What Are You Playing: 9 Years since the Last Dragon Age

[ArmyOfOptimists]

They also kind of tie far too many things into a single alignment dimension.

Look at Mass Effect. Paragon and Renegade is presented as "We need to follow the rules" vs. "I don't have time for the rules, I have a galaxy to save". Also "Heroic friendship speech" vs. "Fall in line or get out of my way".

Okay, sure, that works.

Except it's also xenophile vs. humanity first, for no reason. And working with Cerberus vs. not working with them. And also occasionally just being pointlessly evil vs. not that.

Would be nice if the didn't always just have a single axis you get points on. I'd rather just have no moral axis in most of their games, and the ability to just choose what I want. I especially hate the "you must be *this* evil to give the badass answer" barriers. No, you haven't kicked enough cats to just shoot the criminal instead of negotiating.

I think this is why you don't see many RPGs with tally point morality systems anymore. People didn't like earning Morality Points, they enjoyed having different moral choices and the consequences of them. Once developers realized they could give the choices without any strings attached, they started doing that instead. The points system only made sense for Star Wars anyway, as your morality has a tangible impact on your abilities in its setting.

Not that this was a revelation. Plenty of RPGs were doing morality without points, but it became trendy in the mid-2000s when KOTOR made a big splash. These days it feels weird playing a BioWare RPG that's trying to sum up all your decisions on a single axis like that makes any sense.