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 tend to fall into the same patterns of gameplay, but more because it feels good to see the effect it has on the ending. I love stories where your choices have knock on effects that become part of the denouement. Like in Fallout 2, you see how your story affected each area’s outcomes.
It feels more genuinely heroic to have satisfying evil options on the table regardless, because it does feel rather as if the baddies in BG3 are trying too hard to seem evil. The way Gortash is written is that he’s a handsome charismatic psychopath on his way to return some video tapes, but the guy you meet is a salaciously grinning neckbeard wearing an entire Hot Topic. Orin is about as two dimensional as baddies come. It really feels like the only baddies with believable motives are the ones tied directly to the players’ stories (like Mizora), and Ketheric.
I’m trying to get through a Dark Urge run, and the way these games work leads me to play mainly with an eye to authorship rather than gaming per se. I’m less interested in optimizing than I am in telling the best story I can, and so the evil path from an already evil character who has a real chance at redemption feels like no story at all.
I can’t tell whether the most satisfying evil gameplay in modern gaming is in Disco Elysium or Among Us. But it’s definitely a hard one to get right.
I don’t even think the Dark Urge was intended to be played as evil. I picked it for my first and only playthrough but played it as redemption-seeking, and all the evil options (DUrge-specific or otherwise) seemed so uninteresting. Completely agreed about the games’ villains, too. In fact, I have some general issues with the BG3 writing overall.
I don’t think even the fascist route in Disco is particularly evil, to be honest. It’s mostly just sad. Very well written though. Caught me by surprise.
Fully agree about Among Us though, I didn’t think of it but you’re spot on, that’s a game that lets you be actually evil in a satisfying way.
BG3 writing bothers me slightly whenever I forget to think of it as an empty vessel for a million different possible authorial impulses of the player. If things get too far from my vision it’s “cut! Cut…” and a quick redo.
It began as a joke in my head but I realized, one of the few times in all of gaming (tabletop or digital) when I’ve fully embraced my inner monster was as an impostor.
Even a well written “evil” playthrough of something like Katana Zero or Undertale’s famed genocide run doesn’t land the same because it’s more clearly about the underlying technical challenge than any inner demons with which we might frolic. Darkest Dungeon deserves an honorable mention here, because dehumanizing one’s hirelings seems to be the only way to beat the late game; a failure I’ve been quite satisfied to walk away from.