Evil roleplay

For a very long time I’ve been fascinated with potential of playing “evil” characters in games, mainly in western RPGs. I find that how well the developers handle it often correlates with quality of the game, because basically the it’s the essence of roleplaying to be able to roleplay. Ranking of RPGs based on evil play quality:

• Great:
  • Fallout: New Vegas: Caesar’s legion, see below.
  • Baldur's Gate 3Baldur's Gate 3: Building the plot around mindflayers was ingenious.
  • TyrannyTyranny: The whole premise of the game.
• Good:
  • Stellaris: This is a strategy game that I find involves surprising amount of good roleplay. There are quite many moral topics such as egalitarianism, pacifism, war, slavery, genetic modification, and politics. You can also play as “mindless” beings (hivemind or robots) bent on destroying and/or assimilating every other race. The game gives you constantly interesting decisions (real tradeoffs) accompanied by in-universe explanations that allow for immersion (at least if you are playing alone and can pause the game to read them).
• Interesting:
  • Hogwart’s Legacy. With Slytherin, handled quite tastefully considering the franchise’s limitations.
  • Grand Theft AutoGrand Theft Auto: Not really roleplaying but I think the success of this franchise proves that players want to be bad. Since everyone is a crook in these games the stories nicely explore how these people see right and wrong their own way.
• Bad:
  • Pillars of EternityPillars of Eternity
  • PathfinderPathfinder: Has multiple clearly evil archetypes to play as, but roleplay-wise they mostly merge into series of choices to be a dick.
  • Skyrim: This game does not really have any story choices, you literally do everything in a single playthrough (join all the guilds etc.) I recall Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 also by Bethesda are similar: The choices in the games are rarely mutually exclusive.
  • Cyberpunk 2077: There are several different endings/paths but they feel more like choosing your favorite cyberpunk/scifi trope than roleplaying.

One of the Pillar’s of Eterninity game’s six or so gods is “evil” and outcast, and I wanted to explore that kind of thing but of course there’s basically no content in the game for that. I recently had the same frustrating experience with Skyrim. I think the writers even had the grasp that an evil god character can be interesting if you think about some (fantastical) motives without being cartoonishly evil, but they just chose not to write anything.

Probably the only game I had a good experience with roleplaying as a bad guy was Fallout New Vegas, where I remember being amazed that you could join the Caesar’s legion. And it wasn’t just making one choice between good and evil, the subchoices in the faction quest lines kept giving you choices fitting the moral standpoint of the faction.

Playing Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous (WotR). Uhh, quite numbing actually. The roleplaying element in the game is actually quite low because the mechanics are completely segregated from the story. All the “moral” choices in the game fall on the law-chaos plus good-evil axis and are orthogonal to the character composition. Well that’s how most RPGs are, but having played the story in this one so many times and now “flipping on their head” all the characters by respeccing them jarringly has basically no effect on anything. It’s not the slightest bit odd that the squishy witch is now a melee tank, because the squishiness/witchiness never really came up in the story concretely.

I think “moral” choices in most RPGs are bad:

• They are too clearly good guy vs. dick comparisons. For example the “Evil” option might not provide any real advantage to the player, or the “Good” option has no downsides so that there’s no reason why an evil character would not do it other than to avoid the game shifting your alignment mechanically.
• The results of the action are always immediate and obvious. While in real world everything is very ambiguous, but of course also less impactful which we do not want in a game.
• There are no “real” consequences. For example a dialogue option might be labeled Evil and adjust some stats when you do it, but the effects won’t carry beyond the dialogue — no character will remember you did them (I guess in some games they do but the player rarely sees it because he doesn’t cross some threshold of truly angering the character in question).
• They are not actually choices. For example in WotR you choose the alignment upfront and the character build might actually break if you don’t keep the alignment. Meaning you may have to make decisions to balance your previous decisions. It’s not entirely boring since at least it’s a game mechanic, and often the alignment isn’t such a big deal so it can make you go “huh, I guess I’m actually playing a different kind of character than I planned”, which is not bad.

For the evil roleplay to be interesting, the playable character needs to have some kind of moral framework and a goal that fit together. For example in Hogwart’s Legacy there is at the end a choice where the player can either seal away a great power or take it for himself — a power that he has seen other strong wizards unable to control, causing great suffering. It totally makes sense that an “evil” character would choose to take the power for himself, confident that he is strong enough to wield it safely and wisely. He would not be doing it out of short-sighted greed or cartoonish desire to hurt others, but truly because for him it’s the sensible thing to do. When a game lets you make this sort of decisions during the game instead of just at the end it can really improve quality of the roleplay.

In Baldur’s Gate 3 you can really push your companions into choices that are not in their own best interest, but are in your interests. For example the optional mind flayer powers directly make the party stronger so on my playthrough it became a really tempting choice, in part because I had chosen to play at a harder difficulty level where I was having real challenge with the game.

Similar to harder difficulty is how you choose to approach the save game feature. In XCOM games deaths of your squad members can be quite devastating. If instead of loading when things go wrong, you accept their deaths, then maybe you can see a little bit of evil roleplay in how you gave orders that put them at extra risk. (I’m really squinting here because in reality the XCOM games are extremely frustrating and people probably load their saves all the time like I do. Also when I play I imagine it more like the agents are doing their own decisions).

Related to save-scumming, a thing I like to do is to always choose the most interesting options even if they sound kind of dangerous and likely to backfire. If it turns out the decision was catastrophic (older games are terrible at this, having whole towns become hostile at you etc.) I will load, choose another option and tell myself nothing happened. Sometimes I might also load to see what the other options did. But the I load once more and choose again the option I picked the first time. So in a way I’m committing to consequences of my actions while excepting outcomes that I attribute to the game devs not having had the time to hone those evil options (sensible decision since most players probably choose the good/reasonable options most of the time). Recently Baldur’s Gate 3 stood out as a game where you can almost always get away with any decision. No NPC is too important to be killed, and consequences of getting caught stealing aren’t outlandish. You can put whole settlements to death and a way forward will still exist. All the companions also can have their storylines go in a quite nasty direction if you guide them so.

One more thing: The roleplaying feels best when you don’t know what the outcome of your actions will be, and having already played the game before can spoil a lot of things. That’s why I usually try to do the “evil” roleplay on my very first (and possibly only) playthrough. As said before, I feel this also reveals quality of the story quite nicely. Quite often the outcome is that I see the game doesn’t really allow for that much roleplay and then I just settle on playing the average joe they want me to, assuming other parts of the game are good enough. Also the good playthroughs are often somewhat longer so then you will still have new stuff to explore on the second playthrough. With Baldur’s Gate 3 I’m now in this situation that I think there is quite a bit of stuff that I missed due to antagonising Nightsong, Minsc, Jaheira, and others.