If you had to nominate a candidate for a feature, situation, or character that would have been better left out of your favorite video game, what would it be?
I'm thinking here not of poor technical implementation, but more of the irritatingly offensive or stupid, stuck into the game because in someone's mind it made the game more edgy, exciting, or controversial.
My own candidate here would be the Dark Brotherhood torture chamber in Skyrim. As what is basically the murderers' guild, the Brotherhood can't avoid living in the shadows, and some of the Brotherhood quest line is ostentatiously horrid (though hardly unique; murdering a bride at her own wedding banquet, for instance). But that's what they're there for.
All the same, the torture chamber you can set up in the Brotherhood's new headquarters at the end of the questline, complete with prisoners chained to the wall ready to have the location of their treasures beaten out of them, seems to cross some sort of line. First, you can't even be "nice" on the game's own terms -- there is no way to release the prisoners if they 'fess up. All you can do is kill them. Second, hurting them (and healing them, for that matter) counts as combat practice and increases your skills, which is silly as well as offensive. This is why you won't kill them -- endlessly bringing them to the point of death and then healing them is too profitable. Third, it reinforces a dysfunctional social myth that torture is an effective way of extracting information -- all of the news you receive is valid and profitable; you aren't, for instance, led into any traps.
So what's your nominee for the Shouldn't Have Gone There award?