"Heroics" that left a bad taste in your mouth

[TT Kairen]

This is implying Renegade/Paragon was anything other than "black v. white"

I mean, in the first game you have the option to slaughter a colony because renegade shepard just isn't feelin' the whole saving people thing today.

I would contest that Paragon/Renegade is, for the most part, anything BUT "black v. white." The majority of renegade choices aren't about being evil, they're about being kind of a dick but doing so with the ultimate goal of saving everyone. Renegade Shepard doesn't have time for anyone's shit, they want to finish the job in a way that gives them the best possible advantage against their enemy without caring who they have to step on. That's not evil, it's just being an ass about it.

I figured the way renegade Shep would justify their actions on Feros would be to say that they're working to save the ENTIRE GALAXY, so a handful of dead colonists was the least of their worries. It's strange that your teammates just go along with it though.

No, that's lazy and evil.

Lets also go down the list of things renegade Shepard has done

*Shot their friends
*Continuously tells their teammates to shut the hell up about their problems
*Punches a reporter
*Kills the leading government for humanities gain
*Gets countless innocents killed cause fuck it
*Leaves a refinery to burn for one mans personal bullshit
*Let one of the greatest warriors in the galaxy commit suicide and then killed her daughter, cause fuck it

and more I've forgotten.

These aren't "Looking at the big picture" these are being evil and lazy. That's what renegade Shepard is, and has been, evil and lazy.

For one, if you look at Shepard in either 100% Paragon or Renegade at all, you're doing it wrong. Anybody who does a 100% playthrough doesn't know how to roleplay a character, and is probably a boring person.

That said, there are certain Renegade options that are very impulsive and seem to have no basis. You only listed one.

1) Shot their friends. The ones you can shoot being Wrex, and surviving squadmate in 3. Both have perfectly justifiable purposes.
2) Tells their teammates to shut up. Insensitive and maintains a level of professional distance, yes. Evil? No.
3) Punches reporter. Reckless and impulsive. Likely put in for the lulz.
4) Kills the leading government for humanity's gain. What you fail to mention is that there are two options for the Council dying, but you only mention one in a biased attempt to strengthen your argument. Yes, selfishly allowing them to die is possible. But another, also Renegade option, has you genuinely leave them to die for the sole purpose of throwing as much fire at Sovereign as possible. Obviously the player knows Sovereign dies either way. Shepard does not.
5) When does he get countless innocents killed for no good reason? Ever?
6) Leaves a refinery to burn for one man's vendetta. What you fail to mention is the person he is hunting. He is a proven murderer, backstabber, drug dealer, slaver, and a far bigger general asshole than the guy you're helping. Sacrificing 20 or so meaningless refinery workers to stop a man who's probably caused the deaths or ruination of thousands of people through his organization is an easy choice.
7) Lets (spoiler) kill herself and then kill her daughter because fuck it. Uh, no. Allowing her to kill herself is simply allowing her to fulfill her own Code without interference. Do you presume to interpose your beliefs on another species' culture? Quite insensitive. The daughter is an Ardat-Yakshi, so I can see the practical reasons for killing her, as far as containing the Ardat-Yakshi threat. If you're killing her to prevent Banshification though, you're an asshat. There's already a billion Banshees, will one more really make or break your mission?

 

[Tayh]

A Paragon Shepard is one that seeks to save as many lives as possible without sacrificing ultimate victory, choosing to center the burdens and costs of the struggle on himself; a Renegade Shepard is one that views the loss of those lives as necessary to ultimately save countless more in victory, choosing to spread the burdens and costs out into the whole.

A renegade Shepard will save

Spoiler

Kelly Chambers

in ME3. A Paragon Shepard won't.
Just thought I'd throw that out there.

 

[TailstheHedgehog]

A section in Fable 3 has you capture a key character of important relation to you. A mass-murderor and tyrant, your only options are to kill him like the noble king/queen you are.... or let him join you like the noble king/queen you are. Neither is techincally a 'wrong' choice, you'll just piss off some other characters either way.
But, wait, I cna either stoop to his level, or give him a clean slate? Nobody in Albion ever heard of prison? Hard labour? Why straight to capitol punishment?

 

[Deathninja19]

I'm using a film example but still... Anyone remember that film from about 3 years ago called "Harry Brown"? The things he does in that film to the "chavs" (The almost racial epithet ascribed to this group of lower-class teens) repulsed me. He tortures people and mocks them as he kills them... Granted these people are presented as some of the most repugnant people the human race ever produced but seeing as the film acts like it's almost a social commentary the commentary seems to be saying "You see those teenagers loitering out there? Well go get a big knife and gun and just go to town! They deserve it anyway... They're probably rapists and murderers" I'd also like to point out that similar/worse scenes of violence as seen in films like "A Clockwork Orange" or any Tarantino Film do not bother me. As the violence isn't presented positively it's either ironic/over-the-top/cartoon-like or to show how horrible the villain is. Harry Brown doesn't use the violence as comedy/ironic statement it seems to be supporting violence against "chavs".

Considering the class "difficulties" and the kind of "ghetto" and "sub-people" attitude many British people seem to have adopted to teenagers and especially council-house dwellers, this film comes off as basically immoral because it glorifies this de-humanization. I'd like to point out that this is literally the only film/book/anything I have ever regarded as such that (at least in my experience) no-one really questioned. I can't help but think that if a similar film was made about slaughtering "black" thugs, or "gay" thugs with such reckless "they're all the same" abandon people would be calling for the filmmakers heads.

Mate if you lived on or by a council estate you see people like that everyday, young people who are so bored/malicious that they attack people or simply make their lives hell. I actually lived next to people like that in the 90s long before the word chav was invented and they made living unbearable even regularly threatening me with knifes and beatings. I'm not saying they should be killed but not all of these working class teens (of which I was one) are innocent wayward souls that need hugs, they can be viscous monsters who lack a moral compass.

Oh I know, I'm not saying they're all totally innocent fluffy little bunnies but still it's just the fact that no-one ever really called Harry out on the torture and killings, it was presented as almost necessary to "clean up" the neighbourhood. I just think Harry should have been portrayed a little more morally ambiguously, cold-blooded torture and murder should never be so relatively positively portrayed. I may be misinterpreting the film, or maybe I missed something but I just felt like the movie really wanted me to go along with and enjoy Harry's vengeance spree.

Fair enough but I think the scenes with the two police explains the film's moral standpoints pretty well and does question the motives involved, even if they did ultimately support Harry Brown's worldview it at least explained that view well enough.

 

[sumanoskae]

can we pick movies too?

Spoiler: django unchained

the hero, django shoots a woman because she wanted to make him suffer by letting him work in a stone quarry instead of be killed instantly.

the reason she wanted this was because he and his partner could not resist shooting her brother and other people dead even when they already reached their goal and could had gotten away.
her death was pointless.


edit due popular:

please think about it.

imagine you had a brother or sister and one day someone comes into your house and executes your sister/brother for seemingly no reason.(mind the seemingly)
and now consider that you, by default, often hold your relatives in a better light than they should be.

wouldnt you be pissed too and wish the killer the worst imaginable?

Sorry, I don't follow.

Spoiler

It's difficult to feel bad for the psychopathic, racist, depraved, sadistic slave traders when their introduction scene was having two men beat each other to death for shits and giggles.

The Candies effectively torture people for fun and profit, and let's not forget what they do when you step out of line. "Don't feel like whoring today? into the hot box with ya!" "Don't think you'll survive another fight? well that's nor problem, if you don't fight I'll feed you to my dogs"

And when Candie goes on a rant about how black people are essentially incapable of thinking for themselves and Waltz finally can't take it anymore and shoots the bastard and his sister sells Django back into slavery for putting an end to her sick fuck of a brother, (After she changes her mind about castrating him, mind you) you felt bad when he decides to shoot her?

The woman at the very LEAST was an accomplice to slavery and torture, and that's assuming she never participated.

There's was more than enough reason to kill Calvin, any human being with a modicum of decency could see that.

 

[sumanoskae]

Batman in Arkham City once again refuses to kill the Joker, because apparently his life more valuable then all the people he's killed

 

[TheDoctor455]

Sometimes the protagonist of a game does something you find distasteful or morally suspect and then just passes it off with a oneliner we're apparently supposed to laugh at.

In Uncharted 2 there's a bit where Nathan goes off with a buddy to get something from a Turkish museum. Drake objects to using guns, to which I thought "Oh, he doesn't want to shoot guards for doing their job. Maybe this guy's alright after all." Nope. Few minutes later he throws a guard to his death, and his buddy even jokes about it.

Alpha Protocol has you do a lot of shady things but what stuck with me was framing a guy as a convicted pedophile to get ahead. This wasn't even optional far as I could tell. Sure the man was working for The Evil PMC but for all we know he was some ignorant lackey.

Before anyone mentions Spec Ops: The Line, that one's *supposed* to upset you. Games where doing evil things is optional don't really count either.

TLDR; Ever looked at a protagonist the game portrays as a hero and said to your self: "what a prick"?

Umm... Alpha Protocol... that IS optional. Go straight to his room without even trying that one, he'll be there, and you can just knock him out or kill him. Whatever. And Alpha Protocol was also trying for the shady/gray area. You're a SPY. How often do you think real spies get to go for the best possible option?


OT:

Fallout 3. There's an optional side-quest where you can either convince a girl to give up on a guy she likes... or give her ant queen pheromones so that she can date rape him. (sort of, apparently he kind of liked her too, but... really?) You get good karma for this. Someone at Bethesda has bizarre priorities.

Mass Effect 2: Legion's loyalty mission. Your choice boils down to brain-washing or genocide. The brain-washing one is given Paragon points. Which, despite Bioware's claims, are the 'good' points in the series.

All I can think of at the moment.

 

[Caldarin]

Connor in Assassins Creed 3. Even after he finds out the truth he keeps doing the same thing. And being a non-stop douche.

 

[Daveman]

Captain Price in Modern Warfare 1 using torture made me pretty uncomfortable. What made me even more uncomfortable is that they also showed it working. They also did the same thing in Modern Warfare 2.

 

[Toy Master Typhus]

Captain Price in Modern Warfare 1 using torture made me pretty uncomfortable. What made me even more uncomfortable is that they also showed it working. They also did the same thing in Modern Warfare 2.

Torture has been an effective way of gaining information since civilizations were first made. Granted it isn't always effective, you have people who can't be broken, people who put the value of a cause then their life, or people who just give out false information.


On that note I question the heroics of Avan Hardins in Valkyria Chronicles 2. How he preceded to let the mad doctor go after finding out she has put his brother, several countrymen/women, and young orphans kidnapped across the country side into a brainwashing containment zone to turn them into godless killing-machines. Even after she said she would just go to another nation and do it all over again for them. All because the one kid you managed to save would cry.

You are going to let someone get away with war-crimes (And possibly go out and commit them again) all because it might make the one BRAINWASHED survivor sad about losing her false mother.

 

[Tdoodle]

There's a bit in Fable 3 where you meet a romantic interest from your past, and have to rescue them from a sewer where they starts to remember all their romantic feelings for you. There are two options at the end of the quest, one where you return them to their new spouse and never see them again, and one where you run off into the sunset and leave the new spouse alone. I think they suicide, I'm not sure. Whichever ending I picked I felt kind of bad, either I leave the person with their new spouse knowing that they now have stronger feelings for me, or I run off into the sunset with them and an NPC dies.

 

[Bayushi_Kouya]

I feel the need to come to Kratos' defence on some points -- I'm not contesting that he's a huge throbbing jackass who's killed people for no reason (GOW3), but he's not the complete monster he's made out to be. Every single person he encounters in GOW1-2 that he has to kill could have gotten the hell out of his way, or helped him and earned their lives, but people keep telling him no, apparently oblivious to what happens when you say no to a man who doesn't believe in giving up. The worst you could say is that Kratos is a force for evolution, because he weeds out the stupid with alarming efficiency.

Similarly, I can't feel sympathy for the gods he kills because he is the enemy they created. He would have been happy if they just erased his brain, or just let him die, but no, they HAD to do their usual thing of forcing someone to live in torment.

I also find Nathan Drake's morality quite curious, but I found most of the plot of U2 unintelligible and conforming to the need for set pieces rather than any degree of logic. I usually pretend 2 didn't happen and merrily play 1 and 3.

The entirety of the Orzammar plot in Dragon Age: Origins. The Grey Warden is presented with this big long quest to find a Broodmother and kill her, when the much simpler answer would have been 'enter Bhelen/Harrowmont's residence, lop their head off, a new king is crowned.'

 

[GloatingSwine]

Torture has been an effective way of gaining information since civilizations were first made. Granted it isn't always effective, you have people who can't be broken, people who put the value of a cause then their life, or people who just give out false information.

Torture has been an effective way of making a person tell you what he thinks you want to hear. It has never been an effective way of gaining useful intelligence.

 

[GloatingSwine]

The COGS in Gears of War are all assholes. Well, humanity, really.

The Locust are the native species while humanity has been slowly raping their once beautiful planet, and yet the COG armies have the gall to call the Locust the invaders.

Uh...

Humans on Sera didn't come from Earth or anything, you know that right? Sera is humanities native planet as far as Gears of War is concerned.

The Locust did not attack because humans were wrecking the planet. They were doing it because the lambent infection was spreading and wiping them out. They were running out of time and space because the infection could not be contained underground any longer so they needed a new place to live.

They did not believe humans would be willing to share their land (due to them constantly being at war with one another) so chose to invade it rather than attempt to negotiate.

It comes back to the same place though. Humanity might be native to Sera, but they were colossal assholes for 100% of their recorded history, and the Locust basically assumed that no peace would be possible with such warlike bastards. (Of course, that doesn't actually work, since the whole visual design of the Locust is based around aggression, spikes, and general bastardry, so it's hard to see them as the naturally ambivalent people who made a judgement based on humanity's inability to be peacable. But hey, videogames are rarely made by clever storytellers who consider all aspects of their design and how they interact.

 

[Jakub324]

Just Cause 2. I don't know if Rico was really supposed to be a hero, but all he really did was drag civilians out of (and steal) moving cars, destroy a country's infrastructure, kill random soldiers who did nothing but their duty and threaten everyone who tried to help him, like when he threatened to throw Blaine back to Panay.

 

[BooTsPs3]

Snow. Fucking. Villiers. Dumbass self-proclaimed "hero" and complete tool who even says "heroes don't need plans." Argh!

Every single thing he does isn't thought through at all.

Did you play the game all the way through? The point you made is actually brought up and is a main point for his character development. He has to learn to deal with how when he calls himself a hero or does "heroic" things he is really just being a reckless fool.

OT: Dark souls. When you look into the lore of the world, it really makes you question if you are doing the right thing. Some of that stuff can hit really heavily. My favourite examples being quelaag and ceaseless discharge. I mean, the game tells you how you are the chosen one who should save the world and all, then makes you feel like a dick for doing what you thought was right.

Also megaman 7. At the end megaman almost murders Wile in cold blood.

 

[Saviordd1]

This is implying Renegade/Paragon was anything other than "black v. white"

I mean, in the first game you have the option to slaughter a colony because renegade shepard just isn't feelin' the whole saving people thing today.

I would contest that Paragon/Renegade is, for the most part, anything BUT "black v. white." The majority of renegade choices aren't about being evil, they're about being kind of a dick but doing so with the ultimate goal of saving everyone. Renegade Shepard doesn't have time for anyone's shit, they want to finish the job in a way that gives them the best possible advantage against their enemy without caring who they have to step on. That's not evil, it's just being an ass about it.

I figured the way renegade Shep would justify their actions on Feros would be to say that they're working to save the ENTIRE GALAXY, so a handful of dead colonists was the least of their worries. It's strange that your teammates just go along with it though.

No, that's lazy and evil.

Lets also go down the list of things renegade Shepard has done

*Shot their friends
*Continuously tells their teammates to shut the hell up about their problems
*Punches a reporter
*Kills the leading government for humanities gain
*Gets countless innocents killed cause fuck it
*Leaves a refinery to burn for one mans personal bullshit
*Let one of the greatest warriors in the galaxy commit suicide and then killed her daughter, cause fuck it

and more I've forgotten.

These aren't "Looking at the big picture" these are being evil and lazy. That's what renegade Shepard is, and has been, evil and lazy.

For one, if you look at Shepard in either 100% Paragon or Renegade at all, you're doing it wrong. Anybody who does a 100% playthrough doesn't know how to roleplay a character, and is probably a boring person.

That said, there are certain Renegade options that are very impulsive and seem to have no basis. You only listed one.

1) Shot their friends. The ones you can shoot being Wrex, and surviving squadmate in 3. Both have perfectly justifiable purposes.
2) Tells their teammates to shut up. Insensitive and maintains a level of professional distance, yes. Evil? No.
3) Punches reporter. Reckless and impulsive. Likely put in for the lulz.
4) Kills the leading government for humanity's gain. What you fail to mention is that there are two options for the Council dying, but you only mention one in a biased attempt to strengthen your argument. Yes, selfishly allowing them to die is possible. But another, also Renegade option, has you genuinely leave them to die for the sole purpose of throwing as much fire at Sovereign as possible. Obviously the player knows Sovereign dies either way. Shepard does not.
5) When does he get countless innocents killed for no good reason? Ever?
6) Leaves a refinery to burn for one man's vendetta. What you fail to mention is the person he is hunting. He is a proven murderer, backstabber, drug dealer, slaver, and a far bigger general asshole than the guy you're helping. Sacrificing 20 or so meaningless refinery workers to stop a man who's probably caused the deaths or ruination of thousands of people through his organization is an easy choice.
7) Lets (spoiler) kill herself and then kill her daughter because fuck it. Uh, no. Allowing her to kill herself is simply allowing her to fulfill her own Code without interference. Do you presume to interpose your beliefs on another species' culture? Quite insensitive. The daughter is an Ardat-Yakshi, so I can see the practical reasons for killing her, as far as containing the Ardat-Yakshi threat. If you're killing her to prevent Banshification though, you're an asshat. There's already a billion Banshees, will one more really make or break your mission?

When arguing you have to put it into the binary otherwise its un-arguable, which eliminates a few of your points.

And lets not forget how you can shoot Mordin,and Legion.

As for the innocents see Feros.

And so rather than put her daughter in the custody of the Asari government (Which you would do if you didn't want to "interpose your beliefs on another species' culture) you decide to shoot her.

Brilliant.

 

[Epona]

Snow. Fucking. Villiers. Dumbass self-proclaimed "hero" and complete tool who even says "heroes don't need plans." Argh!

Every single thing he does isn't thought through at all.

You missed the point, he was supposed to be a goof.

 

[Ledan]

All of the uncharted series.... he's doing it for pure personal profits (never finds out about the world saving until the end), and kills people for it. Never felt that he was a hero.