10 Brutally Hard Decisions Video Games Forced You To Make

2. Mass Effect 3's Ending

Although in the years past, fans have applied a more positive, retrospective spin on Mass Effect 3's initially godawful ending, if we're talking about what it was like to play through it at the time, there was nothing more mentally paralysing that having to choose between three terrible options that made no sense, hadn't been appropriately set up, and were already completely unfulfilling.

Fans who played were thoroughly disgusted. After hundreds of hours crafting your custom Shepard and guiding him or her towards an eventuality that would save the universe by uniting all the races under one cause, the result was bowing down to a spectral entity who appeared as a small child, dictating you could either destroy the encroaching Reapers, merge with them, or create a new state of being for all life in the galaxy. Such a supernatural-themed idea for the latter two didn't have any weight or place in a series formerly based in hard sci-fi and explanations for literally everything, and the former - although appropriate - still vaporised all of Earth and saw your crew stranded in a new galaxy anyway.

Mass Effect 3's denouement would go down in history as the worst example of publisher meddling in developer scheduling to date, a result that hampered the game overall, and provided an immortal sour taste Bioware are still trying to shake to this day.