So does anyone else but me find themselves acting morally to computer generated fictional characters? For instance, when playing stealth games like Splinter Cell or Metal Gear Solid, I will typically find a way to avoid confrontation, thereby saving a guard's life, even though often it will be easier to just eliminate any guards in the area before proceeding. Keep in mind that the game itself doesn't penalize me in any way for killing them. I just choose not to, and then bear the risk of them perhaps spotting me further ahead. This is silly behaviour. Those people are not real! I should not care about killing them! Or for another example, when I was playing Sleeping Dogs some time ago, I wouldn't steal a car unless I was in a hurry. Though, to be fair, in that game you are penalized in points for doing crime, so it might be just your standard OCD at play there. Anyone find this familiar?
Most of the reason I don't go around killing innocents and good guys is because I'd end up having nobody left to rescue or to be thanked by. You try doing final missions in a game such as Mass Effect when most of your team is dead because you either killed them or made awful decisions that resulted in them dying. Plus many of them are so well written I feel bad killing them, run-of-the-mill grunts not so much. I haven't played most of the Splinter Cell games, but I recall many times that a mission fell apart if I took out guards on certain missions in Pandora Tomorrow. Usually there was an alarm or the mission ended if I shot anyone. Plus the game is about stealth, if I wanted a shooter I'd have bought something else
I try to avoid killing in MGS games because they give you rewards for it, facilitate it via nonlethal weapons, and it kind of seriously clashes with the themes. Spoiler Also it makes the only mandatory kill in Snake Eater sting a hell of a lot more.
In RPGs that's par for the course - to date I have not managed a playthrough of KotOR I or II where I was not squeaky-clean, pure lightside by the end of it. Even in the far more morally ambiguous Mass Effect series I've only managed one grayish playthrough and one that was overall majority renegade - there are some things that I just can't bring myself to do, even if it is a computer game. Aside from RPGs, I remember in Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy where you had to reach an objective that was guarded by Noghri, which I've really been a fan of ever since the Thrawn Trilogy. Unlike the Sith cultists and stormtroopers who made up the third side of that fight, the Noghri were just doing their job - Vader told them to guard the place, and absent orders to the contrary that's what they do no matter who shows up at the door. The post-mission debriefing states that the survivors are taken offworld to be repatriated, so I really try not to kill them if I can help it. Usually this involves Force-pulling their weapons away and then running like hell before they can pick them up again, plus using Heal or Protection so I don't get killed by poison blasts.
I agree about it clashing with the themes in the MGS series. I remember in Splinter Cell 3, they introduced in a new mechanic where when you snuck up behind an enemy and held him at gunpoint, you now could choose between two ways to take him out. The left shoulder button would knock him cold like the previous games, while the right shoulder button would take him out lethally. I would always choose the left button. I was disappointed that the close quarter attacks introduced in Conviction were exclusively lethal. Especially when you sneak into your own agency, midway in that game. You're not given any tranquilisers or any non-lethal weapons at your disposal so you're forced to kill your way through guards just doing their job. It's a bit lazy writing. I would imagine that if Sam Fisher existed, he would not take as lightly to that prospect as he does in the game.
I was the same exact way. There were times I would start a KotOR playthrough intending to play the darkside and I'd just end up feeling awful for my decisions about 30 minutes in. I hate being rude to characters in game! It drives me crazy. Jedi Academy was a game where I didn't actually feel any remorse, although I would always feel a tad ashamed when Luke or Kyle would talk to me between missions about my dark side powers, but who doesn't want to use crazy powerful lightning or force choke/slam someone into a wall?! Your treatment of the Noghri on that mission is quite commendable. Their little poison-cloud guns drove me crazy so I had no problem frying them to death.
The thing with KotOR and JKA was that while the dark side powers were certainly useful, the lightside stuff was more practical. My Jedi Guardians (the only class I completed both KotOR games as) were unstoppable juggernauts, especially with the pure lightside bonuses. In the first game I had Revan's melee damage stats beefed up to the point where he was hitting harder than Big Z, and he was doing it with the most powerful lightsabers in the game in each hand. The final duel with Malak and some of the more extreme gunfights (the Trandoshans aboard Yavin Station and the Mandos outside the Temple of the Ancients) were about the only real challenges. In the second game I turned the Exile into an even more ridiculous freight train from hell - the full lightside mastery granted a +3 STR bonus plus the ability to trigger Force Speed, Valor, and Armor all in one go. Coupled with a total +8 STR bonus from armor pieces and two of the sickest lightsabers possible (I think in some cases I was dishing out 150+ points of damage in one hit) I was even getting one-hit KOs in on Darth Sion. Maybe not as flashy as frying everything in the room with lighting or crushing a guy into a meatball, but with Force Heal and other defensive bonuses I was mowing through everything in sight like the Terminator while taking little damage in return. As far as JKA, Heal, Absorb, and Protection made you nigh-invincible if used right, and given that a lot of the Force-using baddies could protect themselves from darkside powers frying them with lightning or gripping them didn't always work.
