Video Game Cruelty Potential You DO NOT CROSS

In Hitman: Absolution, there's a security guard in the first level who has just discovered that he doesn't have prostate cancer. You have the option to, among other methods of killing him, throw him off a cliff. I just couldn't do it. That feels pointlessly cruel. The game itself practically eggs you into doing it, too.

"Man, nothing could piss on this day!"

I will never side with the Dark Brotherhood in the Elder Scrolls games, or Edward Sallow's crowd in Fallout: New Vegas. I know the guy has another, in-game name but I don't use it because fuck Edward Sallow.

I don't have much qualms about cannibalism or eating folks when I am in wolf-form in Skyrim though.

If it counts, and I'm probably a huge prude/weenie for saying this, but in The Sims, I never kill my sims. I don't know why, but I guess I treat them as if they're real people? I just can't do it, man.

Especially the babies/children.

I just can't cross the line. In a game with open decisions or a morality system, I can't even force myself into doing asshole/evil moves, especially over innocents, which is why making a renegade run in Mass Effect is out of the question for me, especially after knowing where many of those decisions lead.

I'm more lenient about this in games where you play as a non-hero, but I've learned to not go overboard, especially when it fits with the character (Michael and Franklin in Grand Theft Auto V), and still cringe when something very evil happens and I can't do a damn thing about it (Trevor, I'm loking at you and your little scene).

Pikmin extermination is a good one. I try like hell to keep them from dying, for those pitiful death noises.

Shooting U-Mos in Metroid Prime 2. It doesn't even do anything (he has an energy shield, because i did test it once). The poor guy has gone through so much and is the last survivor of his species not in stasis.

One line i will cross is killing off Shinon in Fire Emblem Tellius "Path of Radiance", since you need Rolf to cross-recruit him, and i never used Rolf. Effort threshold was too high, and Shinon's Jerkass nature didn't make him sympathetic, though you still feel a little bad for the guy when he gets mauled by tiger claws.

Mass Effect makes it harder because it feels like narrative causality is in effect. Why bother making the "tough decisions" if they won't do a single thing to help you stop the Reapers anyway?

For the most part, I really can't play genuinely evil characters. I can do Anti-Heroes (or Anti-Villains, in Overlord's case), but that's about it. I'll steal things, and I'll Kick The Son Of A Bitch, but that's as far as I'll go.

• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
  • First off, I'm a genocidal maniac in this game. All humans must die. I bet you're going to expect me to not hurt the children? Wrong - I use a Game Mod so I can give the Bratty Half Pints the slowest, most sadistic deaths of all. But there's one thing I won't attack, and that's dogs. I never, ever touch Stump. Him even being grazed by the crossfire is enough for me to reload the save.
  • Also, not only is joining them a line I will never cross, but I will annihilate the Thieve's Guild and Dark Brother Hood on every single save file, no exceptions. Those bastards deserve to not just die but be erased.
• Pokémon
  • I can't release a pokémon. I just can't do it. I even cheat when Nuzlocke-ing by just boxing the fallen to transfer to a later gen.
• Neopets
  • Call me a sucker, but I can't let my pets' hunger level ever get in the red. It makes me sick that the larger part of the userbase actually brags about how their entire party's been in tears for basically eternity, mocking the more sentimental users for getting all worked up about "a bunch of pixels".
• Creatures
  • I never, ever let a norn die permanently if I can help it. If their life level's getting low, I export them and make several copies of the file. (Fuck Grendels, though. Into the pirhana pit those go.)

edited 7th Apr '14 8:05:58 PM by BaffleBlend

Yeah, I'm willing to do most things in a game at least once, but not something like this.

That's not cheating. I've seen numerous resources about such runs that say you don't have to release something; instead, just set it aside in the PC in a box you call "Graveyard" or something similar.

• Mass Effect
  • I will never sabotage the Genophage cure or murder Mordin and Wrex. I will never commit genocide on either the Quarians or the Geth. I will never expose Tali's father at her trial.

• Skyrim
  • I will never side with Saadia. I will never side with the Stormcloaks. I will never join the Dark Brotherhood.

@Fancywig, even if it's this baby?◊

For Skyrim:

• I refuse to do the Boethiah quest, the one that requires me to sacrifice a follower. I generally like my followers, even if they sometimes bug the shit out of me (the most used one being Lydia).
• I refuse to do the Mephala quest. That evil katana is beaten out by stuff you can forge and enchant yourself anyway, and killing ten of your friends just to power the damned thing up is not worth it.
• I refuse to betray Lynly Star-Sung to that murdering bastard Sibbi Black-Briar.
• I refuse to kill Paarthurnax. Delphine and Esbern were cool when they were helping me against Alduin when the Greybeards wouldn't, but not all dragons are like that bastard, and killing the dragon that was instrumental to helping humanity end Alduin's reign because these assholes don't believe in redemption qualifies as a Dick Move.

Also for Skyrim, if someone tells me how they're entitled to a woman, like Sven, Faendal, or Mikael, I will never follow their side-quests. I kill them instead. With grenades. Or by turning into a dragon. Or by launching a 20x Kaio-Ken Kamehameha point-blank.

...I think my urges not to be cruel in that game at points is turning me even more psychotic.

edited 15th Apr '14 2:20:23 PM by BaffleBlend

I'm a Spade by nature, so it's almost physically painful to turn away from finding out what the developers added in as consequences for particular actions. But there are whole areas where I tend to rely on my moral sense rather than my Spade tendencies; I don't like playing Evil Evil types. In Skyrim, for example, I am toying with a merciless thief type (will steal everything he can get away with), but not a wanton murderer.

It is this that made me think I wouldn't like the "gang leader simulator" genre (GTA and Saints Row), but I'm glad my friend persuaded me to give Saints Row IV a try, because I have never in my life had more moment-by-moment fun with a game. But after now playing Saints Row III for more than half the story so far, I've run into numerous occasions at which I felt uncomfortable just playing through a required mission. Driving a prostitute and her client around while they made noises in the back of my car, that was amusing enough (like the sexy dance in IV, which had me grinning from start to finish). But a mission soon after that had me rescue a bunch of sex slaves... then choose, with no Third Option, to either sell them back to the fiends we just rescued them from, or turn them over to my pimp friend to work the streets as income for my gang. I would have cheerfully accepted a reduction in income if I could've chosen differently.

I passed that area because I really do want to see the rest of the storyline (especially how some of the characters who show up in IV ended up in the circumstances they found themselves in), but... I would not play through that section again. It left me feeling squicky, and it's not the only mission so far that has made me squirm. (By contrast, Saints Row IV just changed the setting and the goals and suddenly the game was nonstop awesome that always made me feel awesome and competent and never particularly evil (although sometimes a jerk... and even that got commented on and modified a bit before the end).)

Now, on to the game that really made me question the extent to which in-game actions have out-game moralities attached: Minecraft.

At some point I was really, seriously bored, and I ended up making a new save. I started next to a village on the plains, and built up a big, beautiful temple. Then I decided to start "putting the temple to use" as it were, in the way certain cultures have done over the millennia. I started by sacrificing animals, just setting up little altars with fire and nudging the animals into the flames until they caught.

Then I took it in my head to pick the villager with the least appealing trades, and sacrifice him as a sort of christening for the temple proper, which I had finally completed.

It took forever to get the guy separate from the rest of the villagers and to lock him inside the temple. Then I only had to get him upstairs, and then get him to fall off the edge of this balcony into a fiery doom pit. Boy, did his AI not want me doing that. It took everything I had to nudge him into place without losing progress, and it was as if he knew what was coming and was terrified by it.

But eventually, I got him to the edge. Even tempted him with a couple of doors he could run into "for safety" like any normal villager, though of course they only got him closer to the edge and made me feel bad for deceiving him in this way. But I got him there, and then I pushed him off. It was over in a second.

And I was filled with a confusing jumble of mixed emotions. I felt dirty, and sick. And even though I tried to rationalize that I hadn't done anything wrong in any conceivable way, it felt like I had. The whole Video Game Cruelty Potential thing has always been alien to my thinking, and here I had consciously decided to explore it, and I rejected it so thoroughly that I doubt I shall ever walk down that road again.

And I'm still not sure why it feels the way it does, but it feels like what I was doing was absolutely, without a doubt, w r o n g .

You pulled an Aztec Sun God on him. Of course you felt wrong!

I can never bee totally good in games. Nor can I ever be totally evil. I go for a sort of Chaotic Good type character in most RP Gs, that let you. Except for the Legend of Zelda. Link is usually going to be a jerk, but not that much of a jerk.

But anyway, in the Elder Scrolls. I always side with the Dark Brotherhood and the Thieves Guild if I'm doing a stealth character, because the equipment they give is damn good. And the Skyrim Thieves Guild storyline is probably one of my favorites. I will usually whatever it takes to get an edge. This means breaking into noble's houses, and taking all their stuff to either pawn off or equip. And assassinating them if I feel I may get caught. However I always save face in public and use the shiny new toys I steal to take care of the local problems.

I always drive responsibly on the road and avoid killing passerby as much as possible in Retro City Rampage. Which is weird because the stress-relieving mayhem was the whole reason I bought it in the first place.

edited 17th Apr '14 7:20:31 AM by BaffleBlend

@63: I won't do those things in Skyrim, either, and to add to the list: I won't cannibalize the priest of Arkay for Namira's cultists; I kill them instead. I also, after the first playthrough when I didn't know better, won't give evidence of Talos worship to Ondolemar in Markarth. I try to kill him from stealth sometimes, but it's not always possible.

Fallout 3-I've never blown up Megaton,there's too much good stuff in there!

edited 17th Apr '14 7:59:00 AM by Ultimatum

There sure are a lot of them from Skyrim.

Yeah, but at least that Karma Meter thingy was binned. I can understand why Obsidian had it in New Vegas but it would have stuck out like a sore thumb in the morally grey landscape Up North.

I cut down Ondy and his pals in front of the guards in the Keep, paid my forty septims bounty and kept on truckin'.

edited 17th Apr '14 9:40:59 AM by TamH70

My morality in Red Dead Redemption:

• Attempt to help all random encounters, no matter how much of a chore they seem.

• Bad guys get tied up and brought to their victims.

• The dudes menacing women get killed, and shot several times in the head and crotch.

• People who attempt to steal my horse get tied up and carried until I reach my destination. They wanted a ride, they get a ride. Though not as comfortable as they wanted.

• I tried to hogtie and carry to the doctor that girl who was going to die in the desert for her faith, but the law showed up.