BenRGamer

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow

That's nonsense. There's always a third option. For instance, why can't I kill BOTH Washington and Cleopatra and claim I came in after they'd killed each other? I get to stay a Loyalist because, eh, who'll know? And at the same time, I get to stick it to the man for forcing me to make a hard choice, because I'm just a dick like that.

Or how about this? I walk and let them fight each other. Then Cleopatra survives and turns out to not be a jerk. She recognises I helped her by not helping Washington and cuts me in on the deal. Everybody wins. Or I knock them both out, tie them up and appeal to their senses. Who knows, maybe I can turn Washington over to the resistance, or otherwise turn Cleo around to the Loyalist cause. How come Commander Shepard could always do that sort of thing, but I never get the chance to?

And even all that said, there IS a third side: The Syndicate. Cole's men have been trying to hunt them down for how long now and they've done a little damage to the organisation. Why bother with the Loyalists or the Resistance when the Syndicate have proven that they can take care of themselves, and both Tub Chi and Wu Yin offer to take care of me, too. Well, of course, deus ex machina says they have to work for the Resistance because the Syndicate don't exist as a faction, but if they did, this wouldn't be necessary. At all. The Syndicate wouldn't need to be working with the Resistance as a plot device to make their morality choices work if they actually had their own faction.

That this "can't" work is provably wrong and shortsighted, to boot. Once again - this works just fine with the Power arcs, as I've never been asked to make any hard choices so far. All of them were pretty straightforward. Furthermore, it very much "can" because it's a question of writing and storytelling. There are ways to talk around these limitations, provided Going Rogue's agenda doesn't get in the way.