Reckoning: Breaking the Moral Choice Mold
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Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is one of the few games that manages to, in most cases, hit every one of these points. The reason for this is largely because it offers up relatively few moral decisions that are expressly presented in expensive cutscenes and plot lines, and instead offers them up in proportion to the size of the scenario, whether that's a small in-game bonus or a world-altering moment. You might not be making a moral decision in every single situation, or an important one at that, but when you do, chances are you'll think about it more than in many other games. In order to do this, I'm going to use one of the shortest and most insignificant parts of the game to demonstrate this.
An early quest sees the player hunting antelopes and retrieving their heads in order to recreate a folk tale - placing the heads in the right place summons a troll to kill, who guards a magic ring, which is then presented to a damsel. The player is able to follow the quest forward without any dialogue options or cosmetic choices. The decision made available at the end is a simple one, but has more depth than your typical good/evil or saint/jerk response: do you give the ring back to the person who asked you to retrieve it, or do you keep it for yourself?
Right off the bat, we have context. The player has been given a quest that not only has a definite end goal behind it and a set of steps to complete, but there's also a larger world that it fits into. In the Amalur universe, Fate dictates that the events of stories play out time and time again over the ages - the recreation of this story is something that is logical within the game world, and has been established at the point the player receives the quest.
The way the quest is set up here is a bit more subtle. As a Fateless One, the player's character is not bound by Fate in the same way that everyone else in the universe is - unlike others, he or she has the power to change destiny and, perhaps more importantly, change the story being retold. The player's status as Fateless is important, because it gives the choice weight and meaning, The foreshadowing in this case is fairly simple, and admittedly a bit weak, but it does what it needs to, specifically: the player gets the ring as a reward rather than keeping it. Similarly, the consequence is the magic ring the player gets - probably one of the first and best rings the player will have access to (I used it for several hours afterwards).
