What games do you think gave you a decision that gave you a lot of pause before making it.
I’ll use as an example The Witcher 3,
there’s a lot of game which feature romance options, and in most of them it pretty much amounts to picking the one character you like the most. But I felt The Witcher 3 was different. In picking between Yennefer and Triss, you were picking between two different ideologies about what it means to be in love.
Yennefer represents passion, her relationship with Geralt seems completely natural, whenever they see eachother the chemistry is evident. But their relationship is often toxic to the point that neither of them is good for the other. Choosing Yennefer makes you question wether the choice depends most on two people being naturally attracted to each-others strengths and overlooking their flaws.
Triss on the other hand is such a kind person. Geralt often struggles with being a witcher and being an outsider. But when Triss is around, he is allowed to believe the world can be better and kinder. He obviously loves Triss, but their relationship seems more awkward at times it doesn’t come naturally. Choosing Triss makes you question wether the choice depends on which relationship is self sustainable, which relationship is more likely to heal our wounds even if the attraction is not fully there.
I took me so long to choose (I chose Triss, nothing agaisnt Yennefer fans) but I loved how comple the choice was.
Have any of you encountered a choice wether it’s on an Tabletop RPG or a Video game that made you pause the screen and think on it for 8 months before unpausing?
I would say 90% of the decisions I made in Witcher 3 had me going, “I think I made a mistake”, although honestly there are no easy good/bad choices.
I chose Yenn but when you get to the part where you say finally say goodbye to Triss in Novigrad I definitely let the screen idle for a few minutes. She’s such a great person! I didn’t want her to go. I still need to do a playthrough with Triss
I’ve never paused that long, but there’s been a few choices I’ve thought about a lot after making them.
Witcher 2: you have to choose between two things early on that you can tell is going to make a huge difference but both choices feel wrong.
Fallout 3: pretty early in the game you have the option of either saving a town or blowing it up. It wasn’t a hard decision, but it gave me pause detonating a nuke was even an option.
Fallout 4: what to do about Shaun. He’s so awful, but he’s your son. Plus that’s how my brother spells his name and I’d never seen anyone else spell it that way before so it ramped up the family loyalty.
Dragon Age: deciding between the dalish and the werewolves, deciding whether to kill all the mages to stop the abominations, who to give political power in Orzammar, who to make king/queen, whether to kill Howe, what to do about the alienage… pretty much every decision in that game felt important.
Dragon Age 2: choosing to either let Anders die or protect him and have Sebastian have a breakdown and leave.
I’m a huge Dragon Age fangirl, partially the lore, but also because all the decisions feel so gritty and important (even when they’re not).
Even when I do a re-play with the opposite choice, the original choice feels like canon to me, like that’s what really happened and the second playthrough was just a what-if daydream. Does anyone else feel like that?
I definitely have experienced the first playthrough as “canon”
My first time through Fallout 3 as a good gun toting hero of the wasteland was the “real” story, but my second playthrough where I played an evil unarmed murderess was honestly more fun to play. Same with my original Commander Shepard in Mass Effect. I didn’t copy over my game save when I played ME2 and ME3, so my Shepard’s were technically different in each game, but my ME1 Shepard was always the most “real” (also why Liara was always my “real” love lol)