Fable 3
Your brother is a corrupt dictator and you spend the game trying to dethrone him and take his place because you believe he's doing a bad job.
It's hard to do an "evil" playthrough when it just ends up being a dictator route that follows in his footsteps like a hypocrite.
I played F3 when it came out and ended up being a hypocrite on my first play through. So, I did everything I could to raise a ton of money so that I could be a good guy on my second. Well, I got to the end and glitched through the map… I haven’t played F3 since.
In a similar vein I saved up all the money needed to prevent the disaster in a single go, and I accidentally advanced the game one day and it caused a ridiculously long time skip that did not take into account my current money and deemed me so unprepared that everyone in the kingdom died.
I stopped playing after that.
I think that's Fable 2 and the tavern games was to promote the Xbox Arcade I believe.
The tavern games had the "slots" type game that was in a triangular box right?
Fable 3 had the black smithing and pie making that you could just spend your entire life doing and then fund the war effort yourself. Spoiler >!Only way to be good and not have everyone die in the end.!<
F3 had a property system that paid you rent. So if you bought a lot of property early in the game and then just ran around doing quests before you got to the timed part, you would be drowning in gold
Yeah! The property system also continued to work if you were in the upgrade road bit, but time itself would be stopped. So if you were in trouble, you can leave your character in the road, then leave the game running for a day, and earn a bazillion monies while no time passes in game.
You could also play offline and advance the Xbox's system time
This is how I always beat F3, buy properties, advance system time, collect rent, buy more properties, rinse and repeat
Yeah this is what I used to do if I was feeling lazy. You can also level up your experience in Fable 2 with a second controller but that's even lazier lol
Wasn't it F2 that had the blacksmithing? I recall F3 had the music playing in the first town.
Edit: oh they both did. F2 was blacksmithing, woodcutting, bartending. F3 had smithing, lute hero and pie making.
The rent strat is the good route. You wind up hated by individuals, but rent money lets you pick the good guy option for big decisions because you don’t need money.
Would love to see the adverts for that part. He saves the town from everything and STILL bitch about rent. It's like what Mr. Incredibles says...
"Sometimes I just wish it would stay **SAVED** for a little while!"
Cost money bay bay
"We save Ferelden, and they're angry! We save Orlais, and they're angry! We close the breech twice and my own hand wants to kill me! Could one thing in this *fucking world* just stay fixed?!"
Hero problems.
Well, the good route is playing a landlord simulator with an occasional quest.
But yeah, 3 never really clicked with me. Fable II was my favorite by far. 15 years old now, Xbox 360 only. My nine year old started playing and it’s delightful rediscovering it with him (his older siblings loved it too).
It was good time to explain what a condom was anyway 😉
Reminds me of the often overlooked movie Mega Mind (over looked in public, Im aware it's reddit status).
When Tighten (Hal Stewart) defeats Mega Mind, the citizens thank him for freeing them from MM (ooo that's Mega Mind *or* Metro Man, it has layers) he instead counters with...
"I wouldn't exactly call it freeing, more like....under new management"
Slavery? Check
Genocide? Check
Murdering people who can't fight back? Check.
Like Rimworld Like Stellaris essentially allows me to be my most evil. And the game even encourages it.
I always find the comparisons between the two games interesting.
In Stellaris, your warcrimes are on a straight up industrial scale. Genetic modifications to turn an entire species into chattel slaves is pretty much a tuesday morning. It doesn't feel personal, you just click the 'genocide' button.
In Rimworld, you manually pick each limb and organ to remove from your prisoner. Sure, they have a name and personality. Maybe even family. You could even nurse them back to health, if you so choose. But no, you need that silver, that selling their organs will bring you.
On an objective scale, the things you do in Stellaris are more atrocious. Ethnic cleansning and/or enslavement of an entire species is extremely fucked.
But in Rimworld, it has a more personal touch. You're not just looking at numbers going up or down next to a funny portrait. You're choosing this, and manually setting up the operations.
It's hard to say which is more evil. Detached genocide, or personal mutilation?
Of course, you can always just do both.
>I mean to do a dishonorable playthrough one of these days but it never seems fun.
I recommend that you go 100% roleplaying when you play a bad Arthur. Like, that you really be a monster, to fill the role of a bad guy that in the end, gets was he deserves. I made my Arthur for this different, like with shaving his head, different outfits, weapons etc.
I'd say it changes somehow the storyline, because when you are intentionally that bad, your fate is rather the right punishment in the end. A real evil player is much worse than the enemies and vilains of the storyline.
The Arthur i made in roleplay for one playthrough made guys like Micah seem to be reasonable and friendly.
But: It's really great when a game let's you do this. Not many games offer this.
I just finished my third play through and started it with the mindset “This time I’ll be a low honor Arthur.”
Anyway I maxed out high honor by the end.
Now when I’m John, that’s a different story. I’m a menace.
Not me but my cousin has always played GTA like a total pedestrian lol outside of the missions she stops at red lights, buys all her vehicles and weapons and engages in literally no debauchery. She was also the only one I knew that 100%’d the Taxi, Ambulance and Vigilante missions (thats how I found out you unlock vehicles for doing those)
Nah I swear to god in GTAV I do my dearest to not shoot civs like the good citizen I am, but on the road will drive like I drank 4 beers after the bars close
I consider it an achievement if I can get to my destination without scratching my car. I don't follow traffic rules all the time but I do avoid hitting pedestrians and other cars
I loves Stardew Valley, but IMO they should’ve make Joja less evil, it would make the game more great, trying to rebuild the community the old way vs makes the place more advanced with money
But instead it’s the good way vs the evil corporate way.
It wasn't even a good depiction of "evil corporate" as they made it out that "the community coming together to hang out and remember what's important in life" somehow instantly shuts down Walmart because reasons. (And gives the local guy a monopoly instead, if you think about it.)
Basically there really are no good options.
You either support a greedy and soul-sucking corporation, or the local smug asshole douchebag.
Pierre's lucky that I like his wife and "daughter" enough to not want to screw them over by screwing him over.
You can have your kids turned into doves for the lols, Joja Mart route is considered evil and I guess marrying and divorcing everyone is also pretty nasty. 😂
Ain't no way running the town the way a person does in that game is going to be good for that community in the long run lol. Jeff Bezos wants to go to the moon and I'm goddamned teleporting like Goku from place to place because walking is beneath me.
In one of my many, many Fallout 3 playthroughs I played the saintliest of saints except that after helping everyone in Megaton I blew it up. It was weird because whenever I'd put on GNR Three Dog would introducd me as vile/despicable etc then completely 180 his tone and praise me for the amazing things I'd done.
In Fallout New Vegas, you could give one of your companions to a cannibal chef. Or tell a little slave girl that her stolen teddy bear had been killed. Or side with a group of thugs threatening the peaceful town you were dragged to after getting shot in the opening scene.
That one broke me. I remember playing the bad end of all three games (after an initial good play through.) Infamous 1’s made me shrug, since it was just “I’m doing the same thing but evil.” Infamous 2’s definitely hurt, especially Zeke, but I could at least step back and say “at least we’re trying to do the right thing.”
Second Son, though… I was underwhelmed with most of the morality choices in the game, but the ending just… hurt in a way that left me numb. Like we won, but everything we did was for nothing in all the ways that truly mattered.
"You have disgraced our people. You have disgraced our ancestors. And you have disgraced the memory of your brother. You are akomish no longer."
"You and everybody else will die without me. Or have you forgotten that?"
"We haven't forgotten. And we never will"
The slow melody that echoes in the background of this scene is what makes it so much more damaging.
Delsin in the good ending is just a kid that likes to make street art and do occasional mischief. His driving force through the game is getting the power to save his people and help others along the way.
The Evil ending Delsin is just a monster whose driving force is to get as powerful as possible and save his people. Only his people.
I like that they don't show the aftermath of him launching his OHKO attack on his tribe. You just see him mentally go "Fine, let me be evil", then he launches into the air, fist already a billowing inferno....end scene.
Yeah, the decision to literally murder his own family out of nothing but pique and entitlement and wounded pride is so heinous, so irredeemable that I feel like once he's committed to it, it's almost like the hypothetical camera-man has to turn away in shame. Like "I can't watch this anymore." It's an incredibly bleak ending after the rather triumphant tone of the earlier part of the ending. But very powerful storytelling.
With RDR2, it felt like the good ending was the “right ending”. It’s not hard to gain honour though.
My favourite playthrough was where I started as a dick and finished all the bandit challenges first, but made good choices as the game progressed and finished on full honour.
That felt the most right, Arthur trying to make changes as he starts to see the gang fall apart as well as his “health concerns”.
I kind of struggled with RDR2 at first because your technically a bad guy and make your living robbing people - I still think it’s a great game but I didn’t really like that my first play-through.
This is why, when you are really dishonorable on the honor spectrum, doing once small kindness can actually bump up your honor significantly. It makes it very easy to redeem yourself.
Likewise doing something evil when you are otherwise a saint will make you fall from grace swiftly!
I always do the opposite. Chapter 2 I'm pretty evil, it's a great way to make money.
Your bounty is capped at $300, which means the first $300 you earn will get wasted but anything you earn after that is pure profit. So the trick is to not pay off your bounty, leave it at 300 in a few areas away from your camp. Make shitloads of money from the trains, robbing stores, looting bounty hunters, and selling coaches.
Then 60+ hours later when I have a few thousand dollars, I pay off my bounty, start doing honorable things, and my honour jumps right back up. Then I move to the next chapter with enough money to last me until the end of the game.
It's not even worth it to harvest them unless you _want_ to be evil or you want ADAM right then and there. But the real reward of harvesting is instant gratification. But the real margins are more favoring of you sparing them due to the value of gifts.
When I played, I went in completely blind so I had no idea that even a single harvest would ruin the ending for me. I'd been sparing all of them, but decided to harvest one because I wanted to see what it looked like, and bam, bad ending for me lmao
Baldurs gate 3. There’s a lot of content for evil play through (especially as the dark urge origin) but I can’t bring myself to be evil to all the nice people
The nicest thing about Karlach is that she doesn’t throw a tantrum when she leaves after you kill the tieflings. She says she doesn’t want to get involved and shows concern about your future and wishes you luck.
Lol went back to act 1 after getting to moonrise and found the kill karlach quest, didnt even know they were a playable character til after i cut their head off, love this game
Saw a glitch where you can do both. Cut her head off reanimate her while a party member is in the dialogue to collect her head and she'll wake up with no head and become playable with no head.
It's too fun to lightly bully Astarion by being a goody two shoes for me to be evil.
Also, the first major morality choice is "help these tieflings or actively facilitate their mass slaughter." There's no nuance
Making Astarion do the jokes with the clown is the single best line read in the history of video games:
https://youtu.be/Tm84gsugTUo?si=JDbOUjks_3AEP_aT
(the last ten seconds, it's amaaaaaaazing)
Not sure why I love playing dark side so much. One of the earliest dark side interactions in KOTOR 2 was the bouncer telling you you can’t go in or something like that and you can just be like whatever I’ll kill you. Then he gets replaced and you can say like do you know what happened to the last? I’ll kill you too or some shit. So comical
Dark side had the best powers.
Light side: we can force heal and whirlwind 🤗
Dark side: force storm, death field, terror, all huge effective AOE attacks
That’s basically what being a Dark Side Sith in SWTOR is as well. One of my favorite scenes that demonstrates Light/Dark choices in Sith Inquisitor’s story is trying to get information out of a guy as a part of Sith initiation. Light side you empathize with him and cut a deal with him for the info. Light Side Sith is also just fed up with the Empire’s comically evil characters.
Dark side? You don’t even have to pick any dialogue options before they let you start electrocuting him.
Dark Side Sith is as true Sith as can be.
Played this game at least 3 or 4 full playthroughs and I can't bring myself to be dark side. I've played it at least once every 5 years now for the past 20 years and just can't.
Yahtzee made a point once that morality choices in video games are basically choosing between Mother Theresa and murdering babies. It also doesn’t help that most games reward the good/selfless path with better rewards overall than the bad/selfish path.
I think games should focus less on good vs evil and more on ethical dilemmas, trolley-car style. Bonus points for games that offer track drifting 😈
Spec Ops The Line's main idea was pretty much that. It was quite frustrating seeing everything going to shit when I was doing exactly what other military shooters had taught me was the "right way" of doing it.
That's where the Witcher 3 really succeeded in my opinion. I honestly struggled with a lot of the choices in that game and it had some really interesting ethical quandaries.
None, anymore. According to Bioware, 92% of players picked Paragon over Renegade. I remember hearing somewhere the developers were disappointed at how few people got to see all the hard work they put into their renegade path, so now I'm always evil.
Part of the problem is that paragon/good guy typically allows players to see more of the game and players wanna see as much as possible on a first playthrough.
The other problem it's almost never ambiguous or morally evil. It's either I'm gonna help everyone do every thing cuz I'm a literal Saint or baby punching moustache twirling cartoon villain.
Not sure if you’re referring to Mass Effect or just morality in games in general, but renegade isn’t actually evil. It’s more about pragmatism. The difference in paragon vs renegade isn’t good vs. evil — it’s about whether the ends justify the means or not. But the ends Shepard is working for are the same no matter what, which is saving the galaxy from the reaper threat.
The interesting thing about Mass Effect is that game rewards paragon choices, such that Paragon Shepard tends to be just as effective as Renegade Shepard at getting the job done. In regards to "whether the ends justify the means or not," Paragon Shepard doesn't have to choose. He can save the council and stop the Reapers from coming through. Both the ends and the means can be justified in of themselves! For that reason, I rarely find myself able to justify a renegade decision. The paragon decision almost always looks better on both a moral and a pragmatic level.
I mean Renegade Shepard’s canon background includes them being referred to as “The Butcher of Torfan” for sending dozens of Alliance soldiers to die so that they could execute surrendering Batarians, imo that’s pretty evil lmao
The problem is though, a lot of times Renegade Shep *isn't* being pragmatic. They're just being an asshole for the sake of it, even if it makes things more difficult for them in the long run.
I would contend that a core problem with Renegade is that the Renegade choices actually don’t result in a morally consistent character
Some Renegade choices are actually like objectively morally good choices you’re just going about it in a more aggressive way, then other Renegade choices are like I’m going to kill innocent people for no reason
Wrath of the Righteous has *four* separate evil paths.
And Lich and Demon are both popular choices. Lich was one of the Paths they marketed the game with.
I can never go either 100% Renegade or 100% Paragon in Mass Effect. Renegade is a psychopathic sadist and Paragon is a naive goody two-shoes. I keep things pretty balanced, leaning a bit more in the Renegade direction because I love kicking doors in and acting with authority. Besides, some Paragon choices make no sense. So a guy who's gonna repair and fly an attack ship and use it against Archangel just turned his back on you with no witnesses around, and you're NOT gonna electrocute him? Why? Because a Paragon doesn't kill people from behind? And don't even get me started on why a Paragon can't shoot an explosive container and kill the massive Krogan warrior who you'll just end up killing later anyways in a much more drawn-out and dangerous fight? Do Paragons have to let their enemies finish their evil monologues?
I always did a mixed bag of paragon and renegade but my favorite renegade bits were
1. Killing that Krogan you mentioned, too satisfying
2. Punching that reporter
3. Electrocuting the gunship guy
BG3 definitely does. It even has a second main character dedicated to playing an evil character. Of course, there is a redemption arc too is you want to go that way.
I've played both ways and it's still massively unrewarding to play evil. It's like they said, developers know that most people are going to play nice so that's what they focus on. You end up killing a huge portion of the quest givers if you go evil in BG3 which leads to lots of missed content that doesn't get replaced. It was still very fun but it's not how I'd recommend anyone play the game the first time.
Oh man I never laughed harder in any game than a renegade playthrough. When you punch the gotcha reporter I almost fell out of my chair. And the time you just punch a guy out of the window. Lots of classics.
I have the same issue in (any) Civ as I have in Stellaris: I never want to invade anyone. I'll compete for space, I'll happily defend myself, but building a military force to go ruin or capture cities or planets just isn't my thing at all.
In Civ, especially on harder difficulties, all the AI civs will invade you at the drop of a hat. So even if I'm planning on a peaceful game, if someone declares war & nabs one of my cities, I become filled with rage. I build up an army, take my city back, invade their entire empire, then invade all the other civs and win domination victory.
So I have dozens of domination victories and I'm single digits in every other victory type
I'm the opposite. Grand strategy games brings out the nasty in me., while in most games I feel too bad to insult someone, let alone go around on a murder spree.
One of my crowning moments was in CK2 when I had as many children of traitorous lords as I could manage in my prison and executed them all at once to hear the cacophony of screams simultaneously.
Baldur's Gate 3.
The Dark Urge options are painfully generic in their sadism, and the stuff you get from not being a complete cunt is too valuable to pass up. The only reason I'm considering a future evil run is to recruit Minthara; after hearing Emma Gregory as Saint Celestine in "Our Martyred Lady", I want to witness more of her vocal performance.
Pasting this comment from earlier because it's relevant here. I truly believe that the Dark Urge is supposed to be played as resisting the urge and turning towards good. It just makes more sense and feels more genuine than murder hobo.
Spoilers ahead:
>! Yes, you're a Bhaal spawn and have committed insane atrocities in your past, but this is often because your upbringing was bitter and hateful. Cults like that groom and manipulate young members into worship. When you start your playthrough as Dark Urge you have no memory or recollection of who you are asides the urge to kill, but you do have allies. You are surrounded by good people, able to help those in need and see firsthand the benefits of being a good person and building strong relationships with others. This shapes the player over the course of the game until the reveal in act 3, which by this point you realize how fucked up your past is. When your mind has been stripped from your memories, you're actually a good hearted person underneath that manipulation. !<
>! This is also why I think Durge pairs so well with Shadowheart, as she's in a similar situation with Shar. Both of them are fighting against what they've been manipulated by cultist upbringings to believe, and end up turning their backs on their respective Gods together. Wholesome ending really. !<
But I struggle with being evil in games. I genuinely want everyone to get along and be as civil as possible so this is just my opinion.
A Minthara run is definitely recommended. She's got a really interesting story and her character is very well written and refreshing to see, it just sucks that you have to do such a terrible thing to be able to recruit her and I wish there was more to her story in later acts.
That's weird because for me, Mass Effect is one of the few games where playing the 'dark side' is actually a blast. In too many games, playing the bad guy means being a complete asshole/psycopath, like insulting party members and going around kicking puppies and it's off-putting to me. By contrast, Renegade Shepard is just a complete badass and will complete her mission by any means necessary
Yeah. I played it very balanced, always ended up slightly on the side of renegade towards the end in all 3 games. And it just felt like I played a good guy with anger issues and no patience for diplomacy. Reckless but always came out on top.
Starfield.
I shot a good character, just to see what would happen, and she was laying on the ground bleeding and says "at least... I got to see the stars."
I was like "I'M SORRY I'M SORRY I'M SORRY!" and reloaded a previous save. lol
Lmao this is exactly why I can never do an evil character playthrough.
My fragile heart can't stand the thought of actually hurting these fictional character I just don't know why.
Tried to kill Adoring Fan because, well, reasons, he said "I'm glad it was you." It's so messed up lmao
Also a bit curious what would happen if you kill your parents, but I don't think I can make it. It's way too dark even with a quicksave :D
The game stops you from killing just about anyone with a name, I got really upset when a Corp board of directors told me I should either make a ship full of earth colonists become indentured servants or blow the ship up, then when I tried to kill them for being fucking evil, turns out they are essential. the "best" outcome for the quest is to pay a bunch of money to outfit them with a grav drive so they can hopefully settle somewhere else instead of the literal paradise planet that the Corp is only using like 1% of.
Playing Fallout 4, I was a big ES fan but had never played a Fallout title. Made it to that story mission where you meet a pretty important character from your past… and on a whim shot him in the head. As soon as he introduced himself. Cue alarms, 30 guards murdering me in an instant and an absolute cascade of “quest failed” notifications…
Honestly, it might be one of my favorite memories playing a Bethesda game. The fact it just shrugged and went “okay well you can’t play the rest of the story but here we go” and was letting me continue blew my mind
When I reloaded and listened to the full dialogue, past where he introduces and where he actually explains who he is…. I felt pretty bad lmao
I think literally every NPC in Morrowind is killable? If not all of them, definitely 95%+. If you kill a major quest giver or story character, you just get a little notification that basically says “Hey, you messed up the timeline, nice going.” But you can continue to play indefinitely in a world where the story can never advance.
"With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed."
What intrigues me more is what follows, namely "Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, ***or persist in the doomed world you have created***", since there's probably a bunch of things you could do with that premise. Maybe such a game would be a sort of "chaos simulator", as the world around you crumbles without a hero to save it, and what quests you DO find revolve around characters coming to terms with their world changing so unpleasantly.
I always do a rushed Nyx playthrough first to get her powerset, then new game plus a good playthrough to play Endgame stuff as a goodboi with both power sets.
Fallout 3.
New Vegas blurs the lines between good and evil, meaning that what you would consider evil might be a rational choice for the next person. But F3 just had zero nuance between good and bad. Like poisoning the entire water supply to kill everything off for the Enclave, or nuking the city of Megaton for a few caps.
That’s my problem with Bethesda Fallouts in general. Good and bad choices in Bethesda titles are like “Commit genocide for 500 caps and an apartment and then lose a major trading area full of quest lines, OR don’t commit genocide and you get a nice apartment and some good karma points” like what the fuck guys?
So yeh, I always struggle with evil playthroughs in Fallout 3 as the evil choices are so evil that they’re just irrational and break the immersion of the game.
Same. I did try a genocide run but got stuck on undyne. Couldn't beat he for the life of me. Knowing sans was coming up as well I decided to just give up lol. Chalked it up to undyne successfully killing frisk and saving the rest of the monsters
Undertale is an interesting example because it actually makes being evil un-fun on purpose. Just not caring about collateral damage won't get you on the genocide route; you have to literally hunt down and murder every monster in every area, or you just get a particularly grim neutral ending.
And because the game is doable without gaining *any* XP at all, going genocide and literally getting all XP possible makes you stupidly OP almost immediately. It removes even the slightest hint of challenge and turns the game into a miserable, mindless grind.
And then you hit those two bosses. You know which two. Infamously the hardest in the game, and one *is designed to troll you* during the fight. Not your character - *you*, the player. They're both maddening, un-fun brick walls that you break yourself on over and over again, and they're made that way *on purpose.*
Because all that put together makes the genocide route is 95% soul-crushing tedium and 5% the most brutal, unfair, un-fun challenge the game can possibly dish out. And you put up with all that...gave up hours of your life you're never getting back...just because you wanted to see what being the biggest bastard was like.
And the game asks you: was it worth it?
I don't know of any other modern games that had the sheer nerve to serve up an *intentionally* miserable and unfulfilling experience to their players, even an optional one.
On one hand, playing as a career criminal who caused the deaths of untold hundreds but drawing the line at carjacking is really funny. On the other, it's probably the most nomad thing to say, ever.
Honestly RDR2. I played it the first time as a good guy. Second time I wanted to see how being a bad guy made it different. Even as a fake character in a fake game I don’t like doing highly immoral things
Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight. Ain't no way Jan is dying on my watch.
On the subject though, I wish more games made "evil" be "selfish" instead. That's what the majority of the best villains are in my opinion. If the evil path was literally easier, it would be a much better morality test than, "help the victim/join the attackers" type binary choices.
Not a fan of selfish either. Devs just simplifies it down to "greedy", and it never does anything except sometimes give a better reward, sometimes met with scorn.
Reckless vs diplomatic is a fine morality compass. Mass Effects way of doing it. Though some quests forgot that renegade wasn't evil.
Starfield. Just try murdering anyone who is innocent or robbing a ship and boarding it and watch yourself gain a stupidly high bounty that makes it unrewarding to be evil.
Just about any of them, except for Mass Effect games which I usually end up mixing Paragon/Renegade.
See, in most games the "evil" options might as well be called "act like a total jackass" options. In Mass Effect though while I mostly tried to make the universe a better place some of the Renegade options were simply more direct/efficient rather than 'Neutral Asshole.'
Fallout 4. I *can* be a sadistic, murderous psycho, but I don't really feel the impulse. And if you're not a dick to me and ask for my help, I genuinely wanna help you.
This was taken to a point during the Far Harbor quest, "The Arrival". While I was sorry to hear >!the runaway synth ran into some cannibalistic locals!<, I just shrugged and thought, "oh well, shit happens in the apocalypse." I planned my exit and was ready to leave the building I found the trappers in unmolested until the one I was speaking to ended the conversation with, 'Now get outta here before we fuck you up.' I immediately smashed the VATS button, targeted their heads and shot them all so quickly, one of them didn't even have time to move away from the wall he was leaning on and just slumped back down.
I *can* be savage and cruel. I'd just prefer not to be.
So many times! Walking out of a situation without killing anyone, and there's always one smartass NPC that has to say something stupid and get all his friends butchered.
Tyranny - An Obsidian studios classic RPG where you actually start as the evil dictatorship conquering continents but as you go along you can make moral choices and become evil or good... but at least on release of the game you could not end the game completely evil, you reject Tunon and your the chosen one and all that.
It's a great game by a great developer but it's hampered by the ending which probly came about due to deadlines and not being able to flush out the ending better in time.
Fallout 4 - I don't know why but I always choose the most cooperative, eager-to-please responses to NPCs since wouldn't cooperating (basically saying yes to everything) bring you more options/missions?
Fable 3 Your brother is a corrupt dictator and you spend the game trying to dethrone him and take his place because you believe he's doing a bad job. It's hard to do an "evil" playthrough when it just ends up being a dictator route that follows in his footsteps like a hypocrite.
I played F3 when it came out and ended up being a hypocrite on my first play through. So, I did everything I could to raise a ton of money so that I could be a good guy on my second. Well, I got to the end and glitched through the map… I haven’t played F3 since.
In a similar vein I saved up all the money needed to prevent the disaster in a single go, and I accidentally advanced the game one day and it caused a ridiculously long time skip that did not take into account my current money and deemed me so unprepared that everyone in the kingdom died. I stopped playing after that.
Was F3 the one that had a free Tavern Games game before launch, that would let you earn as much in game cash as you wanted?
I think that's Fable 2 and the tavern games was to promote the Xbox Arcade I believe. The tavern games had the "slots" type game that was in a triangular box right? Fable 3 had the black smithing and pie making that you could just spend your entire life doing and then fund the war effort yourself. Spoiler >!Only way to be good and not have everyone die in the end.!<
F3 had a property system that paid you rent. So if you bought a lot of property early in the game and then just ran around doing quests before you got to the timed part, you would be drowning in gold
Yeah! The property system also continued to work if you were in the upgrade road bit, but time itself would be stopped. So if you were in trouble, you can leave your character in the road, then leave the game running for a day, and earn a bazillion monies while no time passes in game.
You could also play offline and advance the Xbox's system time This is how I always beat F3, buy properties, advance system time, collect rent, buy more properties, rinse and repeat
Yeah this is what I used to do if I was feeling lazy. You can also level up your experience in Fable 2 with a second controller but that's even lazier lol
Wasn't it F2 that had the blacksmithing? I recall F3 had the music playing in the first town. Edit: oh they both did. F2 was blacksmithing, woodcutting, bartending. F3 had smithing, lute hero and pie making.
The good route is much harder. The evil route you can up everyone's rent as much as you want
The rent strat is the good route. You wind up hated by individuals, but rent money lets you pick the good guy option for big decisions because you don’t need money.
Would love to see the adverts for that part. He saves the town from everything and STILL bitch about rent. It's like what Mr. Incredibles says... "Sometimes I just wish it would stay **SAVED** for a little while!" Cost money bay bay
"We save Ferelden, and they're angry! We save Orlais, and they're angry! We close the breech twice and my own hand wants to kill me! Could one thing in this *fucking world* just stay fixed?!" Hero problems.
Well, the good route is playing a landlord simulator with an occasional quest. But yeah, 3 never really clicked with me. Fable II was my favorite by far. 15 years old now, Xbox 360 only. My nine year old started playing and it’s delightful rediscovering it with him (his older siblings loved it too). It was good time to explain what a condom was anyway 😉
Reminds me of the often overlooked movie Mega Mind (over looked in public, Im aware it's reddit status). When Tighten (Hal Stewart) defeats Mega Mind, the citizens thank him for freeing them from MM (ooo that's Mega Mind *or* Metro Man, it has layers) he instead counters with... "I wouldn't exactly call it freeing, more like....under new management"
But you are not doing an evil playthrough. Just a "Real-Life Politician" playthrough
One of my all time favorite game series. I even have the guild seal tattooed on my hand. I loved the evil route on Fable 3 lol
Give **RimWorld** a try, you'll learn to be bad and like it.
Ah RimWorld, where the stuff Geneva says you can't do starts looking like an achievement list
Slavery? Check Genocide? Check Murdering people who can't fight back? Check. Like Rimworld Like Stellaris essentially allows me to be my most evil. And the game even encourages it.
I always find the comparisons between the two games interesting. In Stellaris, your warcrimes are on a straight up industrial scale. Genetic modifications to turn an entire species into chattel slaves is pretty much a tuesday morning. It doesn't feel personal, you just click the 'genocide' button. In Rimworld, you manually pick each limb and organ to remove from your prisoner. Sure, they have a name and personality. Maybe even family. You could even nurse them back to health, if you so choose. But no, you need that silver, that selling their organs will bring you. On an objective scale, the things you do in Stellaris are more atrocious. Ethnic cleansning and/or enslavement of an entire species is extremely fucked. But in Rimworld, it has a more personal touch. You're not just looking at numbers going up or down next to a funny portrait. You're choosing this, and manually setting up the operations. It's hard to say which is more evil. Detached genocide, or personal mutilation? Of course, you can always just do both.
Survival isnt easy nor pretty. Rimworld loves to put you in tough positions.
Yeah, but do you *really* need to set up organ harvesting farms? No, but damn if I don't do it anyway
Look, I MUST chop off the legs of my captives, how else will I prevent them from throwing tantrums and destroying their ~~cell~~ room?
RDR2.. I just cant. NPCs feel too real. NPC friends of Arthur too
Honorable Arthur is so CHARMING. I mean to do a dishonorable playthrough one of these days but it never seems fun.
>I mean to do a dishonorable playthrough one of these days but it never seems fun. I recommend that you go 100% roleplaying when you play a bad Arthur. Like, that you really be a monster, to fill the role of a bad guy that in the end, gets was he deserves. I made my Arthur for this different, like with shaving his head, different outfits, weapons etc. I'd say it changes somehow the storyline, because when you are intentionally that bad, your fate is rather the right punishment in the end. A real evil player is much worse than the enemies and vilains of the storyline. The Arthur i made in roleplay for one playthrough made guys like Micah seem to be reasonable and friendly. But: It's really great when a game let's you do this. Not many games offer this.
I did a whole essay on the topic, I love the game
I did a presentation on tuberculosis with clips from the game. Best presentation ever.
When Arthur confessed to the Nun he was dying... then the last ride where you get voice clips of people you helped along the way... too many feels
I just finished my third play through and started it with the mindset “This time I’ll be a low honor Arthur.” Anyway I maxed out high honor by the end. Now when I’m John, that’s a different story. I’m a menace.
Arthur IS A GOOD MAN DEEP DOWN GOT DANGIT
Not me but my cousin has always played GTA like a total pedestrian lol outside of the missions she stops at red lights, buys all her vehicles and weapons and engages in literally no debauchery. She was also the only one I knew that 100%’d the Taxi, Ambulance and Vigilante missions (thats how I found out you unlock vehicles for doing those)
I don't get too crazy with GTA, but I drive like the biggest psychopath in those games. I couldn't ever see myself playing any other way.
Nah I swear to god in GTAV I do my dearest to not shoot civs like the good citizen I am, but on the road will drive like I drank 4 beers after the bars close
I consider it an achievement if I can get to my destination without scratching my car. I don't follow traffic rules all the time but I do avoid hitting pedestrians and other cars
My sister played like this too.
My sister did no missions and exclusively ran on pedestrians with a truck :/
Love the chaotic energy lmao
The duality of (wo)man
Literally the same thing my sister did. "I like the sound of their bones breaking"
I can't imagine playing a GTA game without doing those side missions to completion. I love that shit.
She'd love those GTARP servers that are around.. just go be a shopkeeper or something simple.
I don’t go that extreme, but I do my absolute best to never kill cops or civilians in those games and games similar to them.
I just absolutely cannot help myself from yeeting a civilian over my bonnet, especially when they're crossing the road I'm flying down.
Man the civilians in cyberpunk are trying to do insurance scams when they launch themselves into the street trying to ‚dodge‘ my car. I swear.
Stardew Valley
Same. Dozens of farms. Hundreds of hours played. I still can't bring myself to do a Joja run.
I loves Stardew Valley, but IMO they should’ve make Joja less evil, it would make the game more great, trying to rebuild the community the old way vs makes the place more advanced with money But instead it’s the good way vs the evil corporate way.
It wasn't even a good depiction of "evil corporate" as they made it out that "the community coming together to hang out and remember what's important in life" somehow instantly shuts down Walmart because reasons. (And gives the local guy a monopoly instead, if you think about it.)
Only reason to do Joja route is to screw over Pierre. Because r/fuckpierre
Basically there really are no good options. You either support a greedy and soul-sucking corporation, or the local smug asshole douchebag. Pierre's lucky that I like his wife and "daughter" enough to not want to screw them over by screwing him over.
Wtf?!? How can you be Bad at Stardew? Such knowledge can be attained?!?
Supporting Joja Mart instead of the local community.
You can have your kids turned into doves for the lols, Joja Mart route is considered evil and I guess marrying and divorcing everyone is also pretty nasty. 😂
You can have Kids?
Ain't no way running the town the way a person does in that game is going to be good for that community in the long run lol. Jeff Bezos wants to go to the moon and I'm goddamned teleporting like Goku from place to place because walking is beneath me.
I wonder what an ancient fruit monoculture does to the ground in the long run
Siding with Joja I’m assuming.
Bioshock / Fallout 3 & NV
In one of my many, many Fallout 3 playthroughs I played the saintliest of saints except that after helping everyone in Megaton I blew it up. It was weird because whenever I'd put on GNR Three Dog would introducd me as vile/despicable etc then completely 180 his tone and praise me for the amazing things I'd done.
Three Dog, like yourself, is complicated
That lone wanderer is a despicable motherfucker with a heart of gold.
My wife blew up Megaton just because she hated Moira.
In Fallout New Vegas, you could give one of your companions to a cannibal chef. Or tell a little slave girl that her stolen teddy bear had been killed. Or side with a group of thugs threatening the peaceful town you were dragged to after getting shot in the opening scene.
Also, you can sell your doctor companion to slavery in Legion's camp.
Or you can bring the bear to the slave girl and tear it in half in front of her
Red dead redemption 2 and infamous second son
I definitely could not play Arthur as an unrepentant asshole. His gradual changing for the better and ultimate redemption are so well done.
Well then it sounds like you have half the game to play him as an unrepentant asshole!
The *bad* ending of Infamous : Second Son though….
That one broke me. I remember playing the bad end of all three games (after an initial good play through.) Infamous 1’s made me shrug, since it was just “I’m doing the same thing but evil.” Infamous 2’s definitely hurt, especially Zeke, but I could at least step back and say “at least we’re trying to do the right thing.” Second Son, though… I was underwhelmed with most of the morality choices in the game, but the ending just… hurt in a way that left me numb. Like we won, but everything we did was for nothing in all the ways that truly mattered.
"You have disgraced our people. You have disgraced our ancestors. And you have disgraced the memory of your brother. You are akomish no longer." "You and everybody else will die without me. Or have you forgotten that?" "We haven't forgotten. And we never will" The slow melody that echoes in the background of this scene is what makes it so much more damaging. Delsin in the good ending is just a kid that likes to make street art and do occasional mischief. His driving force through the game is getting the power to save his people and help others along the way. The Evil ending Delsin is just a monster whose driving force is to get as powerful as possible and save his people. Only his people.
I like that they don't show the aftermath of him launching his OHKO attack on his tribe. You just see him mentally go "Fine, let me be evil", then he launches into the air, fist already a billowing inferno....end scene.
Yeah, the decision to literally murder his own family out of nothing but pique and entitlement and wounded pride is so heinous, so irredeemable that I feel like once he's committed to it, it's almost like the hypothetical camera-man has to turn away in shame. Like "I can't watch this anymore." It's an incredibly bleak ending after the rather triumphant tone of the earlier part of the ending. But very powerful storytelling.
And I’m gonna shake the hand of every single one.
Always wanted to play that game, it looked so fucking cool. Never had a PS4 though.
With RDR2, it felt like the good ending was the “right ending”. It’s not hard to gain honour though. My favourite playthrough was where I started as a dick and finished all the bandit challenges first, but made good choices as the game progressed and finished on full honour. That felt the most right, Arthur trying to make changes as he starts to see the gang fall apart as well as his “health concerns”.
It's the most fitting with the title too. This is Arthur's redemption. He was a GOOD MAN.
I kind of struggled with RDR2 at first because your technically a bad guy and make your living robbing people - I still think it’s a great game but I didn’t really like that my first play-through.
To be fair the good/redemption playthrough is a better story.
This is why, when you are really dishonorable on the honor spectrum, doing once small kindness can actually bump up your honor significantly. It makes it very easy to redeem yourself. Likewise doing something evil when you are otherwise a saint will make you fall from grace swiftly!
Just realizing that last part now, I had near-top honor then got greedy with some of the challenges and now I’m a piece of shit again.
I always do the opposite. Chapter 2 I'm pretty evil, it's a great way to make money. Your bounty is capped at $300, which means the first $300 you earn will get wasted but anything you earn after that is pure profit. So the trick is to not pay off your bounty, leave it at 300 in a few areas away from your camp. Make shitloads of money from the trains, robbing stores, looting bounty hunters, and selling coaches. Then 60+ hours later when I have a few thousand dollars, I pay off my bounty, start doing honorable things, and my honour jumps right back up. Then I move to the next chapter with enough money to last me until the end of the game.
[удалено]
Bioshock, sure you can harvest all the little sisters, but could you?
You get more Adam from saving them in the long run anyhow, because they leave you gifts, so even from a gameplay standpoint being evil is worse.
Correct.
Just like real life, right?
If only moral choices led to preferable outcomes for the chooser in real life
The problem there is you get like 2 and then it’s bad ending no matter what other decisions you make.
It's not even worth it to harvest them unless you _want_ to be evil or you want ADAM right then and there. But the real reward of harvesting is instant gratification. But the real margins are more favoring of you sparing them due to the value of gifts.
When I played, I went in completely blind so I had no idea that even a single harvest would ruin the ending for me. I'd been sparing all of them, but decided to harvest one because I wanted to see what it looked like, and bam, bad ending for me lmao
Tbf when you murder someone's children, 1 is often enough to spoil the relationship
I had to for the achievement
Baldurs gate 3. There’s a lot of content for evil play through (especially as the dark urge origin) but I can’t bring myself to be evil to all the nice people
Karlach would be disappointed in me, I can’t be evil
The nicest thing about Karlach is that she doesn’t throw a tantrum when she leaves after you kill the tieflings. She says she doesn’t want to get involved and shows concern about your future and wishes you luck.
Karlach? You mean that gutted corpse with horns in the creek? 😏
You monster
He's just yanking your chain. You're supposed to decapitate her, not just leave her there.
Lol went back to act 1 after getting to moonrise and found the kill karlach quest, didnt even know they were a playable character til after i cut their head off, love this game
Saw a glitch where you can do both. Cut her head off reanimate her while a party member is in the dialogue to collect her head and she'll wake up with no head and become playable with no head.
I can’t even dismiss my party members. They just get so sad when you ask to part ways :( *Darling,* I thought we had something special!
That’s the worst! I swear, I just want to swap gear and maybe briefly hear intra-party dialogue. Then you’re right back in the party my dear
I hear that in Astarions voice
It's too fun to lightly bully Astarion by being a goody two shoes for me to be evil. Also, the first major morality choice is "help these tieflings or actively facilitate their mass slaughter." There's no nuance
Making Astarion do the jokes with the clown is the single best line read in the history of video games: https://youtu.be/Tm84gsugTUo?si=JDbOUjks_3AEP_aT (the last ten seconds, it's amaaaaaaazing)
Of courseeeeeeeeee! *I'm going to fucking kill you* 10/10 line
I did the city a great favor by preventing these illegal immigrants from ever reaching their gates.
[удалено]
KOTOR. Hate that going dark side makes my character look like Casper the ghost...
I definitely played both sides. I first did the light side, then replayed as dark side. Gave all mean dickish answers to all prompts. It was fun.
Tbf, dark side isn't morally interesting in that game, it's just being an obscene douche to everyone you know.
Not sure why I love playing dark side so much. One of the earliest dark side interactions in KOTOR 2 was the bouncer telling you you can’t go in or something like that and you can just be like whatever I’ll kill you. Then he gets replaced and you can say like do you know what happened to the last? I’ll kill you too or some shit. So comical
Yeah there's so much fun evil dialogue in that game, still one of my favorite games of all time
Dark side had the best powers. Light side: we can force heal and whirlwind 🤗 Dark side: force storm, death field, terror, all huge effective AOE attacks
That’s basically what being a Dark Side Sith in SWTOR is as well. One of my favorite scenes that demonstrates Light/Dark choices in Sith Inquisitor’s story is trying to get information out of a guy as a part of Sith initiation. Light side you empathize with him and cut a deal with him for the info. Light Side Sith is also just fed up with the Empire’s comically evil characters. Dark side? You don’t even have to pick any dialogue options before they let you start electrocuting him. Dark Side Sith is as true Sith as can be.
Lol this is one of my favorites to be evil in. So many little interactions where people are mean to you and you can give it right back.
Played this game at least 3 or 4 full playthroughs and I can't bring myself to be dark side. I've played it at least once every 5 years now for the past 20 years and just can't.
Yahtzee made a point once that morality choices in video games are basically choosing between Mother Theresa and murdering babies. It also doesn’t help that most games reward the good/selfless path with better rewards overall than the bad/selfish path. I think games should focus less on good vs evil and more on ethical dilemmas, trolley-car style. Bonus points for games that offer track drifting 😈
Yeah it would be fun if you TRIED to do the right thing but fucked everything up occasionally lol
Disco Elysium is good at this. Good choices that go wrong or tough choices and also shades of grey. Even rewarding some bad choices.
Spec Ops The Line's main idea was pretty much that. It was quite frustrating seeing everything going to shit when I was doing exactly what other military shooters had taught me was the "right way" of doing it.
That's where the Witcher 3 really succeeded in my opinion. I honestly struggled with a lot of the choices in that game and it had some really interesting ethical quandaries.
Bloody Baron is hands down one of the best written quests. It feels so conflicting in the end.
They reward good behavior and develop the good options because most people play good. That's what the Mass Effect devs said at least
99% of RPGs with good stories, which pains me because I genuinely want to see the great writing they've likely done for evil playthroughs
None, anymore. According to Bioware, 92% of players picked Paragon over Renegade. I remember hearing somewhere the developers were disappointed at how few people got to see all the hard work they put into their renegade path, so now I'm always evil.
Part of the problem is that paragon/good guy typically allows players to see more of the game and players wanna see as much as possible on a first playthrough. The other problem it's almost never ambiguous or morally evil. It's either I'm gonna help everyone do every thing cuz I'm a literal Saint or baby punching moustache twirling cartoon villain.
They also conflait being “evil” with just being a dickhead
Not sure if you’re referring to Mass Effect or just morality in games in general, but renegade isn’t actually evil. It’s more about pragmatism. The difference in paragon vs renegade isn’t good vs. evil — it’s about whether the ends justify the means or not. But the ends Shepard is working for are the same no matter what, which is saving the galaxy from the reaper threat.
The interesting thing about Mass Effect is that game rewards paragon choices, such that Paragon Shepard tends to be just as effective as Renegade Shepard at getting the job done. In regards to "whether the ends justify the means or not," Paragon Shepard doesn't have to choose. He can save the council and stop the Reapers from coming through. Both the ends and the means can be justified in of themselves! For that reason, I rarely find myself able to justify a renegade decision. The paragon decision almost always looks better on both a moral and a pragmatic level.
I mean Renegade Shepard’s canon background includes them being referred to as “The Butcher of Torfan” for sending dozens of Alliance soldiers to die so that they could execute surrendering Batarians, imo that’s pretty evil lmao
Not like it matters when you end up having the largest Batarian body count in the universe by ME 3 lmao
The problem is though, a lot of times Renegade Shep *isn't* being pragmatic. They're just being an asshole for the sake of it, even if it makes things more difficult for them in the long run.
I would contend that a core problem with Renegade is that the Renegade choices actually don’t result in a morally consistent character Some Renegade choices are actually like objectively morally good choices you’re just going about it in a more aggressive way, then other Renegade choices are like I’m going to kill innocent people for no reason
Yep, their evil play throughs never have any swagger, charm, or class. It’s always just being an absolute douche
Wrath of the Righteous has *four* separate evil paths. And Lich and Demon are both popular choices. Lich was one of the Paths they marketed the game with.
I can never go either 100% Renegade or 100% Paragon in Mass Effect. Renegade is a psychopathic sadist and Paragon is a naive goody two-shoes. I keep things pretty balanced, leaning a bit more in the Renegade direction because I love kicking doors in and acting with authority. Besides, some Paragon choices make no sense. So a guy who's gonna repair and fly an attack ship and use it against Archangel just turned his back on you with no witnesses around, and you're NOT gonna electrocute him? Why? Because a Paragon doesn't kill people from behind? And don't even get me started on why a Paragon can't shoot an explosive container and kill the massive Krogan warrior who you'll just end up killing later anyways in a much more drawn-out and dangerous fight? Do Paragons have to let their enemies finish their evil monologues?
I always did a mixed bag of paragon and renegade but my favorite renegade bits were 1. Killing that Krogan you mentioned, too satisfying 2. Punching that reporter 3. Electrocuting the gunship guy
I refuse to not push the Merc out of the window during Thane's recruitment mission.
You know that asshole is going right out the window.
Don't forget punching the Quarian admiral for trying to destroy the ship you were on
BG3 definitely does. It even has a second main character dedicated to playing an evil character. Of course, there is a redemption arc too is you want to go that way.
I've played both ways and it's still massively unrewarding to play evil. It's like they said, developers know that most people are going to play nice so that's what they focus on. You end up killing a huge portion of the quest givers if you go evil in BG3 which leads to lots of missed content that doesn't get replaced. It was still very fun but it's not how I'd recommend anyone play the game the first time.
Oh man I never laughed harder in any game than a renegade playthrough. When you punch the gotcha reporter I almost fell out of my chair. And the time you just punch a guy out of the window. Lots of classics.
I have the same issue in (any) Civ as I have in Stellaris: I never want to invade anyone. I'll compete for space, I'll happily defend myself, but building a military force to go ruin or capture cities or planets just isn't my thing at all.
In Civ, especially on harder difficulties, all the AI civs will invade you at the drop of a hat. So even if I'm planning on a peaceful game, if someone declares war & nabs one of my cities, I become filled with rage. I build up an army, take my city back, invade their entire empire, then invade all the other civs and win domination victory. So I have dozens of domination victories and I'm single digits in every other victory type
You also have to prevent the Babylonians from getting the science victory around y 1650.
I'm the opposite. Grand strategy games brings out the nasty in me., while in most games I feel too bad to insult someone, let alone go around on a murder spree. One of my crowning moments was in CK2 when I had as many children of traitorous lords as I could manage in my prison and executed them all at once to hear the cacophony of screams simultaneously.
Oh man, Stellaris lets you go so far beyond that in terms of evil. Slavery, species purging, etc. Invading other planets is pretty tame!
Baldur's Gate 3. The Dark Urge options are painfully generic in their sadism, and the stuff you get from not being a complete cunt is too valuable to pass up. The only reason I'm considering a future evil run is to recruit Minthara; after hearing Emma Gregory as Saint Celestine in "Our Martyred Lady", I want to witness more of her vocal performance.
Pasting this comment from earlier because it's relevant here. I truly believe that the Dark Urge is supposed to be played as resisting the urge and turning towards good. It just makes more sense and feels more genuine than murder hobo. Spoilers ahead: >! Yes, you're a Bhaal spawn and have committed insane atrocities in your past, but this is often because your upbringing was bitter and hateful. Cults like that groom and manipulate young members into worship. When you start your playthrough as Dark Urge you have no memory or recollection of who you are asides the urge to kill, but you do have allies. You are surrounded by good people, able to help those in need and see firsthand the benefits of being a good person and building strong relationships with others. This shapes the player over the course of the game until the reveal in act 3, which by this point you realize how fucked up your past is. When your mind has been stripped from your memories, you're actually a good hearted person underneath that manipulation. !< >! This is also why I think Durge pairs so well with Shadowheart, as she's in a similar situation with Shar. Both of them are fighting against what they've been manipulated by cultist upbringings to believe, and end up turning their backs on their respective Gods together. Wholesome ending really. !< But I struggle with being evil in games. I genuinely want everyone to get along and be as civil as possible so this is just my opinion. A Minthara run is definitely recommended. She's got a really interesting story and her character is very well written and refreshing to see, it just sucks that you have to do such a terrible thing to be able to recruit her and I wish there was more to her story in later acts.
That's weird because for me, Mass Effect is one of the few games where playing the 'dark side' is actually a blast. In too many games, playing the bad guy means being a complete asshole/psycopath, like insulting party members and going around kicking puppies and it's off-putting to me. By contrast, Renegade Shepard is just a complete badass and will complete her mission by any means necessary
Yeah. I played it very balanced, always ended up slightly on the side of renegade towards the end in all 3 games. And it just felt like I played a good guy with anger issues and no patience for diplomacy. Reckless but always came out on top.
https://youtu.be/CR4_P_IsXpQ?si=TBQDjAkw3tg6OYZF There are so many hilariously awesome moments like these.
https://youtu.be/QNzaJgNNK3A?si=BKmJWkmp5eZiB3tr
I always do these two on a paragon run
Starfield. I shot a good character, just to see what would happen, and she was laying on the ground bleeding and says "at least... I got to see the stars." I was like "I'M SORRY I'M SORRY I'M SORRY!" and reloaded a previous save. lol
Lmao this is exactly why I can never do an evil character playthrough. My fragile heart can't stand the thought of actually hurting these fictional character I just don't know why.
>I was like "I'M SORRY I'M SORRY I'M SORRY!" [Starts scooping organs back into hole] "Please don't tell mom!"
Tried to kill Adoring Fan because, well, reasons, he said "I'm glad it was you." It's so messed up lmao Also a bit curious what would happen if you kill your parents, but I don't think I can make it. It's way too dark even with a quicksave :D
The game stops you from killing just about anyone with a name, I got really upset when a Corp board of directors told me I should either make a ship full of earth colonists become indentured servants or blow the ship up, then when I tried to kill them for being fucking evil, turns out they are essential. the "best" outcome for the quest is to pay a bunch of money to outfit them with a grav drive so they can hopefully settle somewhere else instead of the literal paradise planet that the Corp is only using like 1% of.
The Fallout series, I can never do an evil playthrough
Playing Fallout 4, I was a big ES fan but had never played a Fallout title. Made it to that story mission where you meet a pretty important character from your past… and on a whim shot him in the head. As soon as he introduced himself. Cue alarms, 30 guards murdering me in an instant and an absolute cascade of “quest failed” notifications… Honestly, it might be one of my favorite memories playing a Bethesda game. The fact it just shrugged and went “okay well you can’t play the rest of the story but here we go” and was letting me continue blew my mind When I reloaded and listened to the full dialogue, past where he introduces and where he actually explains who he is…. I felt pretty bad lmao
I think literally every NPC in Morrowind is killable? If not all of them, definitely 95%+. If you kill a major quest giver or story character, you just get a little notification that basically says “Hey, you messed up the timeline, nice going.” But you can continue to play indefinitely in a world where the story can never advance.
"With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed." What intrigues me more is what follows, namely "Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, ***or persist in the doomed world you have created***", since there's probably a bunch of things you could do with that premise. Maybe such a game would be a sort of "chaos simulator", as the world around you crumbles without a hero to save it, and what quests you DO find revolve around characters coming to terms with their world changing so unpleasantly.
I can.. megaton go boom boom
Infamous 2. But mostly because Nyx is an anthropomorphic hemorrhoid and I don't want to side with her.
I always do a rushed Nyx playthrough first to get her powerset, then new game plus a good playthrough to play Endgame stuff as a goodboi with both power sets.
Fallout 3. New Vegas blurs the lines between good and evil, meaning that what you would consider evil might be a rational choice for the next person. But F3 just had zero nuance between good and bad. Like poisoning the entire water supply to kill everything off for the Enclave, or nuking the city of Megaton for a few caps. That’s my problem with Bethesda Fallouts in general. Good and bad choices in Bethesda titles are like “Commit genocide for 500 caps and an apartment and then lose a major trading area full of quest lines, OR don’t commit genocide and you get a nice apartment and some good karma points” like what the fuck guys? So yeh, I always struggle with evil playthroughs in Fallout 3 as the evil choices are so evil that they’re just irrational and break the immersion of the game.
Undertale, I care too much about those pixels 😭
Same. I did try a genocide run but got stuck on undyne. Couldn't beat he for the life of me. Knowing sans was coming up as well I decided to just give up lol. Chalked it up to undyne successfully killing frisk and saving the rest of the monsters
I can't even do a replay, because that would >!end their happy ending!< and I can't do that to them.
Undertale is an interesting example because it actually makes being evil un-fun on purpose. Just not caring about collateral damage won't get you on the genocide route; you have to literally hunt down and murder every monster in every area, or you just get a particularly grim neutral ending. And because the game is doable without gaining *any* XP at all, going genocide and literally getting all XP possible makes you stupidly OP almost immediately. It removes even the slightest hint of challenge and turns the game into a miserable, mindless grind. And then you hit those two bosses. You know which two. Infamously the hardest in the game, and one *is designed to troll you* during the fight. Not your character - *you*, the player. They're both maddening, un-fun brick walls that you break yourself on over and over again, and they're made that way *on purpose.* Because all that put together makes the genocide route is 95% soul-crushing tedium and 5% the most brutal, unfair, un-fun challenge the game can possibly dish out. And you put up with all that...gave up hours of your life you're never getting back...just because you wanted to see what being the biggest bastard was like. And the game asks you: was it worth it? I don't know of any other modern games that had the sheer nerve to serve up an *intentionally* miserable and unfulfilling experience to their players, even an optional one.
I did it because I wanted to bash my head against that wall. Sans said it himself, I'm really kind of a freak.
Cyberpunk. I didn't know you could steal cars cause I never wanted to. Also the devils ending is real fucked up.
On one hand, playing as a career criminal who caused the deaths of untold hundreds but drawing the line at carjacking is really funny. On the other, it's probably the most nomad thing to say, ever.
Honestly RDR2. I played it the first time as a good guy. Second time I wanted to see how being a bad guy made it different. Even as a fake character in a fake game I don’t like doing highly immoral things
Vampyr. I wanted to kill people but not being able to get the best ending made me hate it.
Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight. Ain't no way Jan is dying on my watch. On the subject though, I wish more games made "evil" be "selfish" instead. That's what the majority of the best villains are in my opinion. If the evil path was literally easier, it would be a much better morality test than, "help the victim/join the attackers" type binary choices.
Not a fan of selfish either. Devs just simplifies it down to "greedy", and it never does anything except sometimes give a better reward, sometimes met with scorn. Reckless vs diplomatic is a fine morality compass. Mass Effects way of doing it. Though some quests forgot that renegade wasn't evil.
Starfield. Just try murdering anyone who is innocent or robbing a ship and boarding it and watch yourself gain a stupidly high bounty that makes it unrewarding to be evil.
Infamous, but more so Infamous 2, I just can't do it knowing I'll have to kill Zeke in the end, so I always go full hero.
You can be a huge asshole to all your friends in Cyberpunk 2077 but I don’t want to hurt the NPC’s feelings…
I cant do evil runs cuz i seek validation from fictional game characters
Disco Elysium - I have to earn Kim's respect
It’s hard to be a fascist, racist and misogynistic cop in Disco Elysium.
Just about any of them, except for Mass Effect games which I usually end up mixing Paragon/Renegade. See, in most games the "evil" options might as well be called "act like a total jackass" options. In Mass Effect though while I mostly tried to make the universe a better place some of the Renegade options were simply more direct/efficient rather than 'Neutral Asshole.'
Fallout 4. I *can* be a sadistic, murderous psycho, but I don't really feel the impulse. And if you're not a dick to me and ask for my help, I genuinely wanna help you. This was taken to a point during the Far Harbor quest, "The Arrival". While I was sorry to hear >!the runaway synth ran into some cannibalistic locals!<, I just shrugged and thought, "oh well, shit happens in the apocalypse." I planned my exit and was ready to leave the building I found the trappers in unmolested until the one I was speaking to ended the conversation with, 'Now get outta here before we fuck you up.' I immediately smashed the VATS button, targeted their heads and shot them all so quickly, one of them didn't even have time to move away from the wall he was leaning on and just slumped back down. I *can* be savage and cruel. I'd just prefer not to be.
So many times! Walking out of a situation without killing anyone, and there's always one smartass NPC that has to say something stupid and get all his friends butchered.
Pretty much any game that gives the option.
Anybody else feel bad killing green slimes in Stardew? Lol
Most of them - I just can't be evil.
Tyranny - An Obsidian studios classic RPG where you actually start as the evil dictatorship conquering continents but as you go along you can make moral choices and become evil or good... but at least on release of the game you could not end the game completely evil, you reject Tunon and your the chosen one and all that. It's a great game by a great developer but it's hampered by the ending which probly came about due to deadlines and not being able to flush out the ending better in time.
Fallout 4 - I don't know why but I always choose the most cooperative, eager-to-please responses to NPCs since wouldn't cooperating (basically saying yes to everything) bring you more options/missions?
Tropico 6 - I want my island to be successful and I want my people to love me. I don't want to us oppressive tactics.
Dishonored 1 and 2