User blog comment:Commdor/Would you play the next Mass Effect game if it is not a shooter?/@comment-7622429-20130501191721/@comment-4721065-20130501223644

It doesn't have to be an "everyone dies no matter what" type of thing, though; in fact, it's probably the crudest way of making a grey choice. The four-way ending choice of Fallout New Vegas is a better example, as only one side is fully evil; you can easily choose any other and argue it was the best choice.

IMHO, Mass Effect already has considerably grey choices when you first see them; they stop being that way partly because of the Paragade, but mostly because the next game always denies or makes irrelevant the supposed "ends justify the means" pay-off from going for a Renegade choice.

As an example of alternative, just imagine if choosing to finish Overlord in a DLC had actually managed to divert some geth units away from certain War Assets - say an Asari Huntress squad - and you got a heartfelt talk with them afterwards where they thank Archer for their survival and you can then choose to tell them the truth about what it took or not. That actually would have been grey without being that depressing. As it is, the greyest choice in the franchise so far is probably the missile quest in ME2, simply because they didn't carry the results over and left it to our imagination.