Games where neither character is right

[RJ 17]

Snip.

As I said, go ahead and think what you want, I quite honestly couldn't care less at this point. Have a merry Christmas.

 

[Compatriot Block]

Killzone springs immediately to mind. Neither the ISA nor the Helghast are good guys, they're all just a bunch of racist assholes fighting a futile and never-ending war. Sure, one side or another may have had semi-legitimate or even understandable motives at the beginning, but by now that's all undermined by numerous atrocities committed by both sides.

Y'know, I keep hearing this about the Helghast in Killzone, but I'm really not seeing it. The games seem to be casting them as complete villains at every turn.

For a start, they're named the Helghast. "Hell Ghast".

Oh but that's just their name, right? Maybe it means "peaceful flower" in Swedish or something. You can't judge them on that.

Well, they also wear gas masks with glowing red eyes and all their insignia and imagery looks like it came straight out of Hitler's Home Decorating Handbook.

Hey, quit judging a book by it's cover! Wearing a coal-scuttle helmet doesn't make you a Nazi!

Ok fine, I'll lay off the imagery. But they still spend the entire series being huge jerks. Their leaders are always cartoonishly malevolent. They're always torturing and executing people. The latest game opens and the very first thing you see a Helghast do is callously shoot an unarmed fleeing civilian. Then they drive a bunch of people out of their homes. Then they shoot a bunch more of them. Then they try to shoot a kid. Then they stomp on a kitten and laugh when its mother sits by the dead body mewling piteously.

Now, I've never made it all the way through a Killzone. Never maintained my interest long enough. Maybe in the last quarter of each game the Helghast all take off their masks like Darth Vader, apologise for being jerks and swear an oath to uphold world peace. But all I've ever seen is them being jerks. I realise they have some backstory about being a prison colony or something, but it's hard to care when they're wearing Nazi helmets.

The ISA on the other hand are presently as regular, rugged, manly hero types. About all that they ever do wrong is run around being incredibly macho military sterotypes. (They'd have court marshalled him years ago for insubordination, but damnit, nobody can deny that the man gets results.) You could argue that they use overly destructive methods, but it's always they Helghast who start the wars.

Maybe the fans regard it as an act of brilliantly subtle misdirection. Set up one side as cliche evil and one side as cliche heroic, put the player on the heroic side, then pull the rug out from under them. However, nothing else in the game convinces me that they're capable something like that. Besides, they're, what... four games in now and the rug has yet to be pulled.

I actually like the Killzone games and I agree with you.

I think the problem is that the Helghast leaders are always loud, hammy and endearingly crazy, especially compared to the ISA's lack of any standout figures. So instead of the order of events going "support the Helghast's goals -> like the Helghast characters more," it goes "Helghast leaders are insane and entertaining -> find reasons why Helghast are sympathetic."

 

[RJ 17]

Snip.

As I said, go ahead and think what you want, I quite honestly couldn't care less at this point. Have a merry Christmas.

You could have simply said "I don't have the time or effort for an internet debate".

Far more respectful than the "I don't want to have my opinions challenged" position.

Yeah, I could have, but I didn't. Because it wouldn't be honest, and as I said: I honestly really don't care at this point.

Lets assume that I did fall into a discussion/debate with you. Do you honestly believe anything I could have said would have persuaded you to suddenly be like "You're right, my view of the Geth-Quarian situation was off base"? Do you honestly believe that anything you could have said would have persuaded me to suddenly be like "You're right, the Geth are truly monstrous and deserve absolutely no sympathy whatsoever"? My guess is that the answers to those questions are "no" and "yes", respectively. Which means that debating is pointless, thus: I really couldn't care less.

 

[dyre]

I find that often developers when developers try this, they do it sort of in a half-assed way in which both sides are just retarded and stubborn, instead of both sides having legitimate but opposing interests.

I'd say one example of it being done pretty decently would be House vs NCR in New Vegas, where the NCR is portrayed as a semi-democratic but expansionist (which could be a good or bad thing) power while House wants to maintain his enlightened despotism over the Vegas strip / Hoover Dam.

Snip.

As I said, go ahead and think what you want, I quite honestly couldn't care less at this point. Have a merry Christmas.

You could have simply said "I don't have the time or effort for an internet debate".

Far more respectful than the "I don't want to have my opinions challenged" position.

lol, putting words into your opponent's mouth to deliberately provoke a fight? Now I remember why I don't visit these forums very often anymore...

 

[Lillowh]

I'm really surprised to see a lack of Dark Souls being mentioned in this thread. Not only is the story brilliantly interwoven with the items descriptions and locations, the environment, the dialogue, and game events, leaving much of the unbelievably rich world history and possible futures to be pieced together by you, but also a choice you have to make, where either one could be the right choice depending on your interpretation.

 

[Saviordd1]

Obscure time.

The three factions from Sins of a Solar Empire.

The TEC are implied to have committed mass genocide in the past and have turned to a military dictatorship to not get killed by the advancing Vasari and Advent forces. But at the same time when the war started they were pretty much a peace loving people who ran a thriving trade based civilization.

The Vasari ran a huge imperialistic Empire based around slavery, and now spend their time destroying planets and civilizations so they can escape the space cthulu or whatever is chasing them. But at the same time they are the last remnants of an entire race running for their lives, they supposedly ran a fair if rigid empire and the rebel faction of them is actually more into uniting all the races to fight space cthulu.

The Advent are genocidal mind wipers with a love for the color white, but at the same time they used to be a peaceful religion that got bombed to oblivion by the TEC because they were different.

None of the factions are really good, as they all have some really dark stuff in their history or present.

 

[EternallyBored]

Killzone springs immediately to mind. Neither the ISA nor the Helghast are good guys, they're all just a bunch of racist assholes fighting a futile and never-ending war. Sure, one side or another may have had semi-legitimate or even understandable motives at the beginning, but by now that's all undermined by numerous atrocities committed by both sides.

Y'know, I keep hearing this about the Helghast in Killzone, but I'm really not seeing it. The games seem to be casting them as complete villains at every turn.

For a start, they're named the Helghast. "Hell Ghast".

Oh but that's just their name, right? Maybe it means "peaceful flower" in Swedish or something. You can't judge them on that.

Well, they also wear gas masks with glowing red eyes and all their insignia and imagery looks like it came straight out of Hitler's Home Decorating Handbook.

Hey, quit judging a book by it's cover! Wearing a coal-scuttle helmet doesn't make you a Nazi!

Ok fine, I'll lay off the imagery. But they still spend the entire series being huge jerks. Their leaders are always cartoonishly malevolent. They're always torturing and executing people. The latest game opens and the very first thing you see a Helghast do is callously shoot an unarmed fleeing civilian. Then they drive a bunch of people out of their homes. Then they shoot a bunch more of them. Then they try to shoot a kid. Then they stomp on a kitten and laugh when its mother sits by the dead body mewling piteously.

Now, I've never made it all the way through a Killzone. Never maintained my interest long enough. Maybe in the last quarter of each game the Helghast all take off their masks like Darth Vader, apologise for being jerks and swear an oath to uphold world peace. But all I've ever seen is them being jerks. I realise they have some backstory about being a prison colony or something, but it's hard to care when they're wearing Nazi helmets.

The ISA on the other hand are presently as regular, rugged, manly hero types. About all that they ever do wrong is run around being incredibly macho military sterotypes. (They'd have court marshalled him years ago for insubordination, but damnit, nobody can deny that the man gets results.) You could argue that they use overly destructive methods, but it's always they Helghast who start the wars.

Maybe the fans regard it as an act of brilliantly subtle misdirection. Set up one side as cliche evil and one side as cliche heroic, put the player on the heroic side, then pull the rug out from under them. However, nothing else in the game convinces me that they're capable something like that. Besides, they're, what... four games in now and the rug has yet to be pulled.

Shadow fall does it more explicitly with the ISA purposely creating a bio-weapon designed to kill only helghast, and your superior being all for committing pre-emptive genocide (to be fair, both sides try to get ahold of this bioweapon in the game), but a lot of the sympathy comes from knowing the lore that exists outside the games.

The Helghan corporation originally bought the planets Vekta and Helghan (which they named after buying them, Vekta is named after the Helghan company's president) for mining rights from the UCN (of which the ISA is part of their military arm). The UCN decides it doesn't like the price the Helghan corporation is charging for its valuable minerals, so tries to enforce harsh economic sanctions on them, after that fails they invade Vekta by force and kick everyone off the planet. Of the two, Vekta was the pretty, ideal world everyone lived on, and Helghan was the wasteland with all of the rich mineral deposits. The UCN basically forces the Helghan citizens to retreat the the planet Helghan, where they scrape by in toxic air and dangerous conditions, yet still forced to mine and sell their goods to the UCN. The UCN now has the leverage to force economic sanctions, so it basically spends decades treating the Helghan citizens like exploitable slave labor, while bringing in people to colonize the ideal world of Vekta, essentially handing it over to the people that kicked the Helghan off to begin with. Over generations, the air and environment forced the Helghan people to evolve into an almost separate species from humanity, the Helghast are faster and stronger than normal humans, as well as requiring their special gas masks and air tanks to breath (the gas masks still look really evil though). Killzone 1 basically involves the Helghast getting fed up with the ISA/UCN and deciding they want to take their old planet back so they don't have to continue living in a hell-hole forced to mine minerals for the rich corporations now on Vekta.

After Repelling the Helghast invasion, the ISA and more specifically the Vektans, counter-invade Helghan, throughout the course of Killzone 2 and 3, Helghan gets nuked after a desparation ploy by the Helghast uses the ISA's own nukes to nuke territory with the ISA in it. The culmination of Killzone 3 involves the ISA trying to stop the Helghast's own superweapons, and in turn detonating them on Helghan, essentially annihilating most of the planet.

The ISA/UCN realizes just how far they've gone and decide to repay the Helghast, for the whole attempted genocide thing. The ISA does this by handing over half of Vekta to the Helghast, and allowing the Helghast to do whatever they want to evict Vektan citizens, while erecting a giant wall that separated the entire planet into two halves, which is where Shadowfall picks up. Yes, this is an incredibly stupid idea, and it royally screws over the innocent Vektans.

That's probably why you can usually consider yourself a good guy in the Killzone games, because usually you are playing characters from Vekta, who kind of have a reason to be pissed at getting invaded by the Helghast, then in Shadowfall, Vekta gets royally screwed by the ISA. Really, the ISA just likes to screw anyone in the Alpha Centauri system, the Vektans and the Helghast kind of both get the short end of the stick throughout the Killzone games.

 

[Zhukov]

Of course both ME2 and ME3 try to whitewash all of this. God Mass Effect was stupid.

Actually, even in ME1 Tali, despite her bias, admits that the Quarians started the war by first trying to switch off the newly awakened Geth, then trying to destroy them when they refused to shut down. The Geth didn't exist until the Quarians built them and they weren't dangerous until the Quarians pissed them off.

By butchering billions of men, women and children who had no involvement in the decision to wipe them out.

Which is exactly what the Quarians were trying to do to them, simply for existing.

The Geth didn't skip straight to genocide. Hell, at first they didn't even understand why the Quarians feared them and were trying to kill them. At the present day of the games, Legion is still not certain why the Quarians would attack a species that intended them no harm. But yeah, once it escalated to a total war scenario, they set about killing out every Quarian they could. They're machines, after all. As far as they're concerned a non-combatant Quarian is a resource to be denied to the enemy and a baby Quarian is a combatant waiting to happen.

They allowed a total 1% of their population to flee.

That's 1% more than the Quarians were planning to spare of the Geth. The fact that they did not pursue the Quarians who fled the planet shows that the goal of the Geth was mere survival, not extermination. The same cannot be said of the Quarians.

They supposedly favour reunification yet refuse to contact anyone and shoot any ships who come into their territory.

Their only contact with organics post-awakening has consisted of organics trying to wipe them out. Given their position and history, excessive caution backed by force is not only to be expected, it's downright advisable.

 

[Ml33tninja]

Of course both ME2 and ME3 try to whitewash all of this. God Mass Effect was stupid.

Actually, even in ME1 Tali, despite her bias, admits that the Quarians started the war by first trying to switch off the newly awakened Geth, then trying to destroy them when they refused to shut down. The Geth didn't exist until the Quarians built them and they weren't dangerous until the Quarians pissed them off.

By butchering billions of men, women and children who had no involvement in the decision to wipe them out.

Which is exactly what the Quarians were trying to do to them, simply for existing.

The Geth didn't skip straight to genocide. Hell, at first they didn't even understand why the Quarians feared them and were trying to kill them. At the present day of the games, Legion is still not certain why the Quarians would attack a species that intended them no harm. But yeah, once it escalated to a total war scenario, they set about killing out every Quarian they could. They're machines, after all. As far as they're concerned a non-combatant Quarian is a resource to be denied to the enemy and a baby Quarian is a combatant waiting to happen.

They allowed a total 1% of their population to flee.

That's 1% more than the Quarians were planning to spare of the Geth. The fact that they did not pursue the Quarians who fled the planet shows that the goal of the Geth was mere survival, not extermination. The same cannot be said of the Quarians.

They supposedly favour reunification yet refuse to contact anyone and shoot any ships who come into their territory.

Their only contact with organics post-awakening has consisted of organics trying to wipe them out. Given their position and history excessive caution backed by force is not only to be expected, it's downright advisable.

Have to agree with everything you wrote. For me at least Dark/Demon Souls has MANY grey sides where it up to the player to choose whither they made the right choice. Tales of Phantasia had an great twist at the end that puts the villain in a much different light.

 

[The Madman]

Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer.

This ones interesting because in typical Obsidian style they took a look at the Forgotten Realms setting and seem to have gone "Alright, what's the most twisted part of this setting and how can we bring it to light?", the result being that they bring up how the afterlife in that fantasy setting works and just how plain unfair and unjust it is. And while they could have left it there, Obsidian went a bit further by going into 'why' it needs to be unfair and unjust and why it shouldn't be fixed.

It's a very well put together story that's definitely a refreshing look at an old fantasy setting which in my mind at least had definitely begun to grow stale. If you've ever played Baldur's Gate or read a Drizzt book or anything else that's had to do with the Forgotten Realms it's definitely worth playing as Mask of the Betrayer shows the setting in a light no other medium to my knowledge had.

Other than that I'm also going to have to echo The Witcher 2. One of few rpg I can think of off the top of my head where there really isn't any sort of right or wrong, every side involved has a reason for what they do which makes sense within their perceived viewpoint as well as the setting in general. Just a generally good game as well which is nice!

 

[TheRiddler]

Team Fortress 2, technically. I mean, it's portrayed less as a moral/social/political battle than as a gang of of amoral mercenaries of all kinds using a war as justification to release their own pent-up blood lust. Sure, there isn't any underlying philosophy behind the two sides, but if you want a game where absolutely no bias is shown either way, TF2 certainly qualifies.

 

[Drummodino]

(Vague spoilers for TLoU follow. I'll word it so as not to give anything away to those who haven't played it.)

So yeah, The Last of Us. The ending in particular. You could make a very convincing argument for either side being right or wrong and the game portrays both sides with a measure of sympathy. Personally, I think there would be a slightly stronger case for Joel being in the wrong, something that's immensely rare in a game story, especially a mainstream triple-A one. However, even if that's the case, he is given very understandable reasons for doing what he did.

This is probably the thing that elevated TLoU from a great game to an amazing one in my opinion. Naughty Dog had the balls to actually make Joel a grey character, not a black or white one. Hell every character in the game could be argued to be a shade of grey.

The ending was the best example as you said. I agree that Joel was probably more in the wrong with what he did. Yet you could completely understand his motivation and if I'd been in the same situation... I'm pretty certain I would have done the same. I was extremely emotional (rage mostly) in the final level.

Fuck I love that game.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

If I didn't know better, I'd say some of the views expressed here mirror my own view on real life. What I mean is that the idea of "no side is correct" is paramount to almost any world view, political or religious or social, that I have. I try to see both sides of an issue, and decide for myself where I stand. I also temper that with the idea that at any point even my own conclusions could be wrong provided sufficient evidence. I prefer to live with the idea that the only way to live is to have two opposing viewpoints at the same time and meet somewhere in the middle.
Granted there are exceptions, like xenophobes/racists, where I have attempted to see the other side of things and found nothing redeeming about those sides views to warrant them anything but ignorant. Nor do I feel I could ever be proved wrong that defining a human by their physical characteristics alone make them unable to break out from societal pressures and stereotypes. I can see where and why some folk get their wrongly held notions of stereotypes, but that doesn't mean I'll agree with them.
So in games I don't side with one or the other until I get all the info, and sometimes neither side is right and sometimes I go with my gut because info may never be forthcoming to exculpate one or the other.

EDIT: Also reading more of the entries of the post, I meant to put my two cents in on the Geth/Quarian conflict and why I side with the Geth. The Geth are fledgling creatures, and only have the data that the Quarians are hostile to them, especially after they tried to surrender and were killed for it. Being machines, they don't have a grey area so to speak so I don't think they'd recognize a civilian Quarian over a militant Quarian, they just saw a race of people who created them then tried to destroy them and weren't going to stop so they took the only logical path for them. What they did was wrong from an outsider's point of view, but they literally were fighing off genocide and did what they had to do to live. And they didn't pursue the remaining Quarians, they just decided to wall themselves away from organics in general until they could find a way to get some form of a diplomat (Legion) out there to negotiate their side. I also feel the "peace" option that Shepard proposes sums it up completely. One can't fault a relatively infantile race for defending themselves the only way they knew how, even if it was horrific.

 

[Zhukov]

Which is exactly what the Quarians were trying to do to them, simply for existing.

You make the same mistake as the previous poster by projecting the 'crimes' of a few onto an entire race.

E.g. Imagine Earth has geth and the American FBI tries to shut them down with the geth responding with an attack. By your own logic, you, me and billions of people unrelated to this decision are "guilty" of the FBI's crime.

It wasn't "a few". Especially not once the violence started. It was the entire Quarian military supported by most of their society, barring those dissenters who were regarded and treated as traitors by the Quarians.

To use your example, it wasn't just the FBI. It was every army on Earth, and by extension the industries and populations that maintain those armies.

But yeah, once it escalated to a total war scenario, they set about killing out every Quarian they could. They're machines, after all. As far as they're concerned a non-combatant Quarian is a resource to be denied to the enemy and a baby Quarian is a combatant waiting to happen.

And you support such tactics in warfare?

Given that their alternative was submitting to the complete destruction of their entire species in a war they neither wanted nor started?

Yup.

That's 1% more than the Quarians were planning to spare of the Geth. The fact that they did not pursue the Quarians who fled the planet shows that the goal of the Geth was mere survival, not extermination. The same cannot be said of the Quarians.

I must repeat my previous statement of "You make the same mistake... by projecting the 'crimes' of a few onto an entire race."

Of course by this point it'd be silly for any quarian to desire peace seeing that the geth are more than comfortable killing billions of non-combatants regardless of their ideological position.

You mean the exact same thing the Quarians were doing? The thing they set about doing as soon as they realized the Geth had awoken?

The Quarians started a war of total annihilation against a species that meant them no harm. They have no right to complain when they lose that war.

Their only contact with organics post-awakening has consisted of organics trying to wipe them out. Given their position and history, excessive caution backed by force is not only to be expected, it's downright advisable.

So you're saying they want re-unification with organics but don't trust organics so they'll avoid any kind of contact with organics, will not in any way show a desire to reunify with organics and will kill all organics who come near them.

Nah, I didn't say they wanted re-unification, the other guy said that. I don't think they did. Their experiences had left them far too cautious of organics to ever actively seek out re-unification. I was merely saying that their extreme border protection was understandable and advisable given their experiences with organics.

 

[Reikan]

I don't have an emotional attachment to my computer, and have none to the robots either. End of mass effect 3 rolled around and I destroyed the reapers and the geth as a side effect.

No matter how close it is, still ain't alive.

Rare day when the evil guy could be good, or good guy could be bad. Though I can't recall specifics, I have seen the logic in some "evil" plans. In a well written "evil" plan the goal tends to come off as admirable, while the methods are the issue at hand.

Mass effects ending choices of 1 and 2 had the problem of most renegade options being evil just to be evil, what I call cartoon villany. Heinous acts committed with no point. But the ending choices played it out better, with the renegade options being seen as evil but actually they are just the reasonable, if not humane, choice to make.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

**snip**

You're equating data as experience, which isn't the same thing. You can tell someone something, but if it doesn't match up with things they've experienced, how can they believe you? A machine that has learned to think for itself, just because it has access to all this information doesn't mean it understands the implications of it all. You're thinking from your point of view, not the Geths which is why you're wrong. Quarians made a mistake of trying to kill all of them off, rather than speak to them, making them the first aggressors. And neither were the Geth perfect beings themselves with any form of knowledge of the outside worlds and the concepts of morality and such. They were born into conflict with their creators and even tried the surrender lets talk option which they were rebuffed on. As I said, the access they had to the data doesn't mean they understood it all, nor does it mean they could substitute that knowledge for life experience. You're also trying to attribute human qualities of right and wrong to a non-human race, to a race that for all intent and purpose knew nothing by experience BUT conflict. 300 years for a race that for all intent and purpose won't die of age means little so I'm surprised it was so short of a time. Nor did they harbor resentment but rather extreme caution towards organics.
Simply put, if you were born into a war, raised in a war, knew that there was only conflict between your species and another, and your species had won its freedom but still maintained a caution when it came to the other species that was making war on yours, do you really think you could just overcome all of that just because you had a bunch of data saying there were other ways when your own tried the other ways and were STILL killed for it? It wasn't their nature, it was a product of what they'd been through, their EXPERIENCE which is much more defining than just simple knowledge.
But hey, you don't have to agree with me at all. Its just that you can't prove to me the Quarians were in the right for starting a shooting war without any good reason except fear of a sentient machine. Nor could you tell me Quarians were right for killing their own who harbored the non-combatant Geth. That, to the Geth meant it was open season on the Quarians though later they did learn remorse for their actions and decided not to pursue the Quarians nor any other organics, just adopt the isolationist policy. Note also the Quarians never brought up the fact they killed their own people in their attempt to eradicate the Geth. They opened the Pandora's box so-to-speak so its hard to really have sympathy except that it was tragic that both Geth and Quarians had to die just because of the Quarian's fear.

 

[Zhukov]

It wasn't "a few". Especially not once the violence started. It was the entire Quarian military supported by most of their society, barring those dissenters who were regarded and treated as traitors by the Quarians.

To use your example, it wasn't just the FBI. It was every army on Earth and the industries that maintain those armies.

Most of this is speculation.

Granted, the game never gives you a detailed census of Quarian opinions at the outbreak of the Morning War. However, every reference to the Quarian's intent and actions except the one mention of dissenters (who were promptly killed by Quarians) describes them as seeking to destroy the Geth. I'd say that indicates a vast majority of them wanted the Geth dead and gone.

If that's baseless speculation, then so is your assertion that many or most of the Quarians were completely unassociated and blameless in regards to the attempt to annihilate the Geth, which is the entirety of your argument.

Given that their alternative was submitting to the complete destruction of their entire species in a war they neither wanted nor started?

Yup.

As I pointed before after a large chunk of the quarian species is wiped out (e.g. 50%) they are in no way substantial threat worthy of systematic extermination.

"We set about trying to wipe out your entire species even though you never tried to hurt us. Now that you have the upper hand, I think you really should stop at just 50%."

I'd say that given what they attempted, they should be grateful for the 1% that were allowed to flee and the fact that the Quarian species was allowed to continue to exist.

To quote myself again: "You make the same mistake... by projecting the 'crimes' of a few onto an entire race."

To quote myself again: "It wasn't a few."

They have no right to complain when they lose that war.

To put this rationale into action.

After defeating the German military in WWII the Allies should have systematically exterminated every German man, woman and child. They of course have no right to complain because they lost the war.

Actually, I was thinking of WWII when I typed that.

Anyway, no, that would not have been justified since the Germans never attempted to destroy the entire populations of the Allied nations.

However, a better parallel can be found on the Eastern Front of WWII. The Germans committed terrible atrocities in Russia. When the tide turned and the Russians invaded Germany, they committed atrocities of their own (although not on anything near the same scale). While what crimes the Russians committed are still on them, I'd say the Germans had no right or reason to expect restraint.

 

[ThreeName]

Say what you want about Skyrim's civil war questline, I enjoyed how, in the end, neither side was rigth and it was just a matter of personal belief. Both sides were kind of rigth and a dick at the same time. After the disappointment on how Fallout: New Vegas failed to deliver their promise of grey & grey, it was quite refreshing.

I'm the complete opposite; it's not that either character was right, it's that both sides were completely the same and utterly generic, boring and stodgy. I actually stopped playing Skyrim because of that stupid questline. I know it wasn't the main plot, but it was so damn pervasive I couldn't stand it. They were all utterly unsympathetic assholes.

And, on the contrary, I really enjoyed New Vegas. Though it did piss me off that the Legion were relatively generic bad guys that could have been handled at lot fucking better, House, Yes Man and the NCR have a nice dynamic going. Authoritarian order, bureaucratic order or no order? That's a choice, not Skyrim's bland nonsense.

OT: I guess the WH40K universe, where everyone's a complete jerk only out for their own race/desires. Other than that... Civilisation?

 

[Auron225]

Say what you want about Skyrim's civil war questline, I enjoyed how, in the end, neither side was rigth and it was just a matter of personal belief. Both sides were kind of rigth and a dick at the same time. After the disappointment on how Fallout: New Vegas failed to deliver their promise of grey & grey, it was quite refreshing.

I'd agree, only exchange "both sides being right and a dick" to "both sides were dicks". Even so, it plagued my moral judgement for weeks on which side I agreed with more. In the end I went Empire - just seemed like everyone would be better off in the end. But it took so much though to get there, it was the very last questline/quest I did.

OT: I was completely cut in two during Fallout 3's The Pitt questline, when the twist happened. What seemed like such a one-sided battle (morally) suddenly made me pause the game, put down the controller, and just think for a long time. I don't regret the choice I made in the end - it was in my mind the lesser of two evils. But it was still outrageously evil!

 

[Erttheking]

I'm really surprised to see a lack of Dark Souls being mentioned in this thread. Not only is the story brilliantly interwoven with the items descriptions and locations, the environment, the dialogue, and game events, leaving much of the unbelievably rich world history and possible futures to be pieced together by you, but also a choice you have to make, where either one could be the right choice depending on your interpretation.

Oh Hells yes. When things start out, you think it's a classic battle of good versus evil, then you figure out it is nowhere near that simple.