No neutrality in inFamous, because gamers don’t do shades of grey |
|
| BY Kristen Spencer May. 23rd, 2009 | More on: |
Sucker Punch’s inFamous certainly isn’t the first videogame to present players with moral choices, but it is one of the first to be blunt about the complete lack of a moral middle ground.
“We had [neutral karma] initially, but we found that people wanted to be really good or really evil,” said Game Director Nate Fox in a live chat on PlayStation.Blog. “No one cared about the middle.”
“All of Cole’s base powers get twisted by his moral decisions. We wanted to give people who were heroic powers that offset that play style and the same for evil people. Really you get two very different play throughs depending on which side of the moral fence you land on,” he continued, stressing that players’ tendencies toward altruism or assholism will impact more than just the attendance of their ticker tape parade. “The karmic changes to your powers work better for different kinds of play. So some people will find evil easier, some people will find good easier. Both are super fun.”
I’ve tried to walk the fine line between good and evil, but it always results in disappointment. Even games that claim to cover the entire moral spectrum don’t reward neutrality like they do villainy and heroics. In games, morality is binary. Personally, I’d love to explore the moral grey zone, where neutrality was presented as its own choice and not just a balancing act between good and evil. But until developers and designers actually start crafting story lines that cover a wider spectrum of ethical choices, I approve and applaud Sucker Punch’s honest approach. F*ck ambiguity.
May 23rd, 2009
at 11:02 am
Neutrality is not a life choice that people make. A tree can be neutral, a person can’t. A person can be neutral on some topics that truly don’t affect them, but in the end, each and every person has opinions and leanings. Otherwise we’d be robots.
Where’s the fun in exploring a robot’s personality? Spock is only fun when he breaks out of his shell and displays emotion.
May 23rd, 2009
at 11:13 am
Hmm, I don’t think being good 90% of the time and then killing some civilan is really neurtral. In fact that’s evil, not good.
I agree though and I am dissapointed with this idea that you have to be a lot of one thing to get the best of the powers on one side. At least this game doesn’t hype the moral decisions up like Fable 2 did. What a disappointment that game was.
May 23rd, 2009
at 11:32 am
The great thing about this is you can play as evil and good in the same playthrough but your karmic leanings impact the types of powers that you can use. You can build up your hero powers but if you dip below into evil territory, you can’t use those powers anymore until you get yourself back up to heroic.
May 23rd, 2009
at 11:43 am
Nutrality is what the rest of society is doing in the game bystandards are nutral as they see everything but do nothing. That’s not fun for game play :)
May 23rd, 2009
at 12:40 pm
Who the hell would want to play neutral?!!! That sounds boring as hell! And how would you reward a player being neutral? That would have soured the gameplay in my opinion and I’m glad they did not take that route.
May 23rd, 2009
at 2:15 pm
I think what makes the game interesting is the fact that you will either be HERO or VILLAIN. The middle ground is pointless and as a huge fan of Fallout 3 I never found myself trying to stay Neutral since there was really no penalty or reward for doing so. Plus I don’t see Neutral as a state of being, it’s based more around opinion if you want mine.
May 23rd, 2009
at 3:02 pm
I sometimes wish for neutrality in games, because most people really aren’t fully good or fully evil… but I think a superpower game wouldn’t be quite the right story for it. The super scene is full of heros and villains. There’s just no such thing as a super-neutral.
May 23rd, 2009
at 8:57 pm
You can’t ever be neutral. The decisions we make impact our moral standpoints whether we know it or not - you may not be “good” or “evil” but people are never ever neutral.
May 23rd, 2009
at 10:21 pm
evidently, from day to day experience, a person can be capable of good actions and bad actions when the negative side of their personality gets the better of them, sucker punch could have accomodated for this but it is much easier from a game design perspective to reward villainy or heroism. i think its more a case of they could n’t figure out how to get the game to work properly or make sense with people doing a mixture of good and evil. When a game developer does figure this out, they’re omission will seem glaring deficiency.