I already pointed out that that scene is nothing more then poorly written effort at emotional engagement with two bland characters nobody cares in a event without meaningful consequences.
It has meaningful consequences, you lose a member of your team, direct consequences when it comes to gameplay.
This scene is shit because characters in question are boring and bland and you have no attachment to them and because of that the choice is difficult as is flipping a coin.
You are arguing from a place of mere opinion. You didnt like the characters, ergo you didnt think it was a good choice, you are positively retarded.
For the record i liked kaiden and ashley, they were the normies, and normies are important when you are telling a story thats too far from real every day life.
Better choice would be choosing between killing your companions or abandoning the mission
Maybe? who can say.
In ME1 case due shitty writing player feels no attachment to the characters so choosing between them and saving the planet or some shit like that would still be a easy choice
So your argument is that they failed to do what you think they set out to do. My answer is that they succeded to do what i believe they set out to do. Which are fundamentally two different arguments. I believe they wanted to put you in a position where your rank forced you to send one of your men to die, what comes with that. You believe they wanted to make you pick between two friends and failed because its cheap.
Thing is, the evidence is overwhelmingly on my side, it fit the narrative, it struck a chord thematically with the whole "captain of your own ship" deal, and it was two set characters instead of making you pick between the character you were romancing and the character you used the most during the game or some shit like that, which would have clearly betrayed an attempt to manipulate the player emoshuns.
Your argument literally has no legs to stand on other than your retarded and obvious bias.
because its natural to prioritize good of many over lives of few.
So your your idea for a better choice is to make it a non-choice! Bravo! bioware should definitely hire you.
One way to counter that is to make a smaller scale crisis or crisis that you have little information of its effects on the story in the future. There are many small moments in games and many of them in Bioware games when you do something like letting a criminal go in order to save someone with no consequences to your actions, where I always wondered why no game ever punishes player for his mercy. One of the few games to actually tackle this is Witcher where often good deeds goes punished, even in KotOR 2 you get a lesson of consequences of good deeds.
I guess? we are talking about fundamentally different choices, which makes your whole point completely moot, because that isnt the only choice you make in ME1.
What Im rambling about here is that moments is your typical Bioware moment with no real consequences
But there are real consequences, a companion dies, you cant play with him anymore, its literally the ultimate consequence, one that impacts gameplay. Short of making an entirely new alternative path for the game, which i doubt was even an option for bioware.
and nothing of value at stake.
A soldier under your command that you have gotten to know in the last 60 hours of gameplay, the stakes definitely got raised there. Now if you are so detached that you didnt give a shit then thats fine, but considering just how many people actually gave a shit id say it worked well enough.
Made in year where many other games already surpassed this simplistic storytelling.
Sure, you are not going to get me to say ME1 is a work of art and better than getting a blowjob. Im saying it was competently executed and that a lot of work went into it.
But they must be master writers seeing how its became obvious that their writing is actually brilliant and its only some poor people like me that just cant comprehend its full brilliance. And I will forever live in the darkness of not being able to appreciate such brilliant writers like the Bioware ones.
Maybe you are that stupid, or that biased.
Most side content and the main quest in general served several purposes. First they put you in charge of a crew and gave you some leeway when it came to making choices, this all worked to get your feet wet and start to understand the world, which was carefully crafted in such a way that it both had its own internal logic and plenty of parallels with real life, this whole thing grounded the setting and lent the story some credibility.
It borrowed heavily from sci fi shows in the 90s, and while mass effect is somewhat more sci fantasy than sci fi, it did a good job at explaining the main elements of the setting, those being element zero, biotics, the inner workings of most tools at your disposal, etc. This kind of thoughtful design serves to show us that the people that crafted ME1 both cared and wanted to bring something new to the market, and they did both fairly well.
Sure, others did it better, but most do far worse.