>>11404245
The problem with the morality system isn't that it exists so much as it is that Gluttony and Purity are OPPOSED to each other, when instead they should have been two separate stats that are tracked independently and have different effects on gameplay.

The best IRL example of this I can give is the original Mass Effect. In theory having a karma system in ME is a good idea, but the problem is that ME is (trying) to be a morally and ethnically nuanced story with grey-on-grey morality. And that's a great idea in theory. But the problem is that, somewhat in the first game and definitely in the latter games, all nuance was destroyed because everything got fundamentally pigeonholed into either Paragon or Renegade. The mechanic of opposing moral polarities is not synergistic with the theory of a setting defined by it's moral ambiguity.

You could get around this in the first game, however, because there were multiple conversations that could be "looped" to farm Paragon and Renegade points. And that honestly FELT better, because then the two different traits weren't struggling against each other. The game worked perfectly fine if you did this, and I think doing it resulted in the best gameplay experience for ME1.

SB should have handled Gluttony and Purity the same way. There should have been a lot more points knocking loose, and you should have been encouraged to get as many of both as possible. Purity could have been Emmy's "good girl" character arc, while Gluttony was the fetish. There could have been moments where you choose between a lump sum of one or the other, but that's just picking between two DIFFERENT fetish scenes, and picking which stat you, at the moment, want more points of.

Gluttony and Purity in Some Bullshit right now is just invasive enough that it locks players out of content and encourages schizo route plotting, but is absent enough that one wonders why it's even present at all. Making the traits oppose each other was the big mistake.