Genocide: Yes, Mass Effect allows you to choose an option that will lead, probably, to the death of a species -- in the future. That's rather different then, say, "OK, we are going to round up all the elves and put them to work in the mines until they die horrible deaths", and then have mechanics where the player is responsible for building public support for the policy, dealing with guards who oppose this plan, finding and raiding hidden enclaves of elves, and so forth. The later is what is probably not going to be in this game.
Yes, that's more on the line of the grey vs grey choice that was talked about before, you're not choosing who to kill, you're choosing who to save, with the destruction of the other species/community/faction being an unfortunate collateral damage of your choice, which you cannot do anything against.
A pretty common set up for Bioware decisions, in fact, to the point of having become somewhat repetitive at this point.
1) Do you believe that a game that allowed the player the option to do any of the following would sell very well?
- Introduce slavery into a region that previously didn't have slavery by corrupting (or silencing) influential voices who speak out against slavery, procuring and training slaves, providing security for auctions, and hunting down and recovering slaves for their rightful owners?
- Forcible rape and torture of innocents by the PC (without in-game negative consequences).
- Using gladiatorial combat as a means to pacify a population ("bread and circus") by setting up rigged (for maximum bloodlust / effect) fights of various descriptions
- Initiate, organize, and execute genocide against an obviously /innocent/ race or species.
2) Even if you believe such a game could be a financial success, do you believe that the writers and developers at Obsidian would be willing to /write/ the dialog and other UI elements that would be required to implement the above?
Obsidian has precedent in this regard, which is why I keep some hope for this game. Not many games today do such things, especially in the mainstream releases, sure, but there are examples in Obsidian's history.
In KotOR II (by Obsidian), you go to Nar Shaddaa, which has a pre-existing slave culture. You can choose to either help the refugees better their position, or help the local criminals to make their lives even worse. There are several occasions when you do this, you can force, out of desperation, a local leader to surrender its entire community of poor (and never portraied as bad) refugees into servitude to a local crime lord.
There's another example of a family of refugees whose husband has fled to avoid endangering his wife and daughter after getting in debt with the Hutts (who kidnapped and enslaved the underage daughter anyway). You can both manipulate the guy into abandoning his family entirely rather than going back (and giving him the money he needed) and go to the mother, still crying for her missing little girl, and convince her into selling
herself into slavery to pay off the rest of the debt (with the excuse that at least "she'll be reunited in slavery with her daughter").
In Mask of the Betrayer (also by Obsidian) there's so many worse things that you can do, even to your own companions (and especially the good-aligned ones), it would be too long for me to list them all. You can deal with slavers, again, most notably, you can buy a kid from an ogre at one point, then offer him as food to a cannibal,
just to get ahead in a line. In alternative, you can have said cannibal eat a piece of a companion of your chosing (without their consent).
You can devour the soul of a good animal spirit and fashion his hide to create an unholy undead abomination.
You can force the tortured soul of a man to brutally kill his one true love, who is also the mother of one of your companions (right as she watches in pain and disgust as well).
You can kill the angelic grandfather of another of your companions right as she watches (who had only come down from the heavens to take his grandchild back home, never to return), then leave her, your Neutral Good companion who has been with you since from the start, to be collected by demons.
All of these events happen in non-isometric RPGs, with modeled characters, who have face expressions and full voice acting.
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