User blog comment:The Milkman/Shades of Purple/@comment-3492791-20121006045720

Morality systems in general are flawed. It's never really an expression of player morals, it's "are you good or bad". As I once heard someone say on this issue (and quite humorously), you can only choose to be Jesus or Hitler, and nothing in between.

Morals are not ethics. In a real morality system, you are forced to make a difficult decision between 2+ options. None of them are the "good" option, nor the "bad" one. It is up to the player to decide what is the best (or rather the least of all the evils). A good example of this came across in Spec Ops: The Line (My new standard for Morals and Emotional storytelling). You are at one point given the choice between saving a captured CIA agent, who is vital to your mission, or a group of civilians being tortured. Picking one will cause the other to be killed. There is no right decision here. It is up the player to decide which is more important to save. You actually get to base your decisions on your own personal morals, rather than what the game tells you your morals should be. Ultimately the CIA agent dies either way, so you kind of feel bad about letting the Civies die for nothing. At the time you made the choice you believed was right, and you pay for your choice later. Para/Reng has none of this hard decision making. It's usually just a choice between being a cereal box hero and a huge dick.

I will however admit the one time it actual created a decent moral conflict was the genophage cure. I really had to think about that one before I could decide what to do, and I didn't make a choice until the last possible moment when Mordin noticed the sabotage himself (I eventually chose to cure it. I could never betray my bro Wrex like that). Not curing the genophage isn't a "bad" choice. It is a "bad" thing to do, but for all the right reasons.

Mostly what I hate about the system is how Shepard never actually says what you agreed to. This has more than once lead to me picking a dialogue option I agreed with, and Shep rewording it in a way I didn't mean. Kind of ruins the sense, and even the purpose, of making choices when Shep won't even do what you tell them.