The moment that inspired this question:
A long time ago I was playing an MMO called Voyage of the Century Online. A major part of the game was sailing around on a galleon ship and having naval battles in the 1600s.
The game basically allowed you to sail around all of the oceans of the 1600s world and explore. The game was populated with a lot of NPC ships that you could raid and pick up its cargo for loot.
One time, I was sailing around the western coast of Africa and I came across some slavers. This was shocking to me at the time, and I was like “oh, I’m gonna fuck these racist slavers up!”
I proceed to engage the slave ship in battle and win. As I approach the wreckage, I’m bummed out because there wasn’t any loot. Like every ship up until this point had at least some spare cannon balls or treasure, but this one had nothing.
… then it hit me. A slave ship’s cargo would be… people. I sunk this ship and the reason there wasn’t any loot was because I killed the cargo. I felt so bad.
I just sat there for a little while and felt guilty, but I always appreciated that the developers included that detail so I could be humbled in my own self-righteousness. Not all issues can be solved with force.
At least two very different for me:
Myst: I was very small when I played it so maybe I missed some slightly hidden warnings or foreshadowing. But basically during the whole game two brothers that are trapped in two magical books claims that the other brother is evil and trapper him in this books.
It looks like the only way to progress in the game is to trust one of them and go do the quests they are asking in order to free them.
I thought I was smart and did everytime both quests for each of them, my plan was to save before the final quest of one and check if is the “good” one, otherwise reload and finish the last quest of the other.
I finish one guy. cue evil laughter I finish trapped in the book and the evil brother laugh that he managed to lie to me for this whole time. Fine, let’s reload 5 minutes ago and free the other one. another evil laughter basically same thing happen with the other … wtf ? There is no good ending to this game ??
Turned out there was the dad of this two also trapped in another book that was hidden somewhere else, he was the real good guy and lead to the good ending.
So: don’t trust anyone, always look for more options than the two obvious choices that are only an illusion of free will. Lesson learned at a young age.
Other one that is more coming from the community than the game itself: world of Warcraft (vanilla, when it get out), more specifically beating the end boss of the latest raid for the first time. Especially when you are the raid leader. It give such a satisfaction and sensation of fulfilment.
There are a lot of games that require a lot more personnal skill than WoW to beat a boss. But getting 40 people to be ready, prepared, have to good class and good equipment, and play together for hours in order to achieve this common goal is incredible.
Agreed completely about raiding in WoW. To struggle at singing with 40 other people for weeks, and then to finally achieve it… it’s euphoric.
I always really enjoyed the post-raid hangouts, too.