Just started a full renegade play through and god some of these choices remind me why I normally play renegon. It’s not the immoral choices that bother me, it’s the inconsistency. Sometimes you come off as a no-nonsense hardass willing to do whatever it takes to get a job done and other times you just come off like a raging psychopath. Full paragon is generally way more consistent with their characterization but full renegade can’t decide if they’re willing to make harsh decisions for a greater principle or if they’re sadistic, if they’re reckless or if they have a stick up their butt, if they’re strong and silent or whiny and accusatory, etc. And this could potentially work if the hypocrisy was acknowledged and incorporated into the story as a character flaw, but half the scenes feel like you’re just terrorizing people and they’re just laying down and taking it. To be fair, they get a lot better about this in later games, but I wish the characterization was more consistent and I wish there were more realistic reactions to renegade behavior. Maybe it’s because game designers know most people don’t do those kinds of routes and they’re worried that if they had genuine consequences for bad behavior, even less people would do it, but in my opinion, that type of narrative works a lot better when it feels like there’s actual stakes and also rationale for the behavior. There’s several distinct times where renegade choices could have easily been presented as “sacrifice for the greater good” or something along those lines, but for whatever reason they put in dialogue where you’re just being an asshole instead. Killing the rachni queen, for example. The base idea is good. You’re unsure if you can truly trust her. Are you mercifully saving a benevolent creature or is it fooling you and you’re unleashing a terror onto the world? That’s a great idea, but the dialogue doesn’t present it right. And then there’s too many times where the renegade decision just seems completely illogical. Like on Feros, what reason do you have to kill the colonists instead of incapacitate them? It’s just as easy to incapacitate them, there is no loss to it, so if you still chose to kill them, you just come off as irrational and totally careless.  The narrative as a whole pushes the whole “renegade shep is ruthless but gets the job done” depiction, but they just don’t actually present it consistently. Which, again, could work if it was played off as Shepard making excuses for their behavior or believing they’re doing the right thing but just going too far due to losing sight of the bigger picture or something like that, but the inconsistency doesn’t come off as an intentional character flaw of hypocrisy, it just comes off as inconsistent writing. I know they’re less motivated to write that story well because it is so much less popular for the average player, but maybe it would be more popular if they wrote it better. Don’t get me wrong, I love renegade Shepard, just... the one that I’ve created in my head and pieced together from the well-written parts of renegade dialogue. Or more like the one that the narrative promises but doesn’t consistently deliver.