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?
I like the idea of evil playthroughs, but I agree that the execution of them is unsatisfying.
For me it boils down to the bluntness of the evil options and the inability to be effectively deceptive. I want to play an evil character who betrays people after gaining their trust. Most games don’t make that a normal route, as good dialog choices usually give me good boy points.
I envision a game with good/evil dialog options that doesn’t change my alignment based on most verbal choices but instead on my large scale actions. I want to be able to have a heart to heart conversation with an NPC who then opens up to me allowing me to betray them even harder. I want to play as Senator Palpatine, not be forced to act like Emperor Palpatine right away.
While I don’t mind morally simple evil, the inability to play it properly means I tend to go to more morally complex games. Something like Wasteland 3 where the presented choices are rarely obvious in which is the truly morally ideal. The games runs more on conflicting faction reputations and only has a perfectly good (according to the writers) ending if you play an exact perfect combination of factions, which you probably won’t do without looking up a guide.
The next best morality system example is something like Metro 2033 or Frostpunk where the game simply doesn’t mention that it has a morality system until the end, and that brings out the more honest reactions of first time players.
The Metro system was okay in the first game (especially since the bad ending is the intended canon ending), but I have to say the awareness of its existence is part of why I never finished Last Light. Making sure to sit through all the dialogues and do all the things to gain karma every time is such a pain in a game without manual saving.
I’ll try to get through it again some time though, I’ve heard Exodus is great.