The_KFD_Case wrote...
Agreed. The way I tended to pick the options I felt and thought were most appropriate and in-tune with my own moral compass I ended up with a maxed out Paragon meter (and counting but it simply can't hold any more points) and half of the very first sub-unit bar in the Renegade meter filled. To be frank I'm not sure how some of those Renegade points got there; at times I would get both Paragon and Renegade points during the course of a conversation and there seems to be a bug regarding which outcome you decided for the side mission with the hijacked military base and the two Javelin Mk. II missiles. I debated that scenarior quite a bit with myself and was initially inclined to save the strategic port (the colony can be rebuilt if you keep it), but eventually listened to my idealist heart and reasoned that government and military organizations do not exist to promulgate their own existence. They exist to serve and protect the citizenry. While sacrifices are required at times, on that occasion it did not seem fitting to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of civilians for a space port (which in theory should be able to be rebuilt as well if the desire is there - the game doesn't allow for that though apparently). So I saved the residential area and yet in my completed missions log it showed up as though I had opted to save the spaceport.
IMO those random renegade points come from the "greyscale" of the game. In ME1 you could be "pure-paragon" because everything was white or black. Paragon would be something close to a knight errant, wandering the galaxy, helping the poor and saving the universe completely on his own. Whereas in ME2 you're the "wetwork guy", and you have to do some bad things in order to save everyone, no matter if you're paragon or renegade.
Example - Jack. Freeing a dangerous person with proven homicidal tendencies can hardly be interpreted as a "good deed". But you have to do it in order to stop the Collectors. Lesser of two evils is still evil, right ?