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

So one of the things that has evolved in games is being responsible for your own actions. Truth be told, this has been in games since the 80's. One somewhat popular example would be in Dragon Warrior I in which if you...

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Say yes to the Dragonlord that you want half the world, then say yes again, the game will end. the screen will then turn red.

As times went on, at least in the States, things progressed such as in Super Mario RPG where:

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You can go to Merryland or whatever it's called and continually sleep at the hotel. However, upon exiting the hotel, the clerk will state that you actually slept too many times and must work off the debt.

or Chrono Trigger where:

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The things you do determine whether or not you are guilty in your trial. One example is eating another person's pig meat.

Now, while consoles have taken a bit of time to develop such mechanics, PC-based games have had it for quite a long time. One need only look at the Ultima series where you can ATTACK VIRTUALLY EVERYTHING ON SCREEN. Also, most Dungeon and Dragon games are very similar where attacking say, a King, causes his entire army to go at you. You can even go back as far as the old DOS, command line games where you can 'break the rules' by doing things such as having Sam kill virtually everyone in fellowship of the ring until he faints. Of course, it should be noted that games that are ported from PC to Consoles DID have these characteristics in them.

Yet, overall, very few games had a fully defined justice system / checks and balances. Do X crime, get penalty Y. What do you think has the best justice system? What do you think has the worst? What is medicore?

Medicore:

Fable - Petty crimes cost something like 40 gold up a pop. More devasting crimes like murder is a 1000 a pop, and you get thrown out of town. While it does seem silly that after 10 minutes, even if you have completely obliterated a down of it's populaton and guards, that you are free to go back for a friendly visit, the game still has a decent set of checks and balances where you are fined in proposition to the seriousness of the crime.

Ultima VIII - Basically, if you commit a crime, you die. On one hand, it does a nice job of stopping you from doing anything wrong but every crime results in the death penalty which is a bit of an extreme.


Best:
Elder Scrolls III - Similar to Fable, stealing or other minor crimes have a minor penalty. Items stolen are returned. Can;t pay? You go to jail. More serious crimes have a costlier penalty, and eventually if you do enough, basically the guards will attack you on sight. After that, you pretty much can't go to any town without being attacked unless you have the bounty removed. A good set of checks and balances in proportion to your crime AND constant murder is not taken lightly.

Worst:

Grand Theft Auto X - Virtually any in the series will do at least up to 3 which is when I really stopped playing. You can get in a car and mow over tons of people before the police bother to stop you. Even then, it takes quite a while for them to really go for you. And if you paint your car, problems are gone. Now, one could argue that Fable is worse as you can do a ton of damage, then leave town for 10 minutes, and come back as if nothing has happened. However, in Fable, you are much more likely to get caughti n town and have instant repercussions than in GTA. in GTA, you have to do something right in front of the police for them to stop you. And even THEN, you will most likely get one star, something that will fade away after a minute or so if you hop in a car and drive off.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I'm really not sure what you're asking here mortis, and you seem to have greatly missed the point on various games, especially the Grand Theft Auto series. Plus really, if you're going to start dishing out labels such as 'worst' to do with justice systems in games then at least GTA as a series had cops. How many different games let you go on killing sprees completely unchecked? Oh right, lots, including plenty of PC games.

Originally Posted by mortis

As times went on, at least in the States, things progressed such as in Super Mario RPG where:

Wait what? At least in the States? When did Super Mario RPG stop having been developed by Square for Nintendo in Japan?

There's nowhere I can't reach.

The GTA games are tailored to a pick-up-and-play audience. In spite of numerous other questionable things they've got going on, the crime system works beautifully - short term consequences are hard as fuck to get rid of, but the casual, open-ended, ADHD-riddled philosophy the series is known for remains in place. Rockstar aren't trying to go for a grand, realistic, persistent game world.

Apples and oranges. Don't take everything at face value, either.

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

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.

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

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.

I was speaking idiomatically.

I never said GTA was expected to have the greatest 'justice system' but rather was comparing it to other games. Given the plot and missions in GTA, I think a justice system is a mood point for that game, but yet it exists nonetheless in some degree.

I used SMRPG more as an example of how games (mainly console games in the States. I can't say the same for those in Japan though because I haven't played that many games in Japanese. This was what I meant by 'At least...') progressed where choices had consequences.

I'm not going at this with a 'we must make every game realistic to the fullest extent of the law' but rather comparing (given my opinion) how the checks and balances are handled. Some may feel that GTA has the best justice system around, and if you feel so, that's totally fine as you are justified to your opinion (just give your reasoning...which many of you did ). I felt it was a bit lacking but on the same token realize that that wasn't the focal point by the designers.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

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.

FELIPE NO

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.

Yeah, I agree. Plus, what about Fable 2's vehicle controls? They're terrible!

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

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.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

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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.

I'm playing through Mass Effect for the first time right now. I'm about twenty hours in, and I'm actually rather pleased at the background nature of the morality system (if you can even call it that.) For once I'm playing a modern console RPG that isn't needlessly open-ended (and doesn't pretend to be) and doesn't shove a skin-deep you-killed-a-guy-so-now-you-have-horns system down the player's throat. You mentioned Ultima VIII above - similarly, the plot kind of hinges on Shepard being a good guy, so there's little point in allowing you to play him as an interstellar rapist. Mass Effect's setting and themes are very big on acting for the greater good, and while Bioware did allow players to be a dick along the way, they rightly realised that an emphasis on moral choices would have been completely out of place.

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.

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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.

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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.

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

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 was speaking idiomatically.

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

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

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.

FELIPE NO