Was about to mention that myself :) Ellen going on about 'tasty adam' gave me flashbacks to that list video, and got me thinking :"Hold on, didn't Ellen save all the little sisters and then revealed that Luke the monster killed them?"
You also can't spare the bandits in Skyrim even though they shout things like that you've bested them. They literally surrender, but you have to kill them or poof they're all better and ready to 'loot your corpse'
I hated this. For all the terrible things you can do in the game, all the alternate dialog, cut scenes, questlines to take, you should be able to let surrendering bandits flee.
Or worse... a guy with a hoodie and two knives demand you surrender your gold... ...without taking into account your party. You, likely in a full suit of fancy armor who's price could buy a small house, a housecarl, a dog or *battle troll* and potentially up to two permanent summons depending on conjuration skill. This guy cannot be reasoned with unless speak is close to max...
You actually can save the bear in Detroit, what you have to do is maintain stealth the entire time, and once you have alice, go to the upstairs fireplace and start a fire, the bear will be seen outside at the end of the chapter.
But in the case if you do start the fire, the sympathy of the people for the androids will go down during Marcus‘s game play. This could potentially change the outcome when Kara and Alice, and may be Luther if he made it, when they are about to cross the border at the Canada‘s checkpoint.
Joel: "The fungus grows all over the brain." Marlene: "Right, so we're going to perform a brain biopsy and try to remove a couple samples. This comes with some risks, but our head surgeon knows what he's doing and we have spared no expense to prep an OR. We want to keep her alive as much as you do." Joel: "Huh. I just kinda assumed you were gonna pop open her head and rip her brain out." Marlene: "Why the fu... Jesus, Joel. How hard did our man hit you?"
Literally the exact reason why I hated the Fireflies and to this day say that Joel did the right thing in saving her from what was most likely going to end up a worthless sacrifice (I don’t care what Naughty Dog says would have happened if Joel didn’t stop them, literally everything they were doing was incompetent and unnecessarily risky, it would have been a literal goddamn Deus Ex Machina if that team of unprofessional buffoons managed to actually create a cure from a very rapidly decomposing brain that would take the infection with it). Ellie literally did not need to die to make a cure, so the idea that a sacrifice would be necessary is straight up bs.
@@rickyrns1059 I mean, even if she didn't have to die, neither did the thousands she would have saved by dying. If they aren't willing to do it non-lethally, why does that still give you the right to kill them all.
@@freddierhodes8201 But nobody would have been saved. We don't even have fungal vaccines now! What makes you think a veterinarian (Yeah he's not even a people doctor) can create one with the literal scraps of technology that survived the apocalypse?
The one in The Last of Us, either the doctor wasn't as qualified as we're told, nobody explained properly to Marlene, or Marlene wasn't paying attention to the explanation. Vaccines are for _viruses,_ not fungi, and properly researching an immunity would _never_ *start* with a lethal procedure, especially on a human subject and especially especially not on the _only_ case of an immunity. Odds are very high those doctors were so far out of their depths that they never would have even come close to any sort of cure or "vaccine" and Ellie would be dead for no reason.
It’s a dumb video game trying desperately for moral ambiguity and pathos. There was no real medical background or justification, it was expressly designed to make you feel like shit.
@@omnom8378 well yes but finding ubnormalys in the brain can be easily found and since it’s a fungus that uses the brain/ spinal cord to get control over it’s victims it wasn’t exactly a mystery we’re the fungus in her body would be also the normal thing to do would have been to take a spinal sample or too wich isn’t nearly as invasive and would have given much more helpful results on how her body is combating the fungus
Can...can we just....? Would it be possible to...? No...? Okay FINE! Here are the times games forced our hands into doing something we did our best to avoid.
Minor Spoiler for assassins creed valhalla : The new assassins creed valhalla has a mission involving an little child waiting under an tree for the return of her father who promised to be back before the last leaf of the tree falls down. Even if you search the whole city and the way in between those two points you can not bring her father back. Which you will discover (dead) once you search underneath the bridge of the city her father traveled to. (At this point I had already spent an solid 4 hours searching everything) The game only let's you one solution. Shoot the last leaf from the tree leaving the child devastated. (however as an last nice gesture you can take the leaf and put it on the table next to the child) I hate this mission and I loaded multiple saves from before I talked to the child after I discovered her dead father (after 4h of searching) trying every option during talking with her to see if it makes any difference...
In Red Dead Redemption, the Wronged Woman, you have to duel with a guy who got his maid pregnant. But if you try do disarm him, it’s instant death for you. Being forced to kill him dead.
@@dolenir Or RDR2, where Arthur from the start didn't want to do Strauss' work, but the mission was mandatory, the outcome unchangeable, and we all know the rest...
The exact same thing as in Rise of the Triad sometimes happens in Skyrim, an enemy (usually a bandit) will run around and start cowering in a corner while asking you to spare them, but if you do they decide to attack you again as soon as their HP recovers enough.
Although, it makes sense. At that point in the game Connor isn't questioning whether or not he should turn in the deviant. He's still full Deviant Hunter. So really, it would've been stranger to be given the choice to change that so early on.
@@sweetnightmare001 Connor was already becoming deviant from the start because he was literally designed to do so. From the first time you load into him, as he's going to the roof scene, he's already becoming deviant as per the (I forget the exact wording they use) system error that shows in the upper right corner of the screen. And it continues to show until he finally becomes fully deviant. Amanda even reveals this to Connor later on should he become devaint. She doesn't reveal this fact to him when he doesn't deviate because to them it didn't really matter if he actually went deviant or not so long as he led them to their goal, plus they had the "deviant kill switch" for him for in case he did. Thus, it could easily make sense for that choice to be there, especially considering the information he'd absorbed by that point.
@@MoiraMcGill 7 months late, sorry- I think either way, he deviates. He shows emotion (sparing hank/getting angry when he fails) he just becomes a deviant that refuses to belive he's like the rest who in his mind, cause chaos and "are the reason the country is on the brink of civil war" he wants to stop them so he doesn't get destroyed but either way he does, his face shows flickers of regret when the RK900 arrives and he's told he'll be decommissioned
I mean, in theory, you do have a choice in choosing not to find him. Not finding all the clues and not going to the attic. On my first playthrough, I was one of the four percent of people who failed that investigation, and I found I don't really mind, because I didn't really want to incriminate a clearly abused android. Though I did end up finding him on my second playthrough, I wanted to see the "28 stab wounds" scene
@@hanasan4845 That works.....unless you go into the attic. Once you go up, you have to find him and there are no more choices. I tried waiting to be timed out up there before and it didn't work
@She Who Shall Not Be Blamed True, but it would open up opportunities for at least one Commenter Edition sequel, which gives us the chance to have our evil little desires validated!
Ah, pretty similar to the Rise of the Triad one is Skyrim: I was so annoyed when I realized that if you stopped attacking an enemy when they were low on HP and yelled "Mercy!" or "Victory is yours, I submit!", they would just start attacking you again a few seconds later when they regained some health. Made it pretty difficult to play as a character who only believes in killing as a last resort :/ Eventually I was able to use illusion magic to avoid some of the deaths, but still feels wrong for her to slash down enemies crying for mercy when circumstances prevent her from calming all the enemies with magic.
I always played Skyrim with a "kill only when you need to but don't weep for the stupid" attitude. Sure I didn't go out of my way to purge bandit camps but if you knowingly start swinging on me after you just watched me eat a f*cking dragon's soul, then don't you dare get mad at me for swinging back harder.
Normal farmers in Mount and blade: its almost harvesting season. Farmers if Luke would play it: IT IS harvesting season! Rip and tear until everything is harvested!
Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney. There is a flashback sequence where you must present a certain piece of evidence, but doing so will ruin Phoenix Wright's life, as you learn very early on in the game. Since it's a flashback sequence, there's no way to do the right thing.
Hey, look on the bright side! Sure, he lost his entire career and became a disgrace in the legal community, but he also got a cool magic daughter out of it
@She Who Shall Not Be Blamed I feel like you stepping in specifically led to a chain of events that stopped the world from being destroyed in that case
@@KirbyCom It did. The whole game could’ve been prevented if a certain antagonist would’ve simply welcomed being proven wrong instead being afraid of being proven wrong. That certain antagonist rigged pretty much everything, including you and Goro being involved in the game’s plot. The only thing they didn’t rig was their defeat.
This series really likes to make you do stuff like that huh? In the second investigations game you play Gregory Edgeworth during the lead up to the DL6 incident, by this point knowing full well what’s going to happen to everyone involved but powerless to do anything to stop it. Your hands feel so red as everything you do leads everyone towards their various deaths/traumas, and let me tell you it is NOT helped by Gregory saying things like ‘I never want my son to be in the care of someone like Von Karma’!
The ironic thing about the false surrenders in Rise of the Triad is that either you can commit a war crime by killing an unarmed surrendering enemy, or they can commit a war crime by falsely surrendering, but either way a war crime is committed
Not being able to spare Grey Wolf Sif even after learning his entire backstory in Dark Souls. This is made worse by Sif remembering you and howling mournfully before the battle starts.
I always fewed it as time fuckery. You can't save them because time in the souls series is a circle, and Sif has already been killed, or is destined to be
My fiancee was watching me fight that boss and noticed how it gets injured and slower throughout the fight. Watching it struggle at the end is just devastating
The whole "enemies fake surrendering" thing happens in Skyrim too. Really caught me off guard when it happened, then again when the bandit I'd just spared shot me in the back.
I always found the Little Sisters from Bioshock a weird one. You get less up front for sparing them, but for every 3 you save you get sent a care package from Tenenbaum as thanks, which includes enough ADAM that it not only covers the difference, it actually gives _even more_ than you missed out on as a result, along with various other supplies you wouldn't get otherwise.
@@Hartzilla2007 What bugged me about that is, while that's the correct lesson to teach in the real world, in game it diminishes the replay value somewhat. If you already know that taking this one path will give you the most resources, as well as exclusive plasmids you can't get otherwise, then you've no incentive to try the murder path to see what happens. And the bad ending isn't worth it in the slightest.
@@TylerInTraining In an interview Ken Levine said this was due to publisher pushback and he wanted to add more impact to the decision. Apparently, they were nervous about too many branching choices and pathways. Which doesn't make sense to us now but hindsight is 2020.
There are a few things with Bioshock that go to show that their set up for good and evil isn't as dynamic as it is for some other games, like Infamous or Mass Effect, it's more like the system in Dishonored, mimicking karma, which implies that it would be more fruitful to be evil and in the long run actually leaves you and the world much worse off and those who are inclined to "sacrifice" for the sake of being good are later rewarded, normally emotionally.
What I love about the Companion Cube thing is that she says you incinerated it faster than any other test subject no matter how long it takes you to do it...almost as if no one has ever had the heart to do it before Chell
@@PurpleMoon799 didn’t think of that, but in my play through I shot him in the foot and just acted like he was alive so I didn’t have to play the sequel
Actually the Chamber 17 mission in Portal is like some sort of a "mad test". In fact, the guy who was there prior to Chell(who was writing on the walls) went mad because he really believed the cube was his faithful companion, instead of just a tool and a means to an end. That's basically one of GLADOS's psychological warfare techniques, to make you feel that way. I'm glad I didn't fall for that and incinerated that cube almost instantly. Even kinda proud of it lol.
CIA: We managed to get an armed agent within spitting distance of Makarov Also CIA: Instead of killing him why not just have the agent follow along with his rampages, what could go wrong?
Undercover operatives frequently have to do questionable things to get "in" with the organization they infiltrated. Even if Makarov didn't have plot armor in the game, there were still three other armed dudes including one with a GPMG who are capable of Bonnie and Clyding Allen. Also the operation was a joint op between the CIA and the 141 which Shepard commanded and he wanted to the operation to go sideways as he was planning with Makarov to start the war.
@@emberfist8347 Yeah but there is a difference between "doing questionable things" and "murdering an entire airport full of innocent civilians." It takes literally a half second to spray the entire group at point blank range with a fricking machine gun that will tear right through their armor before they can do anything about it. There is no justifiable excuse to carry out the mission. I suppose they might hand wave it as being a new guy without the experience to understand that you dont follow some orders but anyone with the mental faculties of a flea should be able to figure out the moral balance here.
@@chrishubbard64 Morality doesn't really have a place in warfare. Also the airport is morally questionable because he was maintaining his cover so he could take him down later. Black Ops II why an agent maintaining his cover is the best option. If Farid doesn't kill Harper, Cloe gets killed later and that ends up with one of two bad endings. You also really overestimate the capabilities of the M240.
@@emberfist8347 Morality absolutely does have a place in warfare. Its why things like the geneva convention exists and makarov is RIGHT THERE IN GUN RANGE. There is no reason to kill him later, kill him NOW. BEFORE he murders literally hundreds of innocent people. Maintaining cover is meant to be done so you can gather evidence for an arrest or at least be trusted enough to meet the higher ups. Again, you have all the evidence you need, the higher up is standing in front of you, and your magazine has a hundred rounds that will go right through his and his buddies fleshy melon of a skull before anyone can react. This isnt the final chase between yuri and makarov with price where you are in full juggernaut body armor, full helmet and all.
@Ember Fist How about intelligence? Does that have a place in warfare? Assuming Allen's cover wasn't blown and they managed to prevent whatever Makarov had planned next, do you think Russia would care when an AMERICAN AGENT was involved in the premeditated murder of hundreds of people?! WW3 would absolutely still happen if the US refused to surrender Allen along with anybody giving him orders!
Fun fact - the companion cube incinerator was added into the game thanks to beta testers taking the cube out of that map and breaking other puzzles and also finding other workarounds to taking the cube with them.
"In early versions of the game, the player was forced to simply abandon it and move on. However, the developers were seeking a way to make the player familiar with how Aperture Science's incinerators worked in order to use them to destroy the orbs in the final battle against GLaDOS. They hit upon the idea to have GLaDOS force Chell to destroy the Cube in the incinerator, believing the idea to be a "perfect thing" and "way stronger" emotionally, and attributing its success to "design arguments" between members of the development team."
You can get past the surgeon in the last of us. You can actually walk right past him and he wont touch you. I just had the feeling he didnt have the guts, thought "dont make me do this bud", walked past him, picked the girl up and went boom happy end.
Weird, I tried doing that for about 5min in the remastered version and it wouldn't let me, I even spared most of the Fireflies, except for the very last guy who I hopped a barricade literally right into his lap.
@@Linkforlife199 I was about to say the same thing!! When I got to that part I didn’t realize why the game just kept me there because it was a cutscene before that part I believe so I tried walking past him to get Ellie and it didn’t let me. I eventually figured out I had to kill him which make sense, since it’s an important part for TLOU2
I always thought of that choice in Detroit: Become Human as good role-playing, since you the player know that the trackers don't work, but that character does not, only Connor does.
@@mariano3716 yes. But they're not idiots. They make decisions based of the info they have, not the info the omniscient God that controls their every waking moment has. Don't metagame dude!
@@freddierhodes8201 but the thing is - each different player has an opinion and a playstyle. If is mandatory, just put it behind a cutscene, that's all we're saying. Don't force us to opt like you want me to if you're giving us the reins. Like I commented, deviants are deviants because they chose not to act under their directives, so that would be a possible outcome. Also, this is not a regular game - aren't this guy's games supposed to be interactive novelizations? Don't be dense.
Two big things to take from the last two entries: 1: If you can get an asset close to a terrorist leader and/or figurehead, an assassination is a safer option than further attempts at infiltration. 2: Pretending to surrender is dangerous and banned by the Geneva conventions, as someone who pretends to surrender but then attacks their captors causes suspicion to be cast upon every soldier attempting to surrender, leading to many unarmed personnel being killed to minimize risks rather than taken captive.
"This isn't a decision the Fireflies take lightly." Seeing as how they bother trying to search for alternatives for all about a day and how no one bothered to, I don't know, wait until Ellie woke up to ask her if she was cool with dying, I'd argue the contrary.
Plus they just couldn't stop poking the Joel bear. "Let's knock him out with a rifle while he's trying to resuscitate Ellie. Let's take Ellie while they're both unconscious. Let's glare at him, threaten him, shove a gun against his back, & literally dare him to attack while standing next to her belongings."
Was FINALLY waiting to see someone else mention this. They LITERALLY didn't even tell her she was gonna die. They be like "Ok resuscitate her then..SURGERY" She didn't get to wake up and last thing she knows is she died by drowning. Not also at how the dude knocked Joel over the head while he was MID SAVING ELLIE'S LIFE. Like...COME ON
Also, they ignored science. The cordyceps Ellie has is something different. Also, the way cordyceps are is that they can be destroyed only with anti fungal medicine, which is real science. So, thanks to MattPat, we now know that Joel did the right thing for the wrong reasons.
plus i just dont trust the fireflies after all of the lore codexes in the game -- never truly believed they had the resources or intent to distribute the vaccine for the whole world
TBF Skyrim don't really have surrendering enemies. They might go down and beg on their knee for you not to kill them...untill they get just a shiver of enough health...then they will jump up and once again attempt to kill your ass. It honestly annoyed me to no end that I couldn't just let them go so I even had to find a mod for it....
In Skyrim they have actual dialogue for randos challenging you to a fight where they concede. First time facing this was an orc who insisted, wrongfully, that I was a "milk drinker." Because I am kind and forgiving, I brought out a healing spell and healed him, then he went right back to wailing on me. I'm bummed they didn't have an option to just go our separate ways.
Not the entry I was expecting from. Red dead redemption 2, what about not hassling the guy that gives you tuberculosis in order to not get tuberculosis....just seems more valid.
There is also the fact that Daniel, the first deviant that Conner has to deal with in the game, cannot be spared, no matter what route you take, he will always have he's fate set in robotic stone
I'm normally okay with these sorts of things if there's a character related reason for it (e.g. Joel's personality in the TLoU example or the character not knowing in the DBH example) cause it's fun to roleplay, but if it's something that there's no in character way to justify it, it pisses me off
I feel like many of these lose their narrative oomph by robbing the player's agency. If something has to happen to advance the story, have it be a cutscene. Very rarely can you pull it off where you force me into something stupid and it doesn't break immersion. There's a reason that railroading is a bad word in TTRPGs and on-a-rails shooters aren't really made anymore.
I think it gets complicated when the protagonist is a defined character with their own goals and personalities like Joel in TLoU, like in TTRPGs you're playing your own character whereas in many videogames you're playing an existing character's story It still definitely feels frustrating when a character makes a decision without you and I think it's important to find a way present it without it feeling the controller is being wrenched out of the player's hand but idk it seems less egregious when it takes place in those kinds of games as opposed to something like the Fallout series where you're supposed to be role-playing your own character 🤔
Those scenes could be cutscenes, and so could any scene where your entire job as player is to push the walk stick forward for several minutes to get to the next inevitable scene (escaping the nuclear blast in whatever COD that was, walking through the snow in DA: Inquisition, the dream sequences and the wounded walk through the Citadel in ME3). If there's no meaningful choice, don't give me control of the character and make me think maybe I can do something.
@@kemowery Joel does a lot of morally questionable things though. To put it all into scenes would be cutting out a lot of the gameplay. He sometimes makes choices you might not like during scenes like killing those cops early on or killing the first firefly in the hospital but the gameplay directly after those parts is you dealing with the consequences of those decisions. I think it works well in that game because his decisions make sense in the contexts in which he makes them, any other decisions would be illogical & wildly out of character, & being stuck in the situation because of his decision shows that there really was no way out of the situation once he was in it because you're given the freedom to walk around & try other things & nothing makes a difference. The surgeon is an exception though because you logically should be able to take him out non-lethally. Shoot his arms. If his arms can't be fixed in a building full of "surgeons", maybe they shouldn't have called themselves surgeons & tried to murder numerous immune people for a fairy-tale vaccine in which case, good job. You crippled a crazed "surgeon" so he can't murder anyone else. The Last of Us was never much a of a player guild game though. Just a story. The player guilt bullshit mostly entered the picture in the trainwreck sequel.
I always thought that The Fireflies obsession with finding a “cure” although, a noble cause, seemed a tad bit ridiculous. Even if one were possible, it wouldn’t revert those already infected but prevent the healthy from contracting it. What I’m trying to get at is that the Jackson community & WLF base have been doing just fine without the need for one, they created their own system to deal with the infection & live a relatively normal life.
How about a video titled *"7 Times a Game Made Us Choose between Two Stupidly Extreme Opposites with NO Middle Ground"* ? "Do you stand back and let this bad guy be ripped apart by the ravening lynch mob? Or do you step in and… let him toddle off scot free, suffering absolutely no consequences for his heinous crimes whatsoever?" What?! How can those be the _only two choices_ possible in this situation? _(Divinity: Original Sin)_ Plus there's all those simple-minded "morality" systems in which each choice boils down to being either an absolute perfect saint or an irredeemably satanic monster.
Infamous: Do you let every accused thief go scot free or simply leave them to be murdered? No you can't call the police to sort it out because that's their job.
@@ToxicBastard That's pretty realistic though. The Supreme Court (US) ruled that police are not obligated to protect citizens. A coward cop got off scot-free on a NYC subway as a poor guy was stabbed in the skull by a crazed man (poor guy lived). Court ruled police didn't have to protect him.
Kotor2: Do you give this homeless man money or do you viscously verbally abuse him? No, no middle ground options here, we need to make sure the old lady on your team gets mad at you for not taking a middle ground option.
Playing Skyrim, I really wanted to do something about the corrupt Blackbriar family. Throw them in jail, exile them, kill them, _something._ But, no. Not only can you not do anything about the family of crimelords, one of them ends up as the thane of Riften, depending on how you resolve Skyrim's civil war. That's the opposite of what I want.
In the Witcher 3, one of the first side quests where you have to decide between giving the sick woman a medication too strong for the human body, or letting her die peacefully. In fact some TH-camrs debunked the entirety of the quest and what the devs programmed after it involving an encounter with the sick woman's, (from my memory) lover, proving that in fact you could save her.
There's no happy option. Either she dies, or the potion leaves her severely brain damaged. Her lover says he's torn between wanting to curse you for not letting her die with dignity and wanting to thank you for saving her.
How about a list of times games had ‘good’ options in a moral choices that resulted in us feeling even more guilty than the bad one Like a lot of the non lethal options in Dishonoured, or sparing Slate in Bioshock Infinite
I never felt guilty about the nonlethal target eliminations in Dishonored. Nearly all of the targets are terrible people and deserve what they get (maybe with the exception of Lady Boyle). That said, I like the video idea 😄.
How about mass effect 2, at the end of the dlc you have to either use a relay to give you more time to prepare for the reapers but it will kill half of the batarian species, orr you can leave the relay but the reapers will arrive a lot sooner, If you decide to take the risk and responsibility of overloading the relay the council just get pissy at you and don't prepare enough which leads to earth being decimated in the opening of 3 showing that all you essentially did was kill a crapton of batarians and not even dent the reaper forces And on top of all that cerberus is now attacking places itself
In The Witcher 3, when you find the elderly cannibal couple and you think telling them to stop eating people is the better option (rather than telling the herbalist what they've done), but when you go back later the wife has starved to death. (I mean, if you tell the herbalist, he'll send monsters to kill them both, so I guess it's still better? But not great).
@@orlaithmcg there's also that quest with the ancient leshen, you either kill an innocent girl that the leshen has attached itself to so you can kill it, or you perform a ritual to appease it but then some men get all murder happy and you end up killing them, either way the end log for the quest states, maybe the whitcher killed more people than the monster did
So about the little sisters. Saving them is actually MORE beneficial than harvesting them. As you get a lot of Adam in supply drop fashion from them, and access to some powers you dont normally get. So id argue doing the right thing is the ONLY thing to do. Unless you want to do a run where youre the monster i guess.
True but you dont know that if you are new to the game. You only know that sparing them means less adam now thus making the game harder. But either way its a bad entry because this is about games where you CANT make the good choice.
@@chrishubbard64 i recently played bioshock for the first time and while i knew the differences before, i couldn't murder them! i mean it breaks my heart SAVING them... and i didn't find the game to be hard by any means (in fact i am v disappointed with the final fight because like. it's so underwhelming???)
Is anyone going to mention that bit in "Innocence: A plague tale" where you have to lure a cute piggy to be murderered by a swarm of rats? Innocence? More like piggy murder!
During the world wars killing a medic is/was considered a war crime but the Japanese didn't care so they killed the medics anyway so the U.S army said to remove the medic symbols from there helmets as it would make them an even bigger Target
Worst is when they pull that "you could have chose to stop playing the game buy you chose to do a bad thing instead" nonesense. Yes that might be an intriguing commentary on something or other, but I payed sixty quid for this game and would like to actually play it.
Yeah I HATE when games try to question your morality with the idea that just putting the game down and refusing to murder DIGITAL CHARACTERS THAT ARE NOT REAL is a real option. Give me the option to not kill and THEN yell at me for picking the kill option. But acting like I"m a psychopath for just trying to progress the game is just stupid. MOST of us can seperate reality from fiction enough that while killing innocents leaves a bad taste in our mouths we can do it to push the game forward.
I think it's beautiful the way people try and save the life on an imaginary companion in an imaginary world aka the companion cube in portal. It shows how much compassion the human race really has. Personally, I dumped that thing into a fire as soon as I got the opportunity. But it kept coming back until the end of the level.
As long as it's not humans, I'll try to save them at any cost. Companion heart cube deserves not being sacrificed, so was the lion (poor cat was not on good living conditions). Humans? not so much. Maybe kids if the circumstances are incredibly unfair, But adult humans in general? Meh, they will destroy themselves anyways so why bother? Just look at the surrenders ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What about the puppy in Little Misfortune? You can choose to set a cute puppy in a party hat tied to a tree free, or play with it. If you play with it, you throw ball that hits the tree causing a branch to fall and kill the puppy. And if you set it free, it runs towards the nearby road and, you guessed it, gets run over! Our choices are pointless! Yay😆
Technically a different category "Choices games give us that aren't choices at all." PS3 Infamous has one too, where you are given two different groups, the antagonist is going to hang, one group of five doctors, and your girlfriend as the sole person in another. If you hang the five, like Schroder's Cat, the game reminds you that your girlfriend *is* a doctor, as is one of the five. If you hang the one person, its your girlfriend, so she dies regardless.
@@thomasscroggs4410 "Choices" games give us that aren't choices at all... I got some examples that are not (only) Playstation Pokemon: "Do you want to hear the explanation?" "No" "Ah I am so thrilled about this, I will tell it to you anyways!" (Pokemon Black/White - Vivian) "Do you want to join the catching tutorial?" "No." "Oh Please!" "No." "Oh please!" (endless repeat unless you press yes) (Pokemon X/Y) Dragon Quest Builders 2: A "friendly NPC" is catched by some enemies you could rip a new one easily. But they "force" you to yield and get yourself captured. If you try to say NO to the yielding the NPC triggers a loop unless you say yes. Also you are forced to imprison your friend FOR NO REASON and are not allowed to release him.
@@CaligoCastra honestly any game that is a sequel game should give an option saying do you wanna skip the tutorial or be like would you like a tutorial on the controls that are different from the previous game cause if you're playing the sequel then it stands to reason you played the first one and would know the controls
Or swapping to anything other than the basic 6-shot revolver You'll let me use my High Power pistol for duels, but not when its quick reload is actually needed? And I even had my Spencer repeater equipped, with more than enough rounds to wipe the whole crowd in one use of Dead Eye.
If John didn't walk out those doors, and didn't die, the Government guys would have found and killed his family. John knew that, and when faced with the choice to die and let his family live, or live and have his family die, he made the obvious choice.
@@dracosfire7247 Except John is a highly capable gunslinger and had no guarantee the government guys wouldn't just kill his family anyway, they had already broken their word more than once. The choice was actually to die on the off-chance they let his family go safely, or fight tooth and nail to ensure they are protected. With as many guns as John carried around all the time, and how capably he wielded them, he should have been fully capable of busting out of that barn with a bandolier of loaded revolvers, a repeating rifle one hand and a double-barrel shotgun in the other. Instead he strolls out with nothing but the basic revolver, regardless of what you had equipped.
As is stopping Makarov. You as the character don’t know that your cover is already blown. Though, I guess it would make sense if your character’s goal was to kill Makarov, even if it meant being gunned down by his henchmen.
Umm, the very first few minutes of Vampyr where the only option you have is to feed on Jonathan's own sister. I blatantly refused it...for about 5 minutes or so...most awkward hug ever.
One moment that would probably come to my mind was the Black space Cat room in Omori, where it constantly tells you that you have to kill your cat and the dialogue gets more and more tragic with time. But it doesn't really force you though. You can get out of the room by stabbing yourself, but it doesn't tell you that once.
Trying to save characters who are scripted to die (eg Roggvir in Skyrim), not being able arrest enemies who are begging (eg bandits in skyrim) or not being able to kill the big bad because skript/sequal
Technically, if you’re fast enough, you can save Roggvir. Though the game will kill him itself a few minutes afterward. But morally, that’s not really your fault.
I spent an hour trying to Soul Trap Roggvir without getting everyone in Solitude pissed at me for attacking the guy who was going to get his head lopped off anyway. I just couldn't stand that fool thinking he was going to Sovngarde for the only thing of significance he did in life was opening a gate. I had to time it just right as the executioner's axe was swinging down on him. Also in a previous playthrough I soul trapped and executed the guy Roggvir opened a gate for that deserved him getting executed as far as the people of Solitude are concerned. Screw that guy, I'm looking forward to doing that again in my current playthrough.
Welcome to the club. Literally the only and yet still major reason why I actually completely agreed with Joel. They literally had no reason not to do that instead, so the fact that they decided to shows that either they actually never cared about keeping her alive at all and were purposely trying to kill her just like Joel for knowing too much, or they are completely and utterly incompetent in genuinely believing you need to take the brain out to get samples from it.
@@jaredcrabb from what I know, it would have been less of an anti fungus and more of just... More of that fungus. It's the strain Ellie is infected with that makes her immune, right? Just have her bite some people
Isn't the reason that Kara isn't allowed to leave Zlatko, because she as a character isn't aware that the tracker stopped working once she became sentient? I'd assume we aren't allowed to leave cause we are forced to behave and limit our knowledge to that of the character (we sort of become the character in that sense)
He could've easily just left him in the jail at Strawberry, gone back to Dutch and said by the time he got there, they'd already hung him. Boom. Dutch wouldn't be happy but he'd have probably gotten over it and so many problems would've been prevented.
"Hey, Dutch, I busted him out like you said, but then he started trying to kill everyone in town. They got him. I think one of them shot him in the back of the head. Me? No, just someone. There were a lot of people shooting at him."
@She Who Shall Not Be Blamed Yes! I wpuld put killing Ashley, or letting her get taken in Resi 4 on that list. Her character was one of the most annoying ever. If the rumors about a remake of 4 are true, they have got to do a complete redo of her character.
One moment in gaming immediately comes to mind on this topic and that's Spec Ops The Line and it's infamous White Phosphorus incident. Still sends a shiver down my spine any time I think of it.🥶
Yeah, I'm surprised Spec Ops isn't in this list, it's the biggest example of this, and then the game goes on to shame you for your action. While the "you could stop playing" argument has been thrown around before, that feels like a cop out. It fundamentally breaks the fourth wall, and you can never experience the consequence of your inaction. So if you're now thinking outside of the game narrative, and feel forced to continue, then it's clear that you're playing a game, and the people you're killing aren't real, and you as a player aren't responsible for anything, and the emotional/ethical argument is lost. It feels like that whole section only works if you play it as a bit of a mindless player just doing the objectives, and maybe the later narrative causes you to think about your actions, and question the objectives in other games?
Well technically there is a way past the surgeon in TLOU that doesn't require you to shoot him. If you get close you also have the option shank him in the throat with his scalpel. Not sure that's better but it's an option.
@@willfanofmanyii3751 But, I would also say there is a young girl's life on the line. Which makes it as the doctor is protecting, his stolen money from a bank. From, the police.
One instance that always raises my hackles is the Thieves Guild and Maven Black-Briar from Skyrim. Because of plot reasons, you're expected to join the Thieves Guild in order to advance the main quest. You can work around it a bit by passing a tough speech check. But even then you're stuck with the final word of the Disarm shout locked behind the Thieves Guild questline, as well as being stuck with any Stones of Barenziah in your inventory if you picked some up at any point in the game because they are flagged as quest items. Then we get to Maven Black-Briar herself, who is a karma houdini no matter what happens in the game. It's an open secret to everyone but the Jarl of Riften and Asgeir Snow-Shod that both the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood are at her beck and call. And while you can choose to destroy the Dark Brotherhood, you can't destroy the Thieves Guild. Maven herself is flagged essential, so even if you wanted to take matters into your own hands and go on a werewolf or vampire lord rampage to kill her, you can't. Honestly. I like to play Skyrim as a genuine hero and avoid being a thief when I can, even turning down a few daedric quests to maintain character. But the game expects me to join the setting equivalent of the mafia at some point and I can't actually do what I want to do. Which is get rid of said mafia.
I like the Morrowind Thieves Guild quests. More like actual non-killing Thieves and one of the quest lines is basically resurrecting the setting equivalent of Robin Hood. The only killing quests are against the Cammona Tong and a Fighter's Guild leader that sided with the Cammona Tong, which are the evil equivalent and trying to murder everyone.
I hated being forced to join the Thieves Guild for access to fences, when I just wanted to be an independent petty thief who just picked stuff up and said "hey im gonna sell this now", because i was (and still am) a weenie whos terrible in a fight
Eh, the Thieves Guild and Maven are okay in my books. She's unscrupulous, but at least she isn't openly killing people in the city streets who are being an inconvenience to her like Thonar Silver-Blood does in Markarth. It's probably better to let her be in charge of Riften's criminal elements than killing her and risking someone worse coming along. Plus if you complete the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood questlines the Dragonborn effectively becomes the leader of the two groups Maven goes to get things done. The Dragonborn is on roughly equal ground with her and thus can regulate the criminal elements of Riften (and in other parts of Skyrim.) so things don't get too out of hand.
@@rjfrost7090 Thonar can be killed if you side with the Forsworn during "Escape From Cidhna Mine", effectively cleaning up most of Markarth's corruption. Thongvar can become Jarl, but he doesn't demonstrate a preference for Thonvar's tactics. Maven can't be dealt consequences at all.
@@reapergrimm8 There are actually a number of things you can do to screw Maven over. Such as: 1. Kill her kids after getting one her alchemy ingredients, and lying to the other about where her fiance went. 2. Burning down all the bee hives at the goldenglow estate during the Thieves Guild questline. 3. Leaving the rats under Honningbrew Meadery alive. 4. Destroying the Dark Brotherhood so she doesn't have assassins anymore if you don't feel like leading them. 5. Helping a Dunmer who works at her meadery transport some stolen mead to an innkeeper in Ivarstead so you can take whatever you want from her meadery without it being considered stealing. 6. Helping Louis Letrush and her son steal Maven's prized horse and telling her about it, steal the horse for yourself, steal everything at the Black Briar Lodge that's not nailed down, and kill every mercenary she has employed there. You should probably do this before the first item on this list. 7. Progress the main quest until you get to the peace council between the Empire and Stormcloaks, then arrange for Riften to be given to the Empire so when you reclaim it for the Stormcloaks so Maven gets exiled from Riften. Then complete the Thieves Guild questline so she can show up for your coronation as Guild Master so she can see the guild no longer needs her patronage anymore to stand on it's own two feet whilst she is down 2 kids, a horse, her personal assassins, her businesses have been screwed with, and she can't even set foot in the city proper. Then steal all she's got on her, her bodyguard, her remaining son, and her house. And as for Thonar's brother. He's kind of a douche. I'd rather take an idiot jarl blind to the problems his city is suffering from than the douche who is the brother to the source of most of the cities problems.
Knowing the real world alterative of the deadly fungus in The Last of Us, the end of the game is actually good and that Joel did the right thing. If Joel didn't get Ellie she would have just died and it wouldn't have saved anything, in fact it would just make it worse.
@@Ares99999 There's no vaccines for fungi that's for viruses, the tried multiple times before Ellie and failed, they could've done a biopsy and let her live instead of just ripping her brain out and digging through it, why wouldn't you study one of the few immune people on the planet over a period of time instead of immediately killing them.
@@Ares99999 Vaccines do not work on Fungal Infections: they were killing immune people via these procedures for a type of medicine that would've had zero effect Ellie living however allows her to pass on the mutated version(either through regular encounters with others or having kids), which would potentially (over A LOT of time) give humanity a blanket immunity to the Fungus
@@Ares99999 The fact that vaccines for fungal infections dont actually exist so based off the 'real world alternative' this could've never worked, the fact that it had never succeeded before, the fact that they were going to kill the only living human test subject without her consent without knowing if or how it would work and refusing to actually extensively study her immunity beforehand to see if there was any way to actually create a vaccine through it, let alone for it to be done non lethally. What if they could infect other people with the same strain of mutated cordyceps through her blood or saliva and spread immunity that way? What if they could instead produce a drug that slows the rate of infection through samples from a spinal tap? a biopsy?? If they couldnt do those things due to a lack of modern medicine/equipment and suitable doctors then that makes sense, but bodes really badly for the probability of the surgery working at all. Based on real life there was absolutely no chance it could've worked, and even within the world it was an extremely rushed procedure. Killing the only immune specimen in the entire world capable of helping make a cure as soon as you find them without any guarantees that you haven't just doomed everybody's survival is honestly just stupid, and a few hours, days weeks or even months wouldn't be enough time to figure that out. It's not like they had a time limit or anything, which makes the whole thing just that much more risky, reckless and wholly unnecessary. it just wouldn’t have been possible to know the full outcome of this decision and killing her within such a short time frame would probably just doom them all. To quote sean keefe on quora (not the most reliable source of information i know, but he summarises my point really well): " It would have had to have been a process involving a lot of grunt lab work, experimentation, and trials before he even learned what, exactly, it was that prevented zombification. He didn't even know if Ellie's fungus could survive outside of her head, much less whether it could be grown in a lab setting. [To cut the fungus out is] mindboggingly reckless. Even stupid. This was the only known case of it's kind in the entire world. The notes you find in Saint Mary's admit that no one had seen anything like this before. No one knows how it works. They haven't taken any samples of it or run any tests on Ellie except standard imaging and blood work. Jerry just assumes that if he cuts out the entire adult fungus that he'll be able to figure it out, but there is no way on God's Green Apocalypse he could know this. He is very likely killing the only person this mutant strain grows in on pure optimism." Assuming that the surgery was mandatory, and had a 100% fatality rate, there is literally no evidence or scientific basis that it would work the way the firefly's wanted it to, and their confidence is completely unwarranted. Cures take massive amounts of research, funding and time, not some guy with a scapel who seems really sure of himself. We don't know whether jerry wouldve been able (1) to get the sample out properly, (2) keep the sample alive in the lab when the thing it was leeching off of is actively dying, (3) get it to multiply in the first place and harvest the spores or (4) have the mutated cordyceps react to everyone in the same way it did ellie. We dont know whether it was she was immune due to the mutation or whether it was an unusual immune response on ellie's part, so what stops it from just completely taking over the brains of almost everyone else infected by the 'vaccine'? or better yet, mutating a second time to become more dangerous than the first? What about if ellie isnt actually immune (ie, if the fungus is growing at an alarmingly slow rate), and he dooms thousands of people to an early death with a vaccine that honestly isnt necessary? so many things that are VERY LIKELY to go wrong that they just ignore for the sake of their blind belief that the murder of a child could lead to something meaningful. Also even if they manage to do it, what does that achieve really? In the game at the time it had been 20 years after the zombie outbreak occurred, and the cordyceps would've definitely taken over the brains of most of them in its entirety. There was no way to make a cure for that, just a vaccine for all the remaining survivors. But rebuilding society in a fractured, lawless world split into factions is nigh impossible, and the fireflies definitely lacked the resources, technology, manpower and know-how to mass produce and circulate a vaccine properly to a scale big enough for humanity to actually have a fighting chance (or to get the factions to work together enough to do so). The likelihood is that they'd be wiped out somehow (probably by FEDRA) during the process. Plus humanity had managed to adapt and survive in the past 2 decades to the point where a vaccine wouldn't be as extremely necessary as it wouldve been in like 2013. The creators really push the angle that the vaccine was definitely possible in tlou2, but they also said that they tried to make the series' science as realistic as possible and in that case the firefly's whole plan just never wouldve amounted to anything. also, the surgery's success rate was much more ambiguous in part 1 and only became a certainty later on. I see why tbh - the moral dilemma of saving a loved one or the world is part of what makes the series great - but it is honestly much more likely that humanity would still be doomed regardless. The fireflies are woefully inept and humanity is too far gone for even a fully fledged vaccine to make much of an impact
Hell yea, I specifically didn't fight him so my manus fight cold be easier, and omg one try, so maybe I can get past his boss?, nope and not only that you get a new scene in which he recognises you and cries
@@Tommyboi01 I don't remember if I saw that but it was heart wrenching enough to know he was just guarding his master. It would be a bit like punting Greyfriars Bobby into the water of Leith...
@@Zoso14892 tbh it is a small difference, instead of being angry and defensive, he jumps down and sniff's you, recognises that you fought manus together and then howls sadly before ructantly picking up the sword
@@Zoso14892 but yea it was so sad because he's just being a good boy for his friend who sacrificed his life to save him Artorias himself isn't a bad guy he just got corrupted by the abyss after being killed by manus
Mass Effect 2: Can I tell Anderson that I'm trying to take down Cerebus from the inside? No? Can I tell Ashley/Kaiden? No? Am I just genuinely, unironically working for Cerebus now? Red Dead Redemption 2: This is more "they can't tell every possible story" but as it was becoming increasingly clear that Dutch was going to get everyone killed and my Arthur was walking around with $20K in his pocket, I really wanted an option to give Dutch all the money he was asking for at once, end things, and then use the rest to run off to Tahiti or Europe with Sadie to spend Arthur's last days enjoying life.
Mass effect one annoyed my friend and I so much. There's no reason not to take their info and tell them to GTFO, but you aren't allowed to. Even if you do get reinstated as a spectre and told to take them down from the inside... yeah what OP said.
The arrival dlc in ME: 2 gave me Spec Ops the line vibes, I legit tried to warn the entire system to evacuate but the message was cut off and I was forced to kill and entire solar system
The thing pissing me off with Joel isn't that I think I would make a choice to let Ellie die - it's that the game didn't trust me to make any choice. It's like the Devs letting me play this cool and heartwarming story about two people - and then at the very end when it all comes to head they rip the pad out of my hands like an annoying older brother and play it for me. "No, dammit, you have to FEEL like we tell you to!" It would be better if it was a cutscene=_=
And if you listen to the audiologs, which many don't, then you'll learn that the operation doesn't even have much of a success rate, meaning Ellie would die for nothing. And even if by some miracle some kind of cure WAS produced, then EVEN more wars and bloodshed would be wrought because of that cures' existence.
@@Leith_Crowther My bad on that one. It should either be a fungicide or some kind of unspecific cure. Since I'm not a doctor, slipping up on that one makes sense and will be rectified.
@@Leith_Crowther yes you can. In fact there are several in medical trials at the moment. Just like any other biological pathogen, you can train the immune system to recognize it.
Another one regarding sparing enemies, if you’re in a Titan in Titanfall 2 and approach a lone foot soldier (Note: The soldier had to be human, not a robot) the soldier just…. Gives up fighting, they throw down their gun and just accept that they’re gonna die. Right up until you decide to spare them and walk away, whereupon they decide that not dying my being punched into a viscous red pudding is not what they wanted to happen, they’ll start shooting at you again
I'm gonna go with Mad Max, where you're forced to kill Chumbucket at the end. Chumbucket is your first and most faithful ally -- a groveling sycophant, really -- and his only sin was not wanting you to destroy the magnificent vehicle the two of you worked on together throughout the whole game. Kinda feel like Max could have figured a way to beat the bad guy without ruthlessly killing his only friend.
Max also isn't what you'd call a 'rational thinker'. And the world he lives in has no happy endings. You either survive in a blighted hellscape, or get brutally murdered by some gang.
Granted, Chum also told Scrotus about Glory and her mum. Getting them both tortured and killed. Undoing any semblance of sanity Max had regained over his journey through the Wastes with them and Chum, seeing as he basically relived the deaths of his wife and child a second time.
This. I couldn’t make it through the game because of this shit. I liked the gameplay, but I *hated* the decisions Max made that I had no control over... and I hated that basically every major bad thing after, like, the midpoint of the game is either directly or indirectly his fault. I couldn’t finish the game once I realized how much of a mess everything was, and that basically all of it could have been avoided.
I'm shocked that WASN'T on this list. In fact it's what ruined the game for me because it hoenstly makes no sense. The cop character just wanted to avenge his brother. He did that. He had no particular need to hunt down the other character at the risk of his life ALONE! Seriously there was a swat team there why was he freaking alone!?! And the Criminal character could have just gone to prison or asked for a pardon. In the first place his main crime was just being involved with the guy that murdered an undercover cop. After everything he did he could probably get his sentence reduced. Or at the very least he could accept the consequences of his own crimes and wait out whatever sentence he gets. But NOPE one of them has to kill the other because of bullshit ending twists.
In Portal, the lack of a choice makes complete sense. It was exactly something GLaDOS would do. Manipulation and passive-aggressive comments are her MO. Giving you a companion, the only companion you have in a clinical and isolating place, and then ripping it away from you right as you start getting attached and forcing you to destroy it yourself, is Manipulation 101. You wouldn't have been able to take it with you because of that particle field right before the elevator, and leaving it behind would have been bad enough, but forcing you to incinerate it in order to progress? That's a purposeful, calculated psychological attack, manipulation perfectly accentuated by the off-hand comment at the end. "You incinerated your companion cube quicker than any other test subject."
Love the Souls entry on this, but I'm Genuinely surprised sparing Great Grey Wolf Sif wasn't on here. I died to that fight a trillion times just trying to walk away when he was limping
I cannot stress enough about how fast I yeeted my companion cube into the incinerator. Didn't even have a second thought about it. I just threw it in because I was told to.
It always bugs me in RPG's when all of the dialogue options lead to the same result, except with a random phrase inserted at the beginning. NPC - "What do you wish to do?" Player Dialogue Options - 1. Let's Go 2. What do you think? 3. We should wait. 4. Screw you, lady! You don't call the shots! (Player selects "Let's go!") NPC - "Let's go!" (RELOADS SAVE) (Player selects "We should wait.") NPC - "That's not a good idea, let's go!" So... why even ask, if you won't respect my answer?
Ellen: "When we are given the choice in a video game we usually do the right thing, like sparing this Little Sister in BioShock, even if we were to eat her, we would get SO MUCH DNA-altering Adam-power." Luke: "Blender goes brrrrrrrr."
After the incredibly tense stand-off on Oxbox, I'm surprised A Way Out didn't make the list. Not shooting your erstwhile friend seems the obvious and good choice, but nope.
I definitely remember the lion retrieval job, though I can’t say that I ever tried to find an alternative considering the fact that a literally and figuratively bloody lion is trying to kill me after already cutting down at least one other guy and several livestock animals.
In Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, enemies would sometimes yield and you could accept it by sheathing your weapon and the fight would be over. You could also offer a yield to the guards by sheathing your weapon, then they would stop combat and arrest you. The first time an enemy shouted out "I yield" in Skyrim, I sheathed my weapon, only to be surprised when they jumped up a few seconds later to begin attacking me again. I also tried yielding to the guards, but they just kept trying to kill me. :( I found a mod for my current playthrough that allows me to accept a yield and tie them up, but I don't get why they had that system in one game then took it out for the next.
You can still yield to guards, but just like oblivion, it’s near impossible with companions. The main difference is that companions in Skyrim are actually worth having around. I am having trouble finding any info about npcs yielding in Oblivion, and I’ve played for quite a while with no initially hostile npc ever yielding just like in Skyrim. It’s still an incredibly confusing voice line that probably shouldn’t play for those npcs considering there’s already voice lines that can play when an npc is downed that don’t include them surrendering.
I felt Joel rescuing Ellie from the Fireflies was justified on a logical level. But Joel wasn't doing this because of logic. He did it because of his emotions. Which is why he lied to Ellie instead of outright telling her they weren't equipped to do this, which would have been actually the right thing to do that we couldn't.
Honestly, for DBH I always thought it was more frustrating to not let Carlo Ortiz's android get away from the attic rather than letting Kara go into the basement-
I have to say I feel no remorse for killing the surgeon from a logical standpoint. First off all the tools they where using where 20 years old. Second you can’t make a vaccine for a fungal infection. So they would have cracked open Ellie’s skull for nothing. And the recorder stated in the first place there was no fungal growth on her brain. At that point all they would be able to use is some blood and spinal fluid. Both which can be taken without major damage to the patient. This is probably due to some bad writing where not enough research was done on fugal infections.
Apparently he was also a vet. I think it was intentional to prove that the surgeon didn’t know what they were doing, trying to sort of justify Joel’s actions
If it's due to bad writing then it's not an actual reason lmao because it would have worked in universe. A chance, no matter how remote, at literally saving the human race is good but i guess its hard to say since we're all in gamer armchairs and not in the apocalypse.
I always got the feeling all the Fireflies were going to do was use Ellie's brain to make a smoothie and hope that it miraculously gave them her immunity. Joel was 100% in the right to save Ellie.
I always find it funny, when anyone forgets to mention that Joel was doing all of that to retrieve some guns that was his. That were sold to the Fireflies, be it a dead Robert. And, when he finally gets there, not only did they not give him his guns. They were going to make him leave without his supplies all together. No payment equals repossession of merchandise. With or without emotions getting in the way.
Yeah, not just non-payment for goods and services rendered, it's like smacking the pizza guy in the head with a bat and stealing all the pizza and his delivery vehicle and telling him to fuck off.
I always think of Spec Ops: The Line, where they say “hey look, there’s some white phosphorus over there, but we mustn’t use it because it’s a war crime”. So I didn’t. Except the level eventually just overwhelms you with waves of enemies until you realize that you have to do it, and all of a sudden you’re a monster because of it.
That's exactly why I stopped playing that game. People treat it like a masterpiece for some reason, but it's just a movie that's pretending to be a middle-of-the-road third person shooter.
@bird3713 that’s kinda the point, your choice wasn’t made then, it was made by buying the game and playing it in the first time place. It’s kinda like the movie funny games, it berates you for thinking that good things would happen, that there would be a happy ending and that you would be a hero. For trying to live out a fantasy where you’re in charge. Because in reality that doesn’t happen and the game is trying to show that.
@@maxvernick7721 Well, no... uh... if the message is 'you are a bad person for buying our game' as you suggest, then maybe they're just bad developers for not having things like 'you will be required to commit war crimes in this game world to complete it' written on the box... maybe the developers should look in the mirror.
People try to say the right choice would be giving up entirely. When the game got me stuck like that I tried to go all the way to the beginning to see if that would give me an alternate ending. But it doesn't. Either you become a war criminal or the game completely ignores whatever you try to do.
First game that came into my mind was "Ghost of Tsushima" I tried to be honorable, what means looking into someone's eyes while killing them, but the game forced me to sneak around and use poison. The worst thing is, how mad they are at me in the cutscene afterwards for using such a "coward tactic" :/
I wasn’t ashamed of stealth killing. I feel like the worst part was that the ending was a lose-lose situation. Either you honor Lord Shimura by killing him or you give him a fate worse than death by sparing him and dishonoring him.
The game starts off with a whole army of honorable samurai being massacred. The game is pretty clear that the honorable tactic would never have worked, that's why Jin had to learn to skulk and kill from the shadows.
It really presents an interesting look at how Japanese culture exists in a way that was incompatible with pragmatism. Few cultures value honor so highly that dying pointlessly and as an utter failure with honor is more important than doing the right thing, than surviving, than protecting the innocent. The Mongols had no qualms about committing atrocities, mocking the Japanese at every turn, butchering women and children, and yet if not for the monsoons that wiped out the Mongol invaders and their ships TWICE, Japan probably would have been curb stomped into a Mongolian territory over preserving honor. History does not care about honor or dishonor. History is written by victors, and that means honor at the cost of all that you cherish is worse than dishonor to preserve what you cherish. If you are more willing to fight with honor and integrity as your entire nation and culture are destroyed, then in that act you have committed the most cowardly and dishonorable act of all: allowing your entire society and culture to be destroyed.
Little frustrates me more than when a game forces you to do something awful then in the next scene it's like, "How could you do such an awful thing?" P.S. the firefly's plan was terrible, "Here let us scoop out this young girls brain and I don't know, we'll poke at it with science and maybe a cure will fall out?" they had no real idea how to make a cure, no plan or resources to manufacture or distribute said cure and really it was just a bit galling how ready they were to jump straight to attacking her skull with an ice cream scoop.
Especially when part of the reason she's immune may be something about her that's interacting with the infectious agent in some way. Don't kill the immune person if you're trying to duplicate that immunity.
So, you're just gonna ignore that the Doctor said he would be able to make a vaccine? Not might be able to, would be able to? That he had been studying it for decades and was one of the few experts left? You're just gonna make your own canon so you don't have to admit that Joel is terrible?
How about in "Batman: Arkham Knight"? You have a choice to save your innocent partner Robin or lock him in a jail. No matter what you choose, it will eventually lead you to lock him up.
@@aznboi1027 Agreed. What a freaking mess of a story, just to fit in a bog standard 'revenge is bad' story. If they did more with the characters and made them sympathetic, then people wouldn't hate on it so much.
No, the surgeon sacrificing a 14 year old for a vaccine* is extremelly unethical, he was the one in the wrong all along. The only way to make it ethical was to wait for her to wake up, give her years of theraphy, and then, with her informed concent when she's AT LEAST 18 (I'd argue 24), it would be ok to do. The only bad thing Joel did there was take away her choice for good, but in their situation, there wasn't a lot he could've done. *Let's face it, in the universe of last of us, what are the odds this vaccine would even work out? And if it did, would the fireflies give it freely or weaponize it to trade for firepower? Joel did the right thing, Ellie fucked up later for killing innocent people who had nothing to do with Abby's "revenge".
I dont think anyone blames the surgeon, idiot or not, he was trying to save people. Everybody else tho? Yeah, cannot let them get away with anything. Ellie and Joel included.
Just like in Rise of the Triads, Fallout 4 has a perk mechanic of pacifying enemies witch technically turns them friendly. At that point, depending on your perk level, you can give them specific commands like inciting them to attack or making them give you their loot via Trade, but... The moment you holster your weapon or turn your back on them, you'll be sure to face the wrath of a re-hostilised enemy. How nice!
I don't know if this is in the same vain but what about how in all horror games, when you don't have a weapon, and in the dark spooky dungeon you spy, a shovel or a hammer or a pencil, you get what I'm saying, why can't I pick up a weapon.
Thats probably be more along the lines of the smart thing to do that the game doesnt let you. Like in any zombie game ever using whatever you can get your hands on as a weapon cause ammo is no longer being made (except maybe dead rising, never played it but based on videos Ive seen there are still things that you cant use).
I like the last of us 1 doctor part. It reminds me of a video I watched called something along the lines of "Joel did nothing wrong." It talks about morals and other things. The comments also add onto how the fire flies really suck. Cause if your read documents and other events from experience kinda see they suck.
One of the most annoying things about TLoU2 is how they try to redeem Mr. Evil Doctor. It's pretty clear that with the first episode they tried to make Joel look bad in this situation, but as everybody agreed with him, they doubled down on their original idea and forced utterly conflicting personality traits into the doctor. There is no way a good person would do quarter of the shit so heartlessly as he does. He gets nowhere with his stupid vaccine (which is just a vaccine, not even a cure) yet he keeps killing people in chasing it. So even after TLoU2, he absolutely had it coming. The only thing that's worse is the game didn't let you murder his fucking psychopath daughter.
I'd argue that the Fireflies logic was flawed from the beginning. Ellie had a mutated version of the fungus attached to her brain, meaning that even if they created a cure/vaccine, it would only work on the benign version that she was infected by (people who have been following the developments on the current world situation are likely aware of this). And there's no guarantee that the fungus on her brain wouldn't kill her eventually (it's going to keep growing), it just wouldn't turn her into an infected. Meaning that Joel saving her from the Fireflies WAS the right thing to do. Not only did he save Ellie from being killed pointlessly, he also likely averted a potential extinction event, as people would be administered the vaccine (which wouldn't work against the aggressive strain) or would just straight up die out to alternate strain competing for space in the skull. Remember, it's a fungus. It needs to draw its nutrients from SOMETHING. It can't just live in your brainbox, consequence free. I'd like to clarify, I'm not qualified to make this statement with 100% accuracy, just going based off of information I've come across regarding this specific topic. If anybody who's actually studied this stuff could contribute, I would appreciate it. Also, I'd like to point out potential confusion in using the terms Vaccine when discussing a fungus, as vaccines are created to deal with viruses. So in the event that a vaccine wouldn't work, the alternate, parallel solution would be to infect everyone with the benign version to prevent the aggressive strain from taking root, which still poses the potential threat of it eating your brain from the inside.
Not a medical researcher either, but it seems to me like the strain might be benign because its nutrient absorption is taken from the blood, rather than consuming brain tissue per se. Even if it's slow growing like a benign tumor, though, it would eventually grow big enough that this would cause anemia and possibly death that way. Some anti-fungals thrown in might keep it at bay long enough for the malignant strain to die out due to lack of hosts, though, at which point a high dose of anti-fungals should kill a slower-growing strain fast enough that not everyone would die of toxic shock from the meds. I mean it's not an ideal outcome, but it's an apocalypse. ...although if that was their plan they wouldn't need to extract her brain, just grab a cutting of it. There's areas of the brain that you can lose a little bit of without dying. Yeah you have to re-learn to talk but overall that seems a reasonable trade-off. Also as another commentor pointed out, they didn't establish a clean room so there's a pretty good chance they weren't competant enough to keep the strain alive. Seems more likely the whole thing was a grift.
I do hate it a lot when you're given a lot of choice throughout a game, but in the most crucial moment a game gives you NO choice. Aw please. Why.
Because then they have to program in a thousand offshoots of the ending of the game based on whatever random thing you did.
@@chrishubbard64 We are asking for some choice, not all of it.
@@chrishubbard64 Then edit the game so you get a select number of endings based on certain choices. Have game designers never taken a quiz before?
Telltale games anyone?
@@justjames391 You usually always have choice, but you are locked into 2 or 3 must act now, hate all outcomes.
“We would spare the little sisters” don’t you mean you would. We all know Luke didn’t.
The monster
Hes simply a horrible human being
Was about to mention that myself :) Ellen going on about 'tasty adam' gave me flashbacks to that list video, and got me thinking :"Hold on, didn't Ellen save all the little sisters and then revealed that Luke the monster killed them?"
You can spare npcs? And then...like...NOT loot the corpses? You can play games like that?
@@gamehunter88 meh. cheats
You also can't spare the bandits in Skyrim even though they shout things like that you've bested them. They literally surrender, but you have to kill them or poof they're all better and ready to 'loot your corpse'
I hated this. For all the terrible things you can do in the game, all the alternate dialog, cut scenes, questlines to take, you should be able to let surrendering bandits flee.
Or worse... a guy with a hoodie and two knives demand you surrender your gold...
...without taking into account your party. You, likely in a full suit of fancy armor who's price could buy a small house, a housecarl, a dog or *battle troll* and potentially up to two permanent summons depending on conjuration skill.
This guy cannot be reasoned with unless speak is close to max...
You actually can save the bear in Detroit, what you have to do is maintain stealth the entire time, and once you have alice, go to the upstairs fireplace and start a fire, the bear will be seen outside at the end of the chapter.
i was about to comment this. Im happy someone else knew this
But in the case if you do start the fire, the sympathy of the people for the androids will go down during Marcus‘s game play. This could potentially change the outcome when Kara and Alice, and may be Luther if he made it, when they are about to cross the border at the Canada‘s checkpoint.
I was about to say I totally remember saving the bear.
When Quantic Dream said it was their most branching game yet they weren't even kidding
I couldve swore there is one the bear mauls the guy too and doesnt die
Joel: "The fungus grows all over the brain."
Marlene: "Right, so we're going to perform a brain biopsy and try to remove a couple samples. This comes with some risks, but our head surgeon knows what he's doing and we have spared no expense to prep an OR. We want to keep her alive as much as you do."
Joel: "Huh. I just kinda assumed you were gonna pop open her head and rip her brain out."
Marlene: "Why the fu... Jesus, Joel. How hard did our man hit you?"
Ah, in a perfect world that would have been it.
Literally the exact reason why I hated the Fireflies and to this day say that Joel did the right thing in saving her from what was most likely going to end up a worthless sacrifice (I don’t care what Naughty Dog says would have happened if Joel didn’t stop them, literally everything they were doing was incompetent and unnecessarily risky, it would have been a literal goddamn Deus Ex Machina if that team of unprofessional buffoons managed to actually create a cure from a very rapidly decomposing brain that would take the infection with it). Ellie literally did not need to die to make a cure, so the idea that a sacrifice would be necessary is straight up bs.
@@rickyrns1059 I mean, even if she didn't have to die, neither did the thousands she would have saved by dying. If they aren't willing to do it non-lethally, why does that still give you the right to kill them all.
@@freddierhodes8201 But nobody would have been saved. We don't even have fungal vaccines now! What makes you think a veterinarian (Yeah he's not even a people doctor) can create one with the literal scraps of technology that survived the apocalypse?
@@NEETKitten People also forget that even if a vaccine was made, the world wouldn't be fixed overnight and a vaccine isn't a cure.
The one in The Last of Us, either the doctor wasn't as qualified as we're told, nobody explained properly to Marlene, or Marlene wasn't paying attention to the explanation. Vaccines are for _viruses,_ not fungi, and properly researching an immunity would _never_ *start* with a lethal procedure, especially on a human subject and especially especially not on the _only_ case of an immunity.
Odds are very high those doctors were so far out of their depths that they never would have even come close to any sort of cure or "vaccine" and Ellie would be dead for no reason.
To be fair though they did find out why she was immune. Or at least the location of which the immunity comes from idk I’m not a doctor.
Or maybe the story writers are just shite, tlou2 certainly proved that
Plus a vaccine is useless for someone who's already been exposed.
It’s a dumb video game trying desperately for moral ambiguity and pathos. There was no real medical background or justification, it was expressly designed to make you feel like shit.
@@omnom8378 well yes but finding ubnormalys in the brain can be easily found and since it’s a fungus that uses the brain/ spinal cord to get control over it’s victims it wasn’t exactly a mystery we’re the fungus in her body would be also the normal thing to do would have been to take a spinal sample or too wich isn’t nearly as invasive and would have given much more helpful results on how her body is combating the fungus
See if you can spot the point in the red dead entry where the footage switches from Ellen's Arthur to Andy's Arthur 🤠
The vest gave it alllll away 😜
The different vests right?
You can always tell if Andys the one playing a game because his character usually has swag
Why won't either of you feed Arthur though? The man needs to eat
Fashion.
Can...can we just....? Would it be possible to...? No...? Okay FINE! Here are the times games forced our hands into doing something we did our best to avoid.
Minor Spoiler for assassins creed valhalla :
The new assassins creed valhalla has a mission involving an little child waiting under an tree for the return of her father who promised to be back before the last leaf of the tree falls down.
Even if you search the whole city and the way in between those two points you can not bring her father back. Which you will discover (dead) once you search underneath the bridge of the city her father traveled to. (At this point I had already spent an solid 4 hours searching everything)
The game only let's you one solution. Shoot the last leaf from the tree leaving the child devastated.
(however as an last nice gesture you can take the leaf and put it on the table next to the child)
I hate this mission and I loaded multiple saves from before I talked to the child after I discovered her dead father (after 4h of searching) trying every option during talking with her to see if it makes any difference...
Yey Rise of the Triad, its nice to see it on a list as that game needs more love and attention it clearly deserve :)
In Red Dead Redemption, the Wronged Woman, you have to duel with a guy who got his maid pregnant. But if you try do disarm him, it’s instant death for you. Being forced to kill him dead.
@@dolenir
Or RDR2, where Arthur from the start didn't want to do Strauss' work, but the mission was mandatory, the outcome unchangeable, and we all know the rest...
The exact same thing as in Rise of the Triad sometimes happens in Skyrim, an enemy (usually a bandit) will run around and start cowering in a corner while asking you to spare them, but if you do they decide to attack you again as soon as their HP recovers enough.
Another for Detroit Become Human: when you don't have a choice to report finding the abused android in the attic or not.
Although, it makes sense. At that point in the game Connor isn't questioning whether or not he should turn in the deviant. He's still full Deviant Hunter. So really, it would've been stranger to be given the choice to change that so early on.
@@sweetnightmare001 Connor was already becoming deviant from the start because he was literally designed to do so. From the first time you load into him, as he's going to the roof scene, he's already becoming deviant as per the (I forget the exact wording they use) system error that shows in the upper right corner of the screen. And it continues to show until he finally becomes fully deviant. Amanda even reveals this to Connor later on should he become devaint. She doesn't reveal this fact to him when he doesn't deviate because to them it didn't really matter if he actually went deviant or not so long as he led them to their goal, plus they had the "deviant kill switch" for him for in case he did. Thus, it could easily make sense for that choice to be there, especially considering the information he'd absorbed by that point.
@@MoiraMcGill 7 months late, sorry-
I think either way, he deviates. He shows emotion (sparing hank/getting angry when he fails) he just becomes a deviant that refuses to belive he's like the rest who in his mind, cause chaos and "are the reason the country is on the brink of civil war" he wants to stop them so he doesn't get destroyed but either way he does, his face shows flickers of regret when the RK900 arrives and he's told he'll be decommissioned
I mean, in theory, you do have a choice in choosing not to find him. Not finding all the clues and not going to the attic. On my first playthrough, I was one of the four percent of people who failed that investigation, and I found I don't really mind, because I didn't really want to incriminate a clearly abused android. Though I did end up finding him on my second playthrough, I wanted to see the "28 stab wounds" scene
@@hanasan4845 That works.....unless you go into the attic. Once you go up, you have to find him and there are no more choices. I tried waiting to be timed out up there before and it didn't work
On the plus side, actually feigning surrender with the intent to attack once the surrender is accepted (known as perfidy) is also a war crime.
True. At least that's one thing the Geneva Conventions does right.
So THATS what my DM means when they say my party commits war crimes!
@@charastar3 DM?
@@michaelandreipalon359 Dungeon Master. There is also GM, which I believe stands for Game Master, but DM is usually specific to D&D.
@@r.j.penfold Ah, OK.
I'd like to see Jane's take on this video: "7 Times We Tried to Commit Mass Murder but the Game Wouldn't Let Us"
@She Who Shall Not Be Blamed He was right in that movie though. Nuking it from orbit at the start would have caused only a single innocent death.
All joking aside, seven times we tried to be evil and the game didn't let us sounds like a good video.
"7 times genocide was a necessity"
@She Who Shall Not Be Blamed True, but it would open up opportunities for at least one Commenter Edition sequel, which gives us the chance to have our evil little desires validated!
Ah, pretty similar to the Rise of the Triad one is Skyrim: I was so annoyed when I realized that if you stopped attacking an enemy when they were low on HP and yelled "Mercy!" or "Victory is yours, I submit!", they would just start attacking you again a few seconds later when they regained some health. Made it pretty difficult to play as a character who only believes in killing as a last resort :/ Eventually I was able to use illusion magic to avoid some of the deaths, but still feels wrong for her to slash down enemies crying for mercy when circumstances prevent her from calming all the enemies with magic.
Hopefully there's a mod that fixes that issue and just makes them waltz out of the area or just run away instead.
Oh yeah I get exactly what you mean. I rather lower the casualties, at least when trying to get immersed.
was just about comment this
What I hated was that you can’t save the Dark Brotherhood members.
I always played Skyrim with a "kill only when you need to but don't weep for the stupid" attitude. Sure I didn't go out of my way to purge bandit camps but if you knowingly start swinging on me after you just watched me eat a f*cking dragon's soul, then don't you dare get mad at me for swinging back harder.
Little sisters in Bioshock.
"Harvest" or "Rescue"
*Glares at Luke*
Anything you wanna say bud?
Luke simply hates orphans, just look at the events in the town of Bum...ble from oxventure.
Normal farmers in Mount and blade: its almost harvesting season.
Farmers if Luke would play it: IT IS harvesting season! Rip and tear until everything is harvested!
@@Rymeths it’s 1912 all over again
Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney. There is a flashback sequence where you must present a certain piece of evidence, but doing so will ruin Phoenix Wright's life, as you learn very early on in the game. Since it's a flashback sequence, there's no way to do the right thing.
Hey, look on the bright side! Sure, he lost his entire career and became a disgrace in the legal community, but he also got a cool magic daughter out of it
History must be made, even if it means destroying a good man's life temporarily or not.
@She Who Shall Not Be Blamed I feel like you stepping in specifically led to a chain of events that stopped the world from being destroyed in that case
@@KirbyCom It did. The whole game could’ve been prevented if a certain antagonist would’ve simply welcomed being proven wrong instead being afraid of being proven wrong. That certain antagonist rigged pretty much everything, including you and Goro being involved in the game’s plot. The only thing they didn’t rig was their defeat.
This series really likes to make you do stuff like that huh?
In the second investigations game you play Gregory Edgeworth during the lead up to the DL6 incident, by this point knowing full well what’s going to happen to everyone involved but powerless to do anything to stop it. Your hands feel so red as everything you do leads everyone towards their various deaths/traumas, and let me tell you it is NOT helped by Gregory saying things like ‘I never want my son to be in the care of someone like Von Karma’!
The ironic thing about the false surrenders in Rise of the Triad is that either you can commit a war crime by killing an unarmed surrendering enemy, or they can commit a war crime by falsely surrendering, but either way a war crime is committed
Considering it's the Triad, makes sense.
Ah the Pacific War Paradox
Not being able to spare Grey Wolf Sif even after learning his entire backstory in Dark Souls. This is made worse by Sif remembering you and howling mournfully before the battle starts.
You can have someone drop you his ring, save edit, or just not do it in new game+ at least.
@@ragvarok7186 .... Are you fucking serious
I always fewed it as time fuckery. You can't save them because time in the souls series is a circle, and Sif has already been killed, or is destined to be
Wow, That Is Just Sad....
My fiancee was watching me fight that boss and noticed how it gets injured and slower throughout the fight. Watching it struggle at the end is just devastating
The whole "enemies fake surrendering" thing happens in Skyrim too. Really caught me off guard when it happened, then again when the bandit I'd just spared shot me in the back.
Can't you just take their weapons? Not sure if they are dumb enough to fistfight you.
Yeah, it's especially annoying since some innocent npcs can run in fear. There's even a "fear" spell. But no, every single surrender is a fake out.
Happens in The Last of Us Part 2 as well. Super frustrating.
@@EclipsisTenebris They will fist fight you.
@@killertruth186 that is hilarious!... and kinda sad.
I always found the Little Sisters from Bioshock a weird one. You get less up front for sparing them, but for every 3 you save you get sent a care package from Tenenbaum as thanks, which includes enough ADAM that it not only covers the difference, it actually gives _even more_ than you missed out on as a result, along with various other supplies you wouldn't get otherwise.
Thats just seems to be a case of how sometimes making the more moral choice will also work out for you better than the other choice.
@@Hartzilla2007 What bugged me about that is, while that's the correct lesson to teach in the real world, in game it diminishes the replay value somewhat. If you already know that taking this one path will give you the most resources, as well as exclusive plasmids you can't get otherwise, then you've no incentive to try the murder path to see what happens. And the bad ending isn't worth it in the slightest.
@@TylerInTraining In an interview Ken Levine said this was due to publisher pushback and he wanted to add more impact to the decision. Apparently, they were nervous about too many branching choices and pathways. Which doesn't make sense to us now but hindsight is 2020.
Yeah it took out the whole point of a good-evil trade-off. I think Game Maker's Toolkit discusses this in a video about choice and consequences.
There are a few things with Bioshock that go to show that their set up for good and evil isn't as dynamic as it is for some other games, like Infamous or Mass Effect, it's more like the system in Dishonored, mimicking karma, which implies that it would be more fruitful to be evil and in the long run actually leaves you and the world much worse off and those who are inclined to "sacrifice" for the sake of being good are later rewarded, normally emotionally.
Over four decades of brilliant work, an IMDB page most actors would kill for, and Clancy Brown is most remembered for Mr. Krabs.
He'll always be Lex Luthor to me
Kurgon from highlander
Buckaroo Banzai!!!
"The enemy cannot press the red button, if you disable his hands! MEDIC!"
Odin from Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes.
What I love about the Companion Cube thing is that she says you incinerated it faster than any other test subject no matter how long it takes you to do it...almost as if no one has ever had the heart to do it before Chell
so there was a way........but us evil b@st@rds just never found a way!
Or GLADOS was lying. Again. Like she does a lot.
@@Arindilwen If you are the first tester to make it this far, technically GLaDOS isn't lying.
@@Chris_Sizemore Also a possibility.
@@Chris_Sizemore ,isn’t that just lying by omission?
The Portal One is actually part of the Lore, since at the ending of portal 2, Glados actually sends a partly charred companion cube.
The bottle shattering off the doctor and him not flinching was hilarious
How do they know shooting him in the foot killed him he could’ve just passed out from pain
@@joshuaholland5279 the second game..
@@PurpleMoon799 didn’t think of that, but in my play through I shot him in the foot and just acted like he was alive so I didn’t have to play the sequel
@@joshuaholland5279 fair enough
you guys would go the right thing? Im having fun doing war crimes 1942 and not the from the allie's
Love that Luke's first instinct in every Soulsborne game is to attack whatever is in front of him.
Did you not see ellen attack the female merchant in dark souls?
Clearly they're 2 of a kind.
Except his Ghoul-Friends
To be completely fair soulsborne games aren't exactly known for being trust worthy.
@@irishbob26 Every morning the Oxtra team wakes up and chooses violence
@@LordMogatron all that kindness is an act.
In real life Ellen's a thug and Luke's an mma fighter.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Actually the Chamber 17 mission in Portal is like some sort of a "mad test". In fact, the guy who was there prior to Chell(who was writing on the walls) went mad because he really believed the cube was his faithful companion, instead of just a tool and a means to an end. That's basically one of GLADOS's psychological warfare techniques, to make you feel that way. I'm glad I didn't fall for that and incinerated that cube almost instantly. Even kinda proud of it lol.
That dude had schizophrenia and was off his meds thanks to being locked in the apature science building.
@@SamJ.J.True.
CIA: We managed to get an armed agent within spitting distance of Makarov
Also CIA: Instead of killing him why not just have the agent follow along with his rampages, what could go wrong?
Undercover operatives frequently have to do questionable things to get "in" with the organization they infiltrated. Even if Makarov didn't have plot armor in the game, there were still three other armed dudes including one with a GPMG who are capable of Bonnie and Clyding Allen. Also the operation was a joint op between the CIA and the 141 which Shepard commanded and he wanted to the operation to go sideways as he was planning with Makarov to start the war.
@@emberfist8347 Yeah but there is a difference between "doing questionable things" and "murdering an entire airport full of innocent civilians." It takes literally a half second to spray the entire group at point blank range with a fricking machine gun that will tear right through their armor before they can do anything about it. There is no justifiable excuse to carry out the mission. I suppose they might hand wave it as being a new guy without the experience to understand that you dont follow some orders but anyone with the mental faculties of a flea should be able to figure out the moral balance here.
@@chrishubbard64 Morality doesn't really have a place in warfare. Also the airport is morally questionable because he was maintaining his cover so he could take him down later. Black Ops II why an agent maintaining his cover is the best option. If Farid doesn't kill Harper, Cloe gets killed later and that ends up with one of two bad endings. You also really overestimate the capabilities of the M240.
@@emberfist8347 Morality absolutely does have a place in warfare. Its why things like the geneva convention exists and makarov is RIGHT THERE IN GUN RANGE. There is no reason to kill him later, kill him NOW. BEFORE he murders literally hundreds of innocent people.
Maintaining cover is meant to be done so you can gather evidence for an arrest or at least be trusted enough to meet the higher ups. Again, you have all the evidence you need, the higher up is standing in front of you, and your magazine has a hundred rounds that will go right through his and his buddies fleshy melon of a skull before anyone can react. This isnt the final chase between yuri and makarov with price where you are in full juggernaut body armor, full helmet and all.
@Ember Fist How about intelligence? Does that have a place in warfare? Assuming Allen's cover wasn't blown and they managed to prevent whatever Makarov had planned next, do you think Russia would care when an AMERICAN AGENT was involved in the premeditated murder of hundreds of people?! WW3 would absolutely still happen if the US refused to surrender Allen along with anybody giving him orders!
Fun fact - the companion cube incinerator was added into the game thanks to beta testers taking the cube out of that map and breaking other puzzles and also finding other workarounds to taking the cube with them.
"In early versions of the game, the player was forced to simply abandon it and move on. However, the developers were seeking a way to make the player familiar with how Aperture Science's incinerators worked in order to use them to destroy the orbs in the final battle against GLaDOS. They hit upon the idea to have GLaDOS force Chell to destroy the Cube in the incinerator, believing the idea to be a "perfect thing" and "way stronger" emotionally, and attributing its success to "design arguments" between members of the development team."
You can get past the surgeon in the last of us. You can actually walk right past him and he wont touch you. I just had the feeling he didnt have the guts, thought "dont make me do this bud", walked past him, picked the girl up and went boom happy end.
i was actually waiting to see them say what happened if you just walked past and they just never even tried lol
doesn't walking near him immediately make joel to stab his neck
@@gukeoke6312 na
Weird, I tried doing that for about 5min in the remastered version and it wouldn't let me, I even spared most of the Fireflies, except for the very last guy who I hopped a barricade literally right into his lap.
@@Linkforlife199 I was about to say the same thing!! When I got to that part I didn’t realize why the game just kept me there because it was a cutscene before that part I believe so I tried walking past him to get Ellie and it didn’t let me. I eventually figured out I had to kill him which make sense, since it’s an important part for TLOU2
I always thought of that choice in Detroit: Become Human as good role-playing, since you the player know that the trackers don't work, but that character does not, only Connor does.
Mind you those guys were obviously sketchy as hell. It's only bad because it's stupid.
@@DavidJoh yeah, but kara is a sheltered housemaid robot. She doesn't understand human nuance very well.
Fuck it, since you're playing it. You should have the alternative to not trust him. Choice is at the heart of what a deviant is, after all.
@@mariano3716 yes. But they're not idiots. They make decisions based of the info they have, not the info the omniscient God that controls their every waking moment has. Don't metagame dude!
@@freddierhodes8201 but the thing is - each different player has an opinion and a playstyle. If is mandatory, just put it behind a cutscene, that's all we're saying. Don't force us to opt like you want me to if you're giving us the reins. Like I commented, deviants are deviants because they chose not to act under their directives, so that would be a possible outcome. Also, this is not a regular game - aren't this guy's games supposed to be interactive novelizations? Don't be dense.
Two big things to take from the last two entries:
1: If you can get an asset close to a terrorist leader and/or figurehead, an assassination is a safer option than further attempts at infiltration.
2: Pretending to surrender is dangerous and banned by the Geneva conventions, as someone who pretends to surrender but then attacks their captors causes suspicion to be cast upon every soldier attempting to surrender, leading to many unarmed personnel being killed to minimize risks rather than taken captive.
"This isn't a decision the Fireflies take lightly."
Seeing as how they bother trying to search for alternatives for all about a day and how no one bothered to, I don't know, wait until Ellie woke up to ask her if she was cool with dying, I'd argue the contrary.
Plus they just couldn't stop poking the Joel bear. "Let's knock him out with a rifle while he's trying to resuscitate Ellie. Let's take Ellie while they're both unconscious. Let's glare at him, threaten him, shove a gun against his back, & literally dare him to attack while standing next to her belongings."
Was FINALLY waiting to see someone else mention this. They LITERALLY didn't even tell her she was gonna die. They be like "Ok resuscitate her then..SURGERY" She didn't get to wake up and last thing she knows is she died by drowning.
Not also at how the dude knocked Joel over the head while he was MID SAVING ELLIE'S LIFE. Like...COME ON
Also, they ignored science. The cordyceps Ellie has is something different. Also, the way cordyceps are is that they can be destroyed only with anti fungal medicine, which is real science.
So, thanks to MattPat, we now know that Joel did the right thing for the wrong reasons.
That was my thought when I played, plus what they are planning won't do anything to help find a vaccine, just how this version grows
plus i just dont trust the fireflies after all of the lore codexes in the game -- never truly believed they had the resources or intent to distribute the vaccine for the whole world
Romeo and Juliet is not a love story, Luke. I'll have you know that I'm willing to die on this hill.
Its a show of idiot teenagers with self control issues getting everyone killed through their own stupid teen angst.
@@chrishubbard64 And their stupid parents being too busy fighting to notice or help.
Idk man, it is a stupid and unhealthy one for sure, that had it been written today would've been classified as YA, but a love story nonetheless.
@@NotAFanOfHandles idk, killing yourself for someone seems like love to me
So were they
Ohey, turns out Skyrim was copying another game's homework when it decided to make you kill surrendering enemies.
TBF Skyrim don't really have surrendering enemies.
They might go down and beg on their knee for you not to kill them...untill they get just a shiver of enough health...then they will jump up and once again attempt to kill your ass.
It honestly annoyed me to no end that I couldn't just let them go so I even had to find a mod for it....
@@bibbobella which thank god those exist for modern console versions... just don't play ps3 pr xbox 360 versions, they aren't modable.
In Skyrim they have actual dialogue for randos challenging you to a fight where they concede. First time facing this was an orc who insisted, wrongfully, that I was a "milk drinker." Because I am kind and forgiving, I brought out a healing spell and healed him, then he went right back to wailing on me. I'm bummed they didn't have an option to just go our separate ways.
They do if you sheathe your weapon.
@@alexvazquez2871 sometimes
Kingdom come deliverance actually has this feature, in fact if you lose they will even show you mercy and let you go too
Not the entry I was expecting from. Red dead redemption 2, what about not hassling the guy that gives you tuberculosis in order to not get tuberculosis....just seems more valid.
Absolutely agree.
Or just knocking him in the back of the head when he's not looking.
@@isaacgleeth3609 tried that.....didn't work lol
@@omnitiontpictures
True enough, but Arthur could have done that, the guy coughs on the ground, and Arthur has no TB.
@@isaacgleeth3609 lol wouldn't that be nice
There is also the fact that Daniel, the first deviant that Conner has to deal with in the game, cannot be spared, no matter what route you take, he will always have he's fate set in robotic stone
I'm normally okay with these sorts of things if there's a character related reason for it (e.g. Joel's personality in the TLoU example or the character not knowing in the DBH example) cause it's fun to roleplay, but if it's something that there's no in character way to justify it, it pisses me off
I feel like many of these lose their narrative oomph by robbing the player's agency. If something has to happen to advance the story, have it be a cutscene. Very rarely can you pull it off where you force me into something stupid and it doesn't break immersion.
There's a reason that railroading is a bad word in TTRPGs and on-a-rails shooters aren't really made anymore.
I think it gets complicated when the protagonist is a defined character with their own goals and personalities like Joel in TLoU, like in TTRPGs you're playing your own character whereas in many videogames you're playing an existing character's story
It still definitely feels frustrating when a character makes a decision without you and I think it's important to find a way present it without it feeling the controller is being wrenched out of the player's hand but idk it seems less egregious when it takes place in those kinds of games as opposed to something like the Fallout series where you're supposed to be role-playing your own character 🤔
Those scenes could be cutscenes, and so could any scene where your entire job as player is to push the walk stick forward for several minutes to get to the next inevitable scene (escaping the nuclear blast in whatever COD that was, walking through the snow in DA: Inquisition, the dream sequences and the wounded walk through the Citadel in ME3). If there's no meaningful choice, don't give me control of the character and make me think maybe I can do something.
@@kemowery Joel does a lot of morally questionable things though. To put it all into scenes would be cutting out a lot of the gameplay. He sometimes makes choices you might not like during scenes like killing those cops early on or killing the first firefly in the hospital but the gameplay directly after those parts is you dealing with the consequences of those decisions.
I think it works well in that game because his decisions make sense in the contexts in which he makes them, any other decisions would be illogical & wildly out of character, & being stuck in the situation because of his decision shows that there really was no way out of the situation once he was in it because you're given the freedom to walk around & try other things & nothing makes a difference.
The surgeon is an exception though because you logically should be able to take him out non-lethally. Shoot his arms. If his arms can't be fixed in a building full of "surgeons", maybe they shouldn't have called themselves surgeons & tried to murder numerous immune people for a fairy-tale vaccine in which case, good job. You crippled a crazed "surgeon" so he can't murder anyone else.
The Last of Us was never much a of a player guild game though. Just a story. The player guilt bullshit mostly entered the picture in the trainwreck sequel.
I always thought that The Fireflies obsession with finding a “cure” although, a noble cause, seemed a tad bit ridiculous. Even if one were possible, it wouldn’t revert those already infected but prevent the healthy from contracting it. What I’m trying to get at is that the Jackson community & WLF base have been doing just fine without the need for one, they created their own system to deal with the infection & live a relatively normal life.
How about a video titled *"7 Times a Game Made Us Choose between Two Stupidly Extreme Opposites with NO Middle Ground"* ?
"Do you stand back and let this bad guy be ripped apart by the ravening lynch mob? Or do you step in and… let him toddle off scot free, suffering absolutely no consequences for his heinous crimes whatsoever?" What?! How can those be the _only two choices_ possible in this situation? _(Divinity: Original Sin)_
Plus there's all those simple-minded "morality" systems in which each choice boils down to being either an absolute perfect saint or an irredeemably satanic monster.
"Do you want to blow up an entire town or not?"
Infamous: Do you let every accused thief go scot free or simply leave them to be murdered? No you can't call the police to sort it out because that's their job.
Mass Effect 3: Sparring with judo moves is morally good, but sparring with strikes is evil.
@@ToxicBastard That's pretty realistic though. The Supreme Court (US) ruled that police are not obligated to protect citizens. A coward cop got off scot-free on a NYC subway as a poor guy was stabbed in the skull by a crazed man (poor guy lived). Court ruled police didn't have to protect him.
Kotor2: Do you give this homeless man money or do you viscously verbally abuse him? No, no middle ground options here, we need to make sure the old lady on your team gets mad at you for not taking a middle ground option.
Playing Skyrim, I really wanted to do something about the corrupt Blackbriar family. Throw them in jail, exile them, kill them, _something._ But, no. Not only can you not do anything about the family of crimelords, one of them ends up as the thane of Riften, depending on how you resolve Skyrim's civil war. That's the opposite of what I want.
Ingun seems relatively fine, she just wants to be an alchemist.
In the Witcher 3, one of the first side quests where you have to decide between giving the sick woman a medication too strong for the human body, or letting her die peacefully. In fact some TH-camrs debunked the entirety of the quest and what the devs programmed after it involving an encounter with the sick woman's, (from my memory) lover, proving that in fact you could save her.
Damn, I gave her the medicine, but when I found her lover, he said she died horribly because of the potion. I'm glad to know there is a better ending
There's no happy option. Either she dies, or the potion leaves her severely brain damaged. Her lover says he's torn between wanting to curse you for not letting her die with dignity and wanting to thank you for saving her.
How about a list of times games had ‘good’ options in a moral choices that resulted in us feeling even more guilty than the bad one
Like a lot of the non lethal options in Dishonoured, or sparing Slate in Bioshock Infinite
I never felt guilty about the nonlethal target eliminations in Dishonored. Nearly all of the targets are terrible people and deserve what they get (maybe with the exception of Lady Boyle). That said, I like the video idea 😄.
How about mass effect 2, at the end of the dlc you have to either use a relay to give you more time to prepare for the reapers but it will kill half of the batarian species, orr you can leave the relay but the reapers will arrive a lot sooner,
If you decide to take the risk and responsibility of overloading the relay the council just get pissy at you and don't prepare enough which leads to earth being decimated in the opening of 3 showing that all you essentially did was kill a crapton of batarians and not even dent the reaper forces
And on top of all that cerberus is now attacking places itself
In The Witcher 3, when you find the elderly cannibal couple and you think telling them to stop eating people is the better option (rather than telling the herbalist what they've done), but when you go back later the wife has starved to death.
(I mean, if you tell the herbalist, he'll send monsters to kill them both, so I guess it's still better? But not great).
@@orlaithmcg there's also that quest with the ancient leshen, you either kill an innocent girl that the leshen has attached itself to so you can kill it, or you perform a ritual to appease it but then some men get all murder happy and you end up killing them, either way the end log for the quest states,
maybe the whitcher killed more people than the monster did
@@koconnell968 Agreed.
So about the little sisters. Saving them is actually MORE beneficial than harvesting them. As you get a lot of Adam in supply drop fashion from them, and access to some powers you dont normally get. So id argue doing the right thing is the ONLY thing to do. Unless you want to do a run where youre the monster i guess.
Yeah. Mostly for poor Elizabeth...
True but you dont know that if you are new to the game. You only know that sparing them means less adam now thus making the game harder. But either way its a bad entry because this is about games where you CANT make the good choice.
@@chrishubbard64 I can see what you mean.
Still, even without thinking about her, you will feel bad when you harvest the poor things.
@@chrishubbard64 i recently played bioshock for the first time and while i knew the differences before, i couldn't murder them! i mean it breaks my heart SAVING them... and i didn't find the game to be hard by any means (in fact i am v disappointed with the final fight because like. it's so underwhelming???)
@@chrishubbard64 It's not an entry. They mentioned it before any of the entries, as an example of a game that *does* give you moral choices.
Is anyone going to mention that bit in "Innocence: A plague tale" where you have to lure a cute piggy to be murderered by a swarm of rats?
Innocence?
More like piggy murder!
I've never heard of A Plague Tale, but that HAS to be on the list if they ever make a part 2.
22:48 faking a surrender is actually a literal war crime under the Geneva Conventions for that exact reason.
well, he got what he deserved i guess.
The Geneva suggestions are irrelevant to anyone actually at war
@@scotcheggable i think if someone does not follow everyone is gonna gang the SH*T out of em
During the world wars killing a medic is/was considered a war crime but the Japanese didn't care so they killed the medics anyway so the U.S army said to remove the medic symbols from there helmets as it would make them an even bigger Target
@@ILoveHoneyBunss so your saying if you have a cross on your head your gonna be a target and most likely will die
Worst is when they pull that "you could have chose to stop playing the game buy you chose to do a bad thing instead" nonesense. Yes that might be an intriguing commentary on something or other, but I payed sixty quid for this game and would like to actually play it.
Yeah, I'll admit that I got Spec Ops The Line as a freebie packaged with something I actually wanted so I lacked any sunk cost.
Yeah I HATE when games try to question your morality with the idea that just putting the game down and refusing to murder DIGITAL CHARACTERS THAT ARE NOT REAL is a real option.
Give me the option to not kill and THEN yell at me for picking the kill option.
But acting like I"m a psychopath for just trying to progress the game is just stupid. MOST of us can seperate reality from fiction enough that while killing innocents leaves a bad taste in our mouths we can do it to push the game forward.
I think it's beautiful the way people try and save the life on an imaginary companion in an imaginary world aka the companion cube in portal.
It shows how much compassion the human race really has.
Personally, I dumped that thing into a fire as soon as I got the opportunity. But it kept coming back until the end of the level.
As long as it's not humans, I'll try to save them at any cost. Companion heart cube deserves not being sacrificed, so was the lion (poor cat was not on good living conditions). Humans? not so much. Maybe kids if the circumstances are incredibly unfair, But adult humans in general? Meh, they will destroy themselves anyways so why bother? Just look at the surrenders ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@@zoinksscoop20yearsago68 woah, be careful not to cut yourself on that edge bro.
What about the puppy in Little Misfortune? You can choose to set a cute puppy in a party hat tied to a tree free, or play with it. If you play with it, you throw ball that hits the tree causing a branch to fall and kill the puppy. And if you set it free, it runs towards the nearby road and, you guessed it, gets run over! Our choices are pointless! Yay😆
that must have been scaring to watch
Technically a different category "Choices games give us that aren't choices at all." PS3 Infamous has one too, where you are given two different groups, the antagonist is going to hang, one group of five doctors, and your girlfriend as the sole person in another. If you hang the five, like Schroder's Cat, the game reminds you that your girlfriend *is* a doctor, as is one of the five. If you hang the one person, its your girlfriend, so she dies regardless.
Well to be fair the game is literally called "Little Misfortune"...
@@thomasscroggs4410 "Choices" games give us that aren't choices at all...
I got some examples that are not (only) Playstation
Pokemon:
"Do you want to hear the explanation?" "No" "Ah I am so thrilled about this, I will tell it to you anyways!" (Pokemon Black/White - Vivian)
"Do you want to join the catching tutorial?" "No." "Oh Please!" "No." "Oh please!" (endless repeat unless you press yes) (Pokemon X/Y)
Dragon Quest Builders 2:
A "friendly NPC" is catched by some enemies you could rip a new one easily. But they "force" you to yield and get yourself captured. If you try to say NO to the yielding the NPC triggers a loop unless you say yes.
Also you are forced to imprison your friend FOR NO REASON and are not allowed to release him.
@@CaligoCastra honestly any game that is a sequel game should give an option saying do you wanna skip the tutorial or be like would you like a tutorial on the controls that are different from the previous game cause if you're playing the sequel then it stands to reason you played the first one and would know the controls
Walking out those damned barn doors in Red Dead Redemption.
THAT NEVER HAPPENED JOHN IS STILL ALIVE *runs while crying*
"you need to accept john's dead someday"
Or swapping to anything other than the basic 6-shot revolver
You'll let me use my High Power pistol for duels, but not when its quick reload is actually needed? And I even had my Spencer repeater equipped, with more than enough rounds to wipe the whole crowd in one use of Dead Eye.
If John didn't walk out those doors, and didn't die, the Government guys would have found and killed his family.
John knew that, and when faced with the choice to die and let his family live, or live and have his family die, he made the obvious choice.
@@dracosfire7247 Except John is a highly capable gunslinger and had no guarantee the government guys wouldn't just kill his family anyway, they had already broken their word more than once. The choice was actually to die on the off-chance they let his family go safely, or fight tooth and nail to ensure they are protected.
With as many guns as John carried around all the time, and how capably he wielded them, he should have been fully capable of busting out of that barn with a bandolier of loaded revolvers, a repeating rifle one hand and a double-barrel shotgun in the other. Instead he strolls out with nothing but the basic revolver, regardless of what you had equipped.
@@dracosfire7247 john served as a distraction plus he knew he was the one they wanted.
22:54 The Last of Us series does this as well! You can't let someone go who's asking for mercy, they will just attack you if you wait too long.
In DBH’s defence, not going in the basement is definitely a meta gaming choice. Kara would likely go in there
As is stopping Makarov. You as the character don’t know that your cover is already blown. Though, I guess it would make sense if your character’s goal was to kill Makarov, even if it meant being gunned down by his henchmen.
Umm, the very first few minutes of Vampyr where the only option you have is to feed on Jonathan's own sister. I blatantly refused it...for about 5 minutes or so...most awkward hug ever.
Yeah that choice sucked. Especially since it forced it on you instead of just making it a cutscene.
One moment that would probably come to my mind was the Black space Cat room in Omori, where it constantly tells you that you have to kill your cat and the dialogue gets more and more tragic with time. But it doesn't really force you though. You can get out of the room by stabbing yourself, but it doesn't tell you that once.
And the way to do that is by bringing up the menu, which is disabled for that entire section of the game except that one room.
Trying to save characters who are scripted to die (eg Roggvir in Skyrim), not being able arrest enemies who are begging (eg bandits in skyrim) or not being able to kill the big bad because skript/sequal
Technically, if you’re fast enough, you can save Roggvir. Though the game will kill him itself a few minutes afterward. But morally, that’s not really your fault.
I spent an hour trying to Soul Trap Roggvir without getting everyone in Solitude pissed at me for attacking the guy who was going to get his head lopped off anyway.
I just couldn't stand that fool thinking he was going to Sovngarde for the only thing of significance he did in life was opening a gate.
I had to time it just right as the executioner's axe was swinging down on him.
Also in a previous playthrough I soul trapped and executed the guy Roggvir opened a gate for that deserved him getting executed as far as the people of Solitude are concerned. Screw that guy, I'm looking forward to doing that again in my current playthrough.
wait I just thought. why did they need to remove her entire brain to get the cordyceps? they could easily have just taken samples without killing her.
Welcome to the club. Literally the only and yet still major reason why I actually completely agreed with Joel. They literally had no reason not to do that instead, so the fact that they decided to shows that either they actually never cared about keeping her alive at all and were purposely trying to kill her just like Joel for knowing too much, or they are completely and utterly incompetent in genuinely believing you need to take the brain out to get samples from it.
Apparently they needed the whole thing.
@@jaredcrabb apparently, they also didn't know that you can't create a vaccine against fungal infections either.
@@noelkelleher9727 And to my knowledge the fungus itself is useless in making antifungals.
@@jaredcrabb from what I know, it would have been less of an anti fungus and more of just... More of that fungus. It's the strain Ellie is infected with that makes her immune, right? Just have her bite some people
Isn't the reason that Kara isn't allowed to leave Zlatko, because she as a character isn't aware that the tracker stopped working once she became sentient? I'd assume we aren't allowed to leave cause we are forced to behave and limit our knowledge to that of the character (we sort of become the character in that sense)
Also in Red Dead 2, any time you could have shot Micah. You were alone with him a LOT Arthur!
I shot Micah quite often. Then the game failed the mission because I didn't play right. *sigh* So judgey.
He could've easily just left him in the jail at Strawberry, gone back to Dutch and said by the time he got there, they'd already hung him. Boom. Dutch wouldn't be happy but he'd have probably gotten over it and so many problems would've been prevented.
"Hey, Dutch, I busted him out like you said, but then he started trying to kill everyone in town. They got him. I think one of them shot him in the back of the head. Me? No, just someone. There were a lot of people shooting at him."
Tossing dynamite at that jerk is one of the most satisfying game overs I've ever gotten.
@She Who Shall Not Be Blamed Yes! I wpuld put killing Ashley, or letting her get taken in Resi 4 on that list. Her character was one of the most annoying ever. If the rumors about a remake of 4 are true, they have got to do a complete redo of her character.
One moment in gaming immediately comes to mind on this topic and that's Spec Ops The Line and it's infamous White Phosphorus incident.
Still sends a shiver down my spine any time I think of it.🥶
Yeah. It’s been awhile since I’ve played it. Isn’t to goal of that mission to try and find the civilians?
@@ichijofestival2576 Yeah. It's the character's action. Because you're playing a character.
Did he know they were civies though?
Yeah, I'm surprised Spec Ops isn't in this list, it's the biggest example of this, and then the game goes on to shame you for your action. While the "you could stop playing" argument has been thrown around before, that feels like a cop out. It fundamentally breaks the fourth wall, and you can never experience the consequence of your inaction. So if you're now thinking outside of the game narrative, and feel forced to continue, then it's clear that you're playing a game, and the people you're killing aren't real, and you as a player aren't responsible for anything, and the emotional/ethical argument is lost.
It feels like that whole section only works if you play it as a bit of a mindless player just doing the objectives, and maybe the later narrative causes you to think about your actions, and question the objectives in other games?
Damn, you beat me to it! I’ve never even played the game but I know nearly everything about the game due to my subscription to RabbidLuigi
Well technically there is a way past the surgeon in TLOU that doesn't require you to shoot him. If you get close you also have the option shank him in the throat with his scalpel. Not sure that's better but it's an option.
That way you can claim self defense.
@@ecir_winchester_petalclaw I'd say it's self defense for the doctor considering a guy with a gun just barged in.
@@willfanofmanyii3751 But, I would also say there is a young girl's life on the line. Which makes it as the doctor is protecting, his stolen money from a bank. From, the police.
@@willfanofmanyii3751 Or, from the bank owner.
One instance that always raises my hackles is the Thieves Guild and Maven Black-Briar from Skyrim. Because of plot reasons, you're expected to join the Thieves Guild in order to advance the main quest. You can work around it a bit by passing a tough speech check. But even then you're stuck with the final word of the Disarm shout locked behind the Thieves Guild questline, as well as being stuck with any Stones of Barenziah in your inventory if you picked some up at any point in the game because they are flagged as quest items.
Then we get to Maven Black-Briar herself, who is a karma houdini no matter what happens in the game. It's an open secret to everyone but the Jarl of Riften and Asgeir Snow-Shod that both the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood are at her beck and call. And while you can choose to destroy the Dark Brotherhood, you can't destroy the Thieves Guild. Maven herself is flagged essential, so even if you wanted to take matters into your own hands and go on a werewolf or vampire lord rampage to kill her, you can't.
Honestly. I like to play Skyrim as a genuine hero and avoid being a thief when I can, even turning down a few daedric quests to maintain character. But the game expects me to join the setting equivalent of the mafia at some point and I can't actually do what I want to do. Which is get rid of said mafia.
I like the Morrowind Thieves Guild quests.
More like actual non-killing Thieves and one of the quest lines is basically resurrecting the setting equivalent of Robin Hood.
The only killing quests are against the Cammona Tong and a Fighter's Guild leader that sided with the Cammona Tong, which are the evil equivalent and trying to murder everyone.
I hated being forced to join the Thieves Guild for access to fences, when I just wanted to be an independent petty thief who just picked stuff up and said "hey im gonna sell this now", because i was (and still am) a weenie whos terrible in a fight
Eh, the Thieves Guild and Maven are okay in my books.
She's unscrupulous, but at least she isn't openly killing people in the city streets who are being an inconvenience to her like Thonar Silver-Blood does in Markarth.
It's probably better to let her be in charge of Riften's criminal elements than killing her and risking someone worse coming along.
Plus if you complete the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood questlines the Dragonborn effectively becomes the leader of the two groups Maven goes to get things done.
The Dragonborn is on roughly equal ground with her and thus can regulate the criminal elements of Riften (and in other parts of Skyrim.) so things don't get too out of hand.
@@rjfrost7090 Thonar can be killed if you side with the Forsworn during "Escape From Cidhna Mine", effectively cleaning up most of Markarth's corruption. Thongvar can become Jarl, but he doesn't demonstrate a preference for Thonvar's tactics. Maven can't be dealt consequences at all.
@@reapergrimm8 There are actually a number of things you can do to screw Maven over.
Such as:
1. Kill her kids after getting one her alchemy ingredients, and lying to the other about where her fiance went.
2. Burning down all the bee hives at the goldenglow estate during the Thieves Guild questline.
3. Leaving the rats under Honningbrew Meadery alive.
4. Destroying the Dark Brotherhood so she doesn't have assassins anymore if you don't feel like leading them.
5. Helping a Dunmer who works at her meadery transport some stolen mead to an innkeeper in Ivarstead so you can take whatever you want from her meadery without it being considered stealing.
6. Helping Louis Letrush and her son steal Maven's prized horse and telling her about it, steal the horse for yourself, steal everything at the Black Briar Lodge that's not nailed down, and kill every mercenary she has employed there. You should probably do this before the first item on this list.
7. Progress the main quest until you get to the peace council between the Empire and Stormcloaks, then arrange for Riften to be given to the Empire so when you reclaim it for the Stormcloaks so Maven gets exiled from Riften.
Then complete the Thieves Guild questline so she can show up for your coronation as Guild Master so she can see the guild no longer needs her patronage anymore to stand on it's own two feet whilst she is down 2 kids, a horse, her personal assassins, her businesses have been screwed with, and she can't even set foot in the city proper.
Then steal all she's got on her, her bodyguard, her remaining son, and her house.
And as for Thonar's brother. He's kind of a douche.
I'd rather take an idiot jarl blind to the problems his city is suffering from than the douche who is the brother to the source of most of the cities problems.
Knowing the real world alterative of the deadly fungus in The Last of Us, the end of the game is actually good and that Joel did the right thing.
If Joel didn't get Ellie she would have just died and it wouldn't have saved anything, in fact it would just make it worse.
Explain how it would have made things worse. Explain how Ellie living was a positive for the world.
@@Ares99999 There's no vaccines for fungi that's for viruses, the tried multiple times before Ellie and failed, they could've done a biopsy and let her live instead of just ripping her brain out and digging through it, why wouldn't you study one of the few immune people on the planet over a period of time instead of immediately killing them.
@@Ares99999 the fact that they had done the same thing many times before and never succeeded. Why would do it again be any different?
@@Ares99999 Vaccines do not work on Fungal Infections: they were killing immune people via these procedures for a type of medicine that would've had zero effect
Ellie living however allows her to pass on the mutated version(either through regular encounters with others or having kids), which would potentially (over A LOT of time) give humanity a blanket immunity to the Fungus
@@Ares99999 The fact that vaccines for fungal infections dont actually exist so based off the 'real world alternative' this could've never worked, the fact that it had never succeeded before, the fact that they were going to kill the only living human test subject without her consent without knowing if or how it would work and refusing to actually extensively study her immunity beforehand to see if there was any way to actually create a vaccine through it, let alone for it to be done non lethally. What if they could infect other people with the same strain of mutated cordyceps through her blood or saliva and spread immunity that way? What if they could instead produce a drug that slows the rate of infection through samples from a spinal tap? a biopsy?? If they couldnt do those things due to a lack of modern medicine/equipment and suitable doctors then that makes sense, but bodes really badly for the probability of the surgery working at all. Based on real life there was absolutely no chance it could've worked, and even within the world it was an extremely rushed procedure. Killing the only immune specimen in the entire world capable of helping make a cure as soon as you find them without any guarantees that you haven't just doomed everybody's survival is honestly just stupid, and a few hours, days weeks or even months wouldn't be enough time to figure that out. It's not like they had a time limit or anything, which makes the whole thing just that much more risky, reckless and wholly unnecessary. it just wouldn’t have been possible to know the full outcome of this decision and killing her within such a short time frame would probably just doom them all. To quote sean keefe on quora (not the most reliable source of information i know, but he summarises my point really well):
" It would have had to have been a process involving a lot of grunt lab work, experimentation, and trials before he even learned what, exactly, it was that prevented zombification. He didn't even know if Ellie's fungus could survive outside of her head, much less whether it could be grown in a lab setting. [To cut the fungus out is] mindboggingly reckless. Even stupid. This was the only known case of it's kind in the entire world. The notes you find in Saint Mary's admit that no one had seen anything like this before. No one knows how it works. They haven't taken any samples of it or run any tests on Ellie except standard imaging and blood work. Jerry just assumes that if he cuts out the entire adult fungus that he'll be able to figure it out, but there is no way on God's Green Apocalypse he could know this. He is very likely killing the only person this mutant strain grows in on pure optimism."
Assuming that the surgery was mandatory, and had a 100% fatality rate, there is literally no evidence or scientific basis that it would work the way the firefly's wanted it to, and their confidence is completely unwarranted. Cures take massive amounts of research, funding and time, not some guy with a scapel who seems really sure of himself. We don't know whether jerry wouldve been able (1) to get the sample out properly, (2) keep the sample alive in the lab when the thing it was leeching off of is actively dying, (3) get it to multiply in the first place and harvest the spores or (4) have the mutated cordyceps react to everyone in the same way it did ellie. We dont know whether it was she was immune due to the mutation or whether it was an unusual immune response on ellie's part, so what stops it from just completely taking over the brains of almost everyone else infected by the 'vaccine'? or better yet, mutating a second time to become more dangerous than the first? What about if ellie isnt actually immune (ie, if the fungus is growing at an alarmingly slow rate), and he dooms thousands of people to an early death with a vaccine that honestly isnt necessary? so many things that are VERY LIKELY to go wrong that they just ignore for the sake of their blind belief that the murder of a child could lead to something meaningful.
Also even if they manage to do it, what does that achieve really? In the game at the time it had been 20 years after the zombie outbreak occurred, and the cordyceps would've definitely taken over the brains of most of them in its entirety. There was no way to make a cure for that, just a vaccine for all the remaining survivors. But rebuilding society in a fractured, lawless world split into factions is nigh impossible, and the fireflies definitely lacked the resources, technology, manpower and know-how to mass produce and circulate a vaccine properly to a scale big enough for humanity to actually have a fighting chance (or to get the factions to work together enough to do so). The likelihood is that they'd be wiped out somehow (probably by FEDRA) during the process. Plus humanity had managed to adapt and survive in the past 2 decades to the point where a vaccine wouldn't be as extremely necessary as it wouldve been in like 2013.
The creators really push the angle that the vaccine was definitely possible in tlou2, but they also said that they tried to make the series' science as realistic as possible and in that case the firefly's whole plan just never wouldve amounted to anything. also, the surgery's success rate was much more ambiguous in part 1 and only became a certainty later on. I see why tbh - the moral dilemma of saving a loved one or the world is part of what makes the series great - but it is honestly much more likely that humanity would still be doomed regardless. The fireflies are woefully inept and humanity is too far gone for even a fully fledged vaccine to make much of an impact
You forgot killing Great Gray Wolf Sif. Specially if you confront him after completing the DLC. Just prepare to cry
He even limps. Never again. 😭
Hell yea, I specifically didn't fight him so my manus fight cold be easier, and omg one try, so maybe I can get past his boss?, nope and not only that you get a new scene in which he recognises you and cries
@@Tommyboi01 I don't remember if I saw that but it was heart wrenching enough to know he was just guarding his master. It would be a bit like punting Greyfriars Bobby into the water of Leith...
@@Zoso14892 tbh it is a small difference, instead of being angry and defensive, he jumps down and sniff's you, recognises that you fought manus together and then howls sadly before ructantly picking up the sword
@@Zoso14892 but yea it was so sad because he's just being a good boy for his friend who sacrificed his life to save him
Artorias himself isn't a bad guy he just got corrupted by the abyss after being killed by manus
Mass Effect 2: Can I tell Anderson that I'm trying to take down Cerebus from the inside? No? Can I tell Ashley/Kaiden? No? Am I just genuinely, unironically working for Cerebus now?
Red Dead Redemption 2: This is more "they can't tell every possible story" but as it was becoming increasingly clear that Dutch was going to get everyone killed and my Arthur was walking around with $20K in his pocket, I really wanted an option to give Dutch all the money he was asking for at once, end things, and then use the rest to run off to Tahiti or Europe with Sadie to spend Arthur's last days enjoying life.
Mass effect one annoyed my friend and I so much. There's no reason not to take their info and tell them to GTFO, but you aren't allowed to. Even if you do get reinstated as a spectre and told to take them down from the inside... yeah what OP said.
The arrival dlc in ME: 2 gave me Spec Ops the line vibes, I legit tried to warn the entire system to evacuate but the message was cut off and I was forced to kill and entire solar system
The thing pissing me off with Joel isn't that I think I would make a choice to let Ellie die - it's that the game didn't trust me to make any choice. It's like the Devs letting me play this cool and heartwarming story about two people - and then at the very end when it all comes to head they rip the pad out of my hands like an annoying older brother and play it for me. "No, dammit, you have to FEEL like we tell you to!" It would be better if it was a cutscene=_=
This bothered me about the second one too.
Not being able to drown that hag was the dumbest thing ever
In fairness to Joel, the Fireflies weren’t exactly well known for their trustworthiness or accuracy in statements.
And if you listen to the audiologs, which many don't, then you'll learn that the operation doesn't even have much of a success rate, meaning Ellie would die for nothing. And even if by some miracle some kind of cure WAS produced, then EVEN more wars and bloodshed would be wrought because of that cures' existence.
@@GoinGreninja You can’t vaccinate against a fungus.
@@Leith_Crowther My bad on that one. It should either be a fungicide or some kind of unspecific cure. Since I'm not a doctor, slipping up on that one makes sense and will be rectified.
@@GoinGreninja No, not just you. It's the doctor in the game whom I wanted to point out messed up. What he was trying was never going to work.
@@Leith_Crowther yes you can. In fact there are several in medical trials at the moment. Just like any other biological pathogen, you can train the immune system to recognize it.
Another one regarding sparing enemies, if you’re in a Titan in Titanfall 2 and approach a lone foot soldier (Note: The soldier had to be human, not a robot) the soldier just…. Gives up fighting, they throw down their gun and just accept that they’re gonna die.
Right up until you decide to spare them and walk away, whereupon they decide that not dying my being punched into a viscous red pudding is not what they wanted to happen, they’ll start shooting at you again
I'm gonna go with Mad Max, where you're forced to kill Chumbucket at the end. Chumbucket is your first and most faithful ally -- a groveling sycophant, really -- and his only sin was not wanting you to destroy the magnificent vehicle the two of you worked on together throughout the whole game. Kinda feel like Max could have figured a way to beat the bad guy without ruthlessly killing his only friend.
Max also isn't what you'd call a 'rational thinker'. And the world he lives in has no happy endings. You either survive in a blighted hellscape, or get brutally murdered by some gang.
Granted, Chum also told Scrotus about Glory and her mum. Getting them both tortured and killed. Undoing any semblance of sanity Max had regained over his journey through the Wastes with them and Chum, seeing as he basically relived the deaths of his wife and child a second time.
This. I couldn’t make it through the game because of this shit. I liked the gameplay, but I *hated* the decisions Max made that I had no control over... and I hated that basically every major bad thing after, like, the midpoint of the game is either directly or indirectly his fault. I couldn’t finish the game once I realized how much of a mess everything was, and that basically all of it could have been avoided.
No, A Way Out? No matter which way you play there's no way out of doing a terrible thing
Yeah. Why can't you let your friend go or get him a pardon?
@@bdp4 cause everyone would choose that ending.
I'm shocked that WASN'T on this list.
In fact it's what ruined the game for me because it hoenstly makes no sense.
The cop character just wanted to avenge his brother. He did that. He had no particular need to hunt down the other character at the risk of his life ALONE! Seriously there was a swat team there why was he freaking alone!?!
And the Criminal character could have just gone to prison or asked for a pardon. In the first place his main crime was just being involved with the guy that murdered an undercover cop. After everything he did he could probably get his sentence reduced. Or at the very least he could accept the consequences of his own crimes and wait out whatever sentence he gets.
But NOPE one of them has to kill the other because of bullshit ending twists.
In Portal, the lack of a choice makes complete sense. It was exactly something GLaDOS would do. Manipulation and passive-aggressive comments are her MO. Giving you a companion, the only companion you have in a clinical and isolating place, and then ripping it away from you right as you start getting attached and forcing you to destroy it yourself, is Manipulation 101. You wouldn't have been able to take it with you because of that particle field right before the elevator, and leaving it behind would have been bad enough, but forcing you to incinerate it in order to progress? That's a purposeful, calculated psychological attack, manipulation perfectly accentuated by the off-hand comment at the end. "You incinerated your companion cube quicker than any other test subject."
Love the Souls entry on this, but I'm Genuinely surprised sparing Great Grey Wolf Sif wasn't on here. I died to that fight a trillion times just trying to walk away when he was limping
Hated that Maiden Astraea song remix.
I cannot stress enough about how fast I yeeted my companion cube into the incinerator. Didn't even have a second thought about it. I just threw it in because I was told to.
Glados must love you.
U Monster
Same here. I never got why that was so difficult for people. It's not a character, it's a glorified crate.
Pictured in this thread: people who don't anthropomorphize objects
I fear no one.... but this commenter..... he (or she or they) scares me.
It always bugs me in RPG's when all of the dialogue options lead to the same result, except with a random phrase inserted at the beginning.
NPC - "What do you wish to do?"
Player Dialogue Options -
1. Let's Go
2. What do you think?
3. We should wait.
4. Screw you, lady! You don't call the shots!
(Player selects "Let's go!")
NPC - "Let's go!"
(RELOADS SAVE)
(Player selects "We should wait.")
NPC - "That's not a good idea, let's go!"
So... why even ask, if you won't respect my answer?
I KNOWWW
Ellen: "When we are given the choice in a video game we usually do the right thing, like sparing this Little Sister in BioShock, even if we were to eat her, we would get SO MUCH DNA-altering Adam-power."
Luke: "Blender goes brrrrrrrr."
After the incredibly tense stand-off on Oxbox, I'm surprised A Way Out didn't make the list. Not shooting your erstwhile friend seems the obvious and good choice, but nope.
I forgot about that! Definitely that should have been on here!
I definitely remember the lion retrieval job, though I can’t say that I ever tried to find an alternative considering the fact that a literally and figuratively bloody lion is trying to kill me after already cutting down at least one other guy and several livestock animals.
In Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, enemies would sometimes yield and you could accept it by sheathing your weapon and the fight would be over. You could also offer a yield to the guards by sheathing your weapon, then they would stop combat and arrest you.
The first time an enemy shouted out "I yield" in Skyrim, I sheathed my weapon, only to be surprised when they jumped up a few seconds later to begin attacking me again. I also tried yielding to the guards, but they just kept trying to kill me. :(
I found a mod for my current playthrough that allows me to accept a yield and tie them up, but I don't get why they had that system in one game then took it out for the next.
Just another example (and this is from someone with over *1000* hours in the game) of Bethesda dumbing down... basically everything, for Skyrim. 😢
You can still yield to guards, but just like oblivion, it’s near impossible with companions. The main difference is that companions in Skyrim are actually worth having around.
I am having trouble finding any info about npcs yielding in Oblivion, and I’ve played for quite a while with no initially hostile npc ever yielding just like in Skyrim.
It’s still an incredibly confusing voice line that probably shouldn’t play for those npcs considering there’s already voice lines that can play when an npc is downed that don’t include them surrendering.
I felt Joel rescuing Ellie from the Fireflies was justified on a logical level. But Joel wasn't doing this because of logic. He did it because of his emotions. Which is why he lied to Ellie instead of outright telling her they weren't equipped to do this, which would have been actually the right thing to do that we couldn't.
Honestly, for DBH I always thought it was more frustrating to not let Carlo Ortiz's android get away from the attic rather than letting Kara go into the basement-
I have to say I feel no remorse for killing the surgeon from a logical standpoint. First off all the tools they where using where 20 years old. Second you can’t make a vaccine for a fungal infection. So they would have cracked open Ellie’s skull for nothing. And the recorder stated in the first place there was no fungal growth on her brain. At that point all they would be able to use is some blood and spinal fluid. Both which can be taken without major damage to the patient. This is probably due to some bad writing where not enough research was done on fugal infections.
Apparently he was also a vet. I think it was intentional to prove that the surgeon didn’t know what they were doing, trying to sort of justify Joel’s actions
I did. I didn't want to do anything when it came to the finale of the game. I guess I'm just accustomed to playing games with choice.
If it's due to bad writing then it's not an actual reason lmao because it would have worked in universe. A chance, no matter how remote, at literally saving the human race is good but i guess its hard to say since we're all in gamer armchairs and not in the apocalypse.
I always got the feeling all the Fireflies were going to do was use Ellie's brain to make a smoothie and hope that it miraculously gave them her immunity. Joel was 100% in the right to save Ellie.
@@yaoiboi60 well I consider it bad writing because now it’s being passed off as it would have most likely worked. Despite it making no sense
im sure Jane could make a whole list with "7 Times we tried to Do the Bad thing but the Game was a total Narc about it" by herself
I always find it funny, when anyone forgets to mention that Joel was doing all of that to retrieve some guns that was his. That were sold to the Fireflies, be it a dead Robert. And, when he finally gets there, not only did they not give him his guns. They were going to make him leave without his supplies all together.
No payment equals repossession of merchandise. With or without emotions getting in the way.
Yeah, not just non-payment for goods and services rendered, it's like smacking the pizza guy in the head with a bat and stealing all the pizza and his delivery vehicle and telling him to fuck off.
What about all those moments in Red Dead Redemption 2 where you aren't allowed to kill Micah, even though it's clearly the right thing to do?
I always think of Spec Ops: The Line, where they say “hey look, there’s some white phosphorus over there, but we mustn’t use it because it’s a war crime”. So I didn’t. Except the level eventually just overwhelms you with waves of enemies until you realize that you have to do it, and all of a sudden you’re a monster because of it.
That's exactly why I stopped playing that game. People treat it like a masterpiece for some reason, but it's just a movie that's pretending to be a middle-of-the-road third person shooter.
@bird3713 that’s kinda the point, your choice wasn’t made then, it was made by buying the game and playing it in the first time place. It’s kinda like the movie funny games, it berates you for thinking that good things would happen, that there would be a happy ending and that you would be a hero. For trying to live out a fantasy where you’re in charge. Because in reality that doesn’t happen and the game is trying to show that.
@@maxvernick7721 Well, no... uh... if the message is 'you are a bad person for buying our game' as you suggest, then maybe they're just bad developers for not having things like 'you will be required to commit war crimes in this game world to complete it' written on the box... maybe the developers should look in the mirror.
People try to say the right choice would be giving up entirely. When the game got me stuck like that I tried to go all the way to the beginning to see if that would give me an alternate ending. But it doesn't. Either you become a war criminal or the game completely ignores whatever you try to do.
First game that came into my mind was "Ghost of Tsushima"
I tried to be honorable, what means looking into someone's eyes while killing them, but the game forced me to sneak around and use poison. The worst thing is, how mad they are at me in the cutscene afterwards for using such a "coward tactic" :/
I wasn’t ashamed of stealth killing. I feel like the worst part was that the ending was a lose-lose situation. Either you honor Lord Shimura by killing him or you give him a fate worse than death by sparing him and dishonoring him.
Game: makes you do the thing
Also game: why would you do such a thing?
Fucking devs
The game starts off with a whole army of honorable samurai being massacred. The game is pretty clear that the honorable tactic would never have worked, that's why Jin had to learn to skulk and kill from the shadows.
It really presents an interesting look at how Japanese culture exists in a way that was incompatible with pragmatism.
Few cultures value honor so highly that dying pointlessly and as an utter failure with honor is more important than doing the right thing, than surviving, than protecting the innocent.
The Mongols had no qualms about committing atrocities, mocking the Japanese at every turn, butchering women and children, and yet if not for the monsoons that wiped out the Mongol invaders and their ships TWICE, Japan probably would have been curb stomped into a Mongolian territory over preserving honor.
History does not care about honor or dishonor. History is written by victors, and that means honor at the cost of all that you cherish is worse than dishonor to preserve what you cherish. If you are more willing to fight with honor and integrity as your entire nation and culture are destroyed, then in that act you have committed the most cowardly and dishonorable act of all: allowing your entire society and culture to be destroyed.
@@Foxxie0kun Irl the Japanese were clearly not above using "dishonorable" stealth tactics and assassinations.
"oh she enjoyed him juuust fine. she licked her chops and asked for seconds"
I am 100% using this line at some point in my life. funny as hell
Little frustrates me more than when a game forces you to do something awful then in the next scene it's like, "How could you do such an awful thing?"
P.S. the firefly's plan was terrible, "Here let us scoop out this young girls brain and I don't know, we'll poke at it with science and maybe a cure will fall out?" they had no real idea how to make a cure, no plan or resources to manufacture or distribute said cure and really it was just a bit galling how ready they were to jump straight to attacking her skull with an ice cream scoop.
Especially when part of the reason she's immune may be something about her that's interacting with the infectious agent in some way.
Don't kill the immune person if you're trying to duplicate that immunity.
They’re not saying you did an awful thing though, but that the character did an awful thing. That’s just my view
And take note that they did multiple tests like this before Ellie so 🤷🏻♀️
My biggest issue was that they didn't even give Ellie a choice. They brought her in unconscious, sedated her, and were just going to kill her.
So, you're just gonna ignore that the Doctor said he would be able to make a vaccine? Not might be able to, would be able to? That he had been studying it for decades and was one of the few experts left? You're just gonna make your own canon so you don't have to admit that Joel is terrible?
Dying Light
In the 2nd or 3rd mission, you are forced to burn a airdrops worth of Antizin (a drug that suppresses the zombie virus) by the GRE.
Exactly, realistically, I wouldn't have done that
How about in "Batman: Arkham Knight"? You have a choice to save your innocent partner Robin or lock him in a jail. No matter what you choose, it will eventually lead you to lock him up.
The surgeon was an idiot and I blame him for the event of part 2
(I'm being emotional here, so logic is not appreciated)
Not your fault, Neil retcon the whole thing to fit his shitty story writing to justify in killing Joel.
@@aznboi1027 Agreed. What a freaking mess of a story, just to fit in a bog standard 'revenge is bad' story. If they did more with the characters and made them sympathetic, then people wouldn't hate on it so much.
No, the surgeon sacrificing a 14 year old for a vaccine* is extremelly unethical, he was the one in the wrong all along. The only way to make it ethical was to wait for her to wake up, give her years of theraphy, and then, with her informed concent when she's AT LEAST 18 (I'd argue 24), it would be ok to do.
The only bad thing Joel did there was take away her choice for good, but in their situation, there wasn't a lot he could've done.
*Let's face it, in the universe of last of us, what are the odds this vaccine would even work out? And if it did, would the fireflies give it freely or weaponize it to trade for firepower? Joel did the right thing, Ellie fucked up later for killing innocent people who had nothing to do with Abby's "revenge".
@@nina9565 fyi, there were a few immune before Ellie. They tried getting a vaccine out of them. You can guess what happened
I dont think anyone blames the surgeon, idiot or not, he was trying to save people.
Everybody else tho? Yeah, cannot let them get away with anything.
Ellie and Joel included.
Considering the science of the cure they were going for in LoU is shaky at best i dont think you did all that bad
Just like in Rise of the Triads, Fallout 4 has a perk mechanic of pacifying enemies witch technically turns them friendly. At that point, depending on your perk level, you can give them specific commands like inciting them to attack or making them give you their loot via Trade, but... The moment you holster your weapon or turn your back on them, you'll be sure to face the wrath of a re-hostilised enemy. How nice!
I'm so happy that my prediction, Detroit: Become Human was on this list. I suffered through the basement scene as well. It was a new kind of annoying.
I don't know if this is in the same vain but what about how in all horror games, when you don't have a weapon, and in the dark spooky dungeon you spy, a shovel or a hammer or a pencil, you get what I'm saying, why can't I pick up a weapon.
Thats probably be more along the lines of the smart thing to do that the game doesnt let you. Like in any zombie game ever using whatever you can get your hands on as a weapon cause ammo is no longer being made (except maybe dead rising, never played it but based on videos Ive seen there are still things that you cant use).
Naw, I will always stand behind Joel on this one, saving Ellie is the right thing, change my mind lol.
I like the last of us 1 doctor part. It reminds me of a video I watched called something along the lines of "Joel did nothing wrong." It talks about morals and other things. The comments also add onto how the fire flies really suck. Cause if your read documents and other events from experience kinda see they suck.
Nier:Automata: when it forces you to kill machines that are begging for their lives
One of the most annoying things about TLoU2 is how they try to redeem Mr. Evil Doctor. It's pretty clear that with the first episode they tried to make Joel look bad in this situation, but as everybody agreed with him, they doubled down on their original idea and forced utterly conflicting personality traits into the doctor. There is no way a good person would do quarter of the shit so heartlessly as he does. He gets nowhere with his stupid vaccine (which is just a vaccine, not even a cure) yet he keeps killing people in chasing it.
So even after TLoU2, he absolutely had it coming. The only thing that's worse is the game didn't let you murder his fucking psychopath daughter.
They went full David Gaider. Never go full David Gaider.
@@Veladus I would like an explanation to this one as I’m only aware that he wrote things for Dragon Age
Then there is the opposite of this. I don't always want to be the good guy game, let me commit my war crimes.
I'd argue that the Fireflies logic was flawed from the beginning. Ellie had a mutated version of the fungus attached to her brain, meaning that even if they created a cure/vaccine, it would only work on the benign version that she was infected by (people who have been following the developments on the current world situation are likely aware of this). And there's no guarantee that the fungus on her brain wouldn't kill her eventually (it's going to keep growing), it just wouldn't turn her into an infected.
Meaning that Joel saving her from the Fireflies WAS the right thing to do. Not only did he save Ellie from being killed pointlessly, he also likely averted a potential extinction event, as people would be administered the vaccine (which wouldn't work against the aggressive strain) or would just straight up die out to alternate strain competing for space in the skull.
Remember, it's a fungus. It needs to draw its nutrients from SOMETHING. It can't just live in your brainbox, consequence free.
I'd like to clarify, I'm not qualified to make this statement with 100% accuracy, just going based off of information I've come across regarding this specific topic. If anybody who's actually studied this stuff could contribute, I would appreciate it.
Also, I'd like to point out potential confusion in using the terms Vaccine when discussing a fungus, as vaccines are created to deal with viruses. So in the event that a vaccine wouldn't work, the alternate, parallel solution would be to infect everyone with the benign version to prevent the aggressive strain from taking root, which still poses the potential threat of it eating your brain from the inside.
Not a medical researcher either, but it seems to me like the strain might be benign because its nutrient absorption is taken from the blood, rather than consuming brain tissue per se. Even if it's slow growing like a benign tumor, though, it would eventually grow big enough that this would cause anemia and possibly death that way. Some anti-fungals thrown in might keep it at bay long enough for the malignant strain to die out due to lack of hosts, though, at which point a high dose of anti-fungals should kill a slower-growing strain fast enough that not everyone would die of toxic shock from the meds. I mean it's not an ideal outcome, but it's an apocalypse.
...although if that was their plan they wouldn't need to extract her brain, just grab a cutting of it. There's areas of the brain that you can lose a little bit of without dying. Yeah you have to re-learn to talk but overall that seems a reasonable trade-off. Also as another commentor pointed out, they didn't establish a clean room so there's a pretty good chance they weren't competant enough to keep the strain alive. Seems more likely the whole thing was a grift.
Right why are they trying to develop a vaccine for something you kill with a dish soap solution.
When Makarov back tracked you to the elevator and went in swinging at you I lost my shit😂😂😂