When I was a kid I would always play evil characters, especially remember in KOTOR playing full dark side and the dark side options in that are fully “steal the baby’s ice cream” “kick the hungry dog” kind of evil options. Now doing those things makes me feel guilty
DAE KRAEIA SO SMART TOTALLY BLOWS MY MIND GREY JEDIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII???
She’s not though lol
KOTOR 2 spoiler
She was both Jedi and Sith in the past, and over time she came to despise the Force and the effect it has on people and pretty much everything else - her goal is to destroy the force and let people have free will (by proxy. She doesn’t care, but that would be the effect, were the death of the force not mean the death of all living beings in the galaxy). Far from a “lol fuck the light side, fuck the dark side, balance is the best” viewpoint.
She’s far from perfect; a peak Machiavellian with contradictory beliefs - and focused entirely on her feud with the force, completely uncaring of the lives of the people of the galaxy. She is, however, a very fascinating character and it’s a shame the money people rushed Obsidian into an early release date.
KotOR 2 is still one of my favorite games of all time.
Amazing character with stellar writing (with some of the restored content it’s even better), who is absolutely wrong. I love that she can have complex layered motivations for her actions, can cause players to question why they make certain moral choices, and still be absolutely wrong in the end. It’s great, and I feel it’s missing from a lot of game media.
I remember in KOTOR 2 your character has a dialog option that calls out the banality of the evil choices. I forget the exact words, but basically your character laments the opportunities they are provided beyond basic cruelties.
Found it cuz it was bothering me:
"These small acts of cruelty bore me - to take money from others, to insult them, to threaten their lives. " "I command the Force, and yet these small cruelties are all life presents me with. "
When I was a kid, I used to pick all the super outlandish dialogue options just to see how far the game would accommodate absolute incoherence.
But then they stopped making games like Fallout and started making games like Mass Effect.
Nowadays I don’t really have time to do novelty runs and I don’t find it fun to play as an asshole so yeah, it’s communism time in Disco Elysium Baay-beeeee!
(And my Baldur’s Gate 3 character is a goody-two-shoes so now Astarion won’t bang me, THERE ABSOLUTELY ARE BLOODY CONSEQUENCES )
Hint: All games have no consequences because they are games.
Counterpoint; The things you do, even in fiction, write physical changes in to your mind. Games are practice for life.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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
