I feel every moral choice in every video game I have ever played is just "be a good guy and do the right thing, or be a bad guy and do the wrong thing"
You had the slavers, but the leader whom I forget his name had a great vision for the future that required slave labor temporarily. Or you could choose to side with the slaves and free them at the cost of the peoples futures. It was a tough decision. I went with the slavers. So I have to disagree with thrillhouse in this instance.
I feel every moral choice in every video game I have ever played is just "be a good guy and do the right thing, or be a bad guy and do the wrong thing"
This. Developers need to build on characters and when you make a decision, make it count. When I had to choose between my partners in Mass Effect, it really made me think, broke my gamer heart. Everywhere else seems to have the mentality of "you can spare this innocent man and earn nothing but good graces, or shoot him and take his money!"
While that IS a moral choice, its a video game and holds very little impact unless the game developers made that character matter in the long run.
They are all really horrible because you are either satan or Gandhi, games in general cant do moral choices well and just go: well heres a bad/good meter, you fill it up by being/not being a complete prick. E.g. the first infamous, the moral choices in that are really stupid.
Any of the ambiguous decisions in the Dragon Age games. They have a lot of straight good and straight bad but a large handful of significant choices are very ambiguous and really come down to your own moral standings.
@EuanDewar: That was the most bullshit one in my opinion. You previously were traveling up the building massacring hordes of henchmen, leaving countless bodies in your wake. But then it suddenly becomes "Renegade" or evil to kick one guy out the window? I'm calling bullshit. What is death by incineration, gunfire, or force pushing is more morally acceptable than being kicked through a window?
I think morality choices should be removed from games. Ascribing points to actions like that is superfluous.
There have been some really good ones lately. Fallout 3 started with a decent one. ME2 had two pretty good ones. Dragon Age Origins had some interesting conversation options. My favorite so far have been some of the choices in The Witcher. The choice to fight or defend the renegade/freedom figher elves & dwarves in chapter 2 was a pretty good introduction to the choices coming along in chapter 3. The order of the flame guy you meet in the sewers ties into it nicely, and especially his reaction and how his view changes after the dead is done. It's all great stuff.
I also think that Fallout 3 had some of the best ones, like whether to free the slaves, etc,. It seems that it is only RPG's that have real and difficult decsisions to make that actually make a difference in the game world.
I prefer the moral choice I made for myself in Fallout 3. Murder the hell out of the assholes in Paradise Falls without being asked or prompted. It's one of the few times I got honest enjoyment out of that game.
IMO moral choices shouldn't so much be "be a hero or an asehole", I think they should be more like the ones in fallout, with far more grey area, and they're not so much a 'good' or 'bad' choice, they're just choices which affect the future of the game.
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