On the Morality of Being Nice

Debatably, this post has [Mass Effect 2 Spoilers].  I trust you guys to know where you stand on my definition of spoilers at this point.

So, I recently ran into, I think, an effective handling of a moral quandary in an RPG.  Dr. Mordin Solus is easily the most frustratingly morally ambiguous character I've encountered in a long time.  And, I kind of want to call him out on what he's done.  But he's party of my loyal BROhort, and what's more, he's a very loyal and *likeable* member of the Shepherd BROgade.  He made choices of terrible weight, and he definitely feels them.  I don't want to hurt the guy emotionally any more than I have to, but he has done some really bad things, and I don't want to condone those, either.  Do I comfort him, by telling him it's in the past?  Do I tell him it was wrong and demand some kind of enthronement?  Is it better to be nice to Mordin, a friend, or to be honest with him, as a person who has made some despicable, if debatably necessary, choices?  These options are both good and bad in their own ways, morally.  I was honestly conflicted about the whole matter.  What really made this work was that, quite frankly, I was more concerned with finding the option that satisfied me most, and not ferreting out the one that nets more Paragon or Renegade points.  That's the sign that a morality system is working, I'd say.

Now, there's a slight caveat to all of this.  It's worth mentioning that Paragon and Renegade are really more about "how nice are you" versus "how much of a jerk you are" than strictly "good vs evil."  In ME 2, with the introduction of "Paragon Action" and "Renegade Action" quicktime event options into many cutscenes, Renegade is as much about being a dirty-fighting, sneaky SOB as it is about being a baby-kicking jerk.  For instance, you get the opportunity to taze a guy repairing a gunship that you know you're going to have to fight (this isn't a spoiler, because it's obviously Checkov's gunship).  Given the context, this seems to fall within "reasonable video game warzone immorality" - it's a little lenient, if anything, since unless I seriously misunderstood it, he wouldn't have died from the tazing.  Hell, it might have saved his life (I don't *think* he was aboard the gunship later, though).  It's the sort of move Han Solo would pull -  opportunistic and kind of dickish, and also for the greater good.  With the system they have in place, the two aren't mutually exclusive.

Where the system breaks down is in that I metagame too much.  I can't help but optimize my playstyle to either Paragon or Renegade, since there are tangible rewards for doing so (more conversation options, easier resolutions of many conflicts between pairs of characters I like, etc).  So, even though a particularly grandiose Krogan mercenary is blathering on about how he's going to kill and eat me, and clearly I'm going to be shooting him sooner or later regardless of what I do, I feel compelled to sit there and listen instead of shooting the fuel tank he's standing on, because I don't want it to come back and bite me in the ass when I need to tell two bickering teammates to leave each other the f*ck alone.  And you still DO have to kick a lot of babies to amass enough Renegade points for it to be worthwhile (admittedly, when I say "kick babies," I really mean "say unnecessarily mean things to people who look up to you").  So, in Mordin's case, because I really feel conflicted about the whole mess, and because it can't be worth THAT many Paragon or Renegade points to say any particular thing so long as that thing isn't "Eat babies, regret nothing," I don't feel constrained by the mechanics of the system.  I care about making the choice I find to be most morally acceptable (which was, incidentally, just keeping my mouth shut - I wasn't happy with this, but I couldn't come up with anything better than what the game offered anyway), and I'm willing to let the chips fall afterward.  But I'll fruitlessly negotiate with people who clearly are just going to use that time to take aim because, later, I want to be able to tell other people to shut the f*ck up (very charismatically) and stop shooting each other.

Mind you, I'm not claiming that Mass Effect 2 has a truly functioning morality system.  I still think morality systems are mostly a doomed effort.  But, for me at least, it has instances where the system really does work, and I find that very interesting.

An addendum on the matter: maybe a two-part system, where you can set both an action and a demeanor?  So, you could be surly but moral or charming but evil?  Of course, I suppose this has the potential that leads to "shoot him in the dick [nicely]."

-Stormshrug

On Mass Effect Gameplay

So, I recently shredded through Mass Effect because I didn't have my copy of A Dance with Dragons yet and the lack of it made me want to kill some video game enemies in droves.  However, as my copy was coming via snail-mail, I still didn't have it when I finished Mass Effect.  As such, I needed more things to kill, and so I loaded up Mass Effect 2 to continue to bide my time by dismembering virtual aliens, robots, terrorists, and alien robot terrorists until my six-years-in-the-making Martin fix arrived.

I had heard that Mass Effect 2's gameplay was rather different, but I was still really struck by a few things.

1.  Ammo.  There was no ammunition collection in ME 1, due to some applied phlebotinum and handwaving whilst saying the words "Mass Fields."  I was totally fine with this - in fact, I hardly noticed.  What the inclusion of traditional ammunition in Mass Effect 2 made me realize was that I didn't really miss it in ME 1.  In certain games, yes, scraping for ammunition is part of the fun.  Making that last sniper rifle shot really count is critical.  Running out of ammo is scary.  But Mass Effect had offered a reasonable-enough explanation of why you had infinite ammo, put a different limiting resource on your weapons (overheating), and it worked fine.  Fight dynamics were more like an RPG than an FPS, in that they weren't about limited, unrenewable resources, but instead focused around cyclically available resources.  You could play the long game in any fight, because you could wait for your heat to drop, and once it did, the gun would work again.  I'd be annoyed if a hard-boiled FPS like Gears of War or Call of Duty removed ammunition, but Mass Effect, like World of Warcraft, really didn't need it, and it's kind of a hassle.  Let Hunters make their own magic arrows - it isn't going to unbalance the game, anyway.  In works of High Fantasy (and ME, like Star Wars, is basically High Fantasy IN SPESS), such abstractions are totally reasonable.  In ME 2, at least so far, however, your two resources (powers, which are cyclically available, and ammo, which runs out) work differently - which kind of makes powers better for my more conservative, calculating playstyle.  The other irritating thing is that I end up using guns I don't really like, since ammo is universal but apparently not transferrable.  This is a minor gripe - there is tons of ammo, and it is universal.  Thank god.

2.  Visible HP.  I'm not sure why, but ME 2 decided to go to the Gears of War-style "red marks appear on your screen" hit-points for your own HP instead of the previous Halo-style visible Shields and HP.  This particular change makes the game feel MUCH more FPSish, since it's harder to keep track of how you're holding out in a fight, or how much damage specific enemy attacks are doing.  This also slightly changes the strategic aspects of the game - you have to ballpark things, which is much more of an FPS trait than an RPG one.  Enemies still have HP bars, so that part remains largely unchanged.

It's interesting how, despite the mechanical gameplay being very similar, these two minor changes really shift it from feeling like an RPG-FPS hybrid to an FPS.

-Stormshrug