My first experience with a game that gave you moral choices was KOTOR, and I loved it. And actually, I still love it. But only because it's less about being "good" or "bad", but more about being a "Jedi" or "Sith". In just about every other game I've played that features this kind of system, it just feels contrived. Maybe it's the fact that the moral implications of your decisions in real life aren't always so obvious… In real life you're never pondering whether you want to be good and help somebody or if you just want to kill them instead.

One game with a crappy moral system that nonetheless presented a moral decision that I thought was neat was the first Mass Effect. Specifically, the scene when you had to choose to either save Kaiden or Ashley, letting the other die. This was interesting because there was no right or wrong answer, it was a lose-lose scenario. But even though I appreciated the moral grayness of it, it still felt quite forced. You were essentially presented with a prompt telling you to choose between "Save Kaiden, let Ashley die" or "Save Ashley, let Kaiden die". It didn't help that Kaiden and Ashley were both lifeless, generic characters from the beginning anyways. I had to use Google to remember what their names were, for crying out loud. I understand that in videogames, players like to know how their decisions will affect the game. But I that if videogames are to be taken seriously as an artform, they can't be afraid of possibly challenging the player. Let the player make a decision not knowing that it will kill off a character they liked, just so long as you give an explanation as to why the player's choice resulted in that.

Crimson Core, one of the games I'm working on, is mostly a straight JRPG. Not a lot of branching dialog, moral choices, etc. However, towards the beginning of the game, one of the three main characters (The Exile) will be faced with a decision which will set the character on one of two very different paths. It's a morally gray decision, much like the choice from Mass Effect I mentioned, but the choice's effects are not at all obvious to the player. The character is being accused of a crime which he quite honestly doesn't know whether he actually committed it or not, due to being extremely intoxicated at the time. The decision he's presented with is whether to plead guilty or to plead innocent. This choice does not affect the Guilty verdict that the Exile-to-be will receive, but it will nonetheless end up putting the character on two distinctly different paths. I don't necessarily want to spoil what these two paths are and how his decision to plead guilty or innocent causes his path to fork into two, so that's about all I can say about it.