The Battle of DarrowshireNot tragic, and your actions make it end a lot better than it would have been. But it’s still pitiful and heart-wrenchingly full of pathos. Even the “happy ending” had me tearing up.
ETA: if you can do the entire quest chain and not get a bit misty, check your pulse, because you have no soul.
Is that the one where you collect the toys for the little ghost girl?
That’s part of it.
I was in my very early teens, Doom was all the rage and I played drenched in the close and personal violence without batting and eye.
Then one night I installed Fields of Glory and played as the French in The Battle of Wavre. After a good half and hour of multiple infantry and cavalry charges up a steep slope to take a key hill my battered army had to retreat. As the Prussians advanced off the hill I could see the slopes covered in little digital corpses of the men I had sent to their deaths.
I felt somber in a strange way I never forgot.
Wow, yeah, good one, that.
Here’s a great one from Magic: the Gathering. Let me set the stage for you: A new mechanic was introduced, called Miracle. It let you cast very powerful spells for a small fraction of their normal cost if they happened to be the very first card you drew that turn. A lot people disliked the mechanic, as it could cause a huge swing in a game based on luck and not skill.
That year, the world cup championships was a team event. It all came down to the final match, Americans versus Chinese Taipei. The Americans, shown here on the right, held a commanding presence and were a turn away from winning the whole thing. And then…well, this happened.
It was in my first full run-through of all three games together, and I’d promised myself that I was going to live with my decisions. It was hard - I lost Talia at the end of ME2, and also lost the crew of the Normandy who got captured. I managed to bring everyone else through ok to largely happy endings, but losing Talia meant I was never going to bring the Geth and Quarians together.
Mordin’s end-game was different, because that was as good as I could get it. The Quarian thing though, I knew that it was down to me that it happened, and I could have done better. Made it much worse.
This is pretty much the scene - although in mine, Talia was already dead and her place was taken by another Quarian admiral. She didn’t fall off the rock, she shot herself, but I think the rest was the same.
I remember that game. Think about all those workers and peasants, fighting rich men’s wars.
That .gif makes it seem more like a hilarious moment than a heartbreaking one.
Not exactly heartbreaking, but Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty had a good one. You’ve come across a prophecy, showing how the End Times will go if you don’t accomplish the game’s objectives. And of course, you play through the prophesied end as a mission. You have a hugely overwhelming force, more than you get in any other mission, making the last stand against the nihilist ancient god and his forces… And it’s not enough. No matter what you do, you can’t win, until eventually the enemy is throwing Hybrids at you like they were zerglings, and you’re inevitably overrun to the last man. And you know that it’s not going to be enough. Your goal in the mission isn’t even to win, it’s just to make a glorious last stand, that nobody will be left to remember.
I don’t know exactly how they did it, but man, they did a great job in that mission not only making it hopeless (that part is easy; the enemy base is off the map so you can’t attack it), but making it feel hopeless.
Kinda sorta in this same vein…As a Playstation guy I only had access to ME2 for the longest time, and the very first time played the game I lost Mordin and I got so sad because he was one of my favorites and I honestly felt like I lost a member of my crew.
That lab looked so empty…
Oh man, speaking of that. In ME2 there is the “Overlord” DLC, and at the end you see the dude’s brother all strapped in and he starts running through his square roots and then says “it was all so harmless…” That was sad
The Secret World is a current MMO based on very, very dark themes of supernatural conspiracies. Much of the game is about loss and death. There is a particularly excellent late-game story arc involving a nursery where an insane corporation experiments on kidnapped children that’s very well done.
But there’s another moment of pathos in the very first adventure zone, perhaps stronger because you’re not acclimated to the game’s themes yet. You meet an old woman barely holding off zombies with a shotgun. Some time later, in a dank sewer, you find her missing husband kneeling in the slime. He’s been…altered. He stands up and tells you what you need to know to complete your mission. And then, sickeningly, he just kneels back down in the muck and waits for you to leave. You can’t do anything to help him, and you can’t communicate his fate to his wife.
There was a really interesting point in this game, I think. There’s a scene where you’re lead into a small room filled with little memorial markers consisting of a small container with a candle and a picture, presumably of the missing/dead. It was a small thing, but touching- until I looked closer and realized that most of them were the same picture. The game only has so many character models, true; but here’s the thing: if it had been totally different pictures, that would’ve had the intended effect. If it had all been one picture, that would’ve indicated either a person’s overriding sense of total loss, or the loss of a true pillar of the community. If nearly all had been the same, it would’ve done the same, but shown that this wasn’t just for one person. But most of them? Just most? It totally crippled the impact. I guess you’re not supposed to look that closely.
I know a lot of people were upset by Aeris dying in Final Fantasy 7, but losing Alys in Phantasy Star 4 hit me much harder (years earlier, too).
If you’d never seen it, the Mobius trailer is worth watching. They were working on it for Metro: Last Light as a “set the tone” piece but the people on it got pulled off for other projects and it went unfinished. After the game launched, one of the artists picked it back up again and completed it. It’s, well, grim and heartbreaking.
In Everquest, there’s a a “haunted house” zone (Unrest) with a hidden passage leading to a small cave with a female ghost named Serra. If you’re following the right quest, you find out that Serra is was a young girl whose father was forced to leave her mother (due to social class issues) and that she was murdered by her stepfather and dumped in this location. Her ghost is scared and confused and is still waiting on a doll her father had promised her for her birthday. It’s a sad and poignant little tale in a game that was best known for “Camping Orc 3 for sixteen hours” and easily skipped if you were just following a spoiler and ignoring the ‘flavor text’.