Bioware is getting a bad rap in getting compared to The Walking Dead.

I keep hearing, and the Jeffs were both guilty of this, people comparing Bioware games to The Walking Dead unfavorably, citing the fact that the walking dead allows you to make "grey decisions" and Bioware games force you to make black and white decisions.

I have a hard time wrapping my head around this.

When I finish a bioware game, I'm usually about 75%-80% good. My character is almost always "grey" with a slight leaning toward "good". This is because I never subscribe to the black and white sith/jedi, open palm/closed fist/ renegate or paragon concepts they present to the gamer as OPTIONS. Instead, I face the situations as I really would in real life. If a kid is caught stealing an apple, and the good option is to turn him in while the bad option is to let him go, I choose what to do based on my heart. If I think the kid had a good reason, I let him go. This may give me "bad karma", but in the way I play these games, I do what I do and let the game judge me accordingly. I am a good guy, to me, regardless of what the world thinks. Isn't that the definition of "Grey" decisions?

The problem with Bioware games, is that players choose to min/max their gameplay experience so they can play it once as "evil" and once as "good". That is A way to play the games, but I would argue that it is in no way the way Bioware intended the games to played. In fact Jade Empire was specifically against that ideology.

I don't understand or endorse the praise The Walking Dead is getting, because all it seems to do differently is take away most of the gameplay that other "moral choice games" feature and thusly remove the temptation to min/max and powergame. Should games get praise for removing gameplay in order to "save us from ourselves?"