It's amazing how many of these articles are about Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas.
More to the point, I wholeheartedly agree on a number of points here. For characters that you're meant to really get into and project yourself on, the freedom to make your own choices is both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing in that you can chose how to tackle each individual challenge rather than only having one course of action. But at the same time, sometimes you can make a choice that has unforeseen consequences that lead to results you didn't want. In that respect, game with the degree of choice you get in the recent Fallout games are a lot like real life; sometimes you just have to go with what your gut tells you to do and hope and pray things turn out the way you intended them.
Now there is a drawback to this; because games can't include all the nuanced reactions of real life people and their motivations. I've never seen a game programmed to tell the difference between a deliberate killing of an unarmed NPC and accidentally hitting them with friendly fire because you were shooting at a raider/zombie/terrorist/alien/whatever and the NPC ran out right into the line of fire. For a more complex example involving moral choices in a storyline, take the Fallout 3 expansion pack "The Pitt." SPOILER ALERT!!!!!! You go into the expansion with the goal of freeing the slaves of The Pitt. You discover the people of the area have been suffering some kind of horrendous disease and the leader of The Pitt has been forcing the people there to labor in order to keep the disease from spreading, to find a cure and to create a civilized area with the promise that once they have the foundations of their new society laid, the slavery will end.
The source of the cure research turns out to be the leader's infant daughter, who is genetically immune to the disease. You wind up having to choose: either kidnap the baby from its parents and hand it over to the slave rebellion, or side with the slavers. Now, had I been able to, I would have told the leader of The Pitt that I wouldn't take his child from him, but the slavery had to end NOW and he had to let the people choose if they wanted to stay and help him build his new society or not. But I wasn't given the option of making him end the slavery. Instead I had to leave The Pitt with the status quo still going; not the ultimate ending I would have wanted.
Yahtzee often complains about moral choice systems, and I think this is the reason why; so few games are able to give you a variety of choices or to be able to explain the motives behind your actions. Instead, they tend to boil everything down into just a one-good-choice-and-one-bad-choice response. Sometimes you'll get a chance afterward to explain yourself to determine whether the one you made was out of kindness or cruelty, but you usually don't know if you will until after the deed is done.
Having to stop playing a game because you don't like the character is part of the reason I'm having trouble getting through Deus Ex: Human Revolution. However, in this case it's not so much an issue of the uncertain choices I make coming back to bite me, but the fact the course I'm almost being railroaded onto isn't the one I want to take. Because the game offers a number of non-lethal options to handle some situations, my first run-through I figured if I had the ability to do a non-lethal takedown, it behooved me not to kill anyone. But then I get up to the first boss fight. I don't imagine I need to elaborate, but for those who never played the game, the boss fights were apparently designed by a different studio than Ubisoft Montreal (the primary studio) and so could only be taken on with heavy lethal ordinance with a head-on approach.
So now I'm trying a 2nd run-through with a...tougher form of tactics. I've been trying to use non-lethal takedowns when possible, but when the jig's up, I pull out the guns. To be honest, I'm not that uncomfortable with it; I've always been of the school of philosophy that lethal force is justified in self defense and in the defense of others' lives. However, Deus Ex's habit of constantly trying to make their bad guys sympathetic makes that difficult. Best example *ANOTHER SPOILER ALERT!!!* is when in the first mission you get up to the terrorist leader holding the factory manager hostage. If you chose to talk him down, you have to sympathize with this guy and make it sound like you believe he and his people are the put-upon downtrodden who are just trying to stand up for their beliefs....doesn't exactly smack of sincerity when you've seen them plant a chemical bomb to kill innocent factory workers and have been capping them whenever they don't present you with a convenient opportunity to smack 'em with a metal fist.
Freedom and moral choice systems are a difficult marriage in games. They allow for a lot more personal choice in gameplay; a variety of playing styles so you can customize your character to fit how you want them to be. But when the inevitable limitations show up, they can be glaring, and will often put you on a path that you really don't like to be on.
