Medieval 2: Total War gives you the option of slaying virtually all the inhabitants of a settlement you occupy. If you’re diligent your body count could up upwards of half a million defenseless humans. (Note: I never choose this option, not only for the moral reasons but mostly because it greatly reduces the economic state of the settlement, so it’s most worthwhile only if your opponent is about to retake the settlement, and the computer sucks at that.)
I find it’s ofte a good way to reduce discontent in settlemenst I don’t want to plop a bunch of troops in, or which alreayd has a large economic level. The AI builds buildings, I massacre, get a ton of cash, and then don’t need many troops while making a killing off its huge economic bonuses. And the population recovers fast.
Of course, I generally only do this with my hated foes in cities which will rebel against my control once honrably conquered.
Sadly yes: you get to do a lot of damage, but you’re far closer to “mindless psychopath” than “manipulative overlord of evil”. Bioware tends to do that a lot for some ungodly reason.
Still, let’s not forget KotOR2, where you can go a lot further down the path of “evil controller of his minion’s wills”.
Prototype. You play a pyschopathic mass murdering super hero/villain. Ostensibly you are on a quest for revenge against whoever turned you into a murderous demigod, but that doesn’t really play out in the gameplay, where you rampage across new york city, tearing everyone, and everything you come across apart, be it zombie, military trying to contain the infection, or innocent bystander.
Oh, and to regenerate health? No, you don’t rest. You grab a person, and rip them to shreds, consuming them in a horrifically violent manner. And to add insult to injury, steal their memories as well, which for some plays a cutscene. And many of those establish that the person you just killed has done pretty much nothing wrong other than witness something you wish to know, or even merely had some job in the military.
And then you laugh out loud at the storyline cutscenes when your character acts like a wronged victim on a righteous quest for vengeance, never mentioning his heinous acts to those helping him.
Oh yes, most definitely a game where you play the villain. Granted, you are, at the end, the lesser of two evils, but you’re still an evil fuck, completely deluded that your cause is just.
Re. KotOR:
Interestingly enough, they even slipped a joke into KotOR1 about how people think that you just have to be a jerk to be evil (a wisecrack made by someone on Korriban about a Sith-wannabe), which happens to be how a lot of these videogames - Bioware included - does evil.
Bioware’s Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2 are kind of a mix of this. You get a lot of “laugh in the face of the peasant in need” options, but you also get some opportunities for crime, mayhem, etc.
You do find out that you’re a child of the (dead) God of Murder, after all. You get a major fighting power that if you use too often, it may rage out of your control. And at the end of the second game - you can choose to take up your father’s old role.
In Might & Magic VII you got to pick good or evil about halfway through, and this altered the ending of the game (save the world, or conquer it). On the other hand, this mostly just meant you were fighting different enemies - angels instead of undead - rather than actually visiting evil on the world in general.
Fallout and Fallout 2 allow you to be evil, too. And in Arcanum (made by pretty much the same people), you can work for the Dark Elves, in the cause of putting them in their rightful place. According to the Dark Elves, they should be rulers of the world, and all the other races should be their servants.
Then again, M&M VII also gave your wizard the opportunity to cast the “Apocalypse” (or was it Armageddon ?) spell, which deals moderate damage to the entire *country *you’re in. Rarely enough to kill off every last monster (except in the “noob” countries), but always enough to murder every last civilian.
Incidentally, this causes people to not like you very much.
M&M VI let you do that, too. I was in a higher level enemies map and decided to soften everyone up, forgetting there was a town in the map. Even when I got to town (granted, it was a few real-time days later since I saved and quit fairly soon after casting the Armageddon spell) I couldn’t figure out why everyone was dead. Then I happened to glance at my alignment rating and found it was Notorious (i.e. the most evil setting possible). Then I remembered that I cast that Armageddon spell a while back…
The upside was I decided now would be a great time to make my mage a master of Dark Magic, since the requirement is a Notorious reputation. He was already a Master of Light Magic (which required the top good alignment–“Angelic” or something like that). Yes in one act I did a complete 180 degree alignment shift.
Of course, alignment boosts fall like rain in that game, and it didn’t take me that long just by playing through to get myself back up to Angelic.
Ah, these M&M stories are reminding me of Dominions II (and I suppose III though I never played that apart from messing with the demo); you play a god trying to conquer/destroy your fellow gods so as to become the supreme being of the universe; many of your possible lines of development are Not Nice.
One of the options in the game when you’ve conquered a province is to pillage it; it gives you a small one-time monetary gain and destroys much of the population (which reduces its long-term economic value) - it’s a handy thing to do if you’ve sent in a small strike force and taken territory you can’t hold. But one of the nations you can rule is a nation of the undead; for this nation, you want to pillage the hell out of any place you conquer so there are more dead bodies lying around for your magicians and priests to reanimate.
Also, most magic in the game is powered by magic gems associated with the appropriate element, which are slowly generated at power nodes that you control (sort of like Master of Magic); but you can master blood magic, which instead requires you to sacrifice innocent victims who you have hunted from among the local population.
And then there’s the nation of Rl’Yeh…
FEAR
Just to be a stickler, there are no kids in the GTA games. You can be evil in Fallout 3 (exceedingly so actually, and there are kids but you can’t kill them, only knock them unconscious), Oblivion, Fable games, Black & White.
One of the few things I don’t like about Dragon Age is that you can be evil, but it doesn’t make a jot of difference. You can choose to become a Blood Mage and all the goody two shoes characters don’t bat an eyelid. There are two quests that involve exorcising demons from small children. The Paladin doesn’t care if you just wantonly stab the kids to death instead.
Not played it, but maybe RapeLay.
I like to play the god of R’Lyeh, avatar’d by an everflowing fountain of blood.
That way, the non-fish people who choose to worship me anyway can only blame themselves. They can’t say I wasn’t totally upfront about what kind of god I am. Guess they’ll end up cursing their poor judgment all the way to the sacrificial ziggurat of skulls (which I also count as a hint, BTW).
This is making me want to dig out my disc and reload the game.
Too bad the game AI is kinda dumb, and all the players on the game’s bulletin boards are insane spreadsheet mini-maxers.
Y’know, now that you mention it, I’ve never noticed that before.
In order to make up for that I always end up creating back stories for the people I kill. Like that random guy walking? He is walking to the store to pick up some ice cream for his wife who just found out she is pregnant with their first child.
And then a round flies through his head.
With all the uniformed flack GTA already gets imagine if you could kill kids too? The game would be unpublishable.
There aren’t any children in the airport scene in Call of Duty: 2 (during which I hummed “Singing in the Rain” to myself as I knifed the wounded).
But you still don’t get to injure children.
Overlord and Overlord II have you cast as the “Evil Overlord” taking over the kingdom.
The problem (I think) is that people define evil as ‘raving murderous lunatic’.
Way way back in the day, I was a DM many many times for AD&D. I was popular so I must have been ok at it :).
What was interesting to many new players (since the commented about it much) was that it surprised some people that they could be considered to be Lawful Evil in real life. One guy was actually so upset by this that he confided in me that it provoked much self-examination as he considered himself a good Christian.
Basically - if you believed that people rise in status purely based on their skills/abilities used within a system of law/order and that if you didn’t rise you must respect your superiors and know your place…you are on the road to Lawful Evil. All you really need to complete it was the belief that individual rights, when in conflict with the ‘good’ of society, must give way no matter what and you are pretty much there.
There can be all sorts of people that think this way. Some of them could even be good friends/good bosses etc. They were still Lawful Evil. You don’t have to be a raving, murderous lunatic.