Expedition 33 has half of the community accusing you of being a proponent of either genocide or child slavery depending on your choice so I guess it’s between which one of those you like more.
Overall that is my favorite game series of all time.
Pretty much every Telltale game has difficult choices to make. Hard to pick just one.
I’d also nominate “Papers Please”. That game will mess with your head (which is what makes it good but you will feel dirty after playing it). It’s all hard choices.
Hey, I actually have a bit of a discussion on this! That’s pretty cool! 
Ahem…because, then he gets to act like a total slime and get away with it, which is 1. infuriating as hell and 2. not something a death machine like Eivor would EVER brook. Letting him off scot free goes against sensibility and character. Not an option. Having been forced to tolerate endless irritants in the first Assassin’s Creed, there was zero chance I would’ve spared this cretin.
I’m surprised that you’re against even simply taking the money back, as you are very explicitly given this option (and it’s the only time I can remember where it pops up). This, combined with his own admission that his asking price was unreasonable (“a queen’s ransom”, as he puts it), would seem to indicate that Ubisoft 100% expects you to do so. And Eivor is a Viking, after all.
Just because you have the option to do something, that doesn’t mean you should do it; and just because you’re a terrifying death-dealer, that doesn’t mean you can’t also be a generous man and a patron of the arts, with a sense of humor about yourself. That’s also very Viking.
Methinks you failed a moral test.
Just to be different, I had one of my Shepards kill Wrex on Virmire in ME1, and tell Mordin to delete Maelon’s data in ME2. That ensures that Eve won’t survive, and that Wreav leads the krogan by himself.
So you can peacefully convince Mordin not to cure the genophage, because with those two people gone, the krogan aren’t ready for it yet, politically.
Being a werewolf in Skyrim doesn’t make you evil. The Brotherhood aren’t pretending to be good guys while being secretly evil werewolves. They really are good guys, they just sometime kill the bad guys with their teeth instead of a sword.
Also, if you continue with their questline, you discover how to cure lycanthropy, and can choose to take the cure yourself.
Since I’ve been replaying this off and on (just finished the werewolves last night), it’s been on my mind, and I’ve been thinking ahead to how the story branches in Origins play out over the subsequent titles. And another potentially agonizing choice came to mind, in the third game, Inquisition.
I say “potentially” agonizing, because the details of the choice depend on how the story has developed up to that point. It testifies to the incredible complexity of the world state, and the number of dependencies regarding which characters are in which locations performing which roles.
In the game, you are the Inquisitor, leading a ragtag coalition against an ancient evil. (In other words, it’s a BioWare game.) Something strange has been happening with the Grey Wardens, the mysterious warriors who are periodically called upon to rally against the Darkspawn, demonic creatures which surge from their underground lairs from time to time. Your party therefore includes an advisor from the Grey Warden order. Also, there’s an extremely powerful corrupted-mage figure who seems to be responsible for the situation, and your party includes a second advisor, someone who recently faced the mage and can provide information and guidance.
The identity of the Grey Warden depends on several preceding story choices, including who you recommended for the throne in the first game. It will be one of three people: a party member from the first game who you as a player consider a friend (even if he’s new to the Inquisitor), a different party member who was an adversary unless you recruited him at the end of the game under specific conditions, or a side character from the second game with whom you have no special attachment. The “agonizing choice” mentioned above requires that the first of these is your Grey Warden advisor.
The second advisor is even more personal to you — it’s Hawke, your player-character from the second game. It’s a surreal experience to see “yourself” as an NPC, with Hawke’s behavior influenced by your own acts and choices in the second game, assuming you played it (e.g. if you were generally sarcastic and jokey with your dialog in the second game, Hawke’s personality in Inquisition will reflect this). It’s a surprise when Hawke shows up, and it’s pleasantly satisfying when he/she continues tagging along, because of how it ties the stories together.
But then you get to the mission called “Here Lies the Abyss,” where the situation with the Wardens comes to a head. In the chaos of the mission, you get thrown into Dragon Age’s mystical parallel world, the Fade. Your party members come with you, including Hawke and the Warden advisor.
At first, it’s great fun to have a six-person party instead of the usual four. The banter is especially good if you brought party member Varric, who was prominent in the second game and is very close with Hawke. And the mission itself is pretty great, with terrific atmosphere and interesting twists on established game mechanics, on top of huge story revelations.
But then you get to the end of the mission, and you find yourself confronted with a potentially impossible choice: someone in your party has to stay behind to hold the line while everyone else escapes, and it comes down to your two advisors, the Warden and Hawke. With two of the three Warden advisors, the choice is easy. You dislike the second guy and are happy to leave him in the Fade, and the third guy is known to you but there’s no way you pick him over Hawke.
But if the Warden advisor is the first guy — things get tougher. Possibly a lot tougher.
If you played a female Warden in the first game…
and you romanced Alistair…
and your Warden survived the first game (by taking Morrigan’s deal) which means Alistair and your Warden could still be together (there’s some dialog which makes this ambiguous)…
then your choice comes down to sacrificing either
the love of your life from the first game
or
yourself from the second game.
This latter becomes especially rough if Varric is there to have his heart broken seeing his best friend be sacrificed.
Superficially, it’s similar to the Kaidan vs Ashley choice in ME1, but it’s potentially much, much more personalized and painful because these aren’t just two squadmates you may or may not like, they’re two people who’ve had presence throughout the overarching story, and who you’re really, really close to.
I pay attention to YouTubers who post let’s-plays of the Dragon Age series. If they make the right choice at the Landsmeet in the first game, and if they fall in love with their Hawke in the second game, I make a point of watching the third-game chapter where this choice happens, because it’s always wildly entertaining to see the player’s jaw drop and listen to them cursing Inquisition for forcing them to make this insane decision.
(Inquisition is not my favorite Dragon Age overall — it’s just too big and unfocused — but during the missions where it’s firing on all cylinders, it’s as good as the franchise gets.)
The Companions. The Brotherhood, aka the Dark Brotherhood are definitely, even enthusiastically evil.
I really thought this OP of this thread was going to be about one of the choices you have to make in that series.
I’m currently playing Skyrim vr, and it contains an expansion pack where you become a super vampire, with an evil powers skills tree.
As cool as the quest to get those powers was, the very next thing I did was Google how to cure myself. It’s just not me.
I don’t care what people are accusing me of, even if it is half the town. What do the choices actually have you doing?
I didn’t elaborate because you practically need to recount the entire plot for it to land and it’s still a new and popular game but lemme try to summarize:
Mega Super spoilers for Expedition 33
By the end of the game, you have come to learn that the world you know is a creation of a family of Painters on “real” Earth. You are essentially independent characters in an RPG or story. Basically, they’re God and you’re people in God’s created world. The painting you reside in was created by a child who died in a house fire years ago and members of the family have been keeping the painting active by residing within it to avoid processing their grief. The final choice comes down to the conflicting desires of Verso and Maelle.
Verso is the “painted” adult version of Verso, the child whose painting this is. He has been kept alive and largely ageless within the painting for 60+ years and wants to end things. He is exhausted but immortal. In the end, you find the remaining shard of child Verso’s soul endlessly working at the canvas and Verso asks if it wants to stop painting. The remnant of real Verso nods.
Maelle is the painted body of Alicia, Verso’s sister in the real world, who Verso died rescuing from the fire. In the real world, Alicia is horribly burned across her face and neck, missing an eye, unable to speak and living in constant pain from her injuries. She is isolated, resented by her family and has little hope for the future. Within the Canvas, she is a young hero who has just found an adoptive family who loves her (including being with her painted version of brother). The people within the Canvas, for all practical purposes, are real in that they think, feel and operate independently with all the usual hopes, dreams and history of anyone else. Being within the Canvas will eventually kill her in the real world but she’s okay with this and time operates differently so she still has a good stretch of Canvas years ahead of her.
If you chose Verso’s side, Maelle is pushed out back into the real world and everyone you’ve met and known through the game ceases to exist. Your group members are aware of what you’ve done in their final moments and some aren’t especially forgiving. On the plus side, Verso’s soul can rest and Maelle’s family stops using the Canvas as a deflection for processing their family’s grief.
If you choose Maelle’s side, nearly everyone you know essentially gets the Best Ending for their story. The woman who miscarried after attempting suicide following the death of her husband is reunited with him and her child, the brother who died earlier in the story is returned along with his girlfriend who was killed in the prologue, etc. The cost for this is that child Verso’s weary soul remains painting to sustain this, painted Verso is denied his rest and Alicia’s comatose body is increasingly consumed by her psyche in the Canvas. But hundreds/thousands of sapient individuals in Luminare get to remain existing and everyone you connected with during the story gets what they wanted (aside from Verso).
I have yet to play any Mass Effect game, although I’m not adverse to it…it just hasn’t happened yet, I always seem to be playing something else.
With all the talk of hard choices, though, I should bump it up to “playing next, the next time I play a game”.
I think they are really, really good. I remember the fighting mechanics being a lot better in the second than the first, but the first seemed fine to me.
They made huge combat improvements in the second one that carried over into the third one almost without any other changes. Mechanically, the first game is very different from the other two. Exploring space was also changed immensely between 1 and 2.
The story is excellent in all of them though. And I love the variety of characters and abilities.
Just fantastic story telling, with so many paths!
In Pathfinder: Wrath of the righteous has mythic paths for your character that affect how your character develops but also change the story to fit your path. At the end of the Lich mythic path, which up to this point had been fairly neutral as far as how evil you had to be, forces you into sacrificing the character you’ve been romancing or abandoning the path of the Lich. I also have a very hard time being truly evil in video games, but you CAN go most of the game as a wannabe Lich without doing any truly evil things. Until then, then you go full blown evil.
Mass Effect certainly has some emotional moments but I don’t think there is ever really a choice to be made. It may kinda seem like there was a choice but those scenes were gonna happen no matter what.
That said, well worth playing. I do a run through every 18 months or so. Never gets old even when there are no surprises left for me.