Because 666 has to do with evil...

I read an article once where the author wrote that they found the depiction of evil in games to be mediocre - being rude to NPCs and demanding monetary compensation are the things which generally send your alignment needle into the red.

Part of the reason for this is that true evil is genuinly unpalatable - I don't want to play a game involving the torture, rape and/or mutilation of my enimies, UNLESS it furthers the game itself. Doing this wrong gives you crap worse than the Postal series, doing it right gives you gems like Dungeon Keeper and Evil Genius. Both of those games I think provide the appropriate level of violence and "evil" for their worlds and don't devolve into viciousness.

With an immature understanding of evil, the morality of games becomes sanitized and formulaic where you have a choice between evil ("Give me 50 extra gold"), good ("I don't need a reward and here - take 50 gold"), and occationally neutral ("Just pay me what we agreed on"). The lack of more morally ambiguous choices limits roleplaying ("I can rescure either your wife or your daughter, but not both").

A "mature" game is defined by the inclusion of violence and sexuality but not by the moral choices required of the player. If a game allows you to callously send thousands to die in a bid to claim a neigboring land, should young people be allowed to play it? These things didn't matter as much when the ingame characters were only a few pixels but with the rapid incraese in technology, characters now have a face, a voice, and increasingly, emotions. The quest to save a town from monsters takes on a different tone when it's delived by a wounded and terrified farmer, rather than a poorly rendered doll.

In this circumstance, resfusing is far more than a dialog option, it is abandoning compassion - a truely evil act.

What do you think about the role of evil in games, and what do you think developers should do to enhance roleplaying?

 

I think the evil always should be an option, because limiting the gameplay is not always very funny.
Doing the "good" thing because you can't do anything else isn't half as fun as doing the "good" thing because you want to.

But youre right, that brining in torture, rape and mutilation will probaly just be gross.

But the more options, the more freedom you have, the better the game.

 

I find that some of the most evil things you can do in a game have no bearing on your alignment. For instance: looting/mutilating a corpse then leaving it unburied, or stealing from a poor family. Another problem is that crime has no consequences unless you get caught in the act. If I habitually rob a merchant blind every day, don't you think he would have trouble staying in business? And wouldn't he up security after being robbed even once? Wouldn't the authorities be investigating and tracking my ass down? You shouldn't get away scott free just because you made it out the door without raising the alarm, or because nobody happened to be watching when you murdered somebody in their sleep.

 

I dont know if this would be boon to gameplay or not but I've always been annoyed at the lack of emotion in the player's dialog choices. I don't know of a perfect solution to this problem, and I don't really want a voice-recognition program coupled with a face moniter to tell the game how I'm reacting (even if the technical difficulties coudl be solved). That would make playing the game too much like work.

Imagine though a system where you selected a facial expression and an "Aura" for each line of dialog. If the game were programmed to appriciate the subtleties of different combinations, it would open up a new world of meaning in your (the player's) responses.

For instance if you had just the following options...

Aura's; Evil, Neutral, Good.
Expressions; Smile, Frown, Consider, Neutral.

Example 1 - Old style of response equivilent of Neutal, Neutral.

Captain: I need you to clear out the goblins in Mist Pass.
Player: What's the reward? (N,N)
Captain: 40 gold per head and I'm sure our townsfolk will be eternally grateful.

Example 2 - same thing with Good, Consider

Captain: I need you to clear out the goblins in Mist Pass.
Player: What's the reward? (G,C)
Captain: 40 gold for each one you kill, and an opportunity to join the Gaurd.

Example 3 - same thing with Evil, Consider.

Captain: I need you to clear out the goblins in Mist Pass.
Player: What's the reward? (E,C)
Captain: 50 gold per head and anything you find out there.

The problem with this sytem is primarily on the player's end, devs could easily put in these options if the devoted less time to others things *cough-bloomeffects-cough*, but it would increase the time any conversation took and might make it a chore. Then again, RPGs are not supposed to be faced-paced all the time, so maybe someone should at least try it?

 

Hmmm...... I think I like it.

 

I think the idea has merit. Just not in the context you used it in. I'm not giving some guy 10 extra gold just because he gives me a queasy feeling.

 

Remember folks, next time you ask for a raise the altar of Satan will be bathed in the blood of babies. So I hope that extra 25 cents an hour is worth it you sick bastard!

 

Yeah...I have a feeling if a guy was evil, he'd just kill me and take my money. All of it.

 

well, that is one thing that is good about "the witcher".

You can be good sometimes, or evil, but on the mainpot, everyone is evil bastards and you have to be cruel what side you choose, and you never have to stick to one side.

You can go very long only doing what is best for you.

 

As the staple to all RPGs is character progression (i.e. leveling), I find too many RPGs to railroad characters on the path of rightousness as that tends to be the majority of the quests handed out. There rarely seem to be enough evil opportunities to balance the abundance of good opportunities to advance your player. Or the rewards are always unbalanced...evil quests often yield minimal exp and greater monetary/ph@t l007 rewards whereas good quests mostly offer the opposite. In a sense, if you as a player want to get anywhere at higher levels of the game, you're still forced to play your character even remotely good in order to level them sufficiently to prepare for all the level 40 baddies down the road.

But going back to the OP, I agree that another downfall to the "evil" side of RPGs is that there just isn't enough consequence to your evil actions. One of the most truely genuine human merits that is never incorporated is conscience. Truely being evil doesn't mean just acting the part, but also feeling the grudging acceptance of the aftermath of your decisions/actions. When you rob a merchant without getting caught only to find his pockets full again the next day because of some generic script that resets his inventory, you become desensitized after doing it for so long that it doesn't even become a loathsome, degenerate act anymore because no one is suffering from it. You don't care, you just made off with 2000 more gold to blow on swords and hookers. The merchant doesn't care because he'll get it all back tomorrow anyway when the script kicks in. Cause and consequence. That's the true sorce of evil.

Now, the catch-22 of this is where to draw the line of what you feel as a player, as opposed to what you want to portray as the character you're playing. If doing evil things, even in a video game, bothers you as a morally stout person, are you really able to handle the emotional task of playing a really evil character who wouldn't think twice about slitting his own mama's throat for a dollar? So it becomes a question of: who's responsibility is the emotional conveyance of RPGs? The people building the game, or the person doing the roleplaying?

 

We need a good evil rpg, and I think I have an idea.

COPYRIGHT HoL Alert: If any of you guys sell this, I want money for my head stash. Nigga gotta smoke.

Start the game with a somewhat Morrowwindish map, big island, lots of npcs. Throw some energy into making all the npcs interesting. You play an evil scion of darkness who wants to summon his dark lord father to the realm so you can rule as prince of evil in this land. The land starts out as happy-go-lucky and all that shit, but the more you do, the nastier of a place it gets. You could either do trifling things, like open gates and let livestocks loose, or cause an avalanche, or you could just assault a village if you're strong enough.

The island should be large enough to take a good deal of time to thoroughly corrupt, and turning villagers to darkness should be far more rewarding than just killing them. You should be able to level in various areas of corruption, manipulation, necromacy, etc. and after awhile, the good nations you haven't conquered yet should mobilize against you, with you being hunted by bands of adventurers you can mercilessly slaughter.

If paranoid despot is your thing, you should be able to recruit fairly competant mercenaries as well, as well as a number of stronger captains to help you hold down your fort, although you need either fear or money to keep them. Orcish mercenaries, for example, might need to be paid well, while kobolds work for free, provided they are afraid of you. An ogre bodyguard, on the other hand, would require a certain amount of fear, but also payment, since such a creature is a powerful asset.

Hirelings should be competant, but of course not as powerful as you are, and not just lackeys that follow you around. Let's say you have Jake and Adam, two of your evil henchmen, both human mercenaries. You can send Jake out with twenty guards to 'collect taxes' which involves them draining 150 gold from the town through threats, extortion etc. (every character, including yourself, would have stats to determing how effective they are at different tasks). You get 100 gold, and Jake and his boys get to split 50, which they like since they get to get drunk.

You tell Adam to defend the castle with twenty men, while you take your last ten to go find a lost artifact hidden in the mines. If you've been good to Adam (paid him well, don't abuse him too much, he respects your strength, and so on) he won't try to seize power himself while you're gone. If you haven't, you have to kill him when you get back, although a large part of his pay would likely be in his quarters and invested in his items, so you'd get most of what you spent on him back.

If he doesn't revolt, you return to find Jake and his guard drunk in the castle with your money, and Adam will give you a progress update on the state of the defenses. Maybe the dwarves are gathering forces on the ridge with human and elven allies (if you have spies or scouts you might get more details on their strength, numbers), maybe the paladins in the nearby fort have attacked twice, and Adam can give you the results from the battle (obviously he survived, or you'd be hacking through holy men as you came home, trying to stop them from sanctifying your castle). Or maybe nothing happened and there's no news to report.

Well guys, your thoughts?

 

Hmmm... Rape, pillage, extortion, all manner of debauchery and unscrupulous behavior... sounds like a winner.

Needs slavery though. There is a great deal of my bidding needing to be done.

 

I like it. Also if you could have your citadel be the heart of a slowly spreading stain on the landscape, which trists trees and turns streams rotten and rains ash. Sort of like the city to land effect in Disciples II but a lot better. Also, while I'm dreaming, I want full customization options over the building of my fortress (with a wide array of rooms, traps and items a la Dungeon Keeper), a clothing and armor customization system on par with City of Heros, and the ability to breed monsters of any type I wanted (A flying spider-dragon with the ability to eat houses). And a demon-possessed whip. *sigh*

 

I think it's a great premise. One thing to watch, though, is when you do actually bring your father back, if he will allow you to rule under him, or if he sees you as too much of a threat to his own throne.

In either case, I think the best option would be to kill him, but it would be a slightly different setting;

If he lets you rule underneath him, as his avatar of destruction, it means he considers you too weak to actually wrest the power he greedily holds from his hands. You'd just have to play for a longer period of time after that point to gain power, and he finally sees that maybe he should've killed you when he had the chance.

If he sees you as a threat, it's because you've been playing for a long time already with all of what you needed to bring him back, and now see fit to summon him to the world.
Once he's back, he'll realize what a badass you've become, and immediately try to kill you. Even though he commands a great deal of power, he's not willing to share it.

Another thing that might bring about one of those particular scenarios would be how you yourself are willing to play the game. Are you really going to bring your father back just to be subservient to his awesome power, or will you bring him back to take your birthright by force?

Another nice touch would be inner dialogs between yourself and your father. You claim to have a psychic bond with your old man, but none of your lackeys, let alone any of your followers, actually believe it.

And, this might be a silly question, but would gender selection be an option?

 

See no reason why not.

 

Overlord looks pretty good. I'm not into the parody/satire and the minions look more like muppets. But cool concept. The "evil" in it still seems a little on the generic Pillage and Plunder side, though.

 

I think the evil side was perfect in Arcanum. It changed the storyline if you were evil, gave you benefits (but also downsides), gave you evil party members, gave you a different ending, ect.