I’m trying to play an evil bastard in Fallout 3 but I just can’t manage it. I guess I don’t want to wreck the game world.
In WoW, on the other hand, I’m a real jerk to the opposing faction. The allis can go die in a fire, which I will cheerfully provide. I’ll steal mining nodes and tag quest mobs from right under their noses without a second thought, too.
Same here! I’m trying to be a bastard on my first play through, but keep getting positive karma. I just failed the quest to “Blood Ties” trying to get the negative karma ending, but made up for it with my own Evil ending.
I was trying to kill the family to get the negative karma ending, but forgot to kill the guy at the entrance before I talked to Ian. I talked to Ian, then killed the last family member at the entrance afterward. I then got a message saying the citizens of Arefu were hostile to me (all 5 of them :rolleyes:). It happened to be night in Arefu when I went back, so I went into all the houses and shot them while they were sleeping (Evil Grin)
There’s not really a lot of games with a well developed evil side. As noted, most of them just pick the opposite of the “good” choice, with no real motivation other than to be an ass. I have trouble playing the evil side in games like this. On the other hand, I do like games where you only play the bad guy. I played this little gem a few years back called Evil Genius, where you basically play the role of a James Bond villian, in a Dungeon Keeper kind of setting, that was satisfying. You carve out an underground fortress and load it with traps and torture devices for the good guys. No sharks with lasers strapped to their heads, but there was some other stuff that was almost as goofy. There was this bee trap, didn’t do much damage, but you could link traps together, so they’d all go off at the same time. I filled a room with about 50 bee traps and linked them all together, that was very amusing. Except when my minions got caught in it, which was fairly often. Actually, even then it was still pretty funny. I’m still kind of bummed there wasn’t a sequel.
I haven’t gotten around to playing Fallout 3 yet, but none of the RPGs I’ve played have been designed well from an evil standpoint. The missions and payoffs guide you towards generally being a good guy.
I’m an extremes kind of player. No shades of gray here. Either saint or demon. But I don’t generally play through a game a second time to try the other side. Just… sometime early in the game I decide, and then I pursue that direction relentlessly.
And I’m never in the shades of gray concept. Silly fence sitters. Pick a side and go crazy!
Probably the RPG that did the best at allowing the player to follow and evil path was Baldur’s Gate 2. If you’re evil enough you get to bed a hot Drow elf!
I’m at level 20 in Fallout 3 and I’ve got “very good” karma.
I attended Diego and Angela’s wedding in Rivet City, and as soon as the ceremony was over I pulled out my scoped .44 and shot Angela and Diego in the head. Of course everyone started running around, some of them trying to fight me, others just running, saying things like “OH MY GOD! You MURDERER!!” Then of course there was Rivet City Security to kill, and there are also unkillable characters as well, so even if I used the missle launcher on them, they were just “unconscious.” None of the characters tried to escape by simply going through a door to another section; that would have saved them because I have the game set to auto-save when entering areas, and I didn’t want to save after the massacre; I just wanted to see what would happen and how it would affect Karma. Amazingly, after killing pretty much all of Rivet City in cold blood, I had only managed to get to Neutral status. I guess I’d have to go kill all of Megaton to get evil status.
Has a game ever rewarded a balanced approach? You get the big reward for being a mercenary… sorry, “good”, and the consolation prize for being a jerk… excuse me “evil”.
In Fable 2, I was a total goody-two-shoes until the very end, when given the choice by Teresa of who to save. I picked my family. I just couldn’t kill the damn dog.
I enjoyed playing as an assassin in Hitman. Generally I really enjoy stealth-based games like Thief and Splinter Cell and Hitman; but in Hitman there’s just no getting around it; you’re a hired killer. You can try to do the jobs with minimal bloodshed, but really most of the targets and their bodyguards are scum anyway so it almost seems like a morally defensible position to agree to kill them.
In most of the Thief missions, depending on your difficulty level, you could choose to do a completely bloodless mission or you could take your broadheads with you and ice some people, so I suppose that’s a moral choice of sorts, though the higher difficulty levels usually forced you to take the high ground.
On this note, I really, really, REALLY wanted to play Jade Empire as Way of the Closed Fist. The problem is that while as a player you are shown examples of Closed First characters who are not hideously evil, you don’t get the option. I played until the late game when the crappy story* started to bore me. I wound up playing the usual boring goody-two-shoes Way of Open Hand. Which, despite what they say, you really can’t do evil with.
The problem with Jade Empire was that they had a good basic idea but just didn’t know how to pull it off. Many of the supposedly “Closed Fist” options were actually just evil Way of Open Hand options, and vice versa. For those not in the know, Open Hand is the path of harmony with all things and the proper ordering of the universe. Closed Fist is acting against the cosmic order and acting through power, seeking to test your limts and the limits of the world in various ways. The Way of Open Hand tends to be less violent, but is not supposed to be morally “better”. Closed Fist is simply darwinian, and you’re supposed to be the guy who either dominates everything around him, or maybe the guy who shows others how to become strong themselves.
As an example, the game lets you find a slaver along with a girl he’s supposed to buy, and her mother. An Open Hand character might say that the girl is indeed a slave and that the player can either let her go (since he killed her prior masters) or take possession of her (since she is a slave and has no right). The Closed Fist option should be to let the girl fight for her freedom by force or use your power to dominate her, selling her to the slaver. Or you could just ignore it, for a neutral apathetic/focused on your real mission option.
What the game actually does is incredibly stupid, and is described here.
*Amongst other things, I knew the twist, more or less, in about the first cutscene. I didn’t get everything about it, but I had the general idea. Bioware is way too predictable. Hell, I enjoyed KoTOR but the only reason I was suprised by the twist was that I couldn’t believe they’d actually do it that particular way.
I need to go back and play Overlord and try being good. The first time I was just having too much fun being a completely evil bastard. One of my pasttimes when looking around my castle was to kick my jester around, another was having my minions throw themselves in the furnace so I could make stuff. Fun fun.
Psst
Being good in that game basically involves being less sadistically evil. You wind up as a sort of “Everyday Evil,” like Dr. Doom shaking his fist that he was foiled again (but actually he wouldn’t be happy if he did and he just enjoys the battle of good and evil). Although, you already won. It doesn’t actually change much.
Well then. I’ll just play it again being totally evil. The sadism is 3/4 of the fun!
I’m generally a good guy; it always bothers me, in games like Half Life, when I have to kill soldiers who are just doing their jobs. This got kind of balanced out in the expansions once I knew that most of them were gonna die anyway…
I’m currently hating a lot of the new content in World of Warcraft, because it involves fighting (at least temporarily) on the side of evil, sometimes as undead, and it just seems to be breaking everything I ever thought was right about the game.
I also played most of the way through Deus Ex as a pacifist–as much as possible, I only used the baton, cattle prod and tranquilizer darts on people. Dogs & robots, not so much. I made it through to the point where you’re fighting the guys in black armor with machine guns before I really had to start killing people; that’s about the point where you have to sink the supertanker to advance the plot, and I thought “… hey, I bet all those unconscious people aren’t treating water too well…” and then I went to the part where you have to nuke Area 51, and that was it for that experiment. Interestingly enough, even if you’re knocking everybody unconscious, all of the dialog treats you as if you had killed them (Paul: “You killed a lot of people tonight, JC…” Me (as JC): “Actually, no… not even one…”).
GTA IV: I’m of two minds:
When I’m playing the missions, I treat it like a movie I’m watching and therefore I am very moral – in the context of the game. That is, I don’t randomly shoot people or run people down. When driving, while I get to where I’m going as fast as I can and ignore all traffic laws, I go out of my way to avoid getting into wrecks. When I am without a car, I’ll only steal parked ones as opposed to car-jacking. That kind of stuff.
I’ve got a whole other saved game with all the cheats loaded in which I’m a cross between Idi Amin and Jeffrey Dahmer. No one is safe.
Knights of the Old Republic: I waver. I can’t seem to answer questions in the game with the Polly Purebread responses, but neither can I do the straight, “I’m going to kill you now” responses either.
I’m really interested in seeing what the Dark Side ending is, but I can’t seem to be mean enough most of the time.
I’m the same way in WOW. All Horde are KOS. I don’t think twice or show even the slightest twinge of mercy. However, I think I would have serious hesitation in killing a Horde player I know was a fellow Doper. It seems a decade of lurking on the boards trumps my allegiance to the Alliance.
As evil as I like to think of myself, I mostly make the “good/moral” choices in video games because I just can’t bear being a cold-blooded bastard. sigh
I love Submarine sims, and Silent Hunter III is, so far, my favorite.
I do really well at it. This makes me feel bad.
For those who don’t know, in SH3, you play the Nazis.
I’ve recently installed Silent Hunter 4: Wolves of the Pacific.
I’ll surface where possible just to turn my AA guns on the lifeboats.