No, I don’t mean acting like a jagoff over your mic while shooting noobs in Call of Battlefield IX. Rather those single player RPGs that provide opportunity to stray off the path of good.
A friend once played Dragon Age: Origins and complained that you were penalized for taking a darker course (actions that you knew would offend your party members, dialogue choices, etc). If you wanted the best characters and gear, you had to play it straight. I said that it was reasonable that acting like a general dick means you’re going to have less people hanging out and risking their lives for you.
I started a second play through of Fallout New Vegas and decided to join up with the Legion. It’s rare that I play a game twice to explore alternate options and almost always play a good guy my first time through. It’s good for the novelty but it’s not especially satisfying. One may not agree with the New California Republic but at least they try to sell you on the idea: Bringing order, protecting settlements, getting electricity out and restoring civilization. Talk to the Legion and it’s all “You guys are all degenerate dog-men and we’re going to crush you. Thanks for helping us, I guess.” I haven’t run through the entire mission line yet for a Legion victory but so far it feels fairly shallow. On the plus side, I get to chop up NCR guys with a fire axe and eat them.
Various “crime” games like Saints Row the Third or Mafia II openly have you breaking the law but still present you as the clear protagonist in your own story. While you can do jerk things like stand around shooting people and blowing up cars, once you’ve evaded the police no one comments on them nor do the effect the morality of the story at all.
So how about it. Anyone here like to let their evil side out? Any games with particularly fulfilling “alternate experiences”? Do you think it enhances the game or is it unimportant to you since you never play that way?
Caesar’s Legion is also about restoring the wastes - conversations with Caesar point to that (although a loft of it is background info and/or posts by the lead dev). He’s pretty damn ruthless and utilitarian about things (and people) but his end game is a prosperous “new Empire” - rebuilding the new world in the image of the old.
His problem is that he’s kind of blind to the fact that while *he *might have read De Bello Gallico and appreciate the vision of the early Emperors of Rome, his cadre of steroid junkies clearly hasn’t - they’re just a bunch of murder-happy psychopaths and barely coherent tribals dressed up fancy, with a few arch-sadists to keep them in line. They’re absolutely about “you’re all slave dog-men and we’re going to make your children watch us rape your corpses”.
And so whatever the fate of the Legion at the hands of the Courier, it’s bound to fail horribly as soon as Caesar keels over.
Still, I mean, for a neofascist bastard Caesar’s alright.
Anyway, to the question : I don’t find much fun in playing complete monsters myself, but I do sometimes play as a selfish jerkass telling everybody and their mothers to fuck off, if the comedy aspect of that is good - whether it’s because the protagonist’s writing when telling people to fuck off is a cathedral of spite ; or because the NPC respond well and get to burn you right back.
In general though, games with “two sides to play” tend to have one side be neutral-to-saintly while the other is Snidely Whiplash, so that’s no fun.
I had high hopes for a recent Closed Fist playthrough of Jade Empire, seeing as the CF path is supposedly built on more philosophically sound foundations (for being a dick), but was disappointed on that front. Sifu, why am I helping cannibal pygmies kill an obviously beneficient local god, again ? Oh yeah, because I’m Xiao Snidely Whiplash, right, right. There are *some *delightfully malicious quests (the Zither of Discord comes to mind) and the ending is glorious, but mostly Closed Fist is about being a petty jerkass throughout.
Well, that’s what I mean. They don’t really try to sell you on the idea of their idea being the right one. Compared with talking to the NCR who constantly promote their agenda or even groups like the Freesiders who openly advocate for why they should be independent. Talking to the Legion NPCs is usually somewhere on the spectrum of “You guys all suck” and “Hey, for a guy who sucks, you’re not entirely useless”
The character of Trevor in GTAV is notable because his character acts the way many players had always played GTA up to that point. In previous games, you could go on rampages and run folks over and generally be a huge psychopathic dick, but that wasn’t what was actually happening in the story. The GTA protagonists were never good guys, but the narratives weren’t actually about the various ultra-violent things you could do on your own time in the open-world setting.
Trevor changed all that. Trevor was exactly the kind of person who did those ultra-violent things, and it was both fascinating and awful to play him.
I’ve not been too thrilled playing the bad guy… I’ve tried it in Mass Effect, SW:TOR and a few other games and it just seems to take an awful lot of work. On the other end of the scale, it was interesting playing a total pacifist in Deus Ex. I tried to see how far through the game I could get without killing anybody. Pretty far, as it turns out, up to the point where you drop a nuke on somebody. Although, now that I think of it, sinking a supertanker full of unconscious goons should probably count as killing them… now I want to play through it again and see if I can knock them out, then carry them off the ship and drop them on the dock. Maybe spell something out with their unconscious bodies…
True, but OTOH it can absolutely be argued that the NCR is the flipside of that coin : sure they talk, at length, about being a force for the good and benefiting everyone and yadda yadda yadda… but when it comes right down to it they’re really about sucking the Mojave dry and see everyone who lives there as annoyances to be suffered in service to that ideal, the cities on the West Coast and their trade lanes. They don’t want Hoover Dam to help the people or rebuild anything really, they want it to power their own infrastructure and fuck all of y’all if you aren’t a quietly subservient part of that.
It’s pretty apparent in all of the NCR stuff that has to do with Freeside - keeping the water, only distributing their heaps of food to “the worthy poor” (in so many words), not allowing anyone not NCR to ride the trains and so on. Same goes for ARCHIMEDES - distribute that power equally and they’ll bitch at you.
I mean, the Legion’s right in a way - “you guys” *do *suck for letting all of that happen under your nose and not doing anything besides grumbling a bit :p. 'course, the Legion is basterds and Mr. House is even **bigger **basterds, so…
Oh, I’m not saying that they’re right (although I think they’re better than the Legion but I went independent Vegas for my first run). I’m just saying that the Legion gives you zero incentive to work with them for most of the game. Almost amusingly so when you speak to the NPCs and they tell you how everyone in the Mojave is scum waiting to be crushed for Caesar’s glory. The only reason to start off assisting them early in the game is if your character says “Wait, you guys slaughter and burn villages and enslave women and crucify the men? You sound like my kind of people! Can I hang out and try to get your attention until you like me? Here’s some NCR dog tags… do you like dog tags?”
There’s really no justification for assisting the Legion aside from being a general dick. Whatever relative “good points” they have they’re in no hurry to tell you about. The NCR, whether or not they hold up to scrutiny, at least give a plausible reason for assisting them.
I also helped out the Powder Gangers which, again, just means that you decided a bunch of escaped convicts seem like your kind of folk. There isn’t too far to go with that whole group though.
Yeah, that’s fair - given that most player’s first encounter with the Legion is going to be the lottery massacre, then more or less nothing except scatter omnicidal bandit raids along the way to Vegas, then finally Lanius popping back up to order you to talk w/ Caesar and offering only vague threats as to reasons… it really doesn’t make you want to even go and hear C out. Hell, I thought it was a trap at first, like allying with the Master was in F1.
Though I guess that, too, is kinda true to Roman history :).
I think at least part of the problem is the developers. Bioware always tried to put good/bad options out there but they pretty much always suck. The bad is no fun to play so you almost have to default to good. I think for evil to work it has to be designed into the game as the default (or only) option.
New Vegas is both somewhat frustrating and somewhat refreshing in that there’s no truly good end. All your options suck in one way or another. Hell, I’ve never actually completed the game because of that. I played all the DLC, maxed out my character, and left it at that.
Every time I deal with the Legion I keep thinking of that scene from Life of Brian. You know: “All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?” What does the Legion have to show for itself compared to the NCR or even Mr. House? Caesar doesn’t seem to actually understand the history of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire. Dude needed a copy of Gibbon at the very least.
I mostly agree, but SWTOR actually had a lot of fun stuff for the dark side. As a MMO it suffers from the fact there’s no meaningful rewards from the quests so even if you betray somebody for the money, the actual game cash you end up getting is ridiculously little but other than that it’s maybe the game where choosing what to do has been the most fun for me.
Like when playing a Jedi I decided that I’m going to roleplay her as somebody who sees themselves as a hero and who wants to help and do the right thing but who lets their emotions flare when the action starts and you could do that sort of personality with the dark/light system almost perfectly in that particular game. I ran around accepting quests and being all nice and my Light side companion approved everything I did … and then when I got into the combat zones my Jedi used Force Persuade on a bunch of friendly soldiers to stage a suicidal frontal assault, executed a Sith who lost in a duel and in general ran around on a wrathful rampage, my companion going “umm… are you sure we should be doing this?” all the time. It was great!
Then there was my Dark side Imperial Agent who by default chose the Dark side option every time, except when it was colossally stupid and self-defeating, like trying to use a zombie plague as a weapon when it was clear it would backfire. So you could be ruthless but not idiotic.
So that’s my choice as the best game to be a jerk in. In most other games I tend to be a lot nicer, though doing a second playthrough in DA:O just so I could slit all the throats was sort of amusing for a while too.
Planescape: Torment is unique among D&D CRPGs (AFAIK) in that you don’t pick your alignment, but it constantly changes based on your actions (you start true neutral). I could play as good or evil, but personally find it very difficult to not play as chaotic. I mean, tease your robot buddy or always tell the truth? Be a Goofus, don’t be a Gallant. I don’t need to be a complete asshole, but snarky is necessary.
Although many people confuse an “evil” playthrough with an omnicidal playthrough. Enslaving the wasteland is plenty evil; no need to destroy its economy.
He’s a bastard, but a competent one! The endings make the point that Legion wins = bad; Legion wins AND Caesar dies = worse. Lanius lacks all his subtlety and minor compassion (like to the Followers of the Apocalypse, whom he doesn’t eradicate). Not good either, but slavery vs. death.
That’s part of the point: he wants to be THE Caesar, not a guy aping another guy from 2300 years ago. Crossing the [del]Rubicon[/del] Colorado has more impact the first time. Most are unaware that he wasn’t the first Caesar, and maybe even that that’s not his given name.
Bioware has partially improved on this. In Jade Empire, I couldn’t play through as an asshole, because most of the time you built those alignment points by merely being a dick in a way that made you hate your character. But in the Mass Effect series they seemed to have partially come to realize that taking the wicked option should feel good, even heroic. Like punching that reporter al-Jilani in the face, or the insane babbling guy on Eden Prime or shooting that dumb ass stalker in the foot. Yet, there remain too many occasions where you have to do something that makes you feel like a dick in order to score enough dick points to unlock Renegade options.
I don’t know about that game, but one of the common criticisms of the Tropico games is that despite the whole South American dictator shtick, the game actually makes it pretty darn difficult to actually play as a dictator instead of just running your island as a liberal democracy.
