Playing as the "evil" guy/girl - Is that possible?

I almost hate to bring the game up again, but Undertale did a pretty good job using a "kill everything" path as the evil route. There are even different forms of it, one is where you just kill everything you encounter through the game and progress as normal otherwise. Doing this gets you one of the "neutral" endings, because it can be argued that everything you did was in self-defense, even if you're a bit gung-ho about the affair. The alternative to that is a genocide run, where you are actively seeking out random encounters and grinding them out until the game stops giving you monsters to fight. Doing the genocide route has the consequence of most of the NPCs in the hub areas evacuating to avoid your wrath, since you're systematically hunting down and killing anyone you can find. The route also has two boss battles that are only available on this particular type of run, and they're also the two hardest boss battles in the game. To go for this route, you have to start in the first area, before you progress and get locked out of it. It's something you have to be deliberately going for to actually get started.

Not to say every game should try to do this, or that most games don't fall flat with a kill everything route, but it can be done well.

 

*Obligatory Undertale mention*

Man, that game did not age well. I remember playing it in my teens.

 

I wouldn't count GTA as a "evil" game, any more than Fallout, you can be evil - but you can also be as moral as possible

Even Trevor has his moral sides, he is against harassment of immigrants, he is against needless mysogynist banter, he has sympathy for the Azerbadjani torture victim

In GTA4 Nico Belic goes out of his way to defend his homosexual friend, even through the obviously over-the-top gay-flamboyant behavior, that in most other "gangster" settings would have had bad reprecussions

If you play a pure quest-route, avoid needless civilian casualties, then you litterally are just another criminal - not necesarily evil

 

Yeah i believe so. Havent played that game myself so cant comment on it too much but looking at trailers it seems theyre not exactly upstanding citizens.

Also, yeah Trevor has his moments of morality and he actually thinks hes defending the people he hangs out with. Still during the some of the sidequests he doesnt seem that bothered about tazing immigrants for money or shouting obscenities and threathening women or killing and maiming people because he finds them irritating, also i dont think he felt for that torture victim, in the ride to airport he says he actually enjoyed the torturing of the guy but hates government so much that he helps the guy out. He seems kinda hypocritical/shallow in his morals and i think its supposed to be that way since hes a psychopath. He doesnt seem like a bad guy tho, i think its because almost every character in gta world is kind of rotten in their own way and only care about them selves, Trevor seems like a believable response to that world. Its hard to say the main characters are "evil" but id say theyre not exactly good people either, even if you follow the main quest only.

Yeah Gta4 was kinda different tho.

 

How about the Overlord series? Granted, its more of a cartoonish evil but you do play has the bad guy.

 

Oh i remembered another one. Theres this dungeon keeper style game called evil genius where you play as....... evil genius.

 

I don't subscribe to the good and evil dichotomy in video games. It's putting the cart before the horse.

You give the player a motivation. You're a gentleman thief. You're a bank robber. You're a feudal warlord.
You don't decide, "I'm going to be evil in this playthrough" then work your way to the motivation that way.
It forces the player to rationalize his moral choices through silly abstractions rather than having them become a natural part of the character he's roleplaying.

 

I think Silent Hill 2 does that as well, in a more subtle way. If I say more its possible a big spoiler, but anyways in this game there is no good guy or bad guy, you can't even say that Pyramid Head, for example, is a bad guy.

I really like how that game handles moral. Fallout 1 as well, I really like the Master lol, I would love to play as a Super Mutant in his army.

 

Working towards Alpha Protocol's Halbech ending is pretty close to being a villain. As close as I've ever gotten in any RPG. Still, it's more of a "lovable rogue becomes a bit more of an asshole" than "good guy goes evil" so I'm not sure how good of an example it is.

Running off to make your own circle of James Bond villains in an ending is pretty close to being an evil character though, especially when you do it with the help of every companion and faction you befriended through the game, it makes it feels like you've been working towards an evil ending all along. It's like "Bond Villain Origins" in that sense.

 

I once did a total genocide run in Fallout: New Vegas. I OBLITERATED EVERYTHING! I played on Hardcore mode, killed all my companions, killed all named NPCs, made it a point to clear out every camp of Legionnaires, gangers and raiders out there, and, of course, I ate Caesar, too. Then I did a bad karma run of each of the DLC, and then I did a bad karma Yes Man ending, where my character ends up ruling over a city of bones.

 

If I remember correctly, the original Fable and Fable: The Lost Chapters were great at giving you good or evil choices. I haven't played any of the sequels though.

 

Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw brought up a good point in his review of Alpha Protocol. There are RPGs that allow you to choose between different shades of good, or between good and bad, but never an RPG that allows you to choose between different shades of bad. ven Fallout games fall into the "good or bad" category. There should be a game that only presents the choices of different types of evil you can be - order and control kind of person? Chaotic, uncontrollable murderer? Manipulative sociopath capable of talking people into suicide?

 

The way that I see it there are three problems:

1. Evil isn't fun when there isn't meaningful consequence. (consequence of evil actions)
2. People are conditioned not to take the easy way out in video games in fear of not getting a reward or a challenge. (rewards of evil actions)
3. With two equally difficult and equally rewarded tasks, the less evil one makes more sense. (narrative motivation)

 

My point is evil actions needs incentives. Being for the sake of being evil get boring, removing consequences of being evil is bad, and making the evil option the easy way out doesn't work. So how do you incentivize evil actions? I guess you can write the victims as assholes.

 

At that point you're not the villain anymore, though, because you're fighting a bigger evil (or at least somebody evil enough to justify your actions). In this kind of narrative you're just a slightly less harmful asshole. But really, it's difficult to make a compelling story where you're 100% undeniably the bad guy, because you're either a complete genocidal psychopath - which plays up to the entertainment people get from killing everything, but makes any character development trivial - or there's no reason to be invested in that character at all. Which is why stories where you are a bad guy but not the villain are more common and typically more interesting.
.