^ This

If there's one thing I hate more than forced altruism in games, it's these contrived romances. It's even more annoying when the game has dialog options and the only way to cut off the romances is to act like a total dink ie: "No, I have no feelings for you, now shut up and let's get on with our quest".

I'm playing KOTOR 2 for the first time right now. I haven't checked any guides with regards to character interaction but I can already feel it quite likely there are romance options with Visas and the handmaiden. Cos of this, the handmaiden is staying on the Ebon Hawk. It's bad enough I have to choose the stupid do-gooder dialog options to keep my light side mastery bonus so let's not sour the experience even more with NPC romances.

It's the Apocalypse. Your wife is most likely already dead or at least pregnant with E.T.'s hellspawn. She's only seconds away from potentially being dead and/or pregnant too. Under these circumstances Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex is very much a thing.

And you refuse to help. You monster!

Oddly though, I didn't mind it in e.g. Baldur's Gate 2. Then again I didn't feel it tried to force me into any romance anyway, you just had the option with the couple of NPCs. Still, in BG2 I did go into a romance with one NPC, and tried to reach the best (romantic) conclusion with her.

In HL2 and such, there's no option for Alyx' flirting, and maybe it is so much more in your face because it is a FPS game (like Alyx hugging you; ewwww, ok....). Maybe also a bit of feeling as if the game was for total nerds, trying to make them feel good about themselves "See? Even a hot chick like Alyx is hot after you. You are a real man!". Yes yes, but I'm here just chew bubblegum and kick some alien butt, and now I am all out of alien butt.

Then again, again I am unsure why that didn't annoy me that much in Baldur's Gate 2, even if there was even a bit of catfight between the potential love interests. The whole thing was just handled better in BG2, I guess.

Yes, at least a little. As far as I recall, it happened to me in Spec Ops: The Line, Mass Effect 2: Arrival DLC and Kunoichi (NWN module).

I think what I found so irritating about it is not necessarily the unethical part of it, but the games' blatant attempts to shock the player by forcing them to actively take part in the atrocities as if it had been their own decision. They seem to say: "You wanted to play this game, now look at what you've done. Why didn't you just quit?", and that's something I find rather silly and hypocritical for a commercial entertainment game. It's okay to tackle moral dilemmas in games, but what's a moral dilemma without a choice? Why should I think about the right thing to do and take on responsibility for the character's actions if I don't even get a say in the matter? I'm fine with playing a character who I don't have full control over, but if I have no choice in a given situation because this game is about what my character would do and not what I would do, why do I have to control the character in this rail-roaded part as if I was free to do what I wanted? Just make it a cutscene then and don't blame it on the player afterwards. And in the case of Mass Effect, taking away the player's choice goes against what the game pretended to be.

I ended up deleting Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 from my computer (bought them ages ago super cheap in a steam sale, $4 total for the 2, and I have to say they will probably never get played by me, it makes me sad and a bit angry and I want to return them!) because the three times I tried to start Mass Effect, the decisions they make me make (yes, MAKE, that is the difference between well-done morality in a game and horribly done morality in a game, that you feel forced for whatever reason to do one thing over another, it doesn't feel like a choice) were so very annoying compacted by the fact that when I chose my dialogue options I never actually said what it said I was going to say and always said some other REALLY STUPID thing that I didn't want to say. Who the F came up with that dialogue style/system, especially when deciding to couple it with moral choices!? It was the same thing used in the Star Wars MMO The Old Republic (always slightly ashamed to admit I played that, but I did get a full refund for the game purchase and subscription months after raising hell for how awful it was), probably the worst dialogue system EVER.

Just my 2 cents. I love games with unethical behavior! Why because its so outside my own personality. And having a bad day, a sad day, a mean day, whatever, I can go play some GTA or Fallout and expunge those emotions. Games can be a wonderful way to de-stress yourself ^_^

The mission in WarCraft 3 where you have to kill the town's inhabitants before the demons do is pretty rough. It was hard to do, but I didn't view it as me so much as acting out the story.

Just encountered a mission in Skyrim where you encounter cannibals and they want you to lure a priest back to their cave lair then kill him for dinner. I didn't know what the long term ramifications in the game were for following through, nor for avoiding it, but it would go against the personality of the character role I was playing. I ended up having the priest tail me throughout the game for a long time as an extra sidekick instead since he couldn't be killed, but I just got around to deciding to go complete the cannibal mission. I saved the game beforehand so I could see what happens and reverse my decision if need be. I went ahead and killed him, then they let you "have the first bite". It's mostly fake as they don't show anything gory, but in the end all I got out of it was some lameass daedra ring that I wouldn't likely use anyway.

I reloaded the savegame, then instead of killing the priest, I started firing arrows at all of the cannibals. Killed them all and let the priest escape, he was thankful for saving his life.

Even though the quest wasn't gory or anything just the principal of it felt wrong for the character I was playing and had I went ahead and kept the successfully cannibalized result, I'd have felt odd the rest of the game wondering what else might change in the game and whether or not I might regret it. There's 6 or 7 less cannibals running around now though.

P.S. Funny enough, I got bored last night in Markarth and some high and mighty decided to say something rude to me, so I saved the game and shot him in the face with an arrow just to see what would happen. I ended up having to kill all of the city guards, and just about every other person in the game then went on a mass murder rampage killing everyone in Markarth. I'd never done such a thing in game before and wondered what would happen if you did. Well... everybody dies unless they are flagged unkillable, in which case they struggle on the ground until they heal enough to get back up. Oh, and apparently you can not kill children in the game as I tried to kill *everybody* but arrows hitting children do no damage and are ignored, or so it seems anyway. I guess they have to do that to make it sellable in Walmart or whatever. :) I let off my boredom though then reloaded from save to an alive-Markarth again. :)

For me the issue is less about the unethical behavior and more about the lack of choice. GTA and Fallout don't force you to be unethical, they just offer you the option. Well, generally speaking - I guess the whole concept of GTA is doing unethical things, but with games completely centered on unethical behavior, at least you know what you're getting. The problem arises when games that pretend to let you play a hero and/or make your own choices unexpectedly deviate from their own concept without giving you a chance to opt out of it, and worse, even act like it was your own choice afterwards.

No. It is a game. Someone asked a similar Q about killing in games. See my brilliant witty rhetoric for that right here.

In BG2, the romances had quite a bit of character development so they weren't all bad but my main gripe was, did the character development have to be done through romances? I felt the other NPCs had little to no character development because of this. Still, I try not to get caught up on it because to me, BG2 is mostly a dungeon crawler game anyways, don't really need character development for such games. Not sure if it counts for anything but I went through 3 of them, Aerie (her whining got to me a bit), Anomen (I felt his romance wasn't finished when the game shipped ) and Viccy (IMO, the best of the 3). No idea what Jaherias was like.

Sometimes, the romances were just awkward like in KOTOR and NWN: SOTU. GTA: San Andreas was another where it felt so contrived, I just wanted to drive into the nearest lake before I could hear CJ say "that's so interesting" one more time. Most of the time, when characters start acting this way, it just feels awkward and out of place so I'd rather the devs just didn't bother with such nonsense and focus of improving the actual game instead..