Plus evil guys tend to not let you cooperate with them very much. They might begrudgingly be neutral to you but they don’t follow you from area to area with game long plot lines like the deep gnomes, tieflings, Halsin, etc. They are more like NPCs that just stand in the lair.
Minthara basically doesn’t have a plot line or story except “I’m a hot drow you can have sex with”. She should have some type of vengeance she’s after that is more compelling and goes through the game.
Evil is definitely underwritten, there’s no social evil route. You can go full mass murderer killing everything in sight, and you can act unpredictably and in a cruel way. But you cannot really be a villain in a way that intersects with the story except for the handful of major plot decisions where you can act wildly out of character and do something majorly dastardly for the whole world.
Wish there was more opportunities to be a thriving piece of shit sellout, a sniveling cowardly henchman, a manipulative mastermind amassing a huge army and fortune, etc. Why can’t I form a gang and take over a huge chunk of Baldur’s Gate territory to sell drugs, etc
I always play Paladin because i can heal people and make them feel better and hit cops so hard THEY EXPLODE.
There was a DnD game I played a while back as a rogue with maxed charisma and smarts who focused more on white collar sorta crime and scams and stuff rather than pickpocketing and sneaking. By lugging around a suit of paladin armor that slowed me down and made me useless in combat, I tricked a village into starting a peasants crusade and went village to village building an army of religiously zealous followers and just kinda did a quest with several hundred peasants at my command.
If my character wasn’t a con artist, yes. In this case I basically did the first crusade but for petty personal squabbles and to bleed every town dry of valuables. I was a rogue but I operated like the McKinsey Institute instead of your standard DnD sneakthief. My character was incredibly charming but an absolute opportunist and generally crappy person.
There are like 5 games ever that are morally complex. Most games that let you choose between two sides let you pick between a faction of fascists or ineffective cultish hippies. It’s rare for games to present better ideology than those.
Off the top of my head, I can only think of a handful. Disco Elysium, Fallout: New Vegas, Planescape: Torment, Frostpunk, Caves of Qud, Vampire TMB. All of those have writing that allows the player to explore what good or bad are in the right situations. DE is probably the best I’ve ever seen in a game, an absolute masterpiece that shows you the consequences of the bad moral choices, and yet also explores why you might choose the good ones.
I haven’t played Baldur’s Gate 3 yet but I’m told the writing is actually pretty good, so I’ll check that out.
Morrowind as well, all the factions suck (except the anti slavers), and hate each other, but complex material systems of oppression and co dependence trap them in a decaying structure and have caused even the more noble institutions to be corrupted. And now that system is no longer capable of defending itself.
You may or may not be the Nerevarine, and even if you are it’s unclear what that actually means and if it’s prophecy or you taking it “by violence”. But you can use the fact other people think you are to break the cycle.
Of course once you have there’s no guarantee of anything better on the other side, you’re just some guy, you know.
Since BG3 exists within the lore of Forgotten Realms, evil isn’t nearly as complex as, say, Disco Elysium.
Like sure siding with the slavers is easier than siding with the slaves or X Y Z amoral choice may give you an otherwise unobtainable reward for doing strictly the good thing, but it’s not that deep.
Still, great game
BG3 doesn’t really do politics, and the “evil” choices are late-2000s/2010s being a dick for no reason.
I would say there’s a definite theme of refugees being scapegoated by bigots and xenophobes, and those bigots and xenophobes falling into evil. Kagha, Bahl cultists, the people of Baldur’s Gate, etc. are all blaming everything on the tiefling refugees. There’s a definite positive theme of inclusiveness and not being close-minded
I got a little sad when my character told a bigot to shut up, he told me some bs, and I called him out for being foreign too. (one of the better options given)
I then blow him up with a fireball after the crowd agrees with me and turns on him. Of course, the game sees it as murder, because they didn’t code it to be different, but damn in my canon that guy is a pile of soot. It kinda sucks that only RPGs like BG3 are brave enough to take the stance of “Remove all bigots by force if needed”, but only because killing Evil McMurderlord is fun. But I’m glad at least they let you say it.
Some of the Shin Megami Tensei games are really interesting in that regard, because even as they portray the ideologies in their super-dogmatic form and in some cases as everyone-sucks (including the status quo supporters), games like Devil Survivor 1 or Strange Journey actually have writing so good that they make choosing sides not obvious and feel like they actually have weight on the future of humanity in-universe.
Others either flop on their face (SMT IV), or have very clear biases (SMT I or II)
But hey,
SMT II
choosing the Chaos ending, allying with Lucifer and the Demons of the Abyss to destroy the Abrahamic God’s flying Noah’s Ark, to free the world’s oppressed and left-to-their-own-misery subclasses from a theocratic, hierarchical dictatorship… leading to a world where both the mutated humans left on the surface after 1’s events and the demons could co-exist in relative harmony - all while rejecting the title of the Messiah.
…is a great ending and it doesn’t matter if the other two don’t compare.
(I fucking love this game, I eagerly await the day when the translation of the PS1 port comes out)
I agree with the last commentor in this old tumblr screen. I don’t enjoy being cruel to others, even just video game characters. I made myself once for Dragon Empire and just felt bad since I’m neither a sadist nor a massochist.
Yes, they are not real and I’m not judging those that do evil runs. My brain isn’t wired that way, however, and is prone to feeling empathy, even towards the non-sentient, scripted bundles of pixels and data.
It turns out when the options are Comically Evil and Generally Decent, most people will choose the latter. The Mass Effect devs reported that 90% of people chose the “good” route in that game.
When I played Goldeneye 007 as a kid, I would massacre all the civillians and scientists, reset the map, then do it again.
