The moment that inspired this question:
A long time ago I was playing an MMO called Voyage of the Century Online. A major part of the game was sailing around on a galleon ship and having naval battles in the 1600s.
The game basically allowed you to sail around all of the oceans of the 1600s world and explore. The game was populated with a lot of NPC ships that you could raid and pick up its cargo for loot.
One time, I was sailing around the western coast of Africa and I came across some slavers. This was shocking to me at the time, and I was like “oh, I’m gonna fuck these racist slavers up!”
I proceed to engage the slave ship in battle and win. As I approach the wreckage, I’m bummed out because there wasn’t any loot. Like every ship up until this point had at least some spare cannon balls or treasure, but this one had nothing.
… then it hit me. A slave ship’s cargo would be… people. I sunk this ship and the reason there wasn’t any loot was because I killed the cargo. I felt so bad.
I just sat there for a little while and felt guilty, but I always appreciated that the developers included that detail so I could be humbled in my own self-righteousness. Not all issues can be solved with force.
This is easily one of the best games of all time I've played. I've bullied all my friends into playing it and letting me watch and Noone quite experiences the story the same way.
For me though the most memorable moment wasn't even one that I think was an intentional part of the game. I was about half way through and I so was still under the impression that
spoiler
The Naomi were responsible for blowing up the sun
I decided to just fly as far as I could away from the solar system, I flew so far the sun was just another star. I sat on the nose tip of my ship and watched the stars, occasionally telescoping in on them. Then
spoiler
I noticed the sky was much emptier than before, I zoomed in in a star and watched it explode. I realized that it wasn't just our solar system that was dying it was everything. I zoomed in on the home star and listened to the musicians play, and as that music started to play I listened as they one by one stopped playing, and I looked around one last time at the now completely black sky before restarting the loop, and the playback was mostly just the stars slowly fading away.
I did this in the early days of the pandemic, and I would be lying if I wasn't crying my eyes out, but afterwards, it really made me feel better about the pandemic and life in general.
2 weeks later and I came back to read your beautiful post. Hearing about people's early experiences with the game are my favourite.
I once managed to catch the probe. I was so far from home, and couldn't save them.