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Games that force you to make hard choices (lemmy.world)

submitted 9 months ago by kadu@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world

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Hey all!

I'd like to request recommendations (spoiler free!) for games where you need to make choices, take sides, kill or not kill someone, follow or do not follow orders, but where the consequences actually matter - and most importantly, where the choices aren't "obviously good choice vs obviously bad choice".

Give me games where I can choose to side with one kingdom or another, but there's no clear moral high ground, or where I need to decide to save someone dear to me at the cost of innocent lives. I do not want things like "save all the children and get the happy ending and make flowers grow" versus "kill everybody and everything blows up and the world gets all its water replaced by acid".

What games fit this requirement?

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[-] Fridgeratr@lemmy.world 25 points 9 months ago

Baldur's Gate 3! The amount of ways the game can play out is extremely impressive. There are a lot of tough choices to make that can greatly affect your party and even the world as a whole

[-] Frogster8@lemmy.world 8 points 9 months ago

I'd disagree tbh, so far most of the decisions seem pretty clear cut

e.g save village vs side with hoblinss goblins to kill everyone (vague enough to not be spoiler hopefully)

[-] doctorzeromd@sopuli.xyz 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Some are harder as you go, but yeah nothing is too hard until the end of some storylines in act 3, which is of course what you would expect.

[-] Glide@lemmy.ca 4 points 9 months ago

I'll be honest, I really didn't come across any. The "challenging moral decisions" werenot hard choices, no matter how many of my party members took them out of context and got pissy.

Unpopular opinion, but for a game with such immaculate writing for two Acts, Act 3 is such a fucking shit show of mediocre writing and forgotten story threads.

[-] doctorzeromd@sopuli.xyz 3 points 9 months ago

Not that controversial, I also didn't think act 3 was up to the par of 1 and 2.

I felt like the last 3 big decisions you make were pretty hard. I'm not sure how to do spoiler tags otherwise I'd be more specific

[-] solitaire@infosec.pub 1 points 9 months ago

I also disagree. Even discounting the large number of choices which were just a binary where one side was cartoonishly evil, I didn't remember any I found impactful.

I ended up following The Emperor path in Act 3 . There wasn't a moment where I got to weigh up the pros and cons of each major path, as I had decided I didn't trust Raphael already and he doesn't give you enough detail to do so if you don't play along when you meet him at the start of Act 3. If I had then maybe the Orpheus stuff could have given me pause, but that's not how it played out.

I think part of this was playing as Tav though, as the decisions with real emotional weight are all centered on origin characters and I didn't dictate what my companions should do for things that were so personal. Shadowheart's choice in Act III strikes me as one that probably would have hit.

But the bigger issue is I think Larian just isn't very good at writing evil. You never get those moments of practical evil. I don't remember ever having to consider doing something horrible for the greater good or being desperate enough to do something compromising out of self preservation. It was all evil for evil's sake.