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[Neonivek]

The problem is when Linear games when they REQUIRE your character to be an absolute moron to proceed.

Bioschock Infinite has probably one of the worst stories ever imagined simply because of the leaps of stupidity your playable character needs to make just to continue the plot.

"Ohh look I am the antichrist... Well Lets just show off this Tatoo to everyone WHEEEEE!"

[UXLZ]

Doing the 'good' thing tends to get you better quest rewards, but in a less flexible fashion than the 'evil' thing. For example, doing good stuff tends to get you powerful items whereas evil stuff will just give you cold, hard, currency.

Something I personally dislike it when Moral Choice systems do is the whole 'Good gets one super power, evil gets another' thing. It makes being neutral pointless, forcing you to be either a puppy torturing child-molesting demon, or a saint whose mere breath heals the wounded and feeds the poor.

Oh, and I also dislike when there's not ACTUAL neutral choice (or at least relatively neutral), with your only options being:

A) Give away all that you own to the poor family, make their life happy forever after and cleansing them of all pain and illness.
B) Torture the father, murder the daughter, rape the mother, and cast their souls into the eternal abyss, chained in excruciating agony for all of time.

Not giving you:

C) Help them out a bit. (Neutral Good)
D) Steal their TV. (Neutral Greedy)
E) Just leave them alone. (Neutral)

[Neonivek]

Then there are the rare games where the good choice has consequences and going down the path of goodness actually is you sort of crawling through the mud.

Which is a way to do it as well.

I just don't like the "Good" and "Evil" to feel arbitrary.

There is a reason I don't like The Sims 4's morality choice system (because it pays off to being good way more often then evil) versus 3 and 2s (pays off according to what has the better chance of success)

As well often when a choice seems to have a fairly obvious "benefit" the morality becomes muddled and the game's treatment of such as a very moral choice becomes odd. AKA Dragon Age where apperantly doing something good FOR THE REWARD is so holy that it gives Morrigan incredible bouts of diarrhea because she won't shut up about it... and don't get me started on Sten the captain of Instant Gratification.

[SealyStar]

What I don't get is why games need to force moral choice as well (eg. Press X to kill or Y to release). Just leave the character vulnerable at let me walk away if I want, you don't have to smash my face in to the fact that "HEY LOOK, MORAL CHOICE! WE'RE EDGY AND MODERN!". A real good moral choice should be one I don't really think of.
And I have to agree with SealyStar. The beauty of Half-life 2 is that they NEVER took player agency away (unless Gordon was physically restrained, in which case you still controlled his head). They never went "LOOK AT THIS GLORY, LOOOOK AT IT" and let you dick off in the middle of a conversation to go teleport potted plants. Not a single moral choice, and I still feel I had more agency than in Infinite.

To be fair, Infinite didn't really have any dumb moral choices. The only ones I can think of are whether you bean the interracial couple at the beginning and whether you

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

kill Slate

And neither has a real effect down the line.

BioShock 2, which everyone loves to hate, actually had some reasonable, if ultimately not that important, choices about whether to kill or spare NPCs.

[UXLZ]

Why do people dislike BioShock 2? I've never played any of the BS games, but it looks freaking awesome.

[Levi]

Why do people dislike BioShock 2? I've never played any of the BS games, but it looks freaking awesome.

I liked it.  It didn't have the awesome twist of the first one, but the gameplay was a lot better as I remember it. 

[SealyStar]

Why do people dislike BioShock 2? I've never played any of the BS games, but it looks freaking awesome.

I liked it.  It didn't have the awesome twist of the first one, but the gameplay was a lot better as I remember it. 

The main gripes are that the story isn't as good and that it rehashes a significant amount of content from the first game with relatively few new things.

Overall, though, it had better gameplay than the first, which manifests in everything from the streamlining of hacking to somewhat more interesting weapons. The only areas where it was arguably dumbed down are that different classes of tonic have been simplified to one and the vestigial crafting system is gone.

[Darkmere]

There's two ways to look at the Bioshock 2 story. One is that it's a lazy piece of trash ripoff of the first game and blah blah. I'm not sure where this comes from, but a lot of the common internet opinions completely baffle me as well, so I gave up trying to figure it out.

The other way is that it's portraying the exact opposite end of the extremist scale from Bioshock 1. Jack basically had no agency in a group of people who had plenty. Delta has tons of free will among others like him who have none. Andrew Ryan was the absurd pinnacle of objectivism deconstructed, while Sophia Lamb was just as nuts on the collectivist end of the scale. The end result for each was the same, but the illustration of both plots was how they got there through different means. I saw Bioshock 1 and 2 as bookends, though 2 was already at a disadvantage simply because people had seen Rapture before, so now it all "felt old and boring" I guess.

I also wasn't a big fan of how 2's moral choices were dictated to me, but that leads into the morality systems debate, so I want to shill for another game that did morality right:

Alpha Protocol.

There are choices, and they involve levels of morality, but the game never gives you "goody two shoes" or "Snidely Whiplash" points. You can do horrible things without repercussion, or choose to atone for them, or try to be a good guy, but at the end of the game it all plays out as a story. Not about heroes or villain protagonists, but as a guy in a very morally gray world who probably made some very ambiguous decisions but managed to come out on top. There's only one character who usually comes off as EVIL but you can actually beat him at his own game, potentially making your character just as "evil" but not once does it involve kicking a puppy.

Anyway, I recommend it. One of the best-written and least preachy games I've played.

[itisnotlogical]

KOTOR2 has one of the better moral-choice systems, IMO. It's mostly because of the writing; a lot of times, you'll make a choice in a seemingly black-and-white situation, but then Kreia will explain how the choice you made wasn't as perfect as it seemed on the surface. IIRC there's even a special scene if you try to be "neutral" by picking an equal number of dark- and light-side choices.

[Lightningfalcon]

I liked how Mass Effect handled morality... until it became clear that Paragon actually had the best decisions and Renegade was just about being a dick.  They should have made it so that Renegade would win the war much more easily, with Paragon players having a much harder time.  But no, paragon gives you all the war points, and Renegade has you backstabbing anyone and everyone for lulz. 

[Mech#4]

I remember Fable III had a similar idea. If you were evil, it was more because you saw the impending threat and decided to deal with it using high taxation and strict laws to save as many people as possible despite making them unhappy and being labelled a tyrant. Being good meant you would make people happy in the short term but once the threat arrived you would lack the funds to save everyone.

'course the system could be undermined by baking pies to raise the million gold required to save everyone. Or by buying up all the property and making the money off rent.

I remember an apt comic pointing out that since the population was 1 million people, everyone could have just donated 1 gold to not die.

[Shadowlord]

It made sense in Fable III, because of the time constraint and the fact that you were actually running everything, but the property system made it unnecessary, if you get enough: I bought all the properties, but IIRC when I tried to skip time forward a few years, it skipped to the invasion and didn't bother collecting any rent.

In ME, using renegade interactions in ME1 and telling the Alliance fleet to ignore the Council ship and concentrate on Sovereign (because preventing Sovereign from doing what he was trying to do was more important than saving the fleeing Council) resulted in Udina stacking the new council with humans, which I was not happy about. He also managed to get himself into leadership of the Council by ME3, to my consternation. Apparently using primarily paragon interactions would have avoided the all-human council. I had plenty of war score by the end of ME3, although I used primarily paragon interactions in conversation in ME2 and ME3.

[EnigmaticHat]

There's two ways to look at the Bioshock 2 story. One is that it's a lazy piece of trash ripoff of the first game and blah blah. I'm not sure where this comes from, but a lot of the common internet opinions completely baffle me as well, so I gave up trying to figure it out.

The problem is that Bioshock's "story" was about the setting.  We learned about Rapture and got a lot of little stories on top of that.

Bioschock 2 told us nothing about Rapture we didn't already know.  It made things more explicit, but that's not the same thing as better.  Also a lot of story elements were basically rehashed from Bioshock one, for example your companion is presented in much the same way Atlas is except

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

he's more outwardly untrustworthy and DOESN'T betray you

the slum is functionally no different from the slum in the original except the one in the original told a very important part of the story.  Ect.

Also evil collectivist is not as interesting as evil Any Rand expy IMO.  I enjoyed Bioshock 2 but found it didn't hold up to a second playthrough, while the original is still flipping great.

[notquitethere]

Been playing System Shock 2 recently and made me realise that it has all the mechanics of Bioshock in a setting where they actually make sense (hacking, psychic powers, cloning machines etc.).

[Levi]

I hate any multiplayer game that considers itself "competitive" and yet has non-cosmetic microtransactions.