I’m starting a new game of Dragon Age: Origins and I started remembering the last time I played. Two things I did made me ashamed of myself;
[spoiler] Knocking out Arlessa Isolde and killing Conor. In game - I justified it by the zombie outbreak was her fault and she treated Alistair like crap.
Killing Brother Genitivi. Again in game - I was anti-Chantry and he was going to reveal that Andraste’s Ashes actually cured disease. So I stopped him.
I also killed Zevran the first time he appeared but that didn’t bother me at all. [/spoiler]
Not within an NPC-populated game. Closest is killing the screaming people in Alien vs Predator, when you’re an alien and they just stand there screaming until you do shut them up.
In multiplayer… yeah, I’ve done a few dick moves I regretted. Usually thinking I was being funny and realizing afterwards I was just a griefing asshole.
Dragon Age: Origins, playing as a female character ('cause I am female), had to make a tough decision at the end: If you get into a relationship with Alistair, you have to choose whether you sacrifice yourself or your lover to save the world - or let Morrigan screw him to make a baby with an elder god’s soul in it for some Unspecified Purpose probably involving power and/or immortality for her, and uncomfortable questions from the Warden hierarchy later about why one of you isn’t dead. If you have the Awakenings expansion, you can scum it by sacrificing yourself at the end of Origins, then load that character in for Awakenings and voila, you’re alive without anyone thinking twice about it.
Capping civilians in GTA4. In previous GTA games, the violence always tended towards the cartoonish, so I’d get bored with the storyline missions and “let off a little steam” by engaging in pointless mayhem, giggling helplessly as people hopped around on one leg or fled in terror when I took out the tires on their vehicle or whatever. GTA4 upped the realism to me, and I found that I couldn’t do that guiltlessly any more, so I had to give it up. (In general, I thought GTA4 was too “srs bzns” and not enough tongue-in-cheek.)
I recall vaguely having this in other situations as well–shooting Meryl in MGS1, which I both found amusing due to the Colonel’s reaction and guilt-inducing at the same time. Often if I’m forced into (or randomly decide to engage in) violence against video game animals (that aren’t plainly “enemies”) I’ll feel very bad about it, but my empathy runs deep with the critters.
Not a video game, but in high school and college football, I played DB. There was a non-zero amount of instances where I got burned by the WR. I’d do a hard interference to take the 15-yard-penalty, rather than a possible TD.
On one hand, I cheaply rule-lawyered to prevent a score. On the other hand, I should not have been burned like that in the first place. :o
When I chose the Dark Side, and made Zaalbar kill Mission on the Unknown Planet. I didn’t mind most of the Sith choices, but I thought that one was particularly cold, especially since it served no purpose.
And then in Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare -
After completing Birth of the Conservation Movement. I really wanted a last step to that mission where you made the frontiersman pay for his lies.
In Skyrim, I tried the assassin quest chain once. After a few hits on people who didn’t seem to be doing anything to anybody but camping in the wilderness, I just gave up on it.
In World of Warcraft, I played Horde up to about level 72 and finally ground to a halt doing some Undead quests where they need you to test the improved plague virus that they’re going to use to kill EVERY LIVING THING ON THE PLANET. At which point I had a “WTF am I doing on this side?” moment and stopped playing Horde.
Yeah, but you don’t continue with that… and that plot line is necessary for a Really Important Cross-Faction Plot Point in the Wrath expansion, where you see how out-of-bounds those researchers had gone.
In Words With Friends, I had a Q in my rack with one tile left in the bag. There were no U’s or I’s left or available on the board. I traded in the Q and stuck my opponent with it. It felt kind of cheap.
In Fallout 3 I’ve murdered scores of innocent people, stolen entire life savings from those barely scraping by, I’ve even nuked megaton once or twice. But the one thing that made me reload my save and that I’ve never brought myself to do again is be mean to the woman who gives you the poem for you birthday. Don’t know why, it just feels wrong, no matter how evil my character is.
Similar thing happened in Assassin’s Creed 2. Murdering thousands of random guards? Not a blip on my morality meter. Missing the hug cue with da Vinci? Instantly reload and try again. The look on his face just killed me a little inside.
I found those two characters extremely annoying, so I just found that funny. Otherwise though, I agree with you - I hate it when RPGs with good/evil choices have the evil just be thuggish or even pointlessly evil instead of something more philosophical or an actual difficult choice. Bioware RPGs seem about 50/50 on this depending on who wrote that particular scene - KOTOR and Jade Empire tend towards the “evil = thug” mentality, Mass Effect and Dragon Age were better written (though there are always well-written and poorly-written parts in each).
My own choices:
Dragon Age: Origins
Forcing Alistar out of the party to acquire Loghain. Loghain’s interesting, but ultimately I think he was way more dickish than he needed to be, and I loved Alistar.
Jade Empire
[spoiler]There’s a quest where you meet a girl who’s escaped from slavers, and her mother is still being held by them. You eventually encounter the mother with the slavers and a man who has just purchased the women, and you fight and kill the slavers. Then, you have three options:
“Good” option: free the girls and threaten the buyer into running,
“Evil” option: convince the girl to “fight for her freedom” and kill the buyer,
"Evil: option: sell the girls back into slavery and collect the money.
The second option is a great “differing philosophy” moment, but the third just made me feel icky, especially since it’s heavily implied they’re being sold as sex slaves.[/spoiler]
I’m pretty sure they (i.e. the Hand of Vengeance, not Putress’s splinter group) were only planning on using the plague against their enemies. Those enemies being pretty much just the Scourge and the Scarlet Crusade.
In Spec Ops: The Line, there’s a segment where you’re gunning down the usual array of soldiers and there’s a radio voice in your ear taunting you with “That one was close to retirement! Not him, I liked him! That one’s wife just had a baby!..” I don’t know that it made me feel guilty but it did remind me of that comic.
From the same game, more guilt inducing and spoilered for plot…
[spoiler]In one segment you face a large enemy camp you need to pass through and decide to torch it with white phosphorus. One of your companions protests that there must be some other way and you say “There really isn’t”. After torching the camp with white phosphorus mortar rounds, you pick your way through what remains. At the back of the camp was an internment area filled with women and children, all burned alive.
The real kicker is that there WAS no other way if you wanted the game to advance. If you try to fight your way through, you’ll always lose. You’re forced into the scenario just described.[/spoiler]
Plenty of Mass Effect Renegade choices have this effect on me. I’ve seen the videos of some of the death and destruction Shepard can wreak in ME3, and rather than being darkly amusing like in the first two games (punching out the scientist in ME1 or burninating the krogan in ME2), these are sick and wrong and I would feel like a monster for choosing them.
I’ll second the poster who found it wrong to cap civilians in GTA4. Actually, after my first fuck-da-po-lice rampage in GTA3 back in the day, I had to take a few hours’ break from the game to process what I did. Afterward it became fun, but the first one made me feel very uneasy.
Trading away my favorite players in sports games sometimes makes me feel ashamed. I could never make it as a general manager of a real sports team; I trade players WAY too often.
[/spoiler]
