.

That some games dress these choices up in terms of morality calls is a simply cosmetic thing. Rather than saying that in Fable, if you commit crime you'll get fined, you can look at it in terms of if you kill this person, you'll gain x amount of experience, x amount of gold and this experience and it'll cost you x amount of gold and ten minutes of standing around outside the city gates. Every time you make a "moral" decision in a game, you're subconsciously, or even consciously deciding if the rewards are worth the penalties.

Of course, a more advanced morality system like KOTOR's also adds in the choice of whether it's more fun to be a good guy or a bad guy because there are tangible differences as a result. You might want to look all shady and fuck people up with force lightning so of course you're going to go darkside every time. Mass Effect fails because although it's briefly amusing being an arse to people in conversation, Sheppard doesn't ever become more inherently evil as a result, there's no cosmetic or tangible gameplay benefits or costs.

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. This means that with any luck, in future we'll see games where the AI is less scripted and more reactionary and this will apply both to enemy soldiers trying to kill you in fps games and to NPCs reacting to you in rpgs and open-worlders. Rather than every NPC either liking you or not, you'll have greater degrees of relationships with them and longer lists of flags that determine whether they like you. Oblivion alerady does this quite well, assigning people's reactions based on what guilds you're in and even the results of individual quests but at the end of the day, it's still, sadly just a 1-100 numeric value. Once developers start spending less time of graphics engines and more time on AI, games will become a lot more interesting and you'll see a lot more choice in them and some games will present this in terms of a morality judgement.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

True, true, but they spend a load of time at the beginning telling you that Spectre agents can do whatever the fuck they want in pursuit of their mission, implying that you can be an arse if you so wish. also, pre-release one of the many things they lied about including was a detailed system of characters reacting to your actions which like pretty much everything else in the tech-demo videos, ended up on the cutting room floor.

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

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I don't really consider most jrpgs to be rpgs either though, they're more like interactive stories than anything else. For me, an rpg is a game that allows you to play through how you want and solve the puzzles in a variety of ways, then deal with the consequences. Fallout let you approach most of the problems however you wanted and whilst there was little in the way of comeuppance for a lot of your actions, you could if you wish play the whole game without being that good in combat and you can take pretty much any route you want through the game. Mass Effect pushes you along far more and the majority of missions are simply kill these people then go here types, the only customisation you really get is choosing whether to kill people with a shotgun or an assault rifle. I'd actually say that the recent GTA games have more rpg elements to them than most jrpgs, especially San Andreas with it's improving skills mechanic. San Andreas was also a lot less scripted than some of the other recent games and allowed you a pretty free choice as to how to go about most missions.

There are some games around with pretty awesome AI and I think more and more companies are focussing on that as a way to enhance their games. The main reason that Fifa has finally taken the crown from ProEvo is that rather than just tacking on new and shinier graphics each year, EA actually built the game again from the ground up and now it actually feels a lot more like an actual football match, thanks mainly to the vastly improved AI of both the computer players and the one you're controlling.

Likewise Codemasters have always pushed the AI of computer controlled cars as the thing that singles out their racers. GRID might not look as nice as Gran Turismo or feature the same range of cars but you actually feel like you're having a race when you play it, rather than battling to use the racing line that the AI cars are glued to. Bizarrely, it's often the FPS games that are guilty of the most basic AI routines with Ubisoft still delivering terrorists that will happily walk round a corner that has a pile of bodies next to it and Bungie relying on weight of numbers and better energy shields to provide challenge rather than anything approaching tactical thinking on the part of the Covenant. I guess that as long as multiplayer is the main focus of a series than they don't really need to bother improving the single player game but it'd be nice to be able to play co-op against some clever opponents now and then rather than just plotting up somewhere with few enough lines of fire that you can cover them all and just letting the bad guys come to you.

I suppose that sports games are the obvious place for AI development to continue as the behaviour of the character you control is so important. Nobody really wants Master Chief to react in a realistic way when he gets shot whereas having Ronaldo actually head the ball away or chest it down depending on how high it's coming in and how close the defender is makes a big difference, given you're just pressing the same button to get both effects. One hopes though that once that level of behaviour control is in place, it'll get passed on to the other divisions who'll be able to use some of it to stop their terrorists walking into a hail of bullets.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Originally Posted by MalkHead

Penalty system in Oblivion is the most cruel and unforgiving, because even for a single stolen feather you have to PAY WITH YOUR BLOOD!

Except you pay 25 gold or so then they leave you alone. Plus getting out of jail is hilariously easy and the guards give up chasing you 20 yards outside the city gates.

I was speaking idiomatically.