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 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.
I think the ideal way to make moral choices compelling is to make good an actual sacrifice. Declining powerful things for yourself and putting yourself in danger to help others with no gameplay reward, only narrative reward. Make evil tempting, being selfish and pragmatic will make things easier on you. Let’s say there’s a survival sequence where you’re in the wilderness with limited food and encounter someone starving. You can help them, for no inherent player power related reward, but you’ll run the risk of running out of food yourself. Let them starve and you make the sequence much more comfortable.
I think one of the reasons “evil” plot lines get written into games is largely because players keep asking for them. I also think most developers set out to write a game with a heroic plot line. But, because players will keep whining about not having an “evil” option, they shoehorn one in and the end result is exactly the clumsy, “evil for evil’s sake” type response which are so common in games. Imagine you have some sort of “threat to the whole world” type plot line going, but the main character decides to just fuck off and use the ensuing chaos to further their own power/glory/vanity/etc. While it could certainly make for an interesting experience for the player, it means the developers are basically making two games. It would require a large investment of time and resources into making something that isn’t actually the game the developers set out to make. So, at minimum, the “evil” plot line needs to force the evil player to hit all the same story points, set pieces and the like which exist for the “heroic” plot. At best, it is going to feel forced and expose just how meaningless the player’s choices are.
Ultimately, what players what in an “evil” plot in a game is an entirely different game. But, that’s never actually going to happen; so, we get the half-assed versions we see today.
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.
Since you referenced BG3…
The D&D series has always had ‘evil’ as in the alignment and then ‘mindflayer evil’ which was always kinda the next level melodramatic brand of evil.
So BG3 kind of tackled that head on. It was rather successful I think in that it gave evil characters and NPCs a much better and less arbitrary framework, even if it revolved around the trope of everyone being power hungry. Although it all just kinda blurred and overlapped with a few exceptions.
Like the exploding blood potion drow lady. She is evil. But she was well done. In her lane and it worked.
But I could have given a shit less about the machinations of all the side evils. Like, Selune-Shar was always a cringey mess, so Shadowheart never had a chance unless we could’ve had the option of her ditching them both for like, Waukeen.
