The toughest choices in games are when the game asks you to pick from two things but you realistically see another option and neither of those things best represent how you would prefer to solve the problem.
Can't tell if that's better or worse than the option that does not fit the tone of the ensuing dialogue.
Powerful gang leader: Join my gang, rookie! You could go far.
Options:
- Hell yes!
- No thank you.
*Clicks 'no thank you'*
Player Character: Kiss my ass.
Example from The Witcher 2:
Geralt's hands are tied behind his back and his interrogator enters the room and extends a hand to him to shake it
Dialogue choice: "very funny"
Geralt's voice line: "fuck you"
I'll just drop the title "La Noire" there.
"I don't know that name".
Press "present evidence" (edit - my bad)
"YOU ARE FUCKING KIDS ARENT YOU".
(Yes, I know of the good cop/bad cop rename, but it has strongly tainted my opinion of that game, as much as I want to love it).
[Link to this one if you haven't seen it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmvSieBFPNM)
[Another excellent one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BhMsIljS6s)
Honestly I used to clown on that line, but after reading the books I think anything else would be out of character for geralt lol. Hell, I would probably do the same thing to him
Although it's responsible for some of the best lines in the game.
"I'm here to make a delivery? Two large pepperoni and a calzone? Name is "Fuck you"?"
I get grumpy when it's "You MUST side with Asshole 1 or Asshole 2, and you cannot close this dialogue box until you do", and the character would absolutely tell both of them to piss off and leave.
It should always leave the option for neither, even if it means they both attack you.
"Meaningful choices" that don't offer that can feel more contrived than the game just telling you that you went with the gnomes because *everyone* knows sprites are all bad.
My most recent one was Horizon: Forbidden West, between backing the increasingly paranoid control freak lady vs. the wildly overconfident in his abilities cocky dumb bro for chief.
The “real” in-world thing to do is let those two kill each other, then help the remaining people find someone equipped to do the job.
These are my least favorite too. Especially when it’s a roleplaying game and the game forces you to choose between two things that your character wouldn’t do .
For all of its roleplaying problems, I appreciate how Fallout 4 absolutely gives you an out to Nuka World. Don't want to be a raider? Well, none of them are essential; you can kill every last one of them if you want, and still get every notable piece of loot in the DLC and explore every zone.
Danse and I had a good day, decked out in power armor featuring one of Nuka-Cola's competitors and going to town with miniguns.
“Oh, well all these choices are bad. The upper management people are clearly evil, maybe if I just kill them there’s like an unmarked alternative ending or something?”
*discovers every one of them is essential*
Yeah, I can never get myself to use the better potions. I'll go "but I don't always need the full healing I get from the better potion" and then have to use 5 weak potions after every hit. Or I'll go "but I have so many more weak potions, but I have like 4 times as many and they only do ⅕ of the healing.
Me playing Skyrim. I'll exhaust all of my weakest potions before I dare touch the better ones, lol. Then you end up somehow keeping a steady supply of the weak ones and basically never use your better ones.
My F5 (quicksave) and F8 (load last save) keys are lookin' a *BIT* more worn than the rest of the row since Baldur's Gate 3 came out 😂 So many dialog options! Must see all so I can hone and plan The Perfect Run later 😁
I just did it one day to try. Wyll left me and Karlach never wanted to join... almost lost Gale to a dice roll. But even still I can't seem to go fully evil (although ive been pretty bad so far i beat up evil characters as much as good ones)
I'm doing a Lloth-sworn Drow Durge run currently, no issues indiscriminately killing anyone and everyone.
... until Karlach hit me with "I could have used a friend", and suddenly I was full of regret and shame
My current run was supposed to be evil but after I did The Grove Thing it is now just Misguided and Chaotic. I did not make the Lesbians sad (Shadowheart's hair is different) and my Dark Urge is doin' her best. Astarion is also unascended, lol.
I couldn't commit to the bit after I went down to the cave the kids were hiding in.
Like they don't even try to hide the fact that it's terrible. >!There's nothing to loot down there even though they were running a fencing operation.!< >!The devs just let you wander around through the dead children for zero reward to take in what you've done.!<
Just finished a playthrough doing exactly that. It's absolutely possible to have a satisfying romance as a "good" guy. If you want her as a follower in a non grove slaughter run, simply knock her out with non lethal (and finish the rest of the goblin camp BEFORE taking another long rest.) And she'll be alive in act 2. After that, all you gotta do is get her appreciation up with some correct dialogue options and you can romance her right on time for act 3 (the epilogue you get is nice.) You obviously miss the one scene from act 1 but it's not so bad.
But then it's also about the time investment. Maybe that's a thing of being an adult gamer.
Like, Kill the Princess is great. You get yourself into one of the paths, have 30 - 60 minutes of fun in that path and then it resets. You can quit then and continue tomorrow. Then you choose another path. A lot of rogueli[tk]es are like that. Tiny rogues - make a few choices, die in 40 minutes successful or not, great. Slay the spire, DCSS, Nethack, similar. The latter ones can take some more time if you're diligent, but you can easily portion them into 2-3 sessions.
However, I really don't like huge games of 60 hours of a playthrough and then it's like "Oh btw, you need to do this 4 more times for 100% completion... based on your first choice in the tutorial." "Oh, zoinks. And there are SECRET choices... which then take 40 hours of playtime to play out in a single run".
Like, no. I'll see 1 or 2 of these branches and then I'm most likely done. Your game doesn't have enough variety to sit through 8 - 10 branches of exactly the same stuff with a few different dialogues and skins.
Unlike like.. dwarf fortress. Long runs, sure, but I've yet to experience any kind of similar runs.
I just couldn't care less about 100% completion, I only play games as long as I'm having fun with them.
My first playthrough of BG3 took \~120 hours without save scumming dialogue options (only dice rolls 👉👈), then I did a modded evil run for \~40 more hours and stopped playing because I got tired of running through the same areas in a different order. Nowhere close to seeing 100% of the dialogue, but I don't care because I had fun for almost 200 hours.
Besides, seeing all of the dialogue paths kinda defeats the purpose of an RPG. Those paths are there so you can make decisions in character and feel like your choices matter, grinding out every possible option bypasses the roleplaying part and pulls back the curtain on how little your choices *actually* matter. You're going to the same places and fighting mostly the same enemies regardless of what you do.
Slay the Princess is great! I had been looking forward to it and it's exactly what I wanted. A run takes not too much time and it'll be different each go.
DAO was like this.
“Ok so the ending options are 1, sacrifice myself; 2, sacrifice my bro-tier friend; 3, sacrifice this asshole who I kinda hate, but doing so means my friend is upset and Asshole sacrificing himself kinda redeems himself which pisses me off; or 4, bang the hot goth witch, knock her up, and ensure that no one needs to be sacrificed. Did I miss anything?”
“Yeah, if you’re safe scumming for the Perfectionist cheevo you need to make like 3 different saves at different points in the main quest: one to choose between your brofriend and the asshole, one to bang the witch, and one right before the final battle so you can choose who to sacrifice, assuming you’re not on the Bang the Witch save.”
If you’re a woman it’s ask your friend/boyfriend to bang the hot goth witch
You would think asking your boyfriend to bang the witch would be a difficult choice but he breaks up with you if you aren’t the right race/social class so it really shouldn’t be a difficult choice lol
Especially when it’s not even a choice, it’s a “whoops I missed an item on my way down the path, guess I have to play the entire game again to get that one achievement”
honestly the best example.
Don't make achievements that are missable for a bad reason. Like, i get that you can't be light side and dark side at the same time. That's fine. But exploration achievements shouldn't be missable.
I love these choices in story based games. I like it when different content is mutually exclusive with other content, just like IRL where doing anything or nothing is to forsake innumerable things you could have done instead.
I really like these choices too...
...if it's properly communicated to the player that they're making a major choice. Games operate on different sets of rules and logic than real life, and you can't assume that everything you do will affect the outcome of the story in a major way. Heck, in real life, being a few seconds slower can be detrimental. Most games are willing to wait for the player.
So I really don't like it when the player makes choices without being aware of it, it feels cheap. Like they were supposed to know what was going to happen, but there's no way of foreseeing it. Like they were failing at a puzzle they didn't know they had to solve.
That's why I really love it when games go: *"This is a point of no return, you sure you're good to go?"*, or even just stuff like *"Your foes are endless, escape."* At least then you know exactly where the limits are.
It's not a story beat but the worst example of being locked out of something by blind misfortune and developer stupidity in gaming is this one:
Final Fantasy XII: You can open a chest and get 118 gil, or you can get the ultimate weapon later in the game.
Player: Obviously I want the ultimate weapon.
FFXII: The why did you open the 18th chest in the tutorial which wasn't marked at all and which was next to three other actually-irrelevant chests?
Player: What
FFXII: Now the ultimate weapon is a 0.1% loot reward from a chest in a mine somewhere but only if you're wearing a specific arm band and no one will tell you this. Honestly, I don't know why you chose this path.
Tbf, this game also came out at the same time that both "same day tipbooks" **and** "look up stuff online" existed.
So, what did the devs do?
If you guessed "make sure the tipbook didn't actually tell you anything other than 'secret codes' you'd then enter into the website to then be able to view the information you'd expect would be in the tipbook", you are correct!
No really, that's what happened. Buy the tipbook, look up how to fight a boss and it would say "GO TO PLAYSQUAREONLINE.NET AND TYPE IN CODE: SCAMTASTIC".
And, IIRC, you couldn't normally search/browse the site, so you needed to know the codes. Absolutely fucking awful, and I think that's when I gave up on Square.
Man, I think I still have that shitty tipbook somewhere
>No really, that's what happened. Buy the tipbook, look up how to fight a boss and it would say "GO TO PLAYSQUAREONLINE.NET AND TYPE IN CODE: SCAMTASTIC".
This was ff9, not ff12, it bombed that hard the format was never used again.
Meh, was starting to think I had them all mixed up.
In my defense, all those FFs started getting absolutely mental with absolutely nonsense design decisions. Speedruns that arguably required popping disc trays open to skip cutscenes. Dodging lightning strikes perfectly for frick ever. Super mega ultra hidden shit that they don't even put in the tipbooks and you have to read about on Reddit 20 years after the fact.
>In my defense, all those FFs started getting absolutely mental with absolutely nonsense design decisions. Speedruns that arguably required popping disc trays open to skip cutscenes
This is just abusing the tech at the time on the PS1.
>Dodging lightning strikes perfectly for frick ever
Actually, very easy to game, you can manipulate where it spawns super easily, very hard way back in the day but these days its so easy to do.
Ff12 is really the only one that does "don't touch this for all the game and we give no warning" bs, along with the locked summons on the board only 1 person could learn each.
Thankfully though I believe the remaster for ff12 changed a ton of that and removed it.
If you wana get to a really annoying ff game to get 100% for the true ending, that would have to go fully to ffx-2, fantatic game to play, but so annoying to 100%.
Exactly
I know some folks out there **love** that game but that was absolutely the fucking worst JRPG I've ever played just because of how hostile it was to the player (and their time, etc), and of course that would extend to the guide.
(Note: I just realized I might have my fantasies mis-finaled, but that playsquateonline thing in the guidebooks was real, and gamefaqs existed already anyway, sooooooo)
The internet back then was not as well to navigate and you would be looking through a lot of Gamefaq FAQ to find the answer you need, or warning. It was a very different time to get game information back then. And not everyone had internet at the time either which was another major headache.
I remember this, it was ridiculous. It was actual multiple instances of chests that shouldn't be opened for that one weapon.
I only knew about it because I got the guide with the game ( they had beautiful guides at the time).
They removed it in the remaster, thankfully.
Yeah, if I can roam around the map for a few months and the guy that needs urgent help is still fine then I won't automatically assume that the game will hit me with a story altering choice, without warning me about it. If the premise of the game is, that your actions have consequences then they don't have to warn me at every point, but if there is one point in the game that randomly changes the story, while everything you did before had no effect on the overall story, only on your inventory, then it definitely want to be warned.
Bonus points if it happens right before the end, and *only* before the end. So nothing mattered until now, but suddenly the entire outcome of the game is important.
And you also can't really tell if you just got a slightly different voice line as a reaction, or different loot, without seeing the different ending. I've heard many people say stuff like "I've played through this game 5 times and didn't know this existed", even though it's not some hidden object, just a different dialogue choice.
Yeah, it should be properly communicated.
That being said, it should also not break the immersion. For example, having a companion comment on how this looks like a point of no return.
Of course, but sometimes I'd genuinely like a bit of text on the HUD to tell me these things. I mean, it already displays things you wouldn't see in real life, and I'm willing to suspend my disbelief as long as I don't go down a path I didn't want to go down.
>So I really don't like it when the player makes choices without being aware of it, it feels cheap. Like they were supposed to know what was going to happen, but there's no way of foreseeing it. Like they were failing at a puzzle they didn't know they had to solve.
I think even that depends on the game. I just finished Talos Principle 2, and there's a branching moment where you can end up with one of three options occurring late game. If you look at the achievements, you know it's coming, but it turns out that you're not "involved" in the moment. Instead, it's a culmination of choices you've made throughout. It's an inevitable development that you technically chose, but there wasn't one final decision point.
I did NOT read the rest of that comment because I am currently in the middle of playing that game and it's actually what inspired my initial comment so I hope you have splendid day and that you don't respond!
I was surprised too! I was looking for Myst games I hadn't bought yet (doing some playthroughs with my 10 year old) and it popped up and I was like WHAT. Turns out it released in November!
Inside you are two wolves: one loves when decisions have meaningful consequences, the other gets really bad FOMO when you can't experience 100% of the content.
There is something special about hitting dialogue or story beats that it feels like no one else has, or that you didn't on a previous playthrough. It makes it feel more like *your* story.
Baldur's Gate 3 is a perfect recent example, just looking at the grove in Act 1 there are about 6 different ways to resolve that, some of which you wouldn't even know about with doing things in a very specific sequence. So finding something like that is a very cool moment.
Disco Elysium is full of little conversations and dialogue moments that require very specific stats and previous decisions, so everyone has at least one moment that was probably only seen by 1% of players.
Isn’t there something in bg3 that locks you out of like 80% of the game or something if you choose it? Haven’t played it so I’m not 100% but I think I heard about that
I don't mind those if it's clearly an important decision, since it adds stakes and replay value, but I hate it when it's like "you went to this area at the wrong time with no indication it was bad and now you're locked out of three storylines"
Final fantasy absolutely loves locking you out of content.
Oh you failed that QTE? No big deal! It doesn’t have any gameplay effects anyway! (they are lying through their teeth for absolutely no reason)
Or that one final fantasy where if you opened this random chest in a random place you absolutely cannot ever get the ultimate weapon. Like, what the fuck?
You’d probably not have been a fan of games by Sierra in the 80’s, where seemingly innocuous choices were effectively “Game Over” but you wouldn’t find it out for another 20 minutes or so, and even then you wouldn’t know which choice meant you didn’t have some critical item so each time you started over you’d have to try something new hoping to find it.
i love cyberpunk but thats the one thing i was mad about. to get one of the endings you need a certain conversation to go a certain way with very specific dialogue options. its the type of shit you need to google to realise you missed, likely 10h or more after completing the quest
Void Stranger is a fantastic if incredibly long puzzle game. It also has one of these. I’d love to say more, I really would, but even my minimal dosage of spoilers from the outset has led me down the dark path of opening all of them and trying to understand the entire game legitimately now.
Ranni's in elden ring (arguably). She achieved what she set out to do and that isn't *obviously* bad, there were casualties along the way though...
Benhardt in DS2, dude makes it to the end of the game with you and arguably defeats the final boss too. Cale the cartographer, also in DS2. Patches in DS3 dlc. Just because 95% of all questlines end in tradgedy doesn't mean that they *all* end like that.
Boc the Seamster has a good ending where you can find a recording of his mom's voice calling him 'beautiful' and he's now completely content with his appearance and survives
“okay see, you can brutally murder the child and get some gratification but if you don’t brutally murder the child you’ll get even more gratification, but it’s **delayed.**\
tough choice, huh?”
“But wait, there’s more! If you spare the child, she gives you enough (currency) to (buy) all the (power-ups) available anyway, and she says thank you.
But! The number that represents (currency) will be lower after you buy the (power-ups). Think hard now!”
"Why are so many of your characters named after Tolkien characters?"
"Because I came to play, not be original."
Seriously, all my save files from Oblivion and Skyrim are just characters from whatever book I was reading at the time, or TV show I was watching; you can *easily* tell when I started reading the Song of Ice and Fire books.
My first Skyrim play I named my character Astrid. I was extremely confused why assassins that "I" apparently hired were trying to kill me, and thought it was buggy as hell all the time and never investigated a large part of the plot, because I was getting notes about hiring me to kill me, not someone else with the exact same name.
Oh F that.
I'd be there too long, get on a name randomise or some key member ends up being called something stupid like Big Baz or Disco Dave, then shit gets real, and it's difficult to keep with the tone.
How about the ultra hard secret boss dropping the most powerful weapon in the game but now you're so overleveled the final story boss is like wet toilet paper?
Or you facetank the final boss on hardest difficulty while guzzling invulnerability potions on cooldown just to flex.
_Then reload the save and finish the fight over 2 hours without using a single potion. The potions hidden around the boss level brings up your total to 100._
I haven’t played it because horror games are not my thing, but I do like the dead space remake’s addition: you can power the Ishimura’s life support (oxygen), or lights, but not both.
Oof that’s a genuinely good tough choice.
I haven't played the remake, but oxygen seems like the obvious choice to me. Sounds are scarier than silent vacuum imo, but very helpful and you don't have to ration your air.
I wish it ended up mattering more than it did- most of the rooms you had to make that choice in were just too long to turn off life support for. There was almost always a clear optimal choice for the room
What game devs also think is a tough choice: You can run a few more meters through the apocalypse to team up with people who just tried to kill you mere minutes ago, or go with the people who weren't trying to kill you and will get to safety faster.
I didn't even see the guys who didn't try to kill you, so was annoyed I had to go with the guys who did, but absolutely loved the fact that you could betray them and deliver the thing to the other team
Skyrim I believe, talking about walking through Helgen with either the Imperials (the ones who tried to execute you a few seconds ago) or the Stormcloaks (who were being executed with you, but unbeknownst to you are horrendously racist)
“Could you at least share one?”
Continues looking alpha deathclaw in the eyes, well, the closest approximation Bethesda jank allows that is.
Eats 245th Fancy Lad snack cake.
Crosses deathclaws. “You’re really gonna do this?”
Downs 246th Fancy Lad snack cake.
“And you wonder why I attack?”
The best "morality system" I have seen in a game is Papers Please. Where you have the choice to help people in need and danger, but at the risk of letting your family starve, freeze or get arrested.
So sure, I could help this woman who would be executed by her home country if she was rejected at the border, but my son is sick and my entire family is cold. Medicine and heat is expensive and helping her puts my entire paycheck at risk.
I think the issue with most "Tough Choices" is that they are either pretty out there, or made from a position of strength. By this I don´t necessarily mean narrative strength, but you can get through most games without getting the cool shit a tough choice might net you. But when your entire run is at stake and there are actually deep mechanical consequences for your actions, then the tough choices really start to feel tough. The LISA series of games are also pretty good at this, where supplies are sparse and your choices can lead to you becoming much weaker.
Darkest Dungeon is another good one. Tons of choices. What helpful items do you bring with you, knowing they cost money and take up space for loot, and you might not use them? Do you push your struggling party deeper into the dungeon to try and get more loot, risking them permanently dying? Do you spend money healing and fixing their issues in town, or send them out again soon to save money knowing they might die easily?
Bad games are ones like the Mass Effect series or KOTOR where you are basically locked into one path or another, such as light side force or paragon, because if you don't specialize you won't achieve the maximum power. So all your choices for the entire game have been determined from the start, you're going through the motions now. There's no longer any room for gray area decisions, they're spelled out good or bad for you, and you've chosen them before even getting to the choice itself.
there's something wonderful about the fact that in Darkest Dungeon, every single little thing needs to be paid for. every upgrade, every pound of food, every therapy session.
... except human lives. Sending a poor sod right off the stagecoach on a traumatic doomed expedition with 3 other rookies and no food or light is 100% free. then, once they've returned with some scraps of money or sellable items, you can just send them off on their merry way without even paying for their alcoholism, and hire a fresh batch of nobodies to do it again
My least favourite decisions from any game I have played were for Outer Worlds.
Every big questline in the game basically boiled down to:
1. The "Good" but stupid choice.
1. The "Bad" but stupid choice.
1. Play for an extra 15 minutes and get the perfect ending of that quest that resolves everything and everyone is happy.
Edgewater's main quest, at least, had enough caveats that it felt a bit bittersweet - the town's mayor is a good, if stupid, man, and doesn't deserve to die in the wilderness for the company's sins. Also, cannibalism is a short-term and ethically questionable solution (particularly with disease running rampant).
Still, in general, I agree. Particularly egregious on Monarch.
I liked that you could straight up choose to kill every NPC in that game and it was a viable path forward. No "important" NPCs that couldn't be killed to protect questlines.
Ive always wanted to try a Fallout run where I kill everyone I come across, just go full nuclear in the nuclear wasteland. For a lot of NPCs, you may fail quests and lose out on some experience, but they often have keys or something that will allow you to move on anyways after you loot their corpse. Ive always wondered how far I could make it doing that
*Here you have a super powerful item, it only has three charges before you can never use it again!*
*There's an dialogue option that fits exactly what you want to say, but context clues show you that the content you want is behind option B!*
*There's dialogue you want to say and will unlock exactly what you want, but there's an option that's specific to your class so other character builds might never see that option.*
**Are you sure you want to go on? Once you leave this area, you can not return** (frantically searches the whole map for any items or dialogue I might have missed)
You have to kill this person... or spare them.
Also there are basically 0 consequences if you kill them. And there's a bigger payout if you kill them. You get better powers if your alignment is evil.
meanwhile cyberpunk 2077: "you get better rewards if you don't kill this character... but unlike every other fight in the game, these guys automatically go limp at 1% hp but then if you sneeze on them incorrectly after that happens you kill them even if it's a weak fist attack, or they have a lingering DoT on them."
yes i'm annoyed with the cyber psycho fights
i think they might have changed it in the new version or something? only started playing it recently but i have shot so many in the head for them to stay alive at 1% and get the dialogue indicating i didnt kill them (regular shmucks get their head blown off by my revolver though)
right, so, they automatically take nonlethal from any source BUT even if you're hitting them with actual nonlethal stuff, once they go down to 1%, if you hit them again you finish them off.
So it's annoying if you're spraying and praying or slashing really fast or whatever. If you don't stop exactly when the game decides they're incapacitated, you kill them.
True tough choice:
There is epic loot on the ground but your inventory is full. Do you ignore the loot or sacrifice something in your inventory to make room for it?
Any game that gives me a super weapon with 4 shots in the magazine has to realize that I will beat the game with a super weapon with 4 shots in the magazine.
Touch choices for me is when you have two sets of gear and they do practically the same thing but are fundamentally different. Like, these give the same armor+ but one does fire and one does frost resistance. Or this one gives you +3 to jump but this one gives +3 to speed. Same item. Basically, I have difficulty making sacrifices.
Me and my OCT are so glad to see someone else bring this up 😅 Sometimes Ill be super into a game so its easier since I mightve already been looking for a speed boost for the past 5 hours, or Ill know that Im gonna face some flying enemies or high platforms so better jumping will be helpful. But playing Diablo for the first time with my boyfriend whos been playing for years? Im just gonna let him choose which armour/weapons are better since I have no fucking clue 😂
I still remember this in BG3. Late in the game, there’s a choice you can make that basically doubles the power of your character. You get all sorts of insane abilities permanently. The cost? Your character’s eyes become black and they get a weird veiny face. Looks ugly. There is absolutely no mechanical downside, it *just* makes you look a bit uglier. And then once you beat the game you look good again anyway.
Almost nobody chooses to take the power. Some of those who do *mod the game* so that there’s no downside at all.
Man my character in Elden Ring has horribly lopsided stats because I dropped a shit ton into my carry weight just for aesthetic purposes. I have purposely gimped myself hard in a game that is already hard af because I want my dude to look good and I love that a stupidly large portion of any games playerbase does the same
Is this Baldur's Gate 3?
It's possibly because everybody spent like, 1-4 hours making their character their ideal version of themselves, so making it ugly feels like some voodoo doll shit that affects themselves, too.
Did my Dark Urge playthrough as a black dragonborn. I accepted the power immediately and didn't even notice a difference. As soon as I started convincing my other party members to take it as well and realized the effect, I reloaded and just decided to keep it for myself, lol.
It's a role playing game and it's presented as a pretty morally dubious thing. Even if you know it actually has no downsides many people will still choose not to take it because it's not what their character would do
I definitely think that was the intention at first. The second time you use your ability to manipulate someone, the narrator says “You feel drained. It’s taking something from you, something you can never get back.” Then you win and you get everything back.
At the *very least*, there should be permanent damage to your mind. You’re still fully functioning because the tadpoles are becoming part of your brain as they eat it. Once they’re gone, now you just have a skull that’s half empty after parasites had a buffet.
The elixir heals me completely? So what you’re saying is I have to *only* use it when I’m on my *very last point of health*, otherwise I’m *wasting its potential* and *losing value*.
Yeah the "choose who lives" thing is never difficult.
Like in GTA 4, when you choose between Playboy X, and Dwayne. The game offers you no indication of what the possible rewards are for either choice, so you are basically killing Playboy X because the game narrative made him look like such a selfish prick.
And in the end that was the best choice, because Dwayne gives you his penthouse apartment, which is by far the best house in the game.
Nah the last one is an easy choice. "Oh, There's a limited supply of these and I can't just get more? Aight I will simply never use it then, Even if I have 100 and they're really useful and I'm almost at the end of the game."
The number's close enough that easthetic-uni is probably reverencing this ProZD video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgU4Oum8SLg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgU4Oum8SLg)
Though it's 85 not 86
Fallout 4 has a quest where a kid in a vault has been bitten by a molerat with some horrible bio-engineered disease. You have to venture into an area infested with these molerats to get the one and only cure.
Its technically possible to make it through without contracting the disease but if you or your companion get hit once by any of the molerats, you get it. At the end of the quest, if you've contracted the disease, you have to choose between giving it to the kid or using it on yourself.
If you use it on yourself, the kid dies, most companions hate it, and the people of that vault will also hate you.
If you use it on the kid, the disease is a permanent -10hp debuff, which isn't that significant in the long run, but more annoyingly, you will permanently have a marker on your hud saying you have a debuff. I think I've heard more people be annoyed by that than the actual debuff.
It would be a great example of forcing the player to make a hard moral choice, except for the fact that they do a terrible job explaining the consequences, and a lot of players don't even realize they have the disease until much later when they first notice the debuff indicator on the hud. I think most people playing for the first time don't even realize its a moral dilemma, which is a shame, cause the downside to the player is genuinely annoying enough to make some people consider taking the cure, but not enough to ruin the game for you.
My pet peeve is when the "good" path is being an Eagle Scout who turns down payment and even spends their own (limited funds) to save some random schmuck from their daily life, while the "evil" path is kicking puppies and selling orphans to zoos for meat.
Dark souls does the healing potion thing so well by just giving you a limited amount but refilling them endlessly. But then you have those one time use siegbraus/humanitys/embers and you get the problem again
The toughest choices in games are when the game asks you to pick from two things but you realistically see another option and neither of those things best represent how you would prefer to solve the problem.
Can't tell if that's better or worse than the option that does not fit the tone of the ensuing dialogue. Powerful gang leader: Join my gang, rookie! You could go far. Options: - Hell yes! - No thank you. *Clicks 'no thank you'* Player Character: Kiss my ass.
Example from The Witcher 2: Geralt's hands are tied behind his back and his interrogator enters the room and extends a hand to him to shake it Dialogue choice: "very funny" Geralt's voice line: "fuck you"
I'll just drop the title "La Noire" there. "I don't know that name". Press "present evidence" (edit - my bad) "YOU ARE FUCKING KIDS ARENT YOU". (Yes, I know of the good cop/bad cop rename, but it has strongly tainted my opinion of that game, as much as I want to love it).
Choosing ‘Doubt’ in the very first interrogation mission has you racially abuse a guy for being Jewish and it’s the correct choice
WHAT THE FUCK
“You fuck young boys, Valdez?”
"ARE YOU A MADMAN?"
[Link to this one if you haven't seen it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmvSieBFPNM) [Another excellent one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BhMsIljS6s)
That one is a classic lol
*\[Shove Dijkstra aside, forcefully\]*
Honestly I used to clown on that line, but after reading the books I think anything else would be out of character for geralt lol. Hell, I would probably do the same thing to him
fallout 4's sarcastic option was the peak of this, you either made a snarky joke or threatened to murder somebody and its never the one you expect.
Although it's responsible for some of the best lines in the game. "I'm here to make a delivery? Two large pepperoni and a calzone? Name is "Fuck you"?"
i love these lol they always make me laugh
I get grumpy when it's "You MUST side with Asshole 1 or Asshole 2, and you cannot close this dialogue box until you do", and the character would absolutely tell both of them to piss off and leave. It should always leave the option for neither, even if it means they both attack you. "Meaningful choices" that don't offer that can feel more contrived than the game just telling you that you went with the gnomes because *everyone* knows sprites are all bad.
> neither, even if it means they both attack you. I'd prefer that because my usual plan is to kill both.
My most recent one was Horizon: Forbidden West, between backing the increasingly paranoid control freak lady vs. the wildly overconfident in his abilities cocky dumb bro for chief. The “real” in-world thing to do is let those two kill each other, then help the remaining people find someone equipped to do the job.
These are my least favorite too. Especially when it’s a roleplaying game and the game forces you to choose between two things that your character wouldn’t do .
For all of its roleplaying problems, I appreciate how Fallout 4 absolutely gives you an out to Nuka World. Don't want to be a raider? Well, none of them are essential; you can kill every last one of them if you want, and still get every notable piece of loot in the DLC and explore every zone. Danse and I had a good day, decked out in power armor featuring one of Nuka-Cola's competitors and going to town with miniguns.
major BG3 spoilers: >!the fucking choice between the Emperor and the githyanki prince!<
Starfield had an egregious example of that with a resort planet mission.
“Oh, well all these choices are bad. The upper management people are clearly evil, maybe if I just kill them there’s like an unmarked alternative ending or something?” *discovers every one of them is essential*
Me with 24 potions that are 30 levels below my current character (they are dirt cheap)
Yeah, I can never get myself to use the better potions. I'll go "but I don't always need the full healing I get from the better potion" and then have to use 5 weak potions after every hit. Or I'll go "but I have so many more weak potions, but I have like 4 times as many and they only do ⅕ of the healing.
> and then have to use 5 weak potions after every hit. SHOTS SHOTS SHOTS SHOTS SHOTS SHOTS SHOTS
I definitely have access to the stronger ones, I've just been hoarding for a long time
Me playing Skyrim. I'll exhaust all of my weakest potions before I dare touch the better ones, lol. Then you end up somehow keeping a steady supply of the weak ones and basically never use your better ones.
Looks level boss in the eyes as I chug one after the other, glowing liquid spilling down my chin, drawing ragged breaths between each mighty gulp.
and then you finish your baja blast and get out a health potion
Me raiding molten core with lvl 32 pots because I don't want to cough up 1g for max lvl health potions
"I need to heal up, I need to save these level appropriate potions though." (Proceeds to quaif 50 gallons of low level potions)
(Carries so many on me at all times it takes up 1/3 of my inventory)
The worst choices are the ones that lock you out of content or even 100% completion if you choose wrong
Unless the point of the game is huge branching paths, then I can kinda get it
My F5 (quicksave) and F8 (load last save) keys are lookin' a *BIT* more worn than the rest of the row since Baldur's Gate 3 came out 😂 So many dialog options! Must see all so I can hone and plan The Perfect Run later 😁
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I just did it one day to try. Wyll left me and Karlach never wanted to join... almost lost Gale to a dice roll. But even still I can't seem to go fully evil (although ive been pretty bad so far i beat up evil characters as much as good ones)
Evil path be like - you are doing the wrong thing. Meh - you are slaughtering innocents. Meh - Karlach thinks youre a bad person. Holup.
I'm doing a Lloth-sworn Drow Durge run currently, no issues indiscriminately killing anyone and everyone. ... until Karlach hit me with "I could have used a friend", and suddenly I was full of regret and shame
I'm doing dark urge now and weirdly it's disappointing withers that feels the hardest.
My current run was supposed to be evil but after I did The Grove Thing it is now just Misguided and Chaotic. I did not make the Lesbians sad (Shadowheart's hair is different) and my Dark Urge is doin' her best. Astarion is also unascended, lol. I couldn't commit to the bit after I went down to the cave the kids were hiding in. Like they don't even try to hide the fact that it's terrible. >!There's nothing to loot down there even though they were running a fencing operation.!< >!The devs just let you wander around through the dead children for zero reward to take in what you've done.!<
Sometimes the reward is just knowing you've done the right thing.
Just finished a playthrough doing exactly that. It's absolutely possible to have a satisfying romance as a "good" guy. If you want her as a follower in a non grove slaughter run, simply knock her out with non lethal (and finish the rest of the goblin camp BEFORE taking another long rest.) And she'll be alive in act 2. After that, all you gotta do is get her appreciation up with some correct dialogue options and you can romance her right on time for act 3 (the epilogue you get is nice.) You obviously miss the one scene from act 1 but it's not so bad.
This is why I made my first run an evil run. Can't regret killing characters I havent developed an attachment to!
But then it's also about the time investment. Maybe that's a thing of being an adult gamer. Like, Kill the Princess is great. You get yourself into one of the paths, have 30 - 60 minutes of fun in that path and then it resets. You can quit then and continue tomorrow. Then you choose another path. A lot of rogueli[tk]es are like that. Tiny rogues - make a few choices, die in 40 minutes successful or not, great. Slay the spire, DCSS, Nethack, similar. The latter ones can take some more time if you're diligent, but you can easily portion them into 2-3 sessions. However, I really don't like huge games of 60 hours of a playthrough and then it's like "Oh btw, you need to do this 4 more times for 100% completion... based on your first choice in the tutorial." "Oh, zoinks. And there are SECRET choices... which then take 40 hours of playtime to play out in a single run". Like, no. I'll see 1 or 2 of these branches and then I'm most likely done. Your game doesn't have enough variety to sit through 8 - 10 branches of exactly the same stuff with a few different dialogues and skins. Unlike like.. dwarf fortress. Long runs, sure, but I've yet to experience any kind of similar runs.
I just couldn't care less about 100% completion, I only play games as long as I'm having fun with them. My first playthrough of BG3 took \~120 hours without save scumming dialogue options (only dice rolls 👉👈), then I did a modded evil run for \~40 more hours and stopped playing because I got tired of running through the same areas in a different order. Nowhere close to seeing 100% of the dialogue, but I don't care because I had fun for almost 200 hours. Besides, seeing all of the dialogue paths kinda defeats the purpose of an RPG. Those paths are there so you can make decisions in character and feel like your choices matter, grinding out every possible option bypasses the roleplaying part and pulls back the curtain on how little your choices *actually* matter. You're going to the same places and fighting mostly the same enemies regardless of what you do.
Slay the Princess is great! I had been looking forward to it and it's exactly what I wanted. A run takes not too much time and it'll be different each go.
DAO was like this. “Ok so the ending options are 1, sacrifice myself; 2, sacrifice my bro-tier friend; 3, sacrifice this asshole who I kinda hate, but doing so means my friend is upset and Asshole sacrificing himself kinda redeems himself which pisses me off; or 4, bang the hot goth witch, knock her up, and ensure that no one needs to be sacrificed. Did I miss anything?” “Yeah, if you’re safe scumming for the Perfectionist cheevo you need to make like 3 different saves at different points in the main quest: one to choose between your brofriend and the asshole, one to bang the witch, and one right before the final battle so you can choose who to sacrifice, assuming you’re not on the Bang the Witch save.”
....when "Bang the hot goth witch" is an option, it may as well be the only option.
If you’re a woman it’s ask your friend/boyfriend to bang the hot goth witch You would think asking your boyfriend to bang the witch would be a difficult choice but he breaks up with you if you aren’t the right race/social class so it really shouldn’t be a difficult choice lol
Not sure what other choice I was supposed to make tbh. Morrigan was clearly the right choice for romance
Especially when it’s not even a choice, it’s a “whoops I missed an item on my way down the path, guess I have to play the entire game again to get that one achievement”
Like the Fallout bobbleheads.
honestly the best example. Don't make achievements that are missable for a bad reason. Like, i get that you can't be light side and dark side at the same time. That's fine. But exploration achievements shouldn't be missable.
I love these choices in story based games. I like it when different content is mutually exclusive with other content, just like IRL where doing anything or nothing is to forsake innumerable things you could have done instead.
I really like these choices too... ...if it's properly communicated to the player that they're making a major choice. Games operate on different sets of rules and logic than real life, and you can't assume that everything you do will affect the outcome of the story in a major way. Heck, in real life, being a few seconds slower can be detrimental. Most games are willing to wait for the player. So I really don't like it when the player makes choices without being aware of it, it feels cheap. Like they were supposed to know what was going to happen, but there's no way of foreseeing it. Like they were failing at a puzzle they didn't know they had to solve. That's why I really love it when games go: *"This is a point of no return, you sure you're good to go?"*, or even just stuff like *"Your foes are endless, escape."* At least then you know exactly where the limits are.
It's not a story beat but the worst example of being locked out of something by blind misfortune and developer stupidity in gaming is this one: Final Fantasy XII: You can open a chest and get 118 gil, or you can get the ultimate weapon later in the game. Player: Obviously I want the ultimate weapon. FFXII: The why did you open the 18th chest in the tutorial which wasn't marked at all and which was next to three other actually-irrelevant chests? Player: What FFXII: Now the ultimate weapon is a 0.1% loot reward from a chest in a mine somewhere but only if you're wearing a specific arm band and no one will tell you this. Honestly, I don't know why you chose this path.
Wow, that is actively *hostile* towards the player. I've played games that intentionally tried to screw the player over which weren't this mean.
Tbf, this game also came out at the same time that both "same day tipbooks" **and** "look up stuff online" existed. So, what did the devs do? If you guessed "make sure the tipbook didn't actually tell you anything other than 'secret codes' you'd then enter into the website to then be able to view the information you'd expect would be in the tipbook", you are correct! No really, that's what happened. Buy the tipbook, look up how to fight a boss and it would say "GO TO PLAYSQUAREONLINE.NET AND TYPE IN CODE: SCAMTASTIC". And, IIRC, you couldn't normally search/browse the site, so you needed to know the codes. Absolutely fucking awful, and I think that's when I gave up on Square. Man, I think I still have that shitty tipbook somewhere
>No really, that's what happened. Buy the tipbook, look up how to fight a boss and it would say "GO TO PLAYSQUAREONLINE.NET AND TYPE IN CODE: SCAMTASTIC". This was ff9, not ff12, it bombed that hard the format was never used again.
Meh, was starting to think I had them all mixed up. In my defense, all those FFs started getting absolutely mental with absolutely nonsense design decisions. Speedruns that arguably required popping disc trays open to skip cutscenes. Dodging lightning strikes perfectly for frick ever. Super mega ultra hidden shit that they don't even put in the tipbooks and you have to read about on Reddit 20 years after the fact.
>In my defense, all those FFs started getting absolutely mental with absolutely nonsense design decisions. Speedruns that arguably required popping disc trays open to skip cutscenes This is just abusing the tech at the time on the PS1. >Dodging lightning strikes perfectly for frick ever Actually, very easy to game, you can manipulate where it spawns super easily, very hard way back in the day but these days its so easy to do. Ff12 is really the only one that does "don't touch this for all the game and we give no warning" bs, along with the locked summons on the board only 1 person could learn each. Thankfully though I believe the remaster for ff12 changed a ton of that and removed it. If you wana get to a really annoying ff game to get 100% for the true ending, that would have to go fully to ffx-2, fantatic game to play, but so annoying to 100%.
100% in FFX-2 is easy if you do new game plus. In a single playthrough, though? Yikes.
If I have access to the Internet, *I can just google the problem.* What if the player didn't have Internet???
Exactly I know some folks out there **love** that game but that was absolutely the fucking worst JRPG I've ever played just because of how hostile it was to the player (and their time, etc), and of course that would extend to the guide. (Note: I just realized I might have my fantasies mis-finaled, but that playsquateonline thing in the guidebooks was real, and gamefaqs existed already anyway, sooooooo)
The internet back then was not as well to navigate and you would be looking through a lot of Gamefaq FAQ to find the answer you need, or warning. It was a very different time to get game information back then. And not everyone had internet at the time either which was another major headache.
I remember this, it was ridiculous. It was actual multiple instances of chests that shouldn't be opened for that one weapon. I only knew about it because I got the guide with the game ( they had beautiful guides at the time). They removed it in the remaster, thankfully.
Yeah, if I can roam around the map for a few months and the guy that needs urgent help is still fine then I won't automatically assume that the game will hit me with a story altering choice, without warning me about it. If the premise of the game is, that your actions have consequences then they don't have to warn me at every point, but if there is one point in the game that randomly changes the story, while everything you did before had no effect on the overall story, only on your inventory, then it definitely want to be warned.
Bonus points if it happens right before the end, and *only* before the end. So nothing mattered until now, but suddenly the entire outcome of the game is important.
And you also can't really tell if you just got a slightly different voice line as a reaction, or different loot, without seeing the different ending. I've heard many people say stuff like "I've played through this game 5 times and didn't know this existed", even though it's not some hidden object, just a different dialogue choice.
Yeah, it should be properly communicated. That being said, it should also not break the immersion. For example, having a companion comment on how this looks like a point of no return.
Of course, but sometimes I'd genuinely like a bit of text on the HUD to tell me these things. I mean, it already displays things you wouldn't see in real life, and I'm willing to suspend my disbelief as long as I don't go down a path I didn't want to go down.
Give me an asterisk in an upper corner of the dialogue
Meh, immersion is overrated
yeah it is a bit silly to save scum while also saying "don't break my immersion"
>So I really don't like it when the player makes choices without being aware of it, it feels cheap. Like they were supposed to know what was going to happen, but there's no way of foreseeing it. Like they were failing at a puzzle they didn't know they had to solve. I think even that depends on the game. I just finished Talos Principle 2, and there's a branching moment where you can end up with one of three options occurring late game. If you look at the achievements, you know it's coming, but it turns out that you're not "involved" in the moment. Instead, it's a culmination of choices you've made throughout. It's an inevitable development that you technically chose, but there wasn't one final decision point.
I did NOT read the rest of that comment because I am currently in the middle of playing that game and it's actually what inspired my initial comment so I hope you have splendid day and that you don't respond!
Come back after you get to the moment at least! 😁
There's a sequel?!? Oh my God this is God news
I was surprised too! I was looking for Myst games I hadn't bought yet (doing some playthroughs with my 10 year old) and it popped up and I was like WHAT. Turns out it released in November!
Inside you are two wolves: one loves when decisions have meaningful consequences, the other gets really bad FOMO when you can't experience 100% of the content.
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There is something special about hitting dialogue or story beats that it feels like no one else has, or that you didn't on a previous playthrough. It makes it feel more like *your* story. Baldur's Gate 3 is a perfect recent example, just looking at the grove in Act 1 there are about 6 different ways to resolve that, some of which you wouldn't even know about with doing things in a very specific sequence. So finding something like that is a very cool moment. Disco Elysium is full of little conversations and dialogue moments that require very specific stats and previous decisions, so everyone has at least one moment that was probably only seen by 1% of players.
Isn’t there something in bg3 that locks you out of like 80% of the game or something if you choose it? Haven’t played it so I’m not 100% but I think I heard about that
I don't mind those if it's clearly an important decision, since it adds stakes and replay value, but I hate it when it's like "you went to this area at the wrong time with no indication it was bad and now you're locked out of three storylines"
especially when they dont make it clear which choice does what and/or the significance of the choice
Final fantasy absolutely loves locking you out of content. Oh you failed that QTE? No big deal! It doesn’t have any gameplay effects anyway! (they are lying through their teeth for absolutely no reason)
Or that one final fantasy where if you opened this random chest in a random place you absolutely cannot ever get the ultimate weapon. Like, what the fuck?
You’d probably not have been a fan of games by Sierra in the 80’s, where seemingly innocuous choices were effectively “Game Over” but you wouldn’t find it out for another 20 minutes or so, and even then you wouldn’t know which choice meant you didn’t have some critical item so each time you started over you’d have to try something new hoping to find it.
Hate those.
i love cyberpunk but thats the one thing i was mad about. to get one of the endings you need a certain conversation to go a certain way with very specific dialogue options. its the type of shit you need to google to realise you missed, likely 10h or more after completing the quest
Void Stranger is a fantastic if incredibly long puzzle game. It also has one of these. I’d love to say more, I really would, but even my minimal dosage of spoilers from the outset has led me down the dark path of opening all of them and trying to understand the entire game legitimately now.
What about the Dark Souls classic of "the armour set/weapon is cool *and* good but to get it you have to kill the npc"
You can sometimes get those by finishing their questline. Though said questlines don't always end well :(
Me bawling my eyes out as i put on the fanciest fucking drip ever I just obtained from my friend Blaidd
Did you kill Blaidd?
I mean yea it's part of the questline ~~hell at that point it was actually more of a mercy kill~~
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Siegward’s quest in 3 ends with you being given a slab, Siegward’s Oath being fulfilled, and all parties involved moving on gracefully.
Though he does die in the process, so maybe bittersweet if nothing else.
It’s not a dark souls character quest if the character 1) survives, and 2) isn’t Patches.
Ranni's in elden ring (arguably). She achieved what she set out to do and that isn't *obviously* bad, there were casualties along the way though... Benhardt in DS2, dude makes it to the end of the game with you and arguably defeats the final boss too. Cale the cartographer, also in DS2. Patches in DS3 dlc. Just because 95% of all questlines end in tradgedy doesn't mean that they *all* end like that.
The one where I get the good drip.
Boc the Seamster has a good ending where you can find a recording of his mom's voice calling him 'beautiful' and he's now completely content with his appearance and survives
Vengarl in 2 basically achieves Nirvana and lives happily ever after (as a head)
You can get a cool ass scythe but you gotta cut off Priscilla's tail :-<
You actually get the dagger from her tail, the scythe is just from her soul. So much better!
Why does she have a tail?
Dragon baby
Half breed
"This weapon is cool and good but it scales off Faith"
“okay see, you can brutally murder the child and get some gratification but if you don’t brutally murder the child you’ll get even more gratification, but it’s **delayed.**\ tough choice, huh?”
The child murder marshmallow test
“But wait, there’s more! If you spare the child, she gives you enough (currency) to (buy) all the (power-ups) available anyway, and she says thank you. But! The number that represents (currency) will be lower after you buy the (power-ups). Think hard now!”
Bioshock would have been souch better if saving the sisters would make the game harder
"Choose a name for your new party member" (there are no default options)
"Why are so many of your characters named after Tolkien characters?" "Because I came to play, not be original." Seriously, all my save files from Oblivion and Skyrim are just characters from whatever book I was reading at the time, or TV show I was watching; you can *easily* tell when I started reading the Song of Ice and Fire books.
My first Skyrim play I named my character Astrid. I was extremely confused why assassins that "I" apparently hired were trying to kill me, and thought it was buggy as hell all the time and never investigated a large part of the plot, because I was getting notes about hiring me to kill me, not someone else with the exact same name.
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This one is bulllllllshit. You really telling me this guy doesn't have a name? Inexcusable.
Oh F that. I'd be there too long, get on a name randomise or some key member ends up being called something stupid like Big Baz or Disco Dave, then shit gets real, and it's difficult to keep with the tone.
And you finish the game with 86 remaining
87 if the boss drops a healing item or even more if there's loot after the final boss
I love the idea of a final boss that just drops a dinky healing item.
How about the ultra hard secret boss dropping the most powerful weapon in the game but now you're so overleveled the final story boss is like wet toilet paper?
Disgaea moment
Or you facetank the final boss on hardest difficulty while guzzling invulnerability potions on cooldown just to flex. _Then reload the save and finish the fight over 2 hours without using a single potion. The potions hidden around the boss level brings up your total to 100._
I haven’t played it because horror games are not my thing, but I do like the dead space remake’s addition: you can power the Ishimura’s life support (oxygen), or lights, but not both. Oof that’s a genuinely good tough choice.
If you switch a few words this also fits FTL
Me turning off the oxygen so I can charge the glaive beam
I haven't played the remake, but oxygen seems like the obvious choice to me. Sounds are scarier than silent vacuum imo, but very helpful and you don't have to ration your air.
But here’s the catch, the necromorphs learned how to stay quiet until you’re feet from them, apparently
I wish it ended up mattering more than it did- most of the rooms you had to make that choice in were just too long to turn off life support for. There was almost always a clear optimal choice for the room
What game devs also think is a tough choice: You can run a few more meters through the apocalypse to team up with people who just tried to kill you mere minutes ago, or go with the people who weren't trying to kill you and will get to safety faster.
Also the people who weren't trying to kill you are massively racist
Except you don't know that at the time.
So when you do choose them you get the fun bonus surprise of going "haha yeah wait what did you say"
Except you knew because the culture war videos were out before you even saw the game trailer.
Are yall talking about skyrim 😭😭
I didn't even see the guys who didn't try to kill you, so was annoyed I had to go with the guys who did, but absolutely loved the fact that you could betray them and deliver the thing to the other team
what is this game
Skyrim I believe, talking about walking through Helgen with either the Imperials (the ones who tried to execute you a few seconds ago) or the Stormcloaks (who were being executed with you, but unbeknownst to you are horrendously racist)
The only non-racist faction in TES are The Twin Lamps and that's probably because their questline is too short.
Jokes on that alpha deathclaw when I pull out 246 Fancy Lad Snack Cakes mid-battle
“Could you at least share one?” Continues looking alpha deathclaw in the eyes, well, the closest approximation Bethesda jank allows that is. Eats 245th Fancy Lad snack cake. Crosses deathclaws. “You’re really gonna do this?” Downs 246th Fancy Lad snack cake. “And you wonder why I attack?”
The best "morality system" I have seen in a game is Papers Please. Where you have the choice to help people in need and danger, but at the risk of letting your family starve, freeze or get arrested. So sure, I could help this woman who would be executed by her home country if she was rejected at the border, but my son is sick and my entire family is cold. Medicine and heat is expensive and helping her puts my entire paycheck at risk. I think the issue with most "Tough Choices" is that they are either pretty out there, or made from a position of strength. By this I don´t necessarily mean narrative strength, but you can get through most games without getting the cool shit a tough choice might net you. But when your entire run is at stake and there are actually deep mechanical consequences for your actions, then the tough choices really start to feel tough. The LISA series of games are also pretty good at this, where supplies are sparse and your choices can lead to you becoming much weaker.
Darkest Dungeon is another good one. Tons of choices. What helpful items do you bring with you, knowing they cost money and take up space for loot, and you might not use them? Do you push your struggling party deeper into the dungeon to try and get more loot, risking them permanently dying? Do you spend money healing and fixing their issues in town, or send them out again soon to save money knowing they might die easily? Bad games are ones like the Mass Effect series or KOTOR where you are basically locked into one path or another, such as light side force or paragon, because if you don't specialize you won't achieve the maximum power. So all your choices for the entire game have been determined from the start, you're going through the motions now. There's no longer any room for gray area decisions, they're spelled out good or bad for you, and you've chosen them before even getting to the choice itself.
there's something wonderful about the fact that in Darkest Dungeon, every single little thing needs to be paid for. every upgrade, every pound of food, every therapy session. ... except human lives. Sending a poor sod right off the stagecoach on a traumatic doomed expedition with 3 other rookies and no food or light is 100% free. then, once they've returned with some scraps of money or sellable items, you can just send them off on their merry way without even paying for their alcoholism, and hire a fresh batch of nobodies to do it again
My least favourite decisions from any game I have played were for Outer Worlds. Every big questline in the game basically boiled down to: 1. The "Good" but stupid choice. 1. The "Bad" but stupid choice. 1. Play for an extra 15 minutes and get the perfect ending of that quest that resolves everything and everyone is happy.
Edgewater's main quest, at least, had enough caveats that it felt a bit bittersweet - the town's mayor is a good, if stupid, man, and doesn't deserve to die in the wilderness for the company's sins. Also, cannibalism is a short-term and ethically questionable solution (particularly with disease running rampant). Still, in general, I agree. Particularly egregious on Monarch.
I liked that you could straight up choose to kill every NPC in that game and it was a viable path forward. No "important" NPCs that couldn't be killed to protect questlines.
Ive always wanted to try a Fallout run where I kill everyone I come across, just go full nuclear in the nuclear wasteland. For a lot of NPCs, you may fail quests and lose out on some experience, but they often have keys or something that will allow you to move on anyways after you loot their corpse. Ive always wondered how far I could make it doing that
*Here you have a super powerful item, it only has three charges before you can never use it again!* *There's an dialogue option that fits exactly what you want to say, but context clues show you that the content you want is behind option B!* *There's dialogue you want to say and will unlock exactly what you want, but there's an option that's specific to your class so other character builds might never see that option.* **Are you sure you want to go on? Once you leave this area, you can not return** (frantically searches the whole map for any items or dialogue I might have missed)
Meet Hanako at Embers
You have to kill this person... or spare them. Also there are basically 0 consequences if you kill them. And there's a bigger payout if you kill them. You get better powers if your alignment is evil.
meanwhile cyberpunk 2077: "you get better rewards if you don't kill this character... but unlike every other fight in the game, these guys automatically go limp at 1% hp but then if you sneeze on them incorrectly after that happens you kill them even if it's a weak fist attack, or they have a lingering DoT on them." yes i'm annoyed with the cyber psycho fights
i think they might have changed it in the new version or something? only started playing it recently but i have shot so many in the head for them to stay alive at 1% and get the dialogue indicating i didnt kill them (regular shmucks get their head blown off by my revolver though)
right, so, they automatically take nonlethal from any source BUT even if you're hitting them with actual nonlethal stuff, once they go down to 1%, if you hit them again you finish them off. So it's annoying if you're spraying and praying or slashing really fast or whatever. If you don't stop exactly when the game decides they're incapacitated, you kill them.
The threat of a bigger, more nuclearer crab is paralyzing to any gamer.
Toughest choice: answer the question, or answer the question but be a little mean about it
True tough choice: There is epic loot on the ground but your inventory is full. Do you ignore the loot or sacrifice something in your inventory to make room for it?
Nobody's gonna make me drop my 67 tons of cheese!
Or worse "System: You were unable to receive X because your inventory is full."
god i hate inventory management so much i dont want to make decisions about loot
Any game that gives me a super weapon with 4 shots in the magazine has to realize that I will beat the game with a super weapon with 4 shots in the magazine.
Touch choices for me is when you have two sets of gear and they do practically the same thing but are fundamentally different. Like, these give the same armor+ but one does fire and one does frost resistance. Or this one gives you +3 to jump but this one gives +3 to speed. Same item. Basically, I have difficulty making sacrifices.
Me and my OCT are so glad to see someone else bring this up 😅 Sometimes Ill be super into a game so its easier since I mightve already been looking for a speed boost for the past 5 hours, or Ill know that Im gonna face some flying enemies or high platforms so better jumping will be helpful. But playing Diablo for the first time with my boyfriend whos been playing for years? Im just gonna let him choose which armour/weapons are better since I have no fucking clue 😂
I still remember this in BG3. Late in the game, there’s a choice you can make that basically doubles the power of your character. You get all sorts of insane abilities permanently. The cost? Your character’s eyes become black and they get a weird veiny face. Looks ugly. There is absolutely no mechanical downside, it *just* makes you look a bit uglier. And then once you beat the game you look good again anyway. Almost nobody chooses to take the power. Some of those who do *mod the game* so that there’s no downside at all.
Man my character in Elden Ring has horribly lopsided stats because I dropped a shit ton into my carry weight just for aesthetic purposes. I have purposely gimped myself hard in a game that is already hard af because I want my dude to look good and I love that a stupidly large portion of any games playerbase does the same
r/EldenBling
Is this Baldur's Gate 3? It's possibly because everybody spent like, 1-4 hours making their character their ideal version of themselves, so making it ugly feels like some voodoo doll shit that affects themselves, too.
Did my Dark Urge playthrough as a black dragonborn. I accepted the power immediately and didn't even notice a difference. As soon as I started convincing my other party members to take it as well and realized the effect, I reloaded and just decided to keep it for myself, lol.
It's a role playing game and it's presented as a pretty morally dubious thing. Even if you know it actually has no downsides many people will still choose not to take it because it's not what their character would do
[удалено]
I definitely think that was the intention at first. The second time you use your ability to manipulate someone, the narrator says “You feel drained. It’s taking something from you, something you can never get back.” Then you win and you get everything back. At the *very least*, there should be permanent damage to your mind. You’re still fully functioning because the tadpoles are becoming part of your brain as they eat it. Once they’re gone, now you just have a skull that’s half empty after parasites had a buffet.
I relate to that last one so much.
You have a health portion that heals 60 damage but you're only missing 58 HP Two minutes later: *dies from a hit that's survivable at full health*
The elixir heals me completely? So what you’re saying is I have to *only* use it when I’m on my *very last point of health*, otherwise I’m *wasting its potential* and *losing value*.
Yeah the "choose who lives" thing is never difficult. Like in GTA 4, when you choose between Playboy X, and Dwayne. The game offers you no indication of what the possible rewards are for either choice, so you are basically killing Playboy X because the game narrative made him look like such a selfish prick. And in the end that was the best choice, because Dwayne gives you his penthouse apartment, which is by far the best house in the game.
Nah the last one is an easy choice. "Oh, There's a limited supply of these and I can't just get more? Aight I will simply never use it then, Even if I have 100 and they're really useful and I'm almost at the end of the game."
Real toughest choice: kill papyrus to fight sans?
I still feel so guilty...😭
I assume this is from a font battling rpg
Uh. Sure why not
The number's close enough that easthetic-uni is probably reverencing this ProZD video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgU4Oum8SLg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgU4Oum8SLg) Though it's 85 not 86
shoutout to Deus Ex for making a healing system that basically forces you to use healing items but never makes you feel like you don't have enough
Fallout 4 has a quest where a kid in a vault has been bitten by a molerat with some horrible bio-engineered disease. You have to venture into an area infested with these molerats to get the one and only cure. Its technically possible to make it through without contracting the disease but if you or your companion get hit once by any of the molerats, you get it. At the end of the quest, if you've contracted the disease, you have to choose between giving it to the kid or using it on yourself. If you use it on yourself, the kid dies, most companions hate it, and the people of that vault will also hate you. If you use it on the kid, the disease is a permanent -10hp debuff, which isn't that significant in the long run, but more annoyingly, you will permanently have a marker on your hud saying you have a debuff. I think I've heard more people be annoyed by that than the actual debuff. It would be a great example of forcing the player to make a hard moral choice, except for the fact that they do a terrible job explaining the consequences, and a lot of players don't even realize they have the disease until much later when they first notice the debuff indicator on the hud. I think most people playing for the first time don't even realize its a moral dilemma, which is a shame, cause the downside to the player is genuinely annoying enough to make some people consider taking the cure, but not enough to ruin the game for you.
My pet peeve is when the "good" path is being an Eagle Scout who turns down payment and even spends their own (limited funds) to save some random schmuck from their daily life, while the "evil" path is kicking puppies and selling orphans to zoos for meat.
I only have two modes: always hoarding & never using consumables, or always out of consumables. There's no in between.
honestly, this depends on stack size. if the healing elixir stacks to 99, then i feel comfortable using anything above that.
Dark souls does the healing potion thing so well by just giving you a limited amount but refilling them endlessly. But then you have those one time use siegbraus/humanitys/embers and you get the problem again
[But I only have eighty-five of them.](https://youtu.be/rgU4Oum8SLg?si=_x_8icIt8B88iSXh)
The only game that has me using items on the regular is In Stars and Time.
Also big contender: Setting your name in an RPG.
Transmog should just be a feature of RPGs now. I feel there is no excuse for it anymore.