When I was a kid I would always play evil characters, especially remember in KOTOR playing full dark side and the dark side options in that are fully “steal the baby’s ice cream” “kick the hungry dog” kind of evil options. Now doing those things makes me feel guilty
DAE KRAEIA SO SMART TOTALLY BLOWS MY MIND GREY JEDIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII???
She’s not though lol
KOTOR 2 spoiler
She was both Jedi and Sith in the past, and over time she came to despise the Force and the effect it has on people and pretty much everything else - her goal is to destroy the force and let people have free will (by proxy. She doesn’t care, but that would be the effect, were the death of the force not mean the death of all living beings in the galaxy). Far from a “lol fuck the light side, fuck the dark side, balance is the best” viewpoint.
She’s far from perfect; a peak Machiavellian with contradictory beliefs - and focused entirely on her feud with the force, completely uncaring of the lives of the people of the galaxy. She is, however, a very fascinating character and it’s a shame the money people rushed Obsidian into an early release date.
KotOR 2 is still one of my favorite games of all time.
Amazing character with stellar writing (with some of the restored content it’s even better), who is absolutely wrong. I love that she can have complex layered motivations for her actions, can cause players to question why they make certain moral choices, and still be absolutely wrong in the end. It’s great, and I feel it’s missing from a lot of game media.
I remember in KOTOR 2 your character has a dialog option that calls out the banality of the evil choices. I forget the exact words, but basically your character laments the opportunities they are provided beyond basic cruelties.
Found it cuz it was bothering me:
"These small acts of cruelty bore me - to take money from others, to insult them, to threaten their lives. " "I command the Force, and yet these small cruelties are all life presents me with. "
When I was a kid, I used to pick all the super outlandish dialogue options just to see how far the game would accommodate absolute incoherence.
But then they stopped making games like Fallout and started making games like Mass Effect.
Nowadays I don’t really have time to do novelty runs and I don’t find it fun to play as an asshole so yeah, it’s communism time in Disco Elysium Baay-beeeee!
(And my Baldur’s Gate 3 character is a goody-two-shoes so now Astarion won’t bang me, THERE ABSOLUTELY ARE BLOODY CONSEQUENCES
)Hint: All games have no consequences because they are games.
guy who has never experienced carpal tunnel
But but but the psychic damage!Counterpoint; The things you do, even in fiction, write physical changes in to your mind. Games are practice for life.
This is why i only play the sims. trying to become a god
There are like 5 games ever that are morally complex. Most games that let you choose between two sides let you pick between a faction of fascists or ineffective cultish hippies. It’s rare for games to present better ideology than those.
Off the top of my head, I can only think of a handful. Disco Elysium, Fallout: New Vegas, Planescape: Torment, Frostpunk, Caves of Qud, Vampire TMB. All of those have writing that allows the player to explore what good or bad are in the right situations. DE is probably the best I’ve ever seen in a game, an absolute masterpiece that shows you the consequences of the bad moral choices, and yet also explores why you might choose the good ones.
I haven’t played Baldur’s Gate 3 yet but I’m told the writing is actually pretty good, so I’ll check that out.
Morrowind as well, all the factions suck (except the anti slavers), and hate each other, but complex material systems of oppression and co dependence trap them in a decaying structure and have caused even the more noble institutions to be corrupted. And now that system is no longer capable of defending itself.
You may or may not be the Nerevarine, and even if you are it’s unclear what that actually means and if it’s prophecy or you taking it “by violence”. But you can use the fact other people think you are to break the cycle.
Of course once you have there’s no guarantee of anything better on the other side, you’re just some guy, you know.
Broke: you are the Nerevarine, the chosen, the prophesised
Woke: you’re just some guy
Bespoke: the Nerevarine was always just some guy and the Tribunal was always fated to pay for their crimes at the hand of the common man
BG3 doesn’t really do politics, and the “evil” choices are late-2000s/2010s being a dick for no reason.
I would say there’s a definite theme of refugees being scapegoated by bigots and xenophobes, and those bigots and xenophobes falling into evil. Kagha, Bahl cultists, the people of Baldur’s Gate, etc. are all blaming everything on the tiefling refugees. There’s a definite positive theme of inclusiveness and not being close-minded
I got a little sad when my character told a bigot to shut up, he told me some bs, and I called him out for being foreign too. (one of the better options given)
I then blow him up with a fireball after the crowd agrees with me and turns on him. Of course, the game sees it as murder, because they didn’t code it to be different, but damn in my canon that guy is a pile of soot. It kinda sucks that only RPGs like BG3 are brave enough to take the stance of “Remove all bigots by force if needed”, but only because killing Evil McMurderlord is fun. But I’m glad at least they let you say it.
Yeah, that’s what I mean, it’s basically the same morality as a Dragon Age or a Mass Effect. “Mean people and racists are evil”. Which like, they are, but it’s not particularly deep.
Since BG3 exists within the lore of Forgotten Realms, evil isn’t nearly as complex as, say, Disco Elysium.
Like sure siding with the slavers is easier than siding with the slaves or X Y Z amoral choice may give you an otherwise unobtainable reward for doing strictly the good thing, but it’s not that deep.
Still, great game
Some of the Shin Megami Tensei games are really interesting in that regard, because even as they portray the ideologies in their super-dogmatic form and in some cases as everyone-sucks (including the status quo supporters), games like Devil Survivor 1 or Strange Journey actually have writing so good that they make choosing sides not obvious and feel like they actually have weight on the future of humanity in-universe.
Others either flop on their face (SMT IV), or have very clear biases (SMT I or II)
But hey,
SMT II
choosing the Chaos ending, allying with Lucifer and the Demons of the Abyss to destroy the Abrahamic God’s flying Noah’s Ark, to free the world’s oppressed and left-to-their-own-misery subclasses from a theocratic, hierarchical dictatorship… leading to a world where both the mutated humans left on the surface after 1’s events and the demons could co-exist in relative harmony - all while rejecting the title of the Messiah.
…is a great ending and it doesn’t matter if the other two don’t compare.
(I fucking love this game, I eagerly await the day when the translation of the PS1 port comes out)
Oh yeah! Strange Journey is an absolutely amazing game. Good writing. Fun rpg systems.
I mean, in a game with no consequences, why play the bad side?
For the Sans fight
I enjoy being a little rascal.
I always play Paladin because i can heal people and make them feel better and hit cops so hard THEY EXPLODE.
There was a DnD game I played a while back as a rogue with maxed charisma and smarts who focused more on white collar sorta crime and scams and stuff rather than pickpocketing and sneaking. By lugging around a suit of paladin armor that slowed me down and made me useless in combat, I tricked a village into starting a peasants crusade and went village to village building an army of religiously zealous followers and just kinda did a quest with several hundred peasants at my command.
Hell yeah!
deleted by creator
Protracted people’s war.
If my character wasn’t a con artist, yes. In this case I basically did the first crusade but for petty personal squabbles and to bleed every town dry of valuables. I was a rogue but I operated like the McKinsey Institute instead of your standard DnD sneakthief. My character was incredibly charming but an absolute opportunist and generally crappy person.
Because the evil path is the one they write after writing the story and it’s never dedicated enough resources and it honestly kinda sucks most of the time
Plus evil guys tend to not let you cooperate with them very much. They might begrudgingly be neutral to you but they don’t follow you from area to area with game long plot lines like the deep gnomes, tieflings, Halsin, etc. They are more like NPCs that just stand in the lair.
Minthara basically doesn’t have a plot line or story except “I’m a hot drow you can have sex with”. She should have some type of vengeance she’s after that is more compelling and goes through the game.
Evil is definitely underwritten, there’s no social evil route. You can go full mass murderer killing everything in sight, and you can act unpredictably and in a cruel way. But you cannot really be a villain in a way that intersects with the story except for the handful of major plot decisions where you can act wildly out of character and do something majorly dastardly for the whole world.
Wish there was more opportunities to be a thriving piece of shit sellout, a sniveling cowardly henchman, a manipulative mastermind amassing a huge army and fortune, etc. Why can’t I form a gang and take over a huge chunk of Baldur’s Gate territory to sell drugs, etc
You might like the Pathfinder CRPGs then. The chaotic evil choices are generally just murder, but it does lawful and neutral evil options really well.
It also has solid evil companions, with interesting motivations and stories.
Sonic Adventure 2: Battle (but it’s not a morality choice)
I got a game recently where you play the begrudging assistant of the bad guys. It’s one of the few games where going with the outright evil choices rewards you heavily. I can’t bring myself to do it.
oooh, what’s the name?
If you’re not opposed to an adult game with some problematic elements, Seed of Chaos. I honestly got it for the obvious reasons, before realizing I like the story and gameplay loop more than the stuff I bought it for.
Ill check it out, thanks!
Tyrrany was a sleeper hit a while back with that same theme and no hentai a while ago. Also might be of interest
Oh wait that’s what they meant by adult? Lol
Every DND game I end up just trying to do comunism. Evil king needs to be replaced with a good king? Nah, hand out rings of free food/water to the peasants until the monarchy collapses.
creating a union of mages to pump out Power Word Kill scrolls and distributing them to the masses
Non PC humans have like 8hp tops. A wand of any centrip is enough to do then in. Gotta save money to run a revolution
Only the random peasants. Basic soldiers, knights, bandits, etc can all tank a few cantrips.
Good thing you got a mass line of them formed
When I played Goldeneye 007 as a kid, I would massacre all the civillians and scientists, reset the map, then do it again.
Ah the classic fallout quicksave
Time to
leavedie, Dr DoakI enjoy a good GTA all weapons killing spree and not saving after to this day.
I agree with the last commentor in this old tumblr screen. I don’t enjoy being cruel to others, even just video game characters. I made myself once for Dragon Empire and just felt bad since I’m neither a sadist nor a massochist.
Yes, they are not real and I’m not judging those that do evil runs. My brain isn’t wired that way, however, and is prone to feeling empathy, even towards the non-sentient, scripted bundles of pixels and data.
It turns out when the options are Comically Evil and Generally Decent, most people will choose the latter. The Mass Effect devs reported that 90% of people chose the “good” route in that game.
Yeah I think the choice stats trended towards the more moral options (when one is available) in the Telltale Walking Dead games as well.
The problem is they BARELY actually let you do self-interested evil. It’s all just pointless cruelty, often with nothing but downsides. Doing bad shit should push you towards doing more bad shit because people stop trusting you
Yeah I noticed the path of least resistance option was to be heroic and good for the best rewards and friends. The actual min-maxed optimum route for XP and items is full clear mass slaughter of all that exists. There’s not an easy self-interested lawful evil route
BG3 just needed more time to cook unfortunately. The endings all suck, not because they are bad endings it’s because they don’t exist. It just ends suddenly. There’s a massive hole of missing content right at the end and it’s not hard to write, everyone knows what they want to happen with their party and maybe a bittersweet twist. Act 3 just really starts to break down part way through it, despite it being quite beautiful of an area. You can tell content was hacked out of it, there’s weird missing chunks and it doesn’t play like Acts 1 or 2 at all
Classic Larian. Don’t worry, the special edition or whatever it is called will fix that. The same thing happened with DOS2.
That’s why I never finish my genocidal empire Stellaris playthroughs, it just feels bad, I’d rather implement full galactic communism.
I love abducting billions of people with that one ability though. You don’t even have to make them slaves, you can just give them full citizenship afterwards. You will join my space communist society whether you like it or not. Very T’au like.
