Morality Systems

Sounds just as terrible as every other morality system. How is your Chaos system any different from all the other shitty evil options in games that make no sense, and boil down to doing nonsensically destructive or violent actions just to provide a contrast for the other option the game is actually built around?

That's just the thing - the entire purpose of 'Chaos' was to be the opposition. It's something that's meant to be alien and completely apart from human reason, and aligning with it is basically the mark of a madman.

Games tend to do this thing where "Good" or "Evil" are assigned to stupid shit. Like in KOTOR, there's a part where dueling this one champion and killing him is deemed "Dark Side" and other shit like that. The idea here is that you aren't going to get dinged for that sort of shit, but instead, for actually doing shit that's outright fucked.

But more than that: It's something that can be justified. In the given scenario, for instance, it could be burning the whole forest for maximum dick mode - but more likely, it would be something like leading the elves into town to slit everyone's throats. You save the forest, fuck an elf chick, go about your business, but you've opposed human civilization as a whole for the sake of getting your dick wet.

However, the advantage of having 'Chaos' is that it makes 'Law' a much more open book than most systems give for the "good side" - because it's not the "good" way of doing things, it's the "lawful" way of doing things. The most "lawful" thing is sometimes terrible - but it's all for the betterment of mankind as a whole.

Karma meters always make a game worse. If the karma meter affects your abilities, then you reduce all roleplaying to two stock characters from which any deviation makes your character weaker. The only winning move is to play either a good paladin or an evil paladin.
If the karma meter affects your party members, then they'll be shallow characters at best, and usually end up acting in nonsensical ways (like Cass in New Vegas).

It amazes me that so many game devs are this stupid. Why fill your game with bad options that nobody would ever want to take?

Your system is no different than the other morality systems and it fails for the same reasons. You're building the game around what you obviously perceive as the "superior" choice, which in your systems case would be Lawful, (seriously can your bias be more apparent?) and the other option only exists to give players the illusion of choice. Generally it will be hamhanded, dumb, or nonsensical because your game is designed from the ground up to support the main option, and not the contrasting one. You're not actually providing two compelling options, you're providing one option and then tacking on a second that only exists to make the other option look better.

Oh, and the reason you got Dark Side points for fighting that guy in KOTOR is because it's a death match and killing someone just to achieve glory is not the path a Jedi should take. That actually makes sense, so your example is not a good one. Of course everyone killed the guy anyway since the DS gain was minor and you got solid xp/loot rewards for doing so, so if anything your example shows that in game rewards will always trump philosophical pats on the back. Which is another area where morality systems fail, they have no teeth or consequences to following either pathway so people just follow the route of best in game rewards.

KotOR II

Not only was it entertaining, it was philosophical in that the main supporting character (Kreia), through dialogue and demonstration, broke the traditional notions of "light" and "dark" sides of the force being strictly reflective of what appears in the moment to be "good" or "bad."

The game's story centers around the events following a galactic-scale genocidal campaign, and whether or not the Jedi Council was going to intervene. The inaction of the Jedi council due to uncertainty created a split within the order, as many Jedi left to fight, and eventually stop, the galactic genocide. They were labeled rebels for their efforts.

This, along with other dialogue-based conflicts and gameplay choices that influence where on the "Light or Dark" spectrum you fall affects what powers you are able to use, and makes it more difficult for you to use the powers of the opposing spectrum (without making it impossible, for gameplay's sake).

Throughout the game, the weaknessess that come with the "gift" of force sensitivity are emphasized, disrupting the "Force sensitive=powerful" narrative, and the ambiguity of the "Will of the Force" (especially its tendency to balance itself through the actions of sentient beings) is questioned as a potentially tyrannic force that could stand to eliminate free will in sentient beings.

If you're going to play it, the Lost Content Restoration Mod is a must.

KOTOR II was an interesting deconstruction of the Force as presented in the Star Wars universe, but it didn't really handle the morality system better than any other game. The choices given for Light Side or Dark Side are still pretty two dimensional, and the game further reinforces this by giving you bonuses and strengths by consistently following a single path rather than making decisions on a case by case basis.

You retarded nigger, double check this:
Law and Chaos in the mid-20th Century fiction were not the same as whatever meme Lawful/Chaotic alignment you're thinking of it. It's not a matter of bias - it's a simple "if Chaos wins, humanity is fucked".

It's not about providing two compelling options, it's about giving the game a main path that actually has more nuance to it than "turn down quest rewards, free slaves, be pacifist as much as possible". Designing a game with two "routes" is retarded because it locks everything into place. Instead, the game should be designed with one route that has lots of wiggle room within it, so it still maintains replay value. The stuff that outright violates reason, like senseless killings and other shit that's the hallmark of a Bioware "Evil" route, should be the sort of thing that has negative consequences, like being ostracized from society and driven to the point where your only allies are whatever skeletons you can animate in your dungeon while you plot the summoning of elder gods to destroy mankind.

Moral grayness is a meme especially how is handled in Bethesda titles. Bethesda titles are somehow simultaneously childishly black & white and retardedly morally relativistic.

Your dumbass example with the slave girl shows that you clearly, whether you realize it or not, are favoring the Law option and you view differing options as inferior. If that's the case you shouldn't even add additional options into your game and drop the pretense that there is any actual navigation to be had in your game and just make it a JRPG style story.

Somehow, though, you think that because you're not using the typical morality naming system of Good/Evil, your system doesn't have this issue. I can only conclude this is because you are a mouthbreathing retard and should kill yourself. As such, your proposed solution to providing a meaningful morality system is trash, and should be summarily discarded.

Morality systems in pretty much any game are goddamn awful because they don't base their morality on anything more than "not being a cunt".

If someone wants to do it right, they need to establish an in universe morality system that very clearly demands certain choices be made. And even that is a toss up since a morality system that immediately and visibly "scores" you for making some choice basically underscores the whole thing. The only way you could really do a really effective morality system is a) have an in-universe universal "good" (or something like it), b) clearly communicate said good so that the player isn't completely blindsided for doing the "wrong thing" when it should be right, and c) don't immediately show the player their "karma score". Otherwise, it becomes more about gaming the system and less about actual morality in the game.

Not that any dev would actually do this correctly because all the ones that are actually retarded enough implement a "morality system" are generally SJWs anyways.

I like the cut of your jib. Yes, if you don't establish an objective morality with clear cut boundaries of what is, and is not, acceptable, moral choice systems do devolve down to what you describe. However I don't know if current game designers could even attempt to create an objective moral system that had advantages and drawbacks without suffering an aneurysm.

pretty two dimensional,

3 Master classes per side, each have unique feats that will help or hinder your character depending on your playstyle and loadout.

Making opposing choices more regularly lowers point cost of using the opposing side's force powers, and yes, you get bonuses for consistently following a single path, because that's the only thing that makes sense. How else is it supposed to work? Say you dedicate your character to force power usage (less STR) and you align yourself with the Dark side. Should you receive force power bonuses for making a Light-Side decision as a Sith? Physical bonuses for a Light side decision?
Literally nothing else makes sense, because the entire point of the game is that the Force-power system works within the tyranically limiting two-dimensional dichotomy of the force itself. There is no "An-Cap Side" of the force to be chosen gameplay-wise, which is the point of the game. The morality system in KotOR II is as self-aware as any morality system in a video game could theoretically be, as the gameplay and story are limited to the good/evil dichotomy present in the Canon itself. It is at the "Meta" level.

Why should someone be punished for going true neutral or choosing their own path separate from jedi/sith?

Richard Garriot managed to do it in 1985.

KotOR II checks the first two boxes, and the final box brings up an interesting question - if we are not able to even indirectly see what our karma score is, how is the morality system going to effectively influence gameplay?

For example, in KotOR, the karma score screen is pretty heavy-handed, but even if you limited players' knowledge of their karma score to how strenuous it was for them to use a light/dark force power, it would still be noticable.

I can only conceive of a morality system in a video game being an integral part of the gameplay and story in something like a walking simulator, where certain paths may be invisibly closed off to you based on your choices e.g. Donate to the hobo at the bus station? You'll see him get off the bus later on and he'll give you something or go down an otherwise hidden path. Don't, and you'll see him dead later, which may bring its own opportunities for reward. Even if this is a poor example, it is still not so much a "morality" system as it is an interactive one, and I'm not sure how else it could be gone about. Do you have any ideas? My example is obviously bad because donating to a hobo is 100% the thing to do in almost any video game (except KotOR II where donating to a bum has a negative consequence).

You are literally retarded and unable to read. Think about what you just posted and compare it to my last one and you'll be able to figure out exactly where it was you fucked up.

The point you tried to make was that KOTOR handled the morality system well, and then in this post you admit the morality system actually sucked. So, yeah, thanks for that.

Cos they didn't write one.

They're not so much punished as not rewarded. You could stay neutral and have a tougher (less varied) end-game if you wanted but you had to side with one camp or the other in the end. You're only rewarded for accomplishing tall orders for either group.

There's not much room for independents in SW, the bald nigger in the swamp was pretty clear on that, if you're grey the Jedi are so pious they think you're too suspect to keep around and the edgelord darksiders expect you to off fools by the dozen or be so insanely difficult to kill that people don't tend to try.

(checked)

What pisses me off about these morality systems is that they seem to include the way you interact with party members. For example, even light hearted teasing will get you evil points/negative karma. You have to virtue signal your ass off to not get hit with a penalty. What if I want to play a guy with a decent heart who hides it under a facade of being a sarcastic duchebag because he's sick of getting betrayed by everyone he's ever trusted? Can't do that. A screen saying "You are literally Hitler" pops up the second I tell the guy I just helped that no, I don't give two fucks about the rat pelt he wants to give me as thanks and just want to get the hell out of Dodge.

Technically the stuff in the Powder Gangers prison was still NCR property so you were stealing from them, not the Powder Gangers.

A) Because the moral system was previously laid down in the canon, and the gameplay was tailored to fit that.

B) You are not punished, you only have to change your playstyle to be much more physically oriented. (I have seen people do this before, though I have not done so myself.)

Let's not be idiots here and remember what the question was in your OP.

You can fall back on your relativistic interpretation of what is "interesting" to make yourself right or wrong, but assuming you won't be as dense as you seem to be capable of being:

I consider those facts qualifications for the system being "interesting" and my supporting evidence that they were well done is the success with which those ideas are expressed in BOTH the gameplay itself (throughout the entire game) and the dialogue (throughout the entire game).

Can't have you being a meanie weanie to the writer's pet, user. You have to save all that for their strawman character.

What games have a mortality system that doesn't directly tell you what the game considers good or evil? no blatant blue/red indicators. Theres been time I've played games and I found myself ignoring choices that I would have made on my own accord if it weren't for the fact i saw they were blatantly considered good/evil by the game

Law and Chaos dichotomy is retarded very few people actually want Chaos for the sake of Chaos or not be in charged in some way.

admittedly I am sure anybody here could name another RPG that has one of those aspects, but for one to have all of them I would consider it "interesting" and would actually like to play it.

This pisses me off as a DM. There should be an option for the player to return the property to its rightful owner. Or just keep it for themselves. That should be the point where you lose rep.

MGS3? I don't know if it's a moral system, but I guess all of those ghosts in Sorrow's river are kind of a gauge for how much dick you suck at the game of a ruthless cunt you are.

I mean, I don't think it would be easy, but with the proper world building, I don't see it as overtly difficult. Like for example you could have the game be you are some knight templar or something of some religious order that kills monsters/ darkness and shit, and have something like:

The important thing is that the player can't pussyfoot around it either- they have to make a hard choice that realistically most people won't make. And then they have to deal with said consequences (in the example, not killing the fair maiden causes the "darkness" in her to kill a bunch of people or something else bad). The problems when you have the "gray morality" games is that in practice "gray morality" doesn't really exist in the games, or at least in every game that I've seen. Every "gray moral choice" really comes down to a utilitarian "what benefits me the most" instead of an actual gray area, and if that is the case, you may as well not have a morality system at all.

That's kind of my problem with "morality" in games, you kind of have to make it a really big focus of the game or it doesn't work. You just have to kind of outright say to the player "you will be judged on everything that you do", but don't actually communicate when and where it happens. And that, like you said, basically narrows what the game can actually "do" to a really fucking narrow lens.

that's definitely a good example, first time i played MGS3 I played as i wanted, mostly lethal to try out the gadgets and such and the walk through the river was really fuckin' long.

Come on now. Also no, the KOTOR 2 morality system was not interesting for the very reasons I specified in my original post. You choose between being the social worker or Skeletor, there's nothing compelling about that. The fact that Obsidians writers were self aware enough to make fun of it doesn't change what it was.

I like that the game keeps track of how you killed people and where they were shot so if you played as a professional castration bullet surgeon, all of the ghosts would have bloodfalls where their dick ought to be.

To an extent, Metro 2033 and Last Light. While there was an indicator, it was very subtle and I didn't even know until I beat the first one that it was there. The things that trigger the positive ones range from the more obvious "turn down a reward from a poor person" to "sit around a listen to some guy play a guitar for a few minutes", since it was less about morality and more about learning and exploring the world. Also worth noting that if you got enough you could get the non-canon good ending.

Liberty/authority would make for a better spectrum

not necessarily, at least in pointing out the problems with morality systems and paths. It made me think of modern bethesda games where if you saved the hobo you'd probably get a few more lines of dialogue and a special item from him, let him die and the same item would be on the corpse. In the end the results are the same which makes these tacked on morality systems even weaker.

If you kill a guy in the mountains, then let a vulture eat him, then kill and eat the vulture he'll yell "YOU ATE ME" or something along those lines in the river too. fucking great game

LL didn't brow beat you too hard for certain "evil" actions which was nice, there wasn't a "you're just as bad as him" line if you kill the traitors. Shame having enough "good" karma to get the good ending is pretty janky because killing a shitty bandit or getting a lap dance can outweigh any good you did pretty easily it seemed like

Frankly I think having a karma/reputation system in a setting like Fallouts is pointless. They don't do anything other than put guard rails on player behavior and provide artificial guidelines as to what your character "should" be doing based on metagame considerations.

Yeah. In reality choice and consequences have the illusion of choice, with no consequences involved.

The thing that really irks me is I feel like morality systems completely hamstring or destroy otherwise interesting story settings because the designers/writers feel the need to tag one side of a conflict as good/evil. And of course choosing the good option is ultimately the best for the game world and your character, so why not be good? And in that case why is the evil option even in the game?

Biowares games are a great example of this, take Dragon Age 2/3 for example, the idea behind it actually isn't bad. Mages VS Templars could have been a really compelling story, with the Mages having a legitimate desire for independence and self determination, vs the Templars having legitimate reasons to want to take that away to protect the larger populace from demon possessed slaughterfests. Try to give people a real story where there is no "good" or "best" option, and it comes down to what they prioritize personally as more important, liberty or security. A lot of great ways they could explore that conflict. But instead it's just complete garbage with Mages just being "oppressed victims" and Templars being "patriarchal bigots", and you get nothing interesting.

Unless someone else chimes in, I'm pretty convinced that this is the case, and that ambiguous moral system are just not meant for video games - then again - they certainly don't seem to be meant for stories, poems, songs, and other human creative works. So this could be a human limitation due to our instinctual bias, but even were it not, devs would certainly try to stress as few paths as possible to limit development time and money.

As the OP asks,

that question would be for development companies primarily, and clearly the answer is no, because there are never An-Cap-side-of-the-force, Stirner-side of the force, pagan-side of the force, etc.

ok

If you play it like this, it is because you want to, not because the game forces you to. If it were quick to do, I would make them myself, but I can show you screencaps of characters that are neutrally aligned at the end of the game.

Many times in-game you are given the choice to walk away from a clearly social worker/skeletor situation. Yes, the game "punishes" you by withholding the content from you if you choose to walk away instead of choose light/dark, but again, What is it even theoretically supposed to do if you choose the "An-Cap" option of not stopping or assisting the mugger robbing the old lady? Is it supposed to do anything other than reward your indifference with the indifference you desired by not getting involved? What could even theoretically be the effect of multiple "alternative" morality systems in terms of gameplay or dialogue?

You could also make the argument that the other townspeople had just as much of an ability to stockpile and prepare for disaster as the shopkeep did, and that they're responsible for that choice and the consequences that come with it.

Maybe actually doing some of the guff Molyenux claimed on Fable 3(?) like your decisions slowly re-shaping the landscape as you progress, so the more of a thieving, murderous pederast you are the more visibly polluted and hazardous the world becomes ideally with the effect being a gradual subtle morphing according to your actions in the long term rather than anything you can quickly flip, perhaps with some key decisions closing off the 'Nice' states and ending(s), cos there's always room to be bad. The reverse could work too with the world being more Kinkadian as you go looking for good boy points.

I have a shop, try stockpiling all that shit in your house and you'll soon get pissed the fuck off with your own idea there.

So you admit the game forces you to play a cookie cutter character or penalizes you, then say that's fine because that's how morality systems should work? The point I'm making is that morality systems are trash because of that and they should be discarded to focus on other gameplay elements, or completely reworked.

This sounds amazing. I haven't gotten into the MGS series, but that sounds like labor-of-love level attention to detail.

Liberty/authority I think would make great additions to good and evil. Imagine a game where 80% of people are thinking good/evil, and you have the chance to be among the 20% for liberty/authority, and both endings of the game are bad.

Much less necessary and wasteful, absolutely. Spend time and money developing content that makes the game better instead of spending money jacking off your writers.

What I'd like is for someone to take into account the 'Profiteer' route that I always take through games that allow for it which often leaves you just on the side of good but with select groups of people pissed off at you.

I want standard endings/endgames for.
When-it-suits Moralfags
Profiteer Assholes
and Mercenary Dicks

That should bridge the gap between the current Good Goy/Ebul Nigra dichotomy.

Sounds similar to the SMT Law vs Chaos system where Law simply represented order and chaos represented the absence of order.

If you really want to make a good "morality system", you could pit the Law vs Chaos question against the player's own morality. Have some situations where the lawful option is clearly the morally correct option, while other situations where the chaotic option is clearly the morally correct option. Instead of pushing the player to be either full law or full chaos, it could instead be a balance between moderation and extremism. (eg. going full law is evil and going full chaos is also evil, but being moderate law or moderate chaos, or even swinging back and forth between the two where required, and gaining knowledge of both could be the genuine true good path)

Fallout 2.

...

I just got slightly sad and extremely angry after I read that because it reminded me how much of a colossal waste everything in SWTOR is. They could have had a third faction, the underground criminals/mercs where the Bounty Hunter and Smuggler and a potential assassin class could have been. But that wouldn't have fixed even an iota of what was fucked up with that game.

Lack of content is not a punishment if it is a choice you make. That is my point.

If there is a video game about a galactic war, and you begin as a Joe Schmoe neutral bystander, then you do not choose a side in that war, how do you expect to see what interesting things each side is doing? How do you expect the game to advance? You call the dichotomy shitty, but there is a reason no songs are sung about un-valiant bystanders who did not choose sides, and there is a reason why walking simulators where nothing happens and no sides are chosen are called just that.

If you as Joe go it solo and don't align with either side in the galactic war, how, honestly, do you expect to get anywhere? What resources would you have access to? Would you get a job, manage a business and complete paperwork to buy a ship and weapons to join the fight in the name of nothing? Because that sounds dangerously like a walking simulator to me.

This is not the question that was asked in the OP which I was addressing. I was attempting to state that the "holistic" and "meta" execution of the morality system in KotOR II was "interesting" or, at the very least, more interestingly executed than the vast majority of other RPGs. Apparently you disagree

Yet how should morality systems in video games work if morality itself is not to be defined?

Gone Home 2: Electric Boogaloo is the only thing I can see coming out of that.

The only notable exception is Witcher series where staying a beige piece of shit can give you the the best possible outcome you can achieve.

That is fucking hysterical.

I am so glad the registration system was fucked up when that game went F2P so I couldn't get in. I was going to just peek at the story out of morbid curiosity, and I am so glad I wasn't able to.

there's plenty of gray area options, it's generally labeled "sarcastic" now

On this liberty/authority morality note, wouldn't Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines fall into this? Not many of the choices fit good or evil as you are a powerful immortal being who has no need for the trivialities of humanity and good/evil has no effect on the ending. The most emphasis is put on Anarch versus Camarilla or authority/liberty.

g2g
gg no re

decent thread, will check back tomorrow

I guess you could say game developers are being rather obtuse

That's acute. I bet you think you're so funny, don't you Carlos?

Sarcasm is not morality.

To a certain degree

How would you like a complimentary one way ticket back to Mexico

I thought we were getting getting along all right, but this discussion took a complete 180

We could never get along. Your idea of "funny" runs perpendicular to mine.

that's the joke, stuff like Fallout 4 and mass effect tend to make the neutral answers some kind of snide remark

remember when Bioware made an entire DLC for Mass Effect 3 that was one huge snide remark? I do.

Does Fallout 4 have good or evil dialogue options? I thought they removed karma and made companion approval all about picking locks and doing chems.

I don't because i never bothered with ME3, i wasn't really into the first one to start

That would be nice for a game about playing as a god, but on the whole that kind of thing gets a bit irritating if you are playing as some schmuck. Not only do you need to program that, but you will also need to deal with level design related to that, and make sure NPCs both react to it and have lines related to it.

Didn't Black & White do that? If you were evil the land you controlled was blackened and dead looking, shit like that.

To give you a rundown, they created a "farewell" as retarded as it sounds DLC called the citadel where they make fun of their shit writing by pointing it out but then continue to use the same shit writing for the entirety of it. It takes every fault of the game to absurd levels of shit and then they have the gall to have a "super cereal boo hoo" moment at the end of it, which does nothing because it resumes straight into the same shit writing that is in the rest of the game.

New Vegas shouldn't have had that system at all, the reputation system was sufficient.

I just saw it as a way to keep track of how much of an asshole overall I was being. Seems to be how NV treats it too since it really only affects if Cass knows whether or not to bitch about you shooting innocent bystanders and stealing all their shit. Kinda like how an "enemies killed" count in a stat menu doesn't usually affect anything, it's just there for your own benefit of knowing.

That's one of the great things about New Vegas is that most of the reputation is focused on faction standing rather than moral standing. I like that even if you are a venerated hero in the NCR, Boone won't join you if there is a single legionnaire who thinks "Hey, that profligate mailman isn't much of a degenerate. I'd like to share a tale and drink some spirits/have somewhat loving and consensual sex for the purpose of procreation with them."

Have you ever considered that this is because Boone is a raging faggot that needs to be put out of his misery?

Listen little Satan, I won't have your insidious words poison my thoughts. Boone is pure and only needs his just revenge on those flamboyant LARPers.

That's what your bunker in the woods is for user.

Boone is a child killer and a mass murderer, I hardly think he needs anything other than a bullet. But he was just "following orders", right? At least the Legion doesn't pretend what it's doing is anything but brutal conquest and put on false airs of nobility like the NCR.

LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU! The sexist, racist, patriarchal Legion is going down, loser, neckbeard, permavirgin, nerd, Roman wannabe, and there's nothing you can do to stop it because the NCR is on the right side of history.

...

Morality systems are inherently flawed, really, because in order to make them a worthwhile addition in any way you have to tie some kind of gameplay reward to adhering to one side or the other. Almost all games with a binary morality system do this, and it eliminates all nuance a game's choice systems can have.

Mass Effect is a good example of how to fuck it up, even though the first couple games provide you with some decent middle of the road choices or actually compelling moral quandries, players who want to get access to the goodies that come with being a full renegade or a paragon will be forced to stick with whichever side of the dialogue wheel rewards the most good goy/fuckface points.

I think New Vegas is really the only game I can think of that had a morality system that didn't really suck. Your faction reputation is separate from your karma meter, meaning that your character's morality and the sides they fight for don't necessarily have to correlate. You could, conceivably, make a good character who sides with Caesar's Legion because they feel like they're the best choice for the wasteland.

Basically, no, morality systems have and always will be flawed. The vast majority of games that include them would lose nothing by having them removed, and building your game around a good/evil meter as a core concept is a fuckawful idea.

Fallout 4 removed the karma system, but the game in general has a lack of choice be it in the dialogue or otherwise, so it doesn't really have consistent roleplaying in either way. Some companions respond well to you being nice, or being selfish.

War is good for buisness.

I think you can boil down the whole problem to the basics and simply state that a good choice/morality system is one that offers more than one choice people actually want to pick. It's not so simple to implement in practice, sure, but I think the most important aspect of offering people choices is giving them two or more they'll agonize over.

You're either not making your point well or you're not having a good point.

You describe "Law" as "what is good for humanity". Which is bullshit. What I'm playing an elf? Why would law be good for humanity? Have you checked some of our existing laws? Both your reasoning and naming conventions are terrible.

What needs to be done is give the players a sensible list of choices with sensible conseqences. Basically, the writers should be able to write a good case for every decision, and then add shitty reasons to the list for those that want to roleplay idiots and/or people guided by impulse/emotions and not reason.

It's more precise to say that law is a codified set of expected behaviors (with punishments if you do not adhere to them) that benefit society as a whole.

You'd still end up with good choice and evil/selfish choice. It's more important to give people cool choices they'd want to pick, but this heavily depends on the quest itself and how engaged people are in it. I imagine puppy kicking evil choices in BioWare games are there just so they can say the game has deep moral choices on the box, the dev team never actually expects anyone to pick them.

What is the purpose of a morality system in vidya anyway? The only effect they ever seem to have is whether you get a good/bad ending, companion and/or dialogue choices, abilities and which factions like or hate you. Is there even a reasonable purpose to include such a system? Even if a game has a well-designed morality system, what does it really matter in the end if you non-justifiably murder some random NPC for evil karma, or righteously slaughter a town full of corrupt people? Is there a way for it have a significant impact on a game that doesn't involve some form of spirituality as a focal point?

ever since morality systems started to become a common thing i always wanted something with more far-reaching consequences like what you mention. mass effect 1 does spring to mind but for the wrong reasons: renegade was basically "bad cop" mode where you were doing the wrong things but for the right reasons and as a result i thought of renegade points as the actual good guy path. i'd really like to see a game where killing a mass murderer who absolutely will kill again, or nuking a colony of vicious predatory bugs or something would actually give you "good guy who can actually see the big picture" points

That is problem of the Law and Chaos dichotomy in how people perceive it.

Does a raider suddenly become Lawful Evil if he takes over a town and become a warlord? Does a knight become Chaotic Good just because he rebel against his corrupt government even his moral standards hasn't change?

Bethesda titles have really fucked up the discussion of alignment with its shitty writing. All it has truly proved is that all approaches are shit if Bethesda does it.
FO3
Skyrim
FO4

I want to make outright evil faction model after Islam.

Only after a big war, and only if you win. Most wars are pretty bad for everyone's economy, since they redirect and destroy productive forces.

It can be. Ambiguity for its own sake is often too hamfisted, and rarely works. But a good, well crafted setting can often lead to ambiguous situations that don't feel contrived. I'm fine with both black-and-white and morally gray decisions. Good games usually have both.
But I don't like morality systems, partly because they encourage writers and designers to only use black-and-white, and partly because my personal expectations about how a choice should be scored will sometimes deviate from the developers'.