The morality and consequences of choices have long been at the center of the roleplaying genre, but the Mass Effect franchise was one of the first to make this impact one at the game’s central themes. Over the course of the series Mass Effect players make numerous decisions that determine not just Commander Shepard’s fate but also the fates of entire species. Most of the time these decisions are knock-on effects or left up to interpretation or are even the result of a race’s hubris catching up with them, but in the first game there is one choice left up to the player that, due to the unique circumstances, says a lot more about the morality of their Shepard than might be interpreted at first glance: the fate of the Rachni queen.

About halfway through the original Mass Effect, Shepard and their crew visit the planet of Noveria searching for Matriarch Benezia, a trusted advisor of the rogue Spectre Saren. It is discovered that she has been breeding a captive queen of the long thought extinct Rachni race in order to create soldiers for Saren to use as part of his army. After the party defeat Benezia, they are left alone with the Rachni queen, who explains that the team have the power to either kill or spare her. Up to this point in the game, the Rachni have only been mentioned in passing as a scourge that once tried to conquer the galaxy and were seen as enemies earlier on Noveria. In contrast to this image, the queen’s communications are unsightly, but eloquent and thoughtful. She tells Shepard that she is the last of her kind, and that she neither knows nor cares why her predecessors declared war. Her sole wish is to find a hidden world on which to raise her children in harmony and tranquility.

Related: Mass Effect's Most Evil Organizations, Explained

It is with this information that the Rachni and Shepard’s morality are judged. Up to this point in the game, the Renegade choices have been reflective of a sense of justice at any cost. More often than not, when dealing with someone who has threatened Shepard or committed some sort of wrongdoing, these options come down to delivering swift and brutal judgement right between the eyes. While callous, these solutions can be seen as the ends justifying the means when confronted with a dangerous situation.

How Mass Effect's Rachni Choice Is Different

Rachni alien from Mass Effect

With the queen, however, this cannot be the case, as in no way has the queen attempted to harm or even impede the team in any way. She even admits that the enemy Rachni from earlier in the level needed to be put down, as they had essentially gone feral. The only rationale for killing the Rachni queen in Mass Effect is damning her for the sins of her mother. A Shepard that chooses this option is choosing to commit genocide based solely on the idea that she could potentially eventually be a threat one day. This takes the pragmatism expressed in earlier Mass Effect 1 Renegade options to a Machiavellian extreme and shows the true amoral depths to which such a character would sink when dealing with even the faintest specter of a threat.

While it is a given that those Shepards making the opposite choice provide an inverse impression of their character, what is less obvious is the fact that these Paragons are proven to be in the right, and that this shows just where the series comes down on the entire issue. In one of the side-quests of Mass Effect 3, Shepard comes across the queen again and finds out that she has been captured and enslaved by the Reapers.

Provided that Shepard saves her on the mission, she swears loyalty to their cause and her children fight against her former captors by their side, proving both that she is a powerful ally and true to her word. The rub comes in the fact that this is only the case if she was spared in the original Mass Effect game. If she was killed, then the Rachni found on the mission is instead a false queen made by the Reapers who will betray Shepard shortly after being saved, a belated penance for those who decided to doom an entire race on a hunch.

In the Mass Effect games, Paragon and Renegade Shepards are typically shown as being two sides of the same coin. While one side may prefer more conflict-oriented solutions to problems than the other, their end goal of a safer galaxy is always supposed to align. However, it is with choices like that of the fate of the Rachni where players can truly see the rift between how each side interprets what this goal means and what that says about the nature of Shepards following that path.

Next: Mass Effect: What Garrus' Life Was Before Shepard