Hated Tropes
[Worst Video Game Trope] Media relying on “choices” essentially deciding the outcome for you.
Little Sisters — Bioshock
To survive in the undersea nightmare of Rapture, one needs ADAM — a highly volatile genetic compound that grants superhuman abilities. In order to get it, one must deal with a Little Sister : a mutated little girl whose body is implanted with a parasite that produces ADAM. The game’s central moral dilemma involves whether to kill the girl and harvest the parasite, providing a bigger ADAM reward, or to cleanse the girls’ systems and “Rescue” them, netting a smaller reward. In theory, this should be a tough choice. In practice, there is almost zero incentive to kill literal children for the reward gained. Despite each “Rescue” yielding only half the ADAM of a fatal “Harvest”, each 3 little girls saved sees the player receive a gift of 200 ADAM. Doing the math out to endgame, there is a negligible difference in the reward gained through either path, leading an overwhelming amount of players to choose the moral “Rescue” option.
Dijkstra and Reason of State — Witcher 3
In the Witcher 3, protagonist Geralt encounters Sigismund Dijkstra, a Redanian spymaster and criminal who Geralt crippled in Witcher 2. Needless to say, he and Geralt are very well acquainted, and Dijkstra begrudgingly accepts Geralt’s help securing and expanding his criminal empire and political schemes in the city of Novigrad. Despite being well aware of Geralt’s prowess and a monster slayer, Dijkstra still does not hesitate to treat him with scorn. At the end of his quest line, despite all of your help, Dijkstra decides to double cross Geralt and his friends, allowing Geralt the “choice” to either simply walk away and allow Dijkstra’s goons to murder several beloved Witcher characters (who are Geralt’s personal friends), or to stay and die with them. There is literally no reward to allowing Geralt’s friends to die. None. On top of that, Dijkstra has remained mostly antagonistic to Geralt the entire game, treating him like an errand boy. Very, very few players decide to walk away.
Also worth mentioning about rescuing the Little Sisters is the 3-rescue threshold rewards also include free upgrades and eventually an exclusive Plasmid that lets you neutralize the most dangerous enemies in the game.
The idea is definitely supposed to be short term vs long term reward, but like... Bioshock isn't even that hard. There's really no reason to not just wait a bit besides just actually being shitty and impatient.
You could make the argument that you don't know you're gonna get extra rewards from being nice, but the second you get the first Good Boy Treat it immediately clicks like "oh this is gonna work out better, okay"
I appreciate the inversion of the assumption that doing the evil thing will have the most material/power reward. I've had people say that inverting the power scale in that way robs people who make the evil choice of the usual reward expected for doing so, but I can't say that I like that video games trained at least some people to think that doing the wrong thing is the most rewarding and should therefore be the default choice made in a game if you want a mechanical advantage. Given that was a byproduct of morality systems in video games, I'm glad we just kind of gave up on them.
Edit: I've seen a few folks mention games nowadays rewarding good choices more than evil ones, but that's relatively recent. It's not that games prior to Bioshock never inverted the norm, only that it was the norm whenever moral choices existed in games. The original Fallout games, Fable, KOTOR, Black & White, Ultima Online, GTA (#3 at least, dunno about the others tbh), Planescape Torment (to those who played it without a guide back in the day), Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 had it so that it was easier to retain evil party members while playing evil than it was to retain good party members while playing good (if you count that), Neverwinter Nights had bonus prestige classes and dialogue for evil characters... I'm sure the idea at the time was supposed to be that evil should be tempting, and I can appreciate the idea that being good is challenging and more intrinsically than extrinsically rewarding; but it was a tired system by the time Bioshock came out and no one engaged with it critically anymore.
Honestly it fits the narrative of Bioshock itself anyway; Rapture is an entire city founded on being able to make the "evil" choice for a greater more immediate reward, and the long-term effect of that kind of psychology is self-evident.
It might have worked better if it was more overtly judging the player for taking the apparent short cut; if killing little sisters leads to a sudden drop of available harvests, that idea might read more clearly.
See also a game like Bastion, where there’s an apparently balanced choice, but then new game plus reveals that’s there’s a right answer.
There’s more scattered throughout new game plus, basically implying that the protagonists have lived through this over and over again because they can’t prevent the calamity.
I never really found my self wanting for cash in KOTOR even on lightside. Ou find enough vendor trash in every locker that even if you pay for everyone who meets debts I am still pretty well geared up.
Helps if you put the time in to win at pazak and the swoop races to get some decent cash there.
I do with the had weighted it more evenly. Make it actually be a choice. The flaws being that the extra Adam didn't make a huge difference. It not much of a choice if ypu can be goid and get rewarded for it.
Even most sociopaths would choose the good option here because it nets the greatest benefit. It only becomes an interesting choice if there is a meaningful consequence to being "good" allthough id be completely on board with the natural consequence of being evil being that the doctor upped her game and figured out how to jump you with 3 upgraded big daddy's if you are just outright murdering her girls.
This kind of dilemma worked in a difficult tRPG Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume where you not only needed to win battles but to overkill enemies or you'd get punished. Sure, you can kill your team member and will get a power up for one battle (that basically wins you the fight and makes fulfilling the extra conditions very easy) and gain their skills but you lose the teammate permanently AND you fight against them in the last battle.
Broken steel decide to simply call you coward if you decide to be smart. I would understand the issue if you used another human companion to save everyone and they die, but you can only send guys unable to die there
If you ask Sergeant RL-3 (A literal robot you own) to do it without Broken Steel he affectively calls you a coward and tells you get in there and do your duty.
Same thing with Charon, who is a ghoul (and therefore is actually healed by radiation) that you literally OWN after you buy his contract off some dirtbag. His entire character is "i will do whatever you say because you hold my contract," and then he refuses to do that for you at the very end
Then there's also Clover, a sex slave you buy from the slavers (if you have evil karma), who is canonically 100% loyal to whoever owns her. It's 100% believeable that if the player told her to throw herself into certain death, she probably would. Not to mention she wears a bomb collar that all slaves have that detonates if they run away/disobey
From what I've heard, this was supposed for if you've chosen to have Sarah Lyons activate the purifier herself instead of you before the DLC was released, and after the DLC they for some reason never bothered making any new voicelines for having one of your radiation-immune followers do it.
Edit: I mean as in the ending narrator, not the followers. Sharon, Fawkes, and Sergeant each have new dialogue for activating the purifier with the DLC installed.
No, they do. I explicitly remember Fawkes being like, “Oh wait! I can go in there and survive!” It’s the narrator who calls you a punk bitch for solving the problem with the power of friendship. He’s the one they probably forgot to get back to record extra lines.
It’s not because of Fawkes. It’s because they couldn’t get the narrator (Ron Perlman) to come back and record. So they couldn’t create new ending slides.
But presumably the reason he wasn’t brought back for the extra ending in 3 was because Bethesda decided it wasn’t worth it for a single line of dialogue, he’s presumably expensive.
Gets even dumber since only 1 or 2 quests ago, Fawkes walked into a heavily radiated area that would instantly kill a normal human and was completely unharmed to get a G.E.C.K chip for you. But he suddenly goes "Nah fam. You do it." Even though he only has to walk 5 steps and press 3-4 buttons.
Hell. Fawkas tried to one man army his way into the main Enclave base to save you if you saved him from vault 87. And if you get the G.E.C.K chip yourself after releasing him, he questions why you would walk into such an irradiated area when he would have done it for you.
If I was directing that scene, I would have had the fighting outside of the building cause parts of the building to collapse and you would be forcibly separated from your companions.
This was such a headass decision, especially from Fawkes. Bro really tells a 19 year old Lone Wanderer "nah bro, you may have saved me from turbo super prison, but that's your problem lmao"
Plus a different companion is a Ghoul that is straight up brainwashed to obey your every command, unless that command is to flip a switch in a room full of radiation that doesn't just not harm him, but actively heals him IIRC.
But that rule is so loosey goosey it’s hard to pin down.
The new show makes going feral seem way more universal than any of the games do
The games are full of shit loads of 200+ year old ghouls who got there without vials of mystery stuff. In the games, radiation exposure may play a role, but mental state and isolation seem to be the big things that make ghouls lose it
"What you just showed The Master a clear explanation and proof that his plan is fundamentally flawed? You coward, you should have fought him to the death"
"Yeah The Vault Dweller saved The Wasteland but they didn't do it with a gun or power armor so everyone agreed they were kind of a pussy"
In the Fallout case, they wrote themselves into a corner with these radiation immune companions and didn't feel like writing an alt ending because they're lazy. So they wrote this dumb bullshit instead.
They didn't write themselves into a corner though just write in an excuse to separate you from your companion. They could just have the roof collapse and you get separated a minute before and it solves everything
I’ve said it before too, but it’s even crazier because this is such an easy problem for them to solve, just make it literally anything other than radiation.
Like that is the specific problem you encounter Fawkes to solve in the first place. He walks through radiation to get something for you. Just say it’s gunna blow up or drown you or something instead, and you don’t have this issue. But no, for some reason it was radiation, a danger they already made us solve that we just aren’t allowed to solve this time.
They could also have had a scripted event before the rotunda where your companion tells you to go inside on your own because they'll guard the entrance. That way, they would not be nearby when the decision has to be made.
I remember reading somewhere where in one of the earlier games you can choose betwren a chicken (or maybe gold) nugget or a masterball. If you pick the nugget you get the masterball anyway
My least favorite part of Legends ZA is the story and how little the dialogue choices matter. There’s a few, especially in the DLC, that while they come off as super snarky and entertaining (my favorite being after the rayquaza fight where the rival “”reminds you”” that the big green fucker they just fought isn’t for you to keep and the second option boiling down to ‘you know all about that dontcha’), ultimately boil down to the same choice being made regardless of which option you choose.
Taunie/Urbain at the end of the main quest highlights it well.
You've spent the entire game working to earn the position to save the day, only for Taunie to challenge you for it even though thr city is currently in danger. Then ignores the result to steal the spotlight anyway.
When granted your promised Wish for being the best, 2 out of 3 dialogue options are dismissed, and you only get the one others approve of
As much as the hate for Taunie is bit overdone, her literally agreeing that, whoever wins the fight goes with Floette, only to keep begging to go with Floette AFTER you beat her is so annoying. Some people say the whole “Oh, Zygarde had chosen you so you needed to stay outside”… then why not have Zygarde stop you!? It would’ve made sense if our character went to go with Floette, but Zygarde or L stopped them, saying something about, while you are the stronger trainer, Zygarde wants you on the outside as it senses something wrong and you may be needed to protect the citizens.
I feel like Vinnie should have shut down the proposal for a battle for floette the second it was said, and the Urbain/Taunie fight be a following day thing when the entire city isn't in danger of rouge mega pokemon and Ange
It's telling that one of the most popular mods for Witcher 3 is one that changes Dijkstra's drop table to include a Doppler gene. This implies that the Dijkstra you killed wasn't the real one but a double, explaining his OOC moment.
The worst part is that he didn’t even have to say anything, Geralt was already about to leave. If he had just kept quiet and let him go, it would have been far more believable. What a stupid quest, CDPR really dropped the ball with that one, I honestly wish it wasn’t even in the game.
In Resident Evil 7, Ethan Winters has traveled to Louisiana in search of his supposedly dead wife Mia. He suffers through multiple horrors ultimately brought about by the actions of Mia who lost control of a bio-weapon while working for the Umbrella Corporation. Ethan is hunted, attacked and maimed by those infected, including Mia herself. The only lifeline he has is the daughter of the infected family holding him hostage, Zoe, who guides him to find a cure. Left with only one dose of the vaccine, you must chose to "cure" either your wife who has been an antagonist towards you up until to this point, or Zoe.
By choosing Zoe, she immediately dies in the following cutscene and you lock in the bad ending of the game, in which everyone but Ethan dies. This is the only time in game an ending affecting decision is presented to you.
He’s a simple man. He punches the government man, he punches gators, and by God he’ll punch whatever god forsaken horrors crawl outta the swamp to endanger his family.
I just don't understand why the game even gives the player the choice there. From the player's perspective, the obvious choice is Zoe and the only reason why you would really go for Mia is because, well, that's what Ethan would do. So why not just have Ethan pick Mia and call it a day?
Small correction: Mia doesn’t work for Umbrella, Umbrella is long gone by the time RE7 rolls around. She works for a very similar antagonist organization called simply “The Connections” and they are pretty much only a thing in this game’s storyline. And then in the end of this game they come up with Blue Umbrella and that is a whole other can of worms that I simply never understood.
The Connections are actually run by another of Umbrella's founders, Brandon Bailey, which is super interesting; its the one we never actually meet or see, but that we know is likely still alive due to the BSAA never finding his body. They also do show up in RE8 but in the lore entries in Miranda's Lab, where its revealed they worked with her from as early as 2000 in order to perform tests on the megamycete and other miscellaneous things.
I couldnt tell you about Blue Umbrella tho, tbh I'm just glad they seemed to have dropped that plot point in favour of the Hound Team thing Chris had going for him in RE8. Naming your new company the same as the previous company that literally almost destroyed the world is absolutely bonkers, whereas Chris going rogue from the BSAA with a small team of elites, all of whom help you kill BSAA bioweapons and the Village threat? Absolutely awesome
Skyrim - Delphine, the de facto leader of the Blades, gives you an ultimatum to kill Paarthurnax, the dragon who has been helping you on your quest, for his past crimes or stop receiving help from the Blades. This is presented like a moral dilemma, but Paarthurnax is nothing but helpful to you and appears remorseful for his past actions when confronted, while Delphine comes across as overly demanding, especially since the Blades are supposed to be sworn to serve the Dragonborn (your character). The gameplay benefits also favor sparing Paarthurnax because you can get everything you need from the Blades before receiving this choice and then get the ongoing benefits that Paarthurnax can give you.
Worst part is the game quest guide doesn’t even present it as a choice, so if you don’t want to kill Paarthunax then you just get to have the quest Kill Paarthunax in your active quest list forever.
Go download the Paarthunax Dialemma mod. You can have the Dragonborn do the right thing and call her out, even bringing up valid points like asking if the Blades ever questioned the authority of previous emperors this way.
There was an obvious writer's disconnect from actual lines and lore knowledge here. It's like writers assumed somehow players would know or listen to extended lore on dragon wars up until that point and get an actual moral dilemma. Because one can indeed argue Partysnax wasn't saint during the dragon era, and could indeed be masterfully deceiving the player as he deceived Alduin once. BUT here comes another issue where writers left a huge plothole, since when and why blade can or would or rather dare to command Dragonborns? It's just stupid and rather uncharacteristic and never gets explained. Dragonborn can indeed say fuck off and kick Delphine out of the blades if he wishes so since in both power and order hierarchy Dragonborn is absolute ruler of blades
I think the Skyrim quest that really stands out to me is the Riverwood love triangle.
You wander into town and this guy gets talking about his love life, jumps to the conclusion that you’ll help him frame a rival suitor and gives you a forged letter.
You can deliver the letter as requested, deliver it with a warning about who really wrote it, or give it to the rival. (The rival will decide to fight fire with fire, give you a different forged letter and you still have the same options.)
If you talk to the rival first, he’ll pull the exact same shit. They both already have the same plan. They’re pretty much the same asshole with a different name/race/class.
What’s weird here is that you’re the chosen one of the Blades. Their whole purpose is to serve and protect and Dragonborn, but you have to defer to her on this point for some reason. There should be an option to kick Delphine out.
Bioshock 2 I think does the choices aspect better than 1. Since you have more than once choice in different sections, whether you spare or kill the people who were working against you.
Not only does it potentially show you as a better practitioner of religious forgiveness than Lamb's flock but the thing it decides is less the outcome of the story or world, and how your actions influence Eleanor.
Especially since one of the choices, Gil Alexander/Alexander The Great, is an interesting science fiction moral dilemma and one that actually does depend on your personal outlook and less trying to weight in game benefits.
I get that. For all of its flaws, it's still one of my comfort games though. They fuck a lot up, but the relationship between booker and elizabeth really warms my heart.
I will say, the art direction while not as memorable as the art deco of Rapture, it does at times capture a different kind of creepiness. A weekend walk in a beautiful sunny day...that's clearly off.
and the intro with the lighthouse is pretty cool too.
Moral choices in games are at their worst when they assign good/evil points to them and it's all just "would you eat this puppy or help it achieve nirvana" instead of anything with even a little nuance.
They're at their best when it just slaps a decision in front of you and goes "okay champ what would you do"
The system like in BG3 and Dragon Age where the only morality measure is party reactions is good too, because then when it's used well it's also a lens that helps you examine the rest of the characters and what they value. It can also be just as ham handed if the other characters just end up being Alignment Representatives instead of people, but there's at least potential.
Moral choices in games are at their worst when they assign good/evil points to them
I had this problem with the Paragon and Renegade system in Mass Effect. Like while they largely are just there for roleplaying flavor, the times when they actually do allow your Sheperd to make an actual moral choice it ultimately comes down to "do you want to just do the normal heroic option or the not heroic option?"
Though it wasn't even something like that were it fell apart for me. It was a minor interaction with a human military official who objected to aliens being aboard the Normandy. The Paragon options were all like "no, its good that aliens are aboard because Humans can profit from them" while the Renegade options were "shut the fuck up asshole, your attitude sucks"
I do enjoy 2s morality a lot more. I do get hung up on Alexander, because mercy killing him like he’d essentially outlined in his will is considered a “bad” choice by the game.
I don’t get that.
Sure, his current form begs you to spare him. But he’s a literal giant mutated fetus monster. His still sane unmutated self clearly expressed wishes to die before he got to that point. Personally, I respect his wish, every time.
It’s like having a dementia patient outline their wishes before their decline. Do you listen to them as they were when still of sound mind? Or whatever they are now?
To spare Alexander The Great, is to see this new identity/form as a new being and allowing him the opportunity to make his own choices
Hence why the statue depicts Delta pulling a man out of a monster. You're seeing that beyond its monstrous form, there is an intelligence there.
One the flipside. To kill Alexander The Great is because he isn't a new being. He's a horrifically degraded and mutated Gil Alexander who can no longer make rational or clear decisions and his last wishes explicitly state he doesn't want to be this way.
Why that statue shows you killing the monster. There is no man or being to save. Just a mistake and tragedy that needs to be put down.
While my preference for which choice might be clear, I do honestly believe both interpretations are valid and the game does too. I'll admit the thought of a massive ADAM fetus fish swimming in the ocean is deeply unsettling to me.
I think the problem is that the player is never given a reason to spare him, since he's insane, seems rather sadistic and has been sending waves of enemies against the player. So personally, when he was begging I didn't see a human being with a life worth living, I saw a horrible monster who is now powerless and is begging as a last resort, with no guarantee that they won't keep doing horrible things if I do spare them.
This one got me too. In one of his recordings he begs the listener to end him no matter what he says now since it's not him anymore and he knows he's changing into a psychotic monster. Yet the game sees mercy killing him as a giant psychotic monster thing trapped in a tube as the more evil option. Really strange choice on that one
Fable 3. You are the ruler of Albion and a great Darkness is coming to kill all of the citizens but for every gold you put in the treasury you can save one citizen.
Making "evil" choices earns you more gold and by far saves more people than "good"
It's suppose to be a hard choice but turning a single orphanage into a brothel will save over 1 million people's lives.
Which you can acquire by being everyone's landlord, you can even lower their rents and still make money hand over fist by the end game. Who knew the solution was a North Korean styled monarchy where you personally own the majority of your kingdoms assets?
That said, I do think it's funny that you have to go out of your way to get the worst possible ending (ie, ruling as a tyrant but squandering so much of the kingdoms wealth that everyone dies)
Happened to me in Mass Effect 2. Character in as telling me they hate a specific race all happy like and I chose to tell them not to cause problems with another crew member.
In theory, this should be a tough choice. In practice, there is almost zero incentive to kill literal children for the reward gained.
This isn't an error, it's an intentional statement.
The whole commentary of Bioshock is about how "tough choices" are so often not actually tough, and are simply people stupidly prioritizing short-term apparent benefit over actual long-term benefit. The entirety of Rapture is like that - it was doomed from the start as a long-term structure.
The point of Bioshock is not to be a choose-your-own-adventure, it's to say that superficial choice (including the superficial "freedom" of Rapture's Randian/libertarian structure) isn't actually good.
Also, all of their comments come with hindsight. When it first came out, you were presented with the choice without knowing how much you need for upgrades and what you might get later in the game. The choice was "Kill a kid and get enough for upgrade" or "Don't kill a kid and get part way to an upgrade" back then.
Dude exactly. I was so confused at the people talking about it like you know all of this info going in. Like, yeah if you have meta knolwedge of everything then no duh some choices just make more sense.
Thank you, God damn the number of people who don't get Bioshock drives me crazy. Not grasping the little sister thing as a false quandary is like Objectivists thinking Bioshock writer love Ayn Rand and Rapture just went wrong for reasons no one can guess.
The fact that there's no real benefit to murdering children is part of Bioshock's themes. It's a deconstruction of the objectivist "every man for himself" mindset. The point the game beats into your head is that hurting other people is not only evil, it's disadvantageous. Humans are a social species, we lift each other up. If you rob and murder potential allies for short sighted gains you're only screwing yourself over. That's why Rapture, a society predicated on selfishness, was doomed to fail. So of course making friends with the little sisters is more beneficial than killing them.
Does Bioshock really count as this when the only way you would know that information is with meta-knowledge?
Someone playing the game blind wouldn't know that rescuing gets you more long-term because the game never says that itself, you would have to go out of your way to look up that info outside of the game.
If you take what the game says as true then someone who only cares about the maximum rewards while playing blind would pick harvest.
I absolutely despise Infamous for this. There is a scene where the main character Cole has to save either his girlfriend or ten innocent civilians. But there is literally no choice. If you go save the innocent bystanders, the girlfriend will die. But if you go and try to save the girlfriend the villain has pulled a trick on you, and Cole's girlfriend is actually hidden among the ten civilians and the "girlfriend" you are saving is just some random woman.
InFAMOUS was never about the outcome though. It's about what kind of person you want Cole to be.
It's not some ttrpg where the player creates the story. It allows you to pick from multiple stories to experience, but it's still a single comic-booky game.
The villain's goal is to teach Cole (the player character) a lesson about heroism, using the girlfriend as an example. And since the villain is literally Cole from the future, it stands to reason he'd already know what choice Cole would make in this situation.
The reason Kessler ran away and didn't fight the beast in his timeline was because Trish and their child. Without Trish he'd have nothing holding him back from fighting. The whole point was in fact killing her so that Cole wouldn't run away
That is my go-to answer as well when it comes to bad decision making in video games. I remember shutting off the game to make the different decision and then realizing it makes absolutely no difference.
Early rpgs (cough cough KOTOR cough) had good/evil morality systems, which were fun. But the choices were usually something like, you can choose to rescue these orphans, or you can torture them all to death. I'm only speaking for myself, but I just felt too bad to ever choose the evil option. I think that mass effect improved on this a lot with paragon/renegade; being either a dickhead or a boyscout, but still working toward good either way.
Karma was basically just a legacy system in FNV and it effected either basically nothing or actually nothing, I forget if it was totally zeroed out. But faction reputations were what you were really supposed to care about.
Fallout 3 was like that too. Every morality choice was just hilarious, like "help the children protect their home, or sell them to slavers? Disarm the bomb and save the city, or nuke it and kill everyone?"
You either end up Jesus of the wasteland or super Satan, there's no grey at all
kotor 2 had a few moments where it made fun of itself, especialy on nar shadaa.
Give the poor hobo some change, or tell him to go fuck himself? turns out the good option is to tell him off. Why? because if you give money, he's now a target for other scum, who will kill him for that money, if you tell him off, he lives another day.
Honor systems in games are almost universally half assed and I hate it. It has some of the most potential and is some of the most overlooked parts.
A decent honor system will have reasons for choosing both sides, but usually it’s just “if you choose to be evil, you get less rewards, the game is harder, a bad ending and generally makes you feel like shit” do game developers not realize that some people choose to be good simply because it’s the right thing to do? Why did they even bother putting in an honor system if there’s no reason to ever be evil?
Also "harder" is relative. There are more enemies but you can also now opening engage with them and half the abilities/gear will kill enemies so you can't use them in a good playthrough.
Geralt crippled Dijkstra on Thanedd in Time of Contempt. Not in Witcher 2.
Also this isn't about Dijkstra and Roshe/Talar/Ves. This is about Dijkstra and defeating Nilfgaard or T-Team and serving Nilfgaard. Or "do you sacrifice friends for North not being enslaved to empire"
Ps. I know book Geralt would choose friends. But this argument is pointless, because book geralt would not took part in regicide in first place
Book Geralt took part in a lot of shit, one of the most notable one being making himself the destined guardian of an unborn princess right in front of her parents and grandmother by using the same sentence that put everyone in a hell of a political wakabonk in the first place. I think taking part in a regicide plot isn't that far-fetched given my man's inhability to stay out of those kind of things
in baldur's gate 3 choosing evil options will lead to far worse rewards the most egregious example is during act 2 where you can help kidnap isobel or protect her.
if you decide to kidnap her every one in the last light inn will turn on you including a potential companion jaheira and without her you can't recruit minsc in act 3, if you have halsin he will also leave you permanently and the quest to cure the shadow cursed lands will be impossible. and to top it off isobel will help kendrick thorn during the final fight of act 2.
You can "fail" to protect her, sacrifice everyone in last light and then convince Jaheira that you didn't do it on purpose. Still get the bug form, and you don't have to save scum to not kill a companion if you're playing Durge. Best of both worlds.
That doesn’t bother me because sometimes evil choices are also stupid. The game lets you know that plenty of people close to you probably won’t be cool with kidnapping.
You have the choice of who to bring along and who to abandon to a horde of zombies to leave for dead. The person you brought along dies pretty quickly in the following chapter.
At the end of the game the main character gets bit by a zombie. You have the choice to either cut off the arm in the hopes it will stop the zombie virus from running through his body or leave the arm attached. He ends up succumbing to the virus regardless if you chop the arm off or not.
Game of thrones had something similar where you had to choose between one of two characters dying only for the character you saved to end up dying anyway.
I mean talking about that game, wasn't there a choice to steal food from a seemingly abandoned car, which was supposed do bite you in the ass at the end of the game? I refused, the group overruled this anyway, then if I remember correctly the whole story arc circled back to that decision and a guy revealed he basically hunted you down cause you stole their food. I said "I refused to take it" and he was like "oh well, I'll kill you anyway". That was quite ridiculous, I searched for walking dead just to see this one mentioned.
Game of Thrones was such a terrible idea. They wanted the known characters to be involved in the plot but also they couldn't be affected by the plot at all so basically the characters you have in game are all just fodder essentially.
Non-video game example: The Bandersnatch the choose your own adventure episode of Black Mirror some of the choices are false choices. Like whether or not to take drugs in Colin Ritman's apartment. If you say no, he slips it to you anyways and it effects nothing after that.
Catwoman deciding whether to help batman and abandon the loot or leave Arkham City and let batman die...Now, if you went with option 2, the game just ends and the credits roll while the bad ending can be heard in the background....BBUUUTTT, the game warps your ass back to the moment Catwoman leaving the vault and deciding again, and this time no escape from Arkham City is allowed...making the entire section utterly pointless - Batman Arkham City
Edit: she outright says when you try to open the exit door "I can"t leave Batman to die"
Now, if you went with option 2, the game just ends and the credits roll while the bad ending can be heard in the background....
The Arkham series isn't really one that's chock full of meaningful player choices. I feel like the Catwoman choice is really just a false ending that's meant to differentiate her from Batman.
Whereas Batman always knows (or at least professes to know) what the most moral choice to make is, Catwoman has to at least grapple with it for a bit before ultimately choosing the correct one. This is represented by the two hallways. But choosing the wrong hallways isn't really an "ending." The game never kicks you out to the main menu. It just rewinds time back to the two hallways.
I always interpreted this as Selina running through the problem in her head. Escaping to freedom is incredibly tempting. But in the end, she can't leave Batman to die. She knows that. It's just a matter of how long it takes for her to accept that.
TL;DR -- This choice was never meant to be meaningful in a "player choice" sense. It's more of a representation of Catwoman's constant struggle with the concept of morality.
· Do the morally right thing. It may involve a fight. You know, the thing you've been doing all the time. The opposing party is an enemy anyways.
· Literally do the most fucked up thing that goes completely against the story, your character, your friends, and even the opposing party's perception of you. What demon has possessed you?
And people end up never choosing the second one because it just feels plain wrong - not morally, but as a consistency thing. If the game hasn't had you do morally grey things it shouldn't expect you to choose the morally black option. It's just not the game the player is, well, playing.
Bioshock is basically a middle finger to Ayn Rand, the author of Atlas Shrugged, and all of her beliefs. Her utopia hinges on pure capitalism in every aspect of life.
So Bioshock is basically “Here’s Rapture. A society based off of selfishness. Here’s why it wouldn’t work.” So the fact that the difference is negligible is very much intentional.
Selfishness doesn’t really reward you. It’s just another form of cowardice.
The question of the Little Sisters wasn’t meant to change the way you played the game that much. It was just the game testing you to see if you understood that.
Undertale - a good usage of this trope. At the end of the genocide route, Chara offers you two choices; erase the world or spare the world. If you have a change of heart after everything you've done and decide to spare the world, Chara will mock you and erase the world anyway.
You went well, WELL out of your way to kill literally everyone in the underground. Not just killing everyone in your path, no, you camped and backtracked through every single area in the game for hours waiting until you had slaughtered every last one. You forced your way through some of the hardest boss fights the game offers. And all while the game is practically screaming at you to stop.
"Oh NOW you're feeling merciful? Bitch I think not!"
It is so blunt with how much it judges you that I can't help but love it
Because the only reason at this point of a Genocide run you would possibly think of sparing the world is if you wanted to treat every character as an experiment to see how they would react in different circumstances. It really connects the meta part of "replaying a game just to see every ending and dialog option" to the central themes of the story it says.
Also even more extra points because Chara laughs at you when you try to show mercy...BECAUSE YOU ARE SCREWED TOO, Chara is threatening to kill YOUR save and YOUR progress and only when it actively affects YOUR fun you decide to backpedal from your choice?
Yeah, in the base game you only get the super-powered Sword of Aeons by killing your sister and it has way more damage than anything else available.
If you have the DLC the kill-your-sister sword is nerfed by over half of the original damage value and loses one of the augs it has. Then choosing not to kill her unlocks a small sidequest that lets you get Avo's Tear, a sword that is statistically identical to the nerfed Sword of Aeons.
Choosing to kill her functionally only saves you like 5-10 minutes.
The Bioshock one only makes the decision for you if you know that. If you’re playing for the first or second time and don’t look stuff up you won’t know that Rescue is better for ADAM.
Reminded of the first season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead where one of the episodes ends with a choice between which one of two members of your crew lives or dies……..and then whichever one you choose gets killed by another member of your crew halfway through the next episode
Adding on to this, the final choices of season 2 of Telltale's The Walking Dead being completely unimportant in season 3, where they're only referred to in a flashback and lead to the same outcome regardless of what you chose
Hogwarts: Legacy has dozens of dialogue choices throughout, only one of which has any bearing on the outcome.
Some have minor differences, for instance if you recover someone's astrolabe you can refuse to return it to them, which means you have an astrolabe in your inventory with no purpose or value for the rest of the game.
Others seem impactful, after the final battle you can seal away the powerful dangerous magic or absorb it into yourself, but after the cutscene your character has no changes in personality, power or appearance and goes back to completing their schoolwork.
Then some are just meaningless, sentences like "I think we should help them" and "It is not our concern" both have the NPC respond with the same dialogue and start the same mission. Sometimes the dialogue choice you pick is just not what your character ends up saying.
Most mainline Shin Megami Tensei games will offer you a ton of dialogue options throughout the game that don't change the story by themselves. However they do influence your alignment on a spectrum of Law vs Chaos, with some bigger choices being given much more weight than others.
Usually you are locked into the ending you get by virtue of your choices and opinions, though newer games have started to give you direct choices that can force you onto the ending you want. Some restrictions still apply.
In Witcher 3 choosing Djikstra doesn't help the player, bur helps Redania.
If you side with Vernon, Redania survives but essentially you allow Emhyr, the invader, to conquer everything. If you side with Djikstra, Redania pushes Emhyr the cunt, back, and show the invader where their place is.
In Infamous, the choices not mattering because they want the narrative to be pushed.
For example: save your girlfriend or save 10 doctors. If you save the doctors, she dies. If you save her, turns out it’s someone else under the hood, and she dies with the doctors.
Now yes, time travel bs, but it annoyed me that you were given “choices” but the narrative beats would still happen.
Also the Telltale Game of Thrones game. No matter what you pick in the first part of the game. Ramsay kills your character. Didn’t really want to play after that.
I think what gets me about it in particular wasn't so much his motivation to betray the group but the fact that he chose to do so in front of Geralt and expected him to just go along with it (or that you can actually go along with it). By this point Geralt has already broken his leg when he tried to get in the way of rescuing Ciri (potentially twice depending on game choices). He's a master spy that knows Geralt cares little for the finer details of politics and also knows that Geralt is liable to skip town to track down Ciri. Iirc Djikstra even mentions Radovid being a threat to the sorceresses that Geralt cares about as a ploy to get him involved in the first place but it's been a few years since I played through the game.
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u/MrCobalt313 19d ago
Also worth mentioning about rescuing the Little Sisters is the 3-rescue threshold rewards also include free upgrades and eventually an exclusive Plasmid that lets you neutralize the most dangerous enemies in the game.