10 Most Intense Moral Choices In Video Game History

5. Fix The Vault Or Kill The Crops? (Fallout: New Vegas)

Fallout.wikia.com

Coming across a group of friendly farmers in the side mission Hard Luck Blues, your vault dweller is instructed to save the faction's crops by disabling a reactor currently poisoning the town’s food supply.

In classic Fallout fashion your mission takes you on a journey to find the reactor inside a seemingly abandoned vault. However you soon discover that the safe zone has suffered a malfunction that's trapped much of its population underwater, but still alive, for the time being.

The final choice of the quest has you either rerouteing control to the injured vault dwellers so they can escape the vault’s flooding or destroy the reactor, damning them to drown while saving the surface sharecroppers from certain starvation in the process.

Even worse, in Fallout: New Vegas the player is usually rewarded with a small notification as to how a certain action has affected their karma rating. However, after your choice in Hard Luck Blues, you’re given no indication as to whether or not your decision was good or bad, leaving the uncertainty to linger with you throughout the rest of the title.

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Josh has over 11 years of experience as a published writer, having worked nine of those years as a full-time content producer at WhatCulture. In that period he has created hundreds of articles, videos and podcast episodes for multiple WhatCulture channels, specialising in gaming, horror and film & TV. He now primarily works as a senior content producer and presenter on WhatCulture Gaming where he co-hosts the WhatCulture Gaming Podcast, a top 3 UK most listened to gaming podcast that he co-created in 2018. Over the years he has reviewed several high-profile gaming releases, covered industry events with on-site reporting, opined on breaking news, and even kicked off his interviewing career by chatting to childhood hero, Tommy Wiseau.