MisterShine said:
The clearest one I can remember would be in Vampire: The Masquerade.
Good example, I was going to mention Bloodlines when I finished reading the topic.
Instead... hmm. Lemme think of an example someone might not have thought of... Oh, I know.
World of Warcraft, no, wait, stick with me here! In the new cataclysm leveling zones many horde and alliance quests mirror each other, providing multiple perspectives on a single conflict. For the most part the quests tend to just be foils of one another, pretty boring stuff, but every once and awhile there's a quest where you get the feeling some writer at Blizzard really wanted to try and make an impact. The best example is in the Southern Barrens. Playing as Horde you want to avenge a town that was destroyed by the Alliance armies. You get a quest where you visit the ghosts of those innocents killed in the brutal invasion and are sent to met out righteous fury against the Alliance commander, called a butcher and a monster, for this act of brutality. He dies, loot is given, you probably move on and most players never think twice about it!
But play that same zone Alliance side, and you get to meet and work with that same Alliance commander and discover that he was genuinely a good man, that the whole 'butchery' was completely against his orders and that he if anything he was perhaps the most same person in the entire conflict. He'd wanted to try and avoid exactly what happened from happening, at one point even talking about how soldiers should always treat their enemies with dignity and respect so as to not create a cycle of violence where each generation fights the next for the actions of their predecessors. And when he discovers what happened during the attack, the brutality which occurred there, Alliance players have a quest to try and bring justice to the unruly soldiers who'd acted at the behest of the commanders less moral and more bloodthirsty second.
The irony of it all being that when the Horde player kills the Alliance commander during their quest chain, they're in effect removing the lone force of reason within that unit and promoting the man genuinely responsible for the events the Horde had sought to avenge. After learning that suddenly that quest chain didn't seem so fun anymore with Horde characters!
It's a clever twist on Blizzards part, and I salute them for it. More of this and less 'kill X of Y' quests please!
