What villain is the biggest asshole in video game history? I don’t mean evil. It’s easy to be an evil villain who wants to take over the world. It’s harder to make a character who is a villain because he’s a slimy douche.
Is there anyone worse than Ted Faro? In Horizon: Zero Dawn he destroys the entire world with his hubris and stupidity. Then he sabotages Zero Dawn so the accumulated knowledge of human history is lost to reborn humanity. Unfortunately you don’t get to kill him in the game.
I was thinking of saying Micah in RDR2 but he’s a bit too stereotypical evil to fit in my opinion. Still a huge dick.
I haven’t played a whole lot of video games, but I’ll nominate Elder Maxson from Fallout 4. If he had any redeeming qualities, I never encountered them.
(Micah in RDR2- OK, he’s tied with Elder Maxson. God, I wanted to kill that bastard but the game wouldn’t let me!)
Handsome Jack is a petty, egotistical jackwad, who exploits and abuses his own daughter’s Siren powers. He also thinks he’s super-charming, the cleverest man who ever lived, and father of the year material. (He acts the aggrieved father when you basically euthanize the aforementioned daughter. And I honestly think he honestly believed he was.)
I mean, he’s an evil little fuck, too, but he stands out for being an absolute asswipe.
He’s a narrowminded prick, but he has dedicated his life to protecting humankind from literal monsters, and if your persuasion is high enough, he’ll unbend enough to spare Danse’s life after he finds out he’s a synth.
My first two picks (Ted Faro and Handsome Jack) have already been mentioned, but since I’ve been on a Fallout 4 kick lately, I’ll nominate the head of the Institute, your son, Shaun. Talking to him on his death bed, and telling him that his everything he’s ever worked for, in his entire life, is about to go up in a mushroom cloud, and it’s entirely his fault for letting me out of my cryopod is one of the more satisfying villain resolutions I’ve experienced in a game.
You’ve obviously played Portal 2, but you give GlaDOS a pass? She tries to kill you all the time, and when you return the favor, she gets all upset like you’re the asshole. She then spends pretty much the rest of the game gaslighting you, insulting you, fat shaming you, you name it.
You’ve got my vote here. The planetary extinction event was bad, but you could argue that he could not have foreseen what would happen when he told that coder to take out the failsafes. But the deletion of all knowledge was inexcusable. I hope we run across him in the sequel somehow.
We know he died but he was off somewhere by himself. I’m going to predict he did something out west that will threaten the world again. Maybe he was the one who screwed up Hephaestus. That wasn’t resolved in the DLC.
Or maybe there is a crèche popping out Faro clones somewhere.
It’s been a while since I played, but as I recalled it, he died ‘offscreen’ which means all kinds of things are possible. He froze himself, he dumped himself into an AI, whatever.
Regardless, think you’re right. Somehow, something he did sets up whatever’s going on in the sequel.
It’s really hard to look past Ted Faro for this category. Not only is his hubris the cause of the apocalypse, but he destroys the Apollo database because he’s decided that the apocalypse wasn’t really his fault, it was the fault of technology generally. He doesn’t destroy the sum total of human knowledge and culture because he’s evil, but because doing so will salve his conscience. It’s just staggeringly self-absorbed, and extremely human at the same time.
I’d like to nominate Trevor from GTAV to be added to the runners-up category. He’s obviously a really mundane and small-time asshole by comparison, but his assholishness is such that I don’t replay the game just because I’d have to play through the Trevor parts of it.
I found Handsome Jack to be the best fit for this, hands down. And his voice makes me want to break out in hives. Wait, is it his voice or what he says? They’re both so linked in my mind I can’t decide.
On Fallout 4, yeah, Maxson is a zealot, which can easily fall into douche category, but he isn’t slimy. He just has all the charisma of a pond frog, despite the STORY saying he’s amazing and charismatic. So I find him unlikeable, but often end up siding with him because, well, he’s right. Not so much about ghouls, but that the synth technology can only be abused by anyone with access to it.
Summary
I mean after all, the Minutemen are so desperate for people that they promote a nobody to be their Chore-doer-in-chief (I mean General) after helping a single settlement, no way they wouldn’t replace their losses with synths. The Railroad happily mind-wipes synths who barely have a sense of self, telling them it’s for the best . . . And the less said of the institute, the better.
@Miller makes a great case for Shaun. He pretty much hates and manipulates everyone around him - his claims of his great love for you falls flat, considering that he’s only reaching out after using you to get to Kellogg, and both only occur because he’s terminal. He’s a slimy pile of crap, but thankfully, his scale is limited compared to others in this thread.
I just wanted to throw an honorable mention to Gandhi of Civilization fame. Due to the infamous glitch in coding his pacifism, he goes from a peaceful neighbor to a nuke-crazy doombringer, making many old playthroughs dependent upon taking him out as quickly as possible.
Now that I’ve had more coffee, I wanted to mention a side category. Video game with the largest number of slimy A-Holes. And that’s Outer Worlds. I mean there are a few misguided antagonists, but the vast VAST majority are various flavors of brain-damaged slimy corporate fanatics who will happily kill, maim, murder and steal to improve their standing or cover up their failures. And even the ones that aren’t corporate (I’m thinking a certain iconoclast) are willing to let their people starve and die of injuries from fighting his battles to forward a self-serving ideology.
And most of your allies (other than Parvarti) are A-Holes as well.
For a game I like as much as I do, it’s A-Holes all the way down.
Yeah, funny isn’t it? But I find “totally off your rocker” to be quite a different category than “A-hole” and possibly less culpable - not that I’d want to be locked in a room with either
Well, Trevor’s a messed up, sexually perverted serial killer, but at least he owns it. He never pretends to be anything else.
To my mind, Michael is the real asshole in that game. He’s just as murderous as Trevor, but without Trevor’s obvious excuses for being messed up. Michael spends years murdering people just for his own profit as a bank robber, and then, when he gets a free pass to a new life where he not only escapes punishment for his crimes, he also gets to keep all the money he made, he can’t just relax into a retired life of undeserved luxury.
No, he spends all his time moping about about how badly his life treats him, then goes back to his murder-for-profit lifestyle just to stop being so bored and boring.
Michael’s arguably a worse person - or at least just as bad - as Trevor, but for the purposes of this thread, I think Trevor’s more appropriate. Trevor gets off on fucking people over. He’ll go out of his way to ruin the day (if not life) of a random person who crosses his path, just because he can. Michael’s a first-class piece of shit, but he doesn’t take pleasure in making everyone around him miserable. He still does that, of course, but he’s not doing it for funsies, he’s doing it because he’s a toxic, emotionally stunted thug who doesn’t know how to control his temper. But if you’re not someone he’s emotionally invested in (like his family), or someone that he’s specifically targeting for crimes, he’s okay to be around.
