So, I almost never play evil characters in most CRPGs - despite the potential fun to be had - and recently I’ve been thinking about why.
I mean, lawful good is the most boring alignment, evil NPCs can be an absolute hoot (exhibit A: Astarion), stealth murdering villagers for lulz can be entertaining, so why am I always such a freaking goody-two-shoes when it comes to actual plot decisions?
I think a lot of it comes down to lame and crudely-drawn motivations for the evil option in each case.
Your options in most games always seem to boil down to callous, greedy or spiteful: haha no / fuck you pay me / I just blinded your child lol.
And those just aren’t satisfying. Especially when you’re starting out and forming your character’s persona and network, you’re pretty much powerless, dumped in a situation where you’re casting around for allies and can’t afford to burn your bridges.
Running around just randomly being mean to folk like some poster child for Troubled Youth and the need to be Tough On Crime is just… stupid. There’s some crude sadism there, and there’s some crude avarice, it gets you minor short term benefits but no long-term ones, it gets you hated but not feared, without any real sense of control. Everyone dies or gets led off in chains with big sad eyes, and there’s always the strong implication that you failed.
It just feels like a heavy-handed morality lesson where all the bad people are thugs, arseholes and/or developmentally challenged. Apart from being not much fun to play, it’s kind of erasing the harm presented by smarter, more insidious kinds of evil.
Being a good guy gets you willing allies, is about personal validation, and feels like success. It gets you the generosity of the people you help, but that’s a bonus on top the fundamental win of making the world a shinier better place.
By the same token, being an evil bastard should get you unwilling allies, it should be about power, and it should feel like winning. It gets you benefits you did not earn, but that should be a bonus on top of the fundamental win of tightening the screws on people. That’s the actual payoff, but it seems to be the one they always miss.
I think evil playthroughs could be a lot more fun if you had better ways to be evil: blackmail, extortion, sneaky betrayal and brutal revenge. Not ODD, in other words, but NPD. Control, leverage, perfidy. Locking your victims down so they have no choice but to help you, or deceiving them into working against their own interests. Either keep a tight rein on your PR - or let them hate, so long as they also fear.
And another BG3 example: I think the nature of the shadow curse was a misstep, what with the all the grotesque madness and putrid corruption that surrounded it. I think it would have been far more effective as psychological horror, morally corrupt but reeking of purity, so shadowheart would have had believable reasons for wanting to join the gothstapo, and the player could plausibly be sold on it despite everything. But instead the lesson seemed to be that evil is yucky and broken and ew don’t get it on you, and that just feels like a missed opportunity to me.
What say you?
Am I an outlier in this? Do the typical offerings feel satisfying to you? Are there games that do relatable, enjoyable evil especially well?
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I once tried to play Witcher 3 that way. Geralt was - in my version - a classic mercenary-style witcher. You pay him, he does it - no matter what. You don’t pay afterwards? He takes it from you.
Short story: It doesn’t work at all.
That’s because that’s not Geralt at all. Geralt is a sour, cynical old man, but he always has, up to some point, tried to maintain a moral compass, even when the vast majority of the world hated him just for being a mutant. The most brilliant part of the books is their set up for interesting moral dilemmas and how different charactes engage with them.
I realized that, but given the level of optical customization and the praise the game received for its RPG component I had hoped I could play outside the existing character limits…
Lex Luther is evil, but he doesn’t go around stealing candy from babies and punching grandmas. In fact he takes a lot of actions that people would think are good and altruistic. His motivations are what makes him evil. And when push comes to shove he would show how little he actually cares for all those babies and grandmas. This seems to allude many story tellers in many mediums. Infamous was a great game on the “good” story line, and terrible on the evil because you had to punch grandma with no real reason in order to stay evil. Bio shock was a bit better as you had motivation to kill those little girls to gain more power faster.
Writers and storytellers need to think more motivation than actions when it comes to being evil.
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Being evil should feel like cheating and getting away with it. It should feel like the “right” way to play the game if you are playing it that way, your character should essentially “skip dialog”, by cutting people off before they say anything heartfelt or by walking away when stuff starts to get too “sappy” for them. You should never hear what the other characters motivations are, they should all feel like one-sided npcs that just complain all the time.
That is what life feels like to selfish people. They don’t feel selfish. They feel like everyone else is just missing all these easy and obvious shortcuts and whine and complain too much about nothing.
The npcs that we all get to know and care for, are pretty much impossible to be mean to. You have to actually see them the way an “evil” person would for it to make sense to be evil. They should seem like their plans are way too complicated and risky for no reason other than that they aren’t as smart as you and can’t see that rescuing the trapped goblin is not only a huge time cost but risky too. Not worth doing, the reward increase is pretty miniscule, and if any party members should die, or the rescue attempt goes wrong at all and just results in alerting the enemies and getting everyone killed… why risk all that for such little pay off? And of course cut them off or not care about their stupid whiny reasons like it’s a sentient creature or whatever nonsense they are gonna spew. It’s just a plain bad idea, and they aren’t getting it. Maybe you should just try to sabotage it so it’s not even an option anymore, then they’ll come around.
You should check out Tyranny. It’s one of my favourite CRPGs, and it gives you a solid motivation for making evil choices. It also doesn’t really give you “good” options most of the time.
Tyranny is great because those motivations are not just strange situation where doing evil is, for some reason, such a not bad thing to do, but rather your position in the story is almost always constrained by fucked up social systems that rely on violence to sustain themselves - and they will destroy you if you want to triumph above them (unless you somehow find the good route).
Nah that game boofs it so bad.
Five words: you can’t kill the baby.
I have no idea what you’re saying.
I find cartoonish moustache-twirling “evil” boring. Playing as morally grey characters is most compelling. Whether my character is a hero or a villain depends on whom you ask and at which point in history. Damage one faction and help another, when it’s ambiguous who the “good guys” and “bad guys” are. Steal, rob and assassinate for what you believe is a “good cause”. Set up dictators to avert death and destruction, then betray and terminate the them with extreme prejudice when they have served their purpose and become a liability. And so on.
Or just go full mercenary; everyone hates you, believes you have no principles and thinks they have the moral high ground, but at the end of the day everyone needs your specialist expertise. Every client is one missed payment away from becoming a target and every target is one bribe away from becoming a client—unless the target is eg slavers or pirates, because you actually do have principles.
For example, in X3:TC I single-handedly brought peace and prosperity into the universe: fought off Khaak threat; contained Xenons and completely denied their incursions into human and alien space alike; set up industry that boosted the economy at large for everyone; hired a lot of people for very good salaries. But, I had the monopoly in most industries; a fleet of warships capable of steamrolling everyone else if I wished so; literally owned a whole sector; controlled trade routes via the Hub; set up alliances with the pirate factions letting them roam free, trading illegal goods with them, building infrastructure for them. In short, very much a shady dystopian megacorps🙃
I love BG3, but I’m doing a durge run for the first time and have been really disappointed in the evil option. Like, it wants you to be a crazy, egotistical murder hobo. The dialogue options with your party are so over the top I never choose them, because my character is more of the DL serial killer than murder hobo. There’s zero subtlety if you go down the murder route.
BG3 is a terrible example. One of my main gripes with that game is that the virtual DM actively hates evil characters and tries to sabotage your play through at every step. Not to mention that the writers provided only chaotic stupid dialogue variants for evil roleplay. It’s usually [good], [good], [question], [attack the whole town], [goodbye]. And murderhoboing isn’t even fun here because it’s boring to fight whole cities at once. BG3 is a good tactics game with a brothel of a harem VN on the side, but it’s a lousy RPG. Very reminiscent of Mass Effect in that way that was a TPS with a brothel, but a terrible RPG.
Good examples would be KOTOR 2 and Fallout 1/2/NV.
I generally play the “good” roles because it’s generally the harder path. I generally don’t really get into the character or story of games. So it’s just a matter of choosing the option which is more “elite”. I know that’s pretty stupid lol
I loved the first half of Tyranny. You get to play as a bad guy. You’re encouraged to be clever, calculating, to make important decisions that will affect the rest of the game. There’s mysteries about, and power to be had, and though you have superficial allegiances, your actual boss is an enigmatic figure who wants you to vie for power. Your mentors warn you that others will try to control you, and that you should always be looking out for number one.
Unfortunately, halfway through there’s a moment where you don’t get to do that. A moment where the obvious decision to make in order to gain power, is blocked off. Where you cannot make the smart play. Where you have to act not in your own interest, not with cunning, nor deception, nor brute force, though any of those options were easily possible. The game simply doesn’t give you those choices. Your only option is to do what a guy you allied with at the start of the game says. No double cross, no clever lie, no action and rationalisation of the thing you want, the thing that will give you power. You simply give up power that is nearly in the palm of your hands because a guy who thinks he’s your boss but isn’t, says so.
And now I hate that game.
