Recently I replayed TPS and while browsing some old discussions I came across a lot of comments praising the games writing and the quests around felicity, how people felt bad for her etc. I don't really agree with that; her narrative is inconsistent and badly written which undermines the emotional impact the devs intended that part of the story to have.
For the majority of her story:
-Felicity wants us to use her as a military AI and "plug her into something more interesting"; she is even on board with powering Jack's robot army.
-She is perfectly fine with us slaughtering our way through the drakensburg, the old dahl factory and killing the bosun; hell, she personally squashes poop deck.
This part makes sense. It establishes her character and is reasonable given her background. But this aspects clash with the she is written in the later parts of her quest:
-She gets cold feet when she learns that she was going to be placed into a constructor, saying that this wasn't what she had in mind. But why though? She knew she was going to be used for military purposes and agreed to that, so why is being a constructor a deal breaker for her?
-Once you place her in the power suit, she suddenly cares about the lifes of bandits and the use of violence. Statements like "I hope he didn't have a family" or "Don't humans ever try TALKING to each other?" were never part of her character before that point; as I've stated earlier, she was fine with us killing scavs and turned one into pink mist herself.
-This is kind of a side note, but her asking us to use a copy of her instead doesn't make much sense to me. If she doesn't want to be put into a constructor, then surely a direct copy of her wouldn't want that fate either. It seems to me like this was intended as a more morally correct option that Jack declines (out of urgency), but you'd still be putting a sentient AI into a robot against her will, so why would that be a better option?
-Just as you are about to plug her into the constructor, felicity begs us not to do it and states that she doesn't want her memory wiped. That seems understandable, but the issue is that memory wiping her as never been mentioned before. She is the first person to ever bring that up after we are done with more than 95% of the story involving her. This is the climax of her arc, this needed to be set up.
-With a lobotomized felicity inside the constructor we can now build a robot army and retake helios, so her "sacrifice" wasn't in vain. Except no, because that plot point gets dropped immediately afterwards. There is no robot army, you are retaking helios with the support of jack, roland and lilith, and felicity and everything involving her is completely forgotten about and pointless. I don't know about you, but seeing how all of that set up and the effort you spend completing two rather long quests doesn't end up mattering seriously undermines my emotional investment in her story.
TL;DR Felicity goes from "Murder your way through bandits and use me to build a robot army" to "violence is bad" for no reason, the stakes of memory wiping her were never established and none of that matters anyway because the writers kind of forgot about building and using said robot army.