First time I nuked an entire town in a video game was back when I was catching up on all the Fallout games I’d missed. This was maybe 2011, I’d picked up Fallout 3 on some friend’s recommendation – guy at work kept telling me I had to try these post-apocalyptic RPGs. So there I am, wandering around this wasteland, and I stumble into this settlement called Megaton. Whole town’s built around an unexploded nuclear bomb, which even to a construction guy like me seemed like questionable city planning.
This slick character in an expensive suit approaches me, starts talking about how he represents some fancy group, offers me a pile of bottle caps (took me a while to get used to bottle caps being money) to rig that bomb to blow. Not gonna lie – I was curious. Would the game actually let you do something that extreme? I mean, I’d been talking to these people, helping them with little problems, getting to know the town. But the caps were good, and honestly, I wanted to see what would happen.
So I did it. Set the bomb, walked to a safe distance, pushed the button. Watched that mushroom cloud bloom over what used to be a community. Game popped up this message: “Karma decreased.” No kidding. I actually felt sick to my stomach for a minute there. Here I am, a grown man in his forties, feeling genuinely guilty about some pixels on a screen. Ended up reloading a save from two hours back just to undo it. That moment stuck with me – not the explosion itself, but how a simple game mechanic made me think about my own moral compass.
Thing is, I came to RPGs pretty late in life, so I didn’t have years of childhood nostalgia clouding my judgment about these morality systems. When I started exploring gaming history, working backwards through all the classics I’d missed, I could see how these systems had changed over time without getting all misty-eyed about “the good old days.”
Started reading about this game called Ultima IV from 1985 – whole thing was built around becoming a better person through eight virtues like Honesty and Compassion. No traditional bad guy to fight, just you trying to embody these ideals. When I finally tracked down a copy and played it, I was struck by how optimistic it felt. Instead of just killing monsters to level up, the game was judging how you lived your virtual life. Pretty revolutionary concept, even if the execution feels a bit preachy by today’s standards.
My daughter had tried explaining alignment systems to me when she was getting me into this hobby – you know, Lawful Good, Chaotic Evil, all that D&D stuff. Made sense in theory, but early video games turned it into this really basic good/evil slider. Do nice things, bar goes up. Do mean things, bar goes down. Simple as that.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was probably my first real taste of this binary system. Light Side choices made you glow like a saint, Dark Side choices gradually turned you into this red-eyed, veiny nightmare creature. Subtle it wasn’t. But I’ll admit, I played through twice back-to-back – once as the most noble Jedi possible, once as a Sith so cartoonishly evil I half-expected my character to start cackling maniacally at every opportunity.
Problem with those early systems was they undermined themselves by tying the best rewards to the extremes. Want the coolest Light Side powers? Better never pick a Dark Side option, even when it made perfect sense for the situation. I found myself gaming the morality system like it was a stat to optimize, picking dialogue options I didn’t actually agree with just to hit the points threshold for some ability. Kind of defeated the whole purpose, you know?
Mass Effect tried to fix this with their Paragon/Renegade thing – supposed to be more about “by-the-book versus playing by your own rules” rather than straight good versus evil. In practice, though, Paragon still felt like the “nice” option and Renegade felt like the “jerk” option most of the time. I spent that whole trilogy religiously clicking the upper dialogue choice because I couldn’t stand making my Shepard act like an ass, even though some of those Renegade interrupt prompts looked pretty satisfying.
Did give in once, though – pushed some mercenary out a skyscraper window during an interrogation. Felt this jolt of “Holy crap, did I just do that?” followed immediately by “Okay, that was actually pretty cool.” Game didn’t judge me for it with some morality meter, which somehow made it feel more impactful.
Real breakthrough came with games like New Vegas that ditched the single morality meter entirely. Instead of being “good” or “bad,” you had reputation with different factions. Much more realistic – in the real world, your actions make some people love you and others hate you, usually for the exact same reasons. I spent hours agonizing over whether to side with the NCR or Mr. House or that Yes Man robot, not because one was obviously right and the others wrong, but because they all had legitimate points and serious flaws.
Dishonored did something clever with consequences instead of judgment. Kill lots of people, and the world becomes darker and more plague-ridden. Show mercy, and things stay relatively stable. Game wasn’t telling you that you were bad for choosing violence – it was showing you the logical results of your actions. Brilliant twist was making the “good” stealth path much harder to play while the “evil” kill-everything approach was easier but led to a worse ending.
Started that game determined to be the perfect silent ghost, never killing anyone, never even being seen. After failing the same section about fifteen times, I finally snapped and went on this crossbow rampage through the entire level. Felt great in the moment, then felt terrible when I saw how my actions were affecting the city. Reloaded and did it the hard way. That’s good game design right there – making you face the actual consequences of your choices.
Games that really get to me now are the ones with no clear right answers. Witcher 3 excels at this stuff. That whole Bloody Baron questline – Jesus. I sat there with the controller in my hands for a good five minutes, just staring at the dialogue options, knowing there was no “good” choice available. Just different flavors of awful consequences. I actually called my buddy Mike at like midnight to ask what he did in that situation. We ended up arguing about the ethics of it for almost an hour. Over a video game. At midnight on a Tuesday. My alarm the next morning was not my friend.
Dragon Age had this moment that really caught me off guard. There’s this character, Iron Bull – you spend the whole game getting to know him, he becomes part of your team, you trust him. Then there’s this quest where you have to choose between saving his mercenary friends or preserving an important political alliance. Save his friends, he’s loyal forever. Don’t save them – even for completely justifiable strategic reasons – and he betrays you later because his loyalty goes back to his original people.
No “correct” answer that gives you everything you want. That’s life, right there. I saved the mercenaries because I’d grown attached to Bull as a friend, even though the alliance probably would’ve saved more lives in the abstract. What’s that say about me? That I value personal relationships over cold strategic thinking? Maybe. Or maybe I just didn’t want a cool party member to hate me. It’s complicated.
Funny thing is, my approach to these moral choice systems has shifted over the years. When my daughter first got me into gaming, I always played the hero – made the most obviously “good” choices, wanted to be the savior who never compromised his values. These days, I find myself drawn more to the pragmatic middle ground. The necessary evils. The recognition that sometimes there aren’t any clean solutions.
Maybe that’s just me getting more cynical with age, or maybe it’s the kind of appreciation for complexity you get from actually living in the world for five decades. Construction work teaches you that sometimes you have to make compromises to get the job done. Sometimes the “perfect” solution isn’t possible with the time and budget you’ve got.
Still can’t bring myself to play true villain, though. Tried it with this game called Tyranny that’s specifically built around being the bad guy. Couldn’t stick with it. Even in a fictional world with no real consequences, being casually cruel to people made me feel gross. I suspect that’s true for most players – game developers always report that despite creating all these elaborate evil options, the vast majority of people still choose to be heroes.
Best morality systems nowadays don’t even label the choices. They just present situations and let you figure out what feels right without color-coding the “good” and “evil” options. Life is Strange did this really well – butterfly effect of small decisions leading to outcomes you couldn’t predict, just like real life. I changed my mind multiple times during that game about whether I’d made the right choice several chapters earlier.
Disco Elysium might be the peak of this whole concept. Your political and moral leanings shape your character’s entire internal dialogue and worldview. Less about being good or evil, more about what kind of person you are across multiple dimensions – idealistic or cynical, rational or emotional, traditional or progressive. First time my character internally justified something I personally found reprehensible because of earlier choices I’d made, I had to put the controller down. Game had created a consistent psychology that was diverging from my own values, and it felt uncomfortably real.
These systems work best when they’re woven into the actual story, not just some meter in the corner of the screen going up and down. When your moral choices affect relationships, change the narrative, open up different paths – that’s when they really enhance the role-playing experience. The best ones stick with you after you finish the game, making you wonder what would’ve happened if you’d chosen differently.
I still think about some of my Mass Effect decisions years later. Was I right to cure the genophage? Should I have rewritten those Geth instead of destroying them? There’s something powerful about games that make you question your choices even when there are no real-world stakes involved.
That’s the real value of morality systems in RPGs – they let us explore ethical dilemmas from a safe distance, test our values without facing actual consequences. They’re like thought experiments where we get to see how things play out. Sometimes they’re oversimplified, sometimes they’re profound, but when they work right, they add something to gaming that no other medium can quite match.
I’m curious where these systems go next. Maybe games that track not just what moral choices we make, but how long we hesitate before making them. Or systems that adapt the challenges they present based on our established patterns. Whatever comes next, I hope they keep moving beyond simple good-versus-evil binaries toward something that captures more of the messy, complicated reality of human morality.
Because the most satisfying morality system isn’t the one that tells you whether you’re playing a hero or villain – it’s the one that makes you genuinely uncertain which choice is right, and leaves you thinking about that uncertainty long after you’ve shut off the console.
Timothy discovered retro gaming at forty and never looked back. A construction foreman by day and collector by night, he writes from a fresh, nostalgia-free angle—exploring classic games with adult curiosity, honest takes, and zero childhood bias.
