Video games have certainly come a long way from their pixelated past. Back in the days ❀of the Super NES, PlayStaওtion and Nintendo 64, the hardest decision you had to make was what weapon to use to dispatch your enemies. Yet, in today's more sophisticated games, players are given difficult and morally ambiguous choices that can determine the entire course of your character's development, the direction of the whole game, and even change the fate of the wider virtual world and everyone in it.
But some of the most gut-wrenching, seemingly important decisions turn out to be🐎 no more consequential than what color outfit you choose during character creation, only changing the game in superficial ways. Still others seem like meaningful choices that could make pivotal scenes play out in strikingly different ways depending on what you choose, but in reality end up the same way no matter what you did. Still othe🐓r moral choices in games are more a choice of evils than anything else, keeping you up at night with regret, wondering about the ramifications of your actions and if things would have been different if you'd made another decision.
Hℱere are 15 of the most difficult video game decisions that either were not real choices at all, were impossibly difficult decisions between two unbearable options, and/or in the end made no actual difference.
Please note that these entries will contain major spoilers for the games in question, so proceed with cauti🦹on.
15 The Two Brooches (BioShock: Infinite)
As you play BioShock: Infinite and explore the wondrous and horribly racist sky city of Columbia, you are greeted by what seems like an important choice soon after freeing Elizabeth. There are two brooches to choose from: one depicting a bird and the other a cage. Elizabeth asks the player to choose for her. Not an easy choice: si꧟nce she was imprisoned, choosing the cage s𝔉eems not the best symbol, but her prison guard was also a giant bird.
Did you lie awake at night tossing and turning, wondering what kind of insane unforeseen consequence your choice in tasteful accessories might have for our female lead? Well don't worry, because the two brooches are literally never mentioned again in the wꦬhole game and don't affect the outcome whatsoever. It turns out they were both just highly symbolic and for you to notice that in one of the final scenes the "Elizabeth" you've been trying to rescue is not the Elizabeth you've been talking to bec✤ause she isn't wearing the brooch. Other than that, it affects nothing at all. Hope you didn't pull your hair out over it!
14 Side With The A.P.R. Or U.F.L.L. (Far Cry 2)
In Far Cry 2, you play a malarial mercenary who enters into an unnamed African country gripped by civil war. During the course of the story, the game provides you with two factions to side with: the Alliance for Popular Resistance (APR) and the United Front for Liberation and Labour (UFLL). This is a difficult choice to make: the APR seem anti-communist and more to the right of the political spectrum, while the UFLL's name implies left-wing ♉politics and socialist leanings. Players have to choose one to advance the plot and may feel pressured when they seem to have the fate of an entire nat🍃ion in their hands.
Ultimately though, it doesn't matter which of the two factions you side with. It becomes obvious through working for both of them that they are both greedy and only interes🔜ted in power. They both pay exactly the same and, besides rhetoric, they are pretty much identical in practice. Story-wise, no matter which you side with in the civil war, you still end up killing both the UFLL and APR leaders. It really just changes the order in which you kill them. Well, at least you stopped the war, right?
13 Save Your Friend Or Save the Town (Life is Strange)
To be perfectly honest, almost every decision in Life is Strange could be given a spot on this list. Don't get us wrong, it's still a great story either way, but it's the decision at the very end that really gets under the skin of gamers. In a very similar way to Mass Effect 3's controversial ending, the player is given two brutal non-choices that boil down to: save the town or save your friend. That's right. You have to either let thousands of people in Arcadia Bay die by saving Chloe, or you can choose to let Chloe die in the initial bathroom scene, losing your best friend in the world, but saving everyone else. Let's not forget you've gr⛄own attached to Chloe by now and watched her suffer through so many deaths, reversing time each time to save her.
While😼 this final decision does affect the world, there's a reason it belongs on this list. Because it turns out your powers were what was making the tornado more powerful, to stop rewindin♋g time undoes all the hundreds of smaller changes you've made to the timeline. So you can let a town be destroyed, or decide not to save Chloe at the start, by which you logically erase every other decision you made in the game. This makes the whole thing feel rather pointless.
12 Standing Up To Ramsay Bolton (Telltale's Game Of Thrones)
In the first episode of Telltale's Game of Thrones, you come up against everyone's least favorite torturing psychopath, Ramsay Bolton. He's come a-knocking at the Forrester home with a bunch of brutal armed men wielding swords and, in classic style, he starts threatening children with vague referenc📖es to "hunting." Soon he confronts your character, Ethan Forrester. You're given several options for how to behave towards the cold-blooded sadist: you can attempt to bribe him, you can choose to bend the knee to him or refuse, and when he starts threatening your sister Talia, you can choose w🌳hether to stand up to him or play it cautious.
No doubt this is a difficult decision. On the one hand, you want to stop Ramsay from terrorizing and possibly brutally torturing your family, but on the other he's a murdering beast with a violent temper who has all the power in the situation. Sadly, none of these choices make any difference. No matter if you choose to stop him tormenting your sister or bide your time, Ramsay will walk up and stab his knife through E🐎than's throat, declaring him far to♍o much trouble. That's Westeros for you.
11 Cure Cancer Or Solve World Hunger (Saints Row IV)
Being President of the United States grants you the power to make world-changing decisions, which often must be made under very high pressure from all sides. When you play Saints Row IV, as President you'll find you have to make big choices and you learn that quickly when you enter the White House and are gree🐲ted by your Vice President, famous film and voice actor Keith David (yes, as himself). He informs you that🍨 you have enough political clout to push for one major bill, but not both and asks you which one you want him to push for: one that solves world hunger or one that cures cancer.
That's a pretty major decision and you can only choose one. Surely this will🉐 change the world forever either way, right? Well not really, since both decisions are rendered effectively meaningless a few minu𝄹tes later when the Earth is invaded by an alien empire. Well, at least you tried, right?
10 Upgrade Your Chip (Deus Ex: Human Revolution)
Later on in the main story of Deus Ex, mechanically augmented people, including your main character, Adam Je🌌nsen, start to experience a phenomenon known as "the glitch," which causes pain, disorientation, interference to vision for those with augmented eyes and other disturbances supposedly including potentially lethal effects. You're told the cause is a problem with the peripheral nerve interface, which can be fixed with a neural chip upgrade that you can get from the L.I.M.B. clinic in Hengsha. The upgrade is for free, but you still get the choice of whether or not to accept it. Good deal, right?
Except not really. Proving once and for all it's not a good idea to let strangers poke aroꦏund inside your head under suspicious circumstances, it turns out the glitch was inten🐈tionally caused by the Illuminati and the "upgrade" allows them direct control over all augmented people by allowing a "kill switch" to remotely shut down a user's cybernetics. If you choose to get the upgrade, a later boss will shut down all your cybernetic components, making an already difficult fight about ten times harder. But hey, at least it was free!
9 Destroy, Synthesize, Or Control the Reapers (Mass Effect 3)
Mass Effect 3 has an ending that most fans considered, in a word, godawful. Having spent hundreds o♏f hours playing through three excellent and expansive games filled with alien invasions, plagues, dialogue, and romance, nothing angered gamers more than having to choose between three bad options that all feel unfulfilling. To end the Reaper threat, Shepard must choose between controlling the Reapers (Control), merging with them (Synthesis), or destroying them (Destruction). Well, surel🎃y there must be a way to save the universe after all you've fought for?
Except not really. The "Destruction" ending uses the power of the Crucible to destroy all synthetic life in the Milky Way galaxy, with devastating costs to Earth, the Citadel and the Mass Relays. The "Synthesis" ending merges human DNA with synthetics, which basically makes everyone Reapers. And the "Control" ending has you sacrifice yourself to take command of the Reapers and prevent more destruction. Mass Effect fans felt that the ending choices made no sense, 🐽𒅌hadn't been properly set up, and overall were a pretty lame way to end a great series.
8 Love, Sacrifice, Or Wealth? (Fable II)
At the end of Fable II, you're granted one of three wishes and told to choose carefully because it will affect all of Albion. The first choice is "Sacrifice," which brings back to life the thousands of innocent people killed by Lucien Fairfax in ꧒the Tattered Spire's making, but you're told if you choose this one you will never see your family (killed earlier in the game) again. The next is "Love," which brings your family (and even your faithful dog) back to life.🃏 And finally there's the "Wealth" choice, which is a straight-up cash prize of one million gold pieces to spend however you wish.
Choosing Sacrifice seems like the perfect choice for a good character, but you never see those individuals; all that really happens is a statue of you appears in Bowerstone Old Town🐼 and you get a letter of thanks from the people of Albion. One million coins sounds great, but by that time many players earned a mill🐼ion gold anyway and even without choosing this wish, earning it is still possible. In fact, despite it seeming like the least likely choice, Love is probably the best, since you get to play the game with a very cute dog.
7 Which Dictator Do You Want To Rule Kyrat? (Far Cry 4)
From the beginning of Far Cry 4, it's clear to the player that Pagan Min is the violent, tyrannical maniac in charge of the fictional central Asian country of Kyrat, because he is the one who spends most of his time having theatrical outbursts in between stabbing people and o🐼rdering them tortured. Naturally, upon escaping his clutches, players go running into the arms of the Golden Path rebels who want to overthrow Min's regime. At the end of the campaign, the rebels can go one of two ways, depending on which prominent leader you chose to lead the Golden Path.
If you side with Sabal, it's demonstrated that his vision for Kyrat is to turn it into a fundamentalist theocracy and that he plans to execute former members of the group who sided with Amita for heresy against the Gods and treason, claiming that "sins can only be washed away with blood." If you side with Amita and she is placed i🤪n charge, she reveals her true intentions to turn Kyrat into a totalitarian drug state and orders her soldiers to forcibly conscript children to protect the drug fields. Both of these choices are arguably worse than the Pagan Min regime you helped overthrow in the first place.
6 Stormcloaks Or Imperials (The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim)
Speaking of civil wars, few fictional conflicts have inspired so many endless heated fights on internet forums and YouTube comments sections as the Skyrim Civil War in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Everyone has very strong opinions on whe﷽ther the forces ofꦆ the Empire or the Stormcloak rebels represent the best destiny for Skyrim. We've heard all the arguments before: the Imperials banned Talos worship and give the Nazi-esque Thalmor free reign, while the Stormcloaks are racist and thirst for power. Whichever faction your Dragonborn chooses to support will eventually win or else the war will be in eternal stalemate. But hey, no pressure!
It certainly feels ♐important, but like many faction choices in modern games, taking a side only affects the game mechanically; it does nothing to affect the main quest or the final outcome of the game. The 🌊Dragonborn goes on to fulfill their destiny and save the world from Alduin regardless. The only things that change are a few lines of dialogue from NPCs, the uniforms of a few city guards, some permanent damage to either Solitude or Windhelm, and whether General Tullius or Ulfric Stormcloak live to treat you rather dismissively afterwards. Uh...yay?