I feel like ‘evil’ playthroughs are mostly ‘skip lots of content because you’re taking shortcuts through the narrative’ playthroughs. So I almost always play a good guy first and then, if I play again, a bad guy.
Mass Effect was great because “renegade” wasn’t “bad guy.” You didn’t miss out on stuff by playing that way.
While I played Paragon I think I always punched the reporter (I may have skipped it once to be 100% Paragon which didn’t change anything).
For one brief, shining, glorious moment your Paragon was a Renegade.
It’s never really bothered me. I get annoyed with the creators sometimes though.
Like when I had to kill that dog in Walking Dead. I was really hoping he would be my new friend.
Good point. I don’t have a problem being evil to people. But I really hate having to shoot dogs, even if they’re trying bite my face off. I’d rather just give them some food and hug and stroke them and call the George.
Yes and I’d even go further than most here:
I don’t like that a lot of the grinding in video games involves killing lots of animals (or sentient plants or whatever).
Sure, the fodder often attack you, so there’s an argument that you’re defending yourself. But if you otherwise have no reason to be in that environment, a lot of that justification disappears.
Obviously I’m not so precious about this stuff that I can’t play and enjoy a bog standard RPG.
I’m just saying that it is one of the things that takes me out of the game slightly: that the game inherently relies on me behaving in a way that I wouldn’t.
Selling people into slavery is something I’m not comfortable with in games (like Fallout 3 or Dragon Age), unsurprisingly.
I spent a lot of hours killing Nazis in Wolfenstein 3D, but I hated shooting the dogs. I know it’s not mean or evil, heck they were trying to kill me, but that damn yelp got to me.
In Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, I have no problem killing wolves - those bastards attack constantly until you kill one of them. The foxes, however, I never kill. They always run away so I feel guilty killing them.
As I say, if you have reason to be there, I’m fine with it. If I’m trying to get from A to B, and wolves are attacking me on the way, and all I can do to defend myself is kill (one of) them, then fine.
But in a lot of RPGs you’re going into the mushroom kingdom, say, hacking down anthropomorphic Vicious Mushrooms and gaining XP.
In that case, I feel bad even if the mushrooms are aggressive, because why am I there bothering the things?
Yes, like in the Fallout games. I tell myself I’ll do a playthrough as an asshole but it just feels bad.
GTA has the advantage that everyone in the game is some kind of asshole or other. Even the NPCs that just spawn on the street. Spend a few minutes listening to their vacuous, self-centered chatter, and murdering the lot of them becomes much less problematic.
In Fallout 2, you can marry Miria and pimp her out. I was never cool with that.
I have a very hard time playing as a Renegade in the Mass Effect series.
I’ll give you an example.
In Mass Effect 3, Samara will shoot herself to avoid killing her Ardat-Yakshi daughter if you don’t stop her. You then have the option of killing the daughter yourself and leaving them both dead, rendering Samara’s sacrifice pointless.
Only a truly heartless bastard would do that.
I generally have no problem with stomping on pixels. But then most of the games I’m drawn to have monsters and such, not realistic humans.
What I do have a problem with is when my path to level up requires making the game suck for another player. I much prefer cooperative growth, trading, mutual points in battle and the like. I will work around the software to make it happen that way if I can. I end up being the one-woman UN most of the time, teaching others how to scale up faster by working together instead of smashing newbies and ruining the game for them.
I also dislike PvP in most situations.
There have been some notable exceptions (Star Wars Galaxies was fantastic for Rebel vs Empire combat, and I loved Alterac Valley in World of Warcraft) but for the most part it hasn’t been enjoyable.
I always want to see the good ending. I tell myself that I will play through again on the evil side but I never have time to. I would rather move on to a game I haven’t played.
I killed more people than smallpox in RDR2 but I did try to make the good choices. I think that made the emotional impact of the story that much better.
The worst is when it is foisted upon you in a single player game, e.g. Watch Dogs 2, Sniper Elite 5. It’s developer-sanctioned griefing and just a cheap way for them to shoehorn in multiplayer. The really fucked up thing is those games already have multiplayer modes. I know you can turn it off in the settings, but they almost always restrict certain game content for doing so. It’s a really shitty practice and I wish they would knock it the fuck off.
Yeah, I adored that game except for the times when another player showed up out of nowhere when you’re trying to do a mission and starts hacking you.
I tend to roleplay, even when the game is not actually a role-playing game. My characters range from good (avoiding harm to others) to selfish (maximizing personal gain). I don’t do cruelty or jerkishness for its own sake.
I hate built-in alignment systems, because the designers invariably align actions differently than I do. Baldur’s Gate 3 got it right–there’s no alignments, only consequences for actions.