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?
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.
I feel Mass Effect did at least some of this in terms of allowing you to cut people off and quite a few “shortcuts” of just shooting someone that you can tell from a mile away will be trouble. That game of course has you play someone that obviously can’t have reached the position they have by being a selfish asshole so the premise limits what you can do.
The best approach in my opinion was in Mass Effect.
Dragon Age a close second but there it’s much more subtle and good/evil not really a part of it, it’s more internal to you the why behind your characters actions. Stuff like using blood magic which is illegal but very powerful can be used from a perspective of “the greater good” or you could roleplay that decision as a lust for power. Which factions you side with for sure has morality attached but since all roads lead to saving the world its much more about your own reasons to judge if your character is evil or just focused on the grander scheme, utilitarian.
But back to Mass Effect. It’s the same thing with all roads leading to save the world but unlike Dragon Age there is a morality system in place that is not about just a dichotomy between self sacrifice and malicious indulgence. Instead it’s about what is OK to do to save the world? What sacrifices are reasonable? What risks should you take for others? What approach do you take to solve conflict? Renegade (as the ‘evil’ approach is called) options allow you to pistol whip people that want you to follow rules and decorum while the Galaxy hangs in the balance. It allows you to order people to die for the greater good. It’s about using the power you have to take the shortest and most direct route to ultimate salvation. To not pussy foot around trying to appease everyone.
And really that’s the only way to make morality work in a story driven game imo. If the same story is to be told with moral decisions left to the player than they need to be ultimately inconsequential to how the game and story plays out. At best they give slight variations to story beats but nothing really changes from a good playthrough to an evil one in the grand scheme. If it works and feels satisfying is largely down to the developers accepting this and instead focus on smaller nuances like Mass Effect or leaving it ambiguous and up to the player to craft their narrative for the why and motivations like Dragon Age.
What I’d instead would like to see is a game where you play out an evil narrative. And I do know of one such RPG, Tyranny, but I haven’t gotten around to play it yet.
The best example perhaps of melding good and evil in the same game is Star Wars: The Old Republic (the MMORPG). Because you can play it from the evil side as a good character and the good side as an evil character. If you play it through multiple time you can really craft a world and narrative of incredible depth. And I can really recommend playing it as you would any other western RPG and just ignore the MMO side of things. Bear in mind that each individual playthrough suffers from the exact problem you raise in your post, but on the total, the bigger picture, becomes something very interesting and worthwhile.
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.
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.
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).
