10 Toughest Video Game Moral Choices (And What You Picked)
2. What Will The Fate Of The Reapers And The Galaxy, Be? - Mass Effect 3
The stakes: The races of the Milky Way galaxy are facing extinction at the hands of the alien Reapers. With an ancient super weapon granting them one last desperate means to defeat the invaders it falls to players to decided exactly what the future, for all sides, will be.
The choice: There are three. Players can choose to destroy the Reapers, but at the cost of killing all synthetic life – Geth allies, squad mate EDI and the partially synthetic Shepard along with them. They can choose to control the Reapers, but at the cost of Shepard’s life. Or, they can choose synthesis, merging synthetic and organic life into a new form.
The verdict: Destroy. Most players see Control as being too risky: the Reapers may prove too powerful to control and Shepard, now a Reaper himself, may be corrupted into following Reaper ideology. The Synthesis option is seen as too idealistic and erases the diversity that makes people, people.
Only the Destroy option, though it comes at great cost, definitively ends the threat of the Reapers and completes the mission players embarked on all the way back in the Mass Effect 1.