Another day of the long weekend and being a tad ill resulted in more game playing. In this case I remembered I still have Infamous and picked it back up. I've also played Prototype and while I think it might be slightly more enjoyable to me, Infamous is still good and likely better to others. It however fails in it's morality system.
Despite the issues Bioshock had with following through on its morality system, it did make a good incremental step in actually applying morality to games and having the consequences matter; however black and white they may be. Infamous though is just bad in its attempt, and perhaps only helpful in what not to do.
The game is basically you quarantined in a large city with superpowers and stuck between a bunch of cultist anarchists and the Police. The basic morality system is you can either fight of the evil force of the game taking your fellow citizens into account or ignoring them wildly as you tear through the city. You can't max out abilities unless you make a distinct choice in either direction and stick to it. This is thankfully furthered by the game locking out one mission of the other direction each time you finish one.
The execution of this is horribly flawed though which is unfortunate because the story is more filled out story than in Prototype. There are missions through the game and some are 'good' some are 'evil'. These are the main way to advance the degree of whatever morality you choose. Supplementally, there are neutral missions which simply let you get more experience to actually buy power ups.
The flawed part is this
Those neutral/story missions are usually in favor of the citizens, but they can make you more evil! I disabled a couple boats and rescued a few citizens and I become less liked!
Another embodiment of this is that you can 'clean' sections of the city from the cultists by doing missions in them. Some of the missions though specifically force you to choose which moral compass direction you're heading; however the end result is still that that section is cleaned. I let a bomb blow up a police station, and somehow that made the anarchists afraid of that section of the city! Normally you have to take out a local gang of them or remove some poison they're putting in the water.
In hopes of learning from Infamous
Black boxing this, it would look like the developers suffered from tacking on their morality system to a game mechanic which is unfortunately biased in one direction already. In the first case it seems that your level in your moral choice is experience point based so doing a neutral mission can bump you up. The broken part is that the neutral missions are almost always in favor of the citizens, so the end moral shift ends up making no sense if you're evil, and unfortunately hurts an otherwise good story.
The map cleaning falls into this problem also. The game wants to reward you for completing missions by making it easier to get around the city and, given the game's citizen bias, making it safer for the people, but they didn't disable this for those distinct instances where you can do a bad thing.
While I like the morality idea, I do really feel like they took it all a step back by it not only make no difference, but actually have backwards outcomes. I played 'evil' because I only plan on playing once and it was suggested it's more fun. I hope playing the good route only works out better.
(Full disclosure: I haven't finished inFamous, though I'd be really surprised if that somehow changed all these backwards consequences)
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