This is common in games with morality systems and it’s one of the key reasons why implementing a morality system in video games is a bad idea. In other words, you can only unlock everything for your evil character if you’re pure evil, and everything for your good character if you’re pure good. Every power you obtain has specifically locked off portions that are reserved for people of the appropriate karma level. The worst part of the whole thing is that you are forced to care about the karma system in i nFamous Second Son. In these situations, it’s clear that Sucker Punch was skewing good in their development because picking evil results in cartoonish acting for baffling reasoning. Once again, these are heavily skewed towards good. Only one of the choices, an option to murder an NPC later in the game, makes any sense when picking evil due to the emotions flying around at the time. There are a about four moments in the game where you get to specifically pick an evil action despite whatever karma you have. If you want to be evil, then you mindlessly kill everything. If you want to be good, you go out of your way to help people like a hero. It goes back to the Star Wars morality system. Unless you want to be the kind of evil that randomly wastes his time murdering street musicians, you’d better get ready to wait a long time for your karma meter to raise. Delsin gets evil points by randomly killing civilians most of the time, which aside from not making sense, also restricts players in how they want to be evil. This is the kind of morality that has been used in i nFamous games. It was a reduction of the already stark Star Wars morality to good – save everyone ever! – and evil – kill everyone no matter what. Instead, if you wanted to be on the dark side, you had to be a dumb thug that did nothing but murder for little reason. Many, myself included, pictured the subtle manipulations of Darth Sidious. In Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, gamers were given the option to fall to the dark side for the first time. Part of the fault of this lies in the outright bad creation of the black and white morality system as a fake means of giving the player more freedom. Even in a pure evil run, every evil action he takes seems incredibly out of character, making the whole thing seem poorly tacked on. Delsin isn’t the kind of guy to randomly murder civilians. Deeper characterization is praiseworthy in most circumstances, but it undercuts the harsh nature of the morality system. This personality is developed through cutscenes, character interactions, and general commentary as you play in your city-sandbox. Delsin is a developed character, and morality systems have been inserted into so many games that the novelty is definitely gone.ĭelsin Rowe is the character that Cole McGrath never could be, which is to say that he has a personality. However, neither of these two reasonings apply anymore. This basic system worked, to some extent, in the first two i nFamous games partially because morality systems were still less common back in 2009, and partially because the protagonist, Cole McGrath, was such a nonentity that you could just as easily imagine him cutting a swath through the innocents of Empire City as you could imagine him helping them. Evil actions like killing civilians push you further towards red, or evil, karma, while good actions like reviving civilians push you towards good. This all relies on a morality system in order to check your progress. You are set forth in a city with the ability to grow and become a superhero or super villain should you decide. The basic concept of the i nFamous games are intriguing to anyone with the faintest idea of what a superhero comic or movie is about. Therefore, I put forth that maybe it’s time for the i nFamous series to turn its back on their basic karma system and embrace a newer-freer system that rewards gamers without constricting them. These kinds of morality systems grew increasingly popular last generation for similar reasons and very few of them succeeded in any meaningful way. It’s poorly implemented and has little purpose outside of artificially expanding replayability. What I’m talking about is the black and white morality system. Yet, clouded beneath the superior characters, and beautiful graphics is an old relic that just doesn’t seem to have a place in the slicker game. InFamous Second Son was released on the PlayStation 4 recently and has been heralded as the best AAA game on the system. takes a look at inFamous Second Son and why the series’ trademark morality system doesn’t work anymore.
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