In most modern games there is a moral choice system. Depending on your choice the game may or may not change. You've seen it in Mass Effect, Infamous, etc.
Today I'm going to talk about the way Infamous has taken this seemingly arbitrary system and given deeper choices that the player could be making subconsciously.
First and foremost, this article is about the first Infamous. Due to the PS3's Welcome Back program, I was able to get my hands on a copy for free.
Throughout the game the player will encounter points where the game will freeze and explain a certain scenario that will affect your morality.
An example of this would be at one point fairly early in the game when you reach a group of riot cops barring the path to the bridge. Cole, the protagonist, is trying to escape the city. The gameplay freezes and pans around the scene as Cole narrates. He tells the player that he could fire electricity at the guards from inside the crowd so that the cops won't be able to find him but warns the player that many innocent civilians would die. He also adds that he could try fighting them from outside the crowd -- but that would be risky.
The main idea I want to focus on is simple: it's easy to be evil.
The game seems to go out of its way to tell the player that if he makes all of the easy choices the game will literally become easier.
There's a mission in which Cole has to knock the canisters pumping a black sludge into the city's water supply. You have a choice: you can either shoot the pump off, overloading it with electricity and causing it to chug a large amount into the water before falling off or going up and knocking it off manually, causing the sludge to fly into your eyes. If you take the higher road and decide it would be better for the civilians if you knocked it off manually then the sludge will make Cole hallucinate for a few seconds and you'll lose some of your power for the rest of your mission. Or you could overload the pump and have no direct affects.
PS: The Witcher 2 is the future of choice-based story telling. You can bet I'll make a blog post on that!!!
