Forums » The Lounge » Read Thread

Honestly RPGs regardless of the setting rarely give you a well written path to play as an evil character. Even the "dark fantasy" settings aren't really great at it most of the time.

Sure, you might get a few evil quests here and there, but it usually just devolves into killing everyone and taking everyone's shit, which if you played the really old RPGs, you did that anyway while playing as a traditional hero.

With games, the motivation for a playable character to be evil is usually just the actual player wanting to be a little gremlin and screw everyone over. In turn, it usually kind of becomes comical and shallow; like watching a cartoon but the villain always wins.

I really like games like the Witcher for this because rather than just giving you a good choice or an evil choice, it gives you actual moral dilemmas a lot of times. Of course, Geralt is usually a good guy, so you never actually have the option to go full tilt evil.

Another game that I thought did this really well was Detroit: Become Human. Connor's story in particular was written in such a way that I could take both his good and evil paths seriously. His so-called evil path is really just him working to accomplish his directives with maximum efficiency. Who doesn't love an honest, hard worker?

I wish more games chose to experiment with the gray rather than just thinking of morality as something binary like good/evil.

Actually, on a somewhat related topic, when I was first writing Ignis and Aero (yes, shameless self-promo, sorry), I realized that allowing the protagonist to have more options also requires leaving their beliefs and their sense of morality vague. You can't say the protagonist is a good guy and then give the player an option to kill a random sheep for no reason.

Conversely, the more freedom you want your players to have, the more generic and vaguer you have to make your character's personality.

But I wanted to have my cake and eat it too, so I made the protagonist be strong-willed and have their own wants and desires (Ignis) and I made the person that the players control have a bit more of a vague personality but still have some stake in the protagonist's actions (Aero). In general, I made the story less about the player character and more about the characters that surround them. I'm sure veteran interactive fiction writers probably have better ways to do this than my approach though.

Regarding Ignis and Aero, I just want to say that I really loved the game. I played the game recently, and man it was so fun. It was a treat trying to get to all the 6 endings.

At some points it felt like I was getting video game cut scenes, with the switches in perspective to the dad, the brother, and to Helen. The game was really fun and immersive, and I thought you did a really fantastic job.

The idea for the golem's core was cool, it felt like I was playing a fantasy video game, it was great.

I think Skeptic might have been my favorite ending because Aero was being a terrible brother in that path, basically thinking of Ignis as a stupid kid and lying to him, so I really empathized with Ignis's frustration and anger.

Aww, thanks for the kind words. :]

I'm actually working on another story in the same universe. I did think of enrolling into Corgi's contest, but I'm not entirely confident that I can make the deadline because of Christmas stuff occupying my free time. Rest assured that it will be coming out soon though. ;)

Can't wait for it, I'm sure it will be really good!

I thought the pacing was really good, I love how you slowed down the fight with the golem and gave us choices to approach it that felt like a video game. I should have read and reviewed a lot earlier, this was great

This was the same reason I avoided the contest.

Tis the season to be distracted indeed XD

Sometimes, being the good guy means being taken advantage of. I don't really see much of that happening in games though. So maybe the escape is being a good guy and not having people take advantage of you? Or people actually being grateful and stuff?

I personally always pick the good guy options because it's sometimes impractical to do that in real life.

I pick the good options because it's not fun being an edgy dick to perfectly nice NPCs.

But yeah, there's probably something to the idea of the escapism of not only having clear cut good choices but being able to act on them effectively too. IRL, it's being a selfish asshole that pays.

You make a good point about effectiveness.

In games, you can stick to your principles and usually end up changing the world or at least getting a satisfying outcome for your efforts.

In real life, it's easier to change yourself to adapt to how the world is.

I mean from a meta gaming standpoint it’s usually more advantageous to play as the good guy to get the best loot and outcomes since like I mentioned above RPGs rarely bother writing a proper evil path and its usually just half assed most of the time.

Now I think there have been better attempts in recent years, but really playing as an asshole in an RPG is typically just ramping up the difficulty level without actually raising the difficulty level. You potentially cut yourself off from various quests, choices, story, etc. but hey ain't no rest for the wicked.

I don't think I've played the old school RPGs you are referring to, but this line of thought honestly reminds me of the Dark Souls games. The Souls community basically normalized killing NPCs as soon as you see them to gain access to their weapons and armor quickly.

But in their recent game (Elden Ring), most of the NPCs are also attached to questlines that give great rewards if you engage with them properly. It definitely feels like developers much prefer people to do quests rather than kill everything.

I think the proper way to deal with this may be to have NPC deaths trigger unique questlines of their own. Maybe a character who thought you were a religious person would end up changing their mind about you when you kill a priest, and end up giving you a unique quest or something like that? That might give rise to actually well written evil paths.

Well in the really old RPGs, like 80s and early 90s old, typically there was no "evil path" most of the time. You were usually playing as the designated hero to kill the evil overlord. However due to simplistic design choice (or limitations) there were a lot of times where you were forced to do something that would normally be considered evil in today's RPGs.

Usually this involved like needing to acquire an object or something similar and this could ONLY be accomplished by murdering the shit out of someone that was more or less just some innocent NPC.

I'm reminded of a few of the very early Ultima games, specifically Ultima 2, where you have to go into a town, kill the guards and break into an airfield to steal the only plane in the game (And you have to do this or you're not getting any further in the game)

You also have to do something like this again with stealing a spaceship, but in that case you're in post apocalyptic Russia and this was the 80s so fuck the Soviet Union.

Then again, the overall plot of the game was you were time hopping across the world trying to stop an evil sorceress from destroying it, so I suppose it could be argued that all the innocents you killed were justified and didn't matter anyway since you were maintaining the timeline or something.

Nowadays I imagine there would have been other options like doing some side quest to gain access or bribing the guards or sneaking in without the guards knowing you were ever there in the first place.

Probably the first RPG that I know of that actually did keep track of you being "evil" or "good" was the Alternate Reality series, which is actually deserving of its own post so I'll go over it in a different post in this thread.

Why are you always retarded?

Split the thread to preserve the grimdark purity.

Anyway, nowadays I typically play through the evil paths if possible in games (or what exists of them) since I don't really have time to do an evil and good playthrough and I figure most are going to do the good playthrough anyway so I can find out what I missed from someone else.

Still even then, I'm probably never maximizing the evil since I'm probably still treating followers decently because they're useful in a fight or other reasons. Or at least keeping them around as long as possible before they leave because I'm being too much of a dick to everyone else.

I think Tyranny is the only game I've ever played that has really satisfying, archetypally evil options. By the end of the game, they do end up railroading you on the type of evil you can be, but the end for anything other than the kind of "canon" path reeks of rushed writing and for a hot minute it feels like they genuinely were gonna allow you to be different kinds of legitimate malicious asshole throughout the whole game and kind of have it make sense.

That's probably because the default in that setting is evil, so being a bastard was the primary thing in mind with the writing.

Really I think just going 100% villain protagonist like Tyranny did is probably the best way to writing the evil path. (Obsidian just has a terrible habit of releasing games half finished with a shitload of cut content)

I feel like to a certain extent the setting of Tyranny was also cheating and pulling an Overlord, because it also did a lot to make you the lesser evil compared to the Emperor no matter what. That was kind of a disappointment because they did a good job of making it feel like one of those omnipresent unsolvable cosmic problems, but I guess it wouldn't be a CRPG if you don't blow one of those up with magic at the end.

So continuing with my mention of Alternate Reality RPG, there were plans for 6 games, but 2 only came out. The City and the Dungeon. I’ll focus on The Dungeon since it was more fleshed of the two.

It was really ahead of its time for various reasons, but focusing on the evil path thing, the game actively tracked if you were doing evil stuff like attacking peasants or robbing banks. Also doing combat options like tricking someone to get a bonus first attack was also considered evil for some strange reason (Yes, even if you were doing this to demons) It was definitely a lot easier to be evil just killing and steal from anyone that crossed you. Being good was a lot harder mainly because not being a murderous bastard wasn’t enough and the only way to increase your “goodness” was to do stuff like donating to random peasants you might bump into or things like the Flophouse or the Chapel.

So you had to be reliably rich and throw money around to be good and most of time killing stuff and stealing made you rich, so…Lol

Now it was still the late 80s, so being good or evil didn’t matter all that much in the scheme of things of the storyline. However there were a few consequences which you didn’t see very often in games like that back then.

(And yeah I'm well aware of Ultima 4 which came out around the same time and tracked how good you were being since it was required in order for you to win, but that was just reinforcing the "good path" and eliminating the odd murder hobo shit you could do and still be called a "hero." We're focusing on viable evil paths here)

The first one being the obvious which was you got attacked by the few morally good monsters you’d occasionally bump into like knights and such. Now to be fair, even if you weren’t evil, you usually STILL got attacked by morally good monsters like phoenix or valkyries (A lot of morally good monsters also didn’t like humans for whatever reason) So this wasn’t really a deterrent to not be evil. Also killing them even if they attacked YOU first was still considered evil. Your only option was really to run away if you didn’t want a karma hit.

The second one was certain weapons or items couldn’t be used. Now this affected good characters more than evil ones because there were more evil aligned weapons just laying around. In fact, if you tried to pick up a weapon with a different alignment than you, it would actually scream at you stating it would never serve such a vile bastard/lame do-gooder and you took damage before dropping it. The only evil aligned item I remember you could use without being evil was the Reforged Ring, but that was because it actively turned you more evil over time (But it also eliminated the need to eat or drink…yeah not really seeing the downside)

The third one was guilds. Some guilds were good and some were evil and all were where you could store excess gold/gems in a locker and learn new spells. You wouldn’t be able to join one if you weren’t good or evil enough.

And finally there was the Chapel which not only was the only reliable place you could determine your alignment (As opposed to picking up random weapons and having them scream at you) but there was an option that only showed up in the chapel if you were REALLY good. You got to enter the chapel garden and got some unique magic items that only good guys could get. This was probably the only specific advantage that good guys got.

The Chapel was also a place where you could repent your evil ways so you could reset your alignment to neutral and start again. The problem is you had to give up ALL your worldly possessions to do it which meant everything you were carrying down to your last gold piece. So it usually wasn’t worth it, unless you wanted to try to cheat the system by dropping all your stuff just outside the chapel first, but that had its own risks of your stuff just disappearing anyway (Dropped items never stuck around for very long) Nothing’s free.

Damn, a game from the 80s having all these alignment-based mechanics is kind of mind-blowing (The only games I've played from that era are contra and super mario bros). Then again, I guess if you name your video game "Alternate Reality", you must be one incredibly ambitious SOB.

It was very ambitious for the era. Probably too ambitious given the limitations of tech at the time.

The 6 games were all supposed to inter connect so you could go back and forth between them. There was the City, the Dungeon, the Arena, the Palace, the Wilderness, Revelation, and Destiny. And if that’s 7, that’s due to the Dungeon not even being a game originally. It was supposed to be the sewers of the city, but it ended up getting chopped into its own game.

Of course keep in mind this is before the days of having everything on a hard drive, you would have been swapping floppy disks in and out of the disk drive for all this when you moved into a different area.

Basic concept was you were a human kidnapped by some aliens and shoved you into this fantasy setting (The Alternate Reality) for their own amusement. They did this to a lot of people. Presumably some of the people you were interacting with were other prisoners.

That's sort of another thing you saw a lot more back then, a mix of scifi and fantasy elements together. The 3 major old RPGs on computers (Ultima, Wizardry and Might and Magic) all started with this type of set up so it was more common.

Anyway you were basically trying to figure out how to get out of the system and ultimately confront the aliens. Now the intro cut scene along with the song at the beginning sort of gives away the plot rather than it being a big mystery, though if you were the type to just skip intros, then yeah you might miss it.

The City game was more or less just a sandbox without much actually there. You could run around fighting things and shop for stuff, but there just wasn’t too much to do after a certain point since the other games were meant to flesh things out.

The Dungeon actually was a bit more lively in that if you wandered enough, you’d probably stumble on the major quest that you can try to complete. (There was other stuff too) Completing the main quest actually did allow you to get to the alien ship and you needed a specific item to not get vaporized instantly by the alien overseer.

Get past the overseer and you could explore deeper into the ship, but you needed to insert disk 1 of Revelation for that. So you weren’t getting much further, and it was just a sandbox at that point that you could just run around being a dungeon overlord.

The game notes implied you had several options of how you would be able to deal with your situation, either go back to earth with the rest of your fellow humans (Everyone was in a metal cocoon/brain in a jar type thing I think) get revenge on your captors by throwing them into the sim (or just killing them I guess), or just stay in the simulation and live like a god there.

If you really want to be evil and RPGs aren't doing it for you, there's enough "make your own plot" roguelikes, simulations and the like out there that let you do some absolutely heinous stuff in the name of efficiency, completely judgement free.

Rimworld with its slave labor and human leather cowboy hats of course. But its predecessor Dwarf Fortress is a more classic example with even more options. I remember a discussion on another forum years ago where the OP was setting up a farm for mermaid bones after realizing they made the most valuable bone trinkets. The discussion went into all the logistics of sucking them in from the ocean down a series of chutes to the kill room, with asides like "how to use pressure plates to filter out the mer babies until they're ready".

Even Minecraft lets you get a little diabolical with all those peaceful villagers. It seems pretty common for players to just casually burn down every one they encounter to force new ones to spawn that might offer more favorable trades.

Was impressed by how Baldurs Gate 3 has a path where you murder everyone and become a death demigod and the last you see if your character is him wandering through fields of corpses and oceans of blood 

Well see if they'd lead with that rather than everyone hyping all the gay bear, gay vampire gay etc faggotry, I might have showed more interest in this game.

BG3 fans: it's not JUST about the sex!

Also BG3 fans: only interested in discussing the sex