Note: you should probably spoiler anything that’s spoiler-worthy.
I’m playing through Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and it’s one of those games with an inherent ‘morality’ system. I generally use non-lethal options except when facing down gangsters and corrupt cops. It’s partially because Deus Ex’s gameplay is more engaging when you play sneakily, but also because I generally play the ‘good guy’ in games that give me that option.
I remember, as a kid, loading one of the premade cities that came with the original SimCity. I bulldozed all the police and fire stations and then, once the city was burning and rife with crime, I unleashed a bunch of disasters on it from the menu. As I watched the total number of citizens tick downwards to zero, I felt kind of bad about what I’d done.
When games have a morality system I always play as a good guy (for the most part). I actually feel bad about treating the fictional characters in the game badly. Games have gotten better(?) at making this harder to do with more complicated choices and less A=Good and B=Bad type branches. And in some games the “bad” choices are more “My character is an asshole” type stuff than evil doing.
I haven’t played a new game for a while so I can’t comment on anything recent. When I did play however the vast majority of the time in most of the games the reward structure is set up to give you the good stuff if you play good. Shake down this guy and you might get an easy 50GP, but help him and you’ll get a useless looking object that later on unlocks the +5 axe of smackdown, so I would play good. However if the only way to get something good is to flat out murder a bunch of orphans and then exploit the morality system so that it sdoesn’t hit my reputation too hard I’m happy to do that too, as they’re just pixels
I tend to play good most of the time. Sometimes, after the first or second “good guy” run through, I’ll play the asshole just to see what happens but it’s not really my style. Fortunately, most games reward the good guy choices better than the jerk choices. I had a friend all bitter about that once but, in my opinion, it’s fitting in most stories that actually working with people and getting on their good side rewards you better than being a huge dick and betraying everyone constantly or doing the Chaotic Stupid “I kill the bartender and light everyone on fire” schtick.
I think the only game that springs to mind where I went all out “bad guy” was a New Vegas run where I murdered the innocents, ate them and allied with Caesar. Basically any bad karma choice, I took it. But even that was on my third run (after Independent Vegas and NCR wins).
Separate from all this are “crime sim” style games (GTA/Saints Row/Mafia, etc) where I have no hesitations about stealing cars, running over people on the sidewalks, robbing liquor stores, etc. But you can’t really play the “Good” guy in those by definition anyway.
I will always play as “myself” for the first playthrough. This usually means being the good guy and, if the game has the option, not killing innocents and trying to do the job as stealthily and wholesome as possible. I didn’t kill anyone other than my target when I played Dishonored or the Hitman series.
Once I do that, then I’ll go through the game as much in the other direction as possible. Being as Renegade as possible in Mass Effect, killing whomever I want to in Fallout and etc.
Mass Effect is my favorite cuz I’ve played that game about a billion times so it’s now just a good time to kill people whenever I can.
It depends. If it’s one of those “self insertion” games like Mass Effect or, more classically, Ultima, then yes, I’m playing myself and making mostly “good” decisions. If it’s a game that actually features a protagonist with a non-entirely-player designed personality then usually I try to pick what I think they would do.
The presence of absence of a morality system doesn’t super influence either of those decisions though.
I usually tend to get annoyed with them because they don’t really fit a type of character I want to play, or force really bad decisions. My usual tendency in games is to be ‘good, but fights to win and is willing to be pragmatic at times’, and if I play a bad guy I usually like to be the cool sociopath type, who is out for personal gain either for himself or himself plus friends. Game morality doesn’t seem to track real well with that. The Mass Effect Paragon/Renegade system is pretty obnoxious that way, to max paragon you have to be make some really bad decisions and some wimpy ones, while to max renegade you have to be an asshole to people close to you. If you want to get a maximum renegade score, you can’t be a cut throat bastard who sneers at the council’s hand-wringing, kills anyone who gets in his way, fights for human supremacy, but also fiercely protects the guys who have his back in a firefight and manipulates people who he can’t fight. An example of weird morality is that in Fallout:New Vegas I get good karma for slaughtering Caesar’s Legion troops wherever I find them, no karma for looting their bodies, but bad karma for stealing from their base or looting their base after killing them. It’s really strange that murdering them for their stuff makes me a good guy as long as they’re carrying it, but taking the spare ammo from their tent after killing them moves me to ‘bad’.
I have a real hard time playing as a bad guy, and when games force me to do that, I’ll often quit the game. (There was one game, Prototype maybe? that had a scene where you drive a tank through a crowded city street, and everyone’s running in terror, except really they’re kind of moseying in terror, often wandering straight into the path of the tank, and after I squished the third or four civilian despite driving at like 2 mph, I quit the game).
But there was an exception recently. The excellent board game Near and Far (the sequel to Above and Below) has a reputation track on it. Normally you get points by having a good reputation, but I drew a card that gave me an excellent benefit if I scored a negative reputation–so I started playing the most cartoonish villain I possibly could in order to get that card’s value, and win the game. It was pretty fun :).
I fixed Detroit fairly quickly in that game. It did involve quite a bit of bulldozing.
I generally play the good guy first time through just to get through the story. After that I might get a little sketchy just to tease out other story lines. Still can’t bring myself to slaughter all the NPCs in a town, though. Admittedly, that’s only because I think I might need them later.
Hell, even when I play paragon I still hang up on those assholes.
I was mostly talking about Mass Effect 2 (and a bit of 3) where I purposely put the wrong people (the ones I don’t like) in the wrong situations just to watch them die. Bye Miranda…
Game devs tend to have a hard time stepping back and looking at their choices objectively.
An example of that would be the SWTOR prologue bit, where if you’re playing a Republic trooper, you get a mission to track down some stolen bacta that is needed in surgery. It was stolen by refugees, who were then robbed by raiders. So you go kill the raiders & get the medicine back…and are given the choice of who to return it to:
the refugees who stole it.
your commanding officer, so it can be used to save the lives of soldiers injured while defending those refugees.
If you chose 2, then congratulations! you get dark side points!
Usually, I follow my own personal reactions on the first time.
Then I play the most angelic possible.
Then I try to play the worst possible…but I usually end up quitting those runs halfway through. I refused to join the Legion in Fallout: New Vegas, and I can’t bring myself to go full Renegade in ME, because I don’t like the racist options.
Usually I play the “Good Guy” the first time through since that’s usually easier and with better rewards. Then I’ll do it the evil way (like massacring the population of Megaton, looting everything and then nuking it).
An exception was Dragon Age Origin. I* intended *to play a good character first, but after fooling around with the character creator I changed my mind. I’d created a female mage, bald, facial tattoos…I couldn’t help but think "This is not a ‘good girl’. This is an ‘insane blood cultist girl’ ".
It was just so appropriate for her to casually stab people or whatever.
First run through I’ll play it as me…which generally means good. Unless something really cool presents itself. Like nuking Megaton. I couldn’t help myself. I really really enjoyed it. Sitting on that balcony and watching it. Over and over. MY karma never did recover even though most of the rest of the game I was good.
Second run, I might try to be either sooper dooper good/bad, depending on how I feel. Though even when playing bad, I still won’t do the slaver thing.
I play whatever I feel like. It’s a game, I have no moral quandary about causing suffering for fictional people living in an imaginary world.
My main character I played in SWTOR was an upstanding, heroic Jedi (though he bent the rules at times for the greater good or to protect his friends).
When I grouped with some friends though and we played folks in the Sith Empire, I played a Sith Sorcerer and was mustache-twirly cartoon evil. I always picked the most a-hole, selfish, evil option possible. Even if it wasn’t in my best self interest. And I was always looking for the option that would lead to electrocuting something with Force Lightning. If someone spilled their drink on me, DEATH BY LIGHTNING!
But I’m not a bad guy in real life, I just like playing one sometimes. Then again, there was that one time me and my friends were on a hostile ice planet (probably Hoth) and while my buddy went AFK to get something to eat and drink, I ran into the freezing death zone and used my Force power that pulled an ally to my location (theoretically to get them out of danger) then ran back to safety. When he came back he was furious and wondering how he died. I could not stop laughing. So maybe there is something wrong with me after all.
I play as Paragon in the Mass Effect series, with occasional Renegade tendencies. If a Renegade interrupt means I can kill somebody in a cutscene instead of straight-up, I’ll do it. (See: Miranda’s loyalty mission; Thane’s recruitment mission).
I’ve seen the “Shepard is a jerk” videos for all three games, and in the third one you can play him as basically straight-up evil.
Yeah, first run is usually as myself - I’ll avoid needless killing, but if it’s easier to shoot you than sneak 15 minutes through dangerous terrain, risking getting lost the entire time, then you’re getting a .45 to the dome.
Second run is generally “kill no one that’s not necessary”. In the Dishonored series, going so far as to find the non-lethal takedowns for mission targets.
Third run, if I feel like it, is all asshole. If you’re a hostile, or even a civilian that gets lippy, BOOM!
Most of them, unfortunately, reward you for sticking to one set of actions or the other, with anyone who chooses back and forth depending on the situation tending to miss out. Therefore, I tend to wind up just doing two playthroughs, assuming the game is interesting enough. I would like to see more games that reward you for doing what you think is best in each situation. If the game is really entertaining, I will often do a third playthrough just to be able to do this, mostly just out of curiosity to see what happens. I am usually disappointed in the results. It can lead to things like not having enough morality points of either side to successfully do things, like in the Mass Effect series - if you sometimes go Paragon and sometimes Renegade, depending on what you do (and how many sidequests you complete) you can wind up with insufficient Paragon OR Renegade to use the dialogue options in ME2, at least.
I played a lot of SWTOR; a lot of the “Dark Side” choices were either mustache-twirling evil (we used to call it “puppy-kicking”), or mindlessly following orders, as in the example you give.
There’s a low-level mission on Tython (the Jedi temple world), when your Jedi character is still a padawan. Two Jedi Masters tell you that they suspect that two other padawans are romantically involved with each other (which is seen as a violation of the “no attachments” rule of the Jedi Order). They send you to spy on the two padawans, and confront them.
The padawans are in love, and they plead with you to not turn them in. If you let them go, you get Dark Side points. If you return to the two masters and turn in the padawans for their affair, you get Light Side points for being a weaselly, heartless spy.
