The best approach in my opinion was in Mass Effect.

Dragon Age a close second but there it’s much more subtle and good/evil not really a part of it, it’s more internal to you the why behind your characters actions. Stuff like using blood magic which is illegal but very powerful can be used from a perspective of “the greater good” or you could roleplay that decision as a lust for power. Which factions you side with for sure has morality attached but since all roads lead to saving the world its much more about your own reasons to judge if your character is evil or just focused on the grander scheme, utilitarian.

But back to Mass Effect. It’s the same thing with all roads leading to save the world but unlike Dragon Age there is a morality system in place that is not about just a dichotomy between self sacrifice and malicious indulgence. Instead it’s about what is OK to do to save the world? What sacrifices are reasonable? What risks should you take for others? What approach do you take to solve conflict? Renegade (as the ‘evil’ approach is called) options allow you to pistol whip people that want you to follow rules and decorum while the Galaxy hangs in the balance. It allows you to order people to die for the greater good. It’s about using the power you have to take the shortest and most direct route to ultimate salvation. To not pussy foot around trying to appease everyone.

And really that’s the only way to make morality work in a story driven game imo. If the same story is to be told with moral decisions left to the player than they need to be ultimately inconsequential to how the game and story plays out. At best they give slight variations to story beats but nothing really changes from a good playthrough to an evil one in the grand scheme. If it works and feels satisfying is largely down to the developers accepting this and instead focus on smaller nuances like Mass Effect or leaving it ambiguous and up to the player to craft their narrative for the why and motivations like Dragon Age.

What I’d instead would like to see is a game where you play out an evil narrative. And I do know of one such RPG, Tyranny, but I haven’t gotten around to play it yet.

The best example perhaps of melding good and evil in the same game is Star Wars: The Old Republic (the MMORPG). Because you can play it from the evil side as a good character and the good side as an evil character. If you play it through multiple time you can really craft a world and narrative of incredible depth. And I can really recommend playing it as you would any other western RPG and just ignore the MMO side of things. Bear in mind that each individual playthrough suffers from the exact problem you raise in your post, but on the total, the bigger picture, becomes something very interesting and worthwhile.

BG3 is a terrible example. One of my main gripes with that game is that the virtual DM actively hates evil characters and tries to sabotage your play through at every step. Not to mention that the writers provided only chaotic stupid dialogue variants for evil roleplay. It’s usually [good], [good], [question], [attack the whole town], [goodbye]. And murderhoboing isn’t even fun here because it’s boring to fight whole cities at once. BG3 is a good tactics game with a brothel of a harem VN on the side, but it’s a lousy RPG. Very reminiscent of Mass Effect in that way that was a TPS with a brothel, but a terrible RPG.

Good examples would be KOTOR 2 and Fallout 1/2/NV.

I once tried to play Witcher 3 that way. Geralt was - in my version - a classic mercenary-style witcher. You pay him, he does it - no matter what. You don’t pay afterwards? He takes it from you.

Short story: It doesn’t work at all.

Lex Luther is evil, but he doesn’t go around stealing candy from babies and punching grandmas. In fact he takes a lot of actions that people would think are good and altruistic. His motivations are what makes him evil. And when push comes to shove he would show how little he actually cares for all those babies and grandmas. This seems to allude many story tellers in many mediums. Infamous was a great game on the “good” story line, and terrible on the evil because you had to punch grandma with no real reason in order to stay evil. Bio shock was a bit better as you had motivation to kill those little girls to gain more power faster.

Writers and storytellers need to think more motivation than actions when it comes to being evil.

Agree! I’m bored of always being chosen one, lawfully good saviour and choose neutral or evil playthroughs but it’s like you said - always feel kind of shallow and punishing.

Being evil should feel like cheating and getting away with it. It should feel like the “right” way to play the game if you are playing it that way, your character should essentially “skip dialog”, by cutting people off before they say anything heartfelt or by walking away when stuff starts to get too “sappy” for them. You should never hear what the other characters motivations are, they should all feel like one-sided npcs that just complain all the time.

That is what life feels like to selfish people. They don’t feel selfish. They feel like everyone else is just missing all these easy and obvious shortcuts and whine and complain too much about nothing.

The npcs that we all get to know and care for, are pretty much impossible to be mean to. You have to actually see them the way an “evil” person would for it to make sense to be evil. They should seem like their plans are way too complicated and risky for no reason other than that they aren’t as smart as you and can’t see that rescuing the trapped goblin is not only a huge time cost but risky too. Not worth doing, the reward increase is pretty miniscule, and if any party members should die, or the rescue attempt goes wrong at all and just results in alerting the enemies and getting everyone killed… why risk all that for such little pay off? And of course cut them off or not care about their stupid whiny reasons like it’s a sentient creature or whatever nonsense they are gonna spew. It’s just a plain bad idea, and they aren’t getting it. Maybe you should just try to sabotage it so it’s not even an option anymore, then they’ll come around.

You should check out Tyranny. It’s one of my favourite CRPGs, and it gives you a solid motivation for making evil choices. It also doesn’t really give you “good” options most of the time.

Evil is usually about power and influence and that’s something players typically don’t get to have in large quantities – otherwise the game quickly starts behaving much differently. Why go on adventure when you can just hire adventures to do it for you while you work to further your influence, after all?

A TTRPG can try to mutate to accommodate this (probably using a pile of ad hoc house rules) but a CRPG world need to have all that programmed in. And the players might not like the genre shift.

If you don’t have power you can still be an effective hero but as a villain your only option is to try to backstab your way to the top – but if you can make any substantial progress there we end up with the aforementioned problems. If you can’t make that progress you’re basically stuck roleplaying Iznogoud and few people want a gameplay loop that deliberately leads nowhere.

What can work is an evil character playing along with heroes for their own reasons. I once had a TTRPG character who was a SHODAN clone (inhabiting a human body via invasive cyberware). My SHODAN was perfectly aware of how vulnerable she was and how she needed allies. As a result she wasn’t nice but fiercely loyal to the party, deferring to their judgement on most matters because that was most likely to keep her alive.

She still ended up getting written out when she turned out too annoying to play. I hope she’s happy with the space station I bought her.

Don’t have anything to add, just appreciation for your post. A true evil playthrough would be interesting. Done well it’d uncomfortable and illuminating. But maybe too threatening for many? Maybe we stick to simplistic versions because they are safe?

Dishonored 2 did something in the right direction, the way choices start to color the world around you.

I find cartoonish moustache-twirling “evil” boring. Playing as morally grey characters is most compelling. Whether my character is a hero or a villain depends on whom you ask and at which point in history. Damage one faction and help another, when it’s ambiguous who the “good guys” and “bad guys” are. Steal, rob and assassinate for what you believe is a “good cause”. Set up dictators to avert death and destruction, then betray and terminate the them with extreme prejudice when they have served their purpose and become a liability. And so on.

Or just go full mercenary; everyone hates you, believes you have no principles and thinks they have the moral high ground, but at the end of the day everyone needs your specialist expertise. Every client is one missed payment away from becoming a target and every target is one bribe away from becoming a client—unless the target is eg slavers or pirates, because you actually do have principles.

For example, in X3:TC I single-handedly brought peace and prosperity into the universe: fought off Khaak threat; contained Xenons and completely denied their incursions into human and alien space alike; set up industry that boosted the economy at large for everyone; hired a lot of people for very good salaries. But, I had the monopoly in most industries; a fleet of warships capable of steamrolling everyone else if I wished so; literally owned a whole sector; controlled trade routes via the Hub; set up alliances with the pirate factions letting them roam free, trading illegal goods with them, building infrastructure for them. In short, very much a shady dystopian megacorps🙃

Since you referenced BG3…

The D&D series has always had ‘evil’ as in the alignment and then ‘mindflayer evil’ which was always kinda the next level melodramatic brand of evil.

So BG3 kind of tackled that head on. It was rather successful I think in that it gave evil characters and NPCs a much better and less arbitrary framework, even if it revolved around the trope of everyone being power hungry. Although it all just kinda blurred and overlapped with a few exceptions.

Like the exploding blood potion drow lady. She is evil. But she was well done. In her lane and it worked.

But I could have given a shit less about the machinations of all the side evils. Like, Selune-Shar was always a cringey mess, so Shadowheart never had a chance unless we could’ve had the option of her ditching them both for like, Waukeen.

I think the ideal way to make moral choices compelling is to make good an actual sacrifice. Declining powerful things for yourself and putting yourself in danger to help others with no gameplay reward, only narrative reward. Make evil tempting, being selfish and pragmatic will make things easier on you. Let’s say there’s a survival sequence where you’re in the wilderness with limited food and encounter someone starving. You can help them, for no inherent player power related reward, but you’ll run the risk of running out of food yourself. Let them starve and you make the sequence much more comfortable.

I don’t know how seriously to take this kind of discussion sometimes. I can rationalize that a person can do awful things to people in a fictional setting and it’s not a commentary of who they are as a person. On the other hand I cannot escape the feeling that I am replying to a genuine sadistic monster, based on everything you just said in this post. Forget all of that. Unnecessary commentary when there’s a point I want to make.

There’s a crucial difference in video games vs more free-form varieties like TTRPGs: You’re on The Rails. Video game RPGs are almost always on the rails. There’s no real sandbox game anywhere. Like there are good attempts, but at the end of the day, any game has programmed expectations for your inputs and what it can output. Video games can’t possibly fathom how deeply evil you could actually get. It would be a developmental and technological nightmare to try programming in all of your awful choices and how they could spiral the narrative. They have to do their best within the limitations of how much could possibly fit in a game. And I’m assuming the game companies also have to take into account the ratings system, and PR. Even if you could play the game any way you want, good AND bad choices, you’re going to get odd looks from people if they know the game allows you to sexually abuse NPCs, or enslave people through extortion. You know what I’m getting at? The real limitation isn’t the technology, even though that’s already a big one. Even in virtual, completely fictional settings, being allowed to play that shit out is wholly monstrous. And I can’t imagine the toll it would take on designers who would be tasked to write it.

So if you really want all of that and accept the risks, make your own CRPG where you can go all out on Evil. Being critical of developers and designers for not being willing to go as far as your twisted mind can go in a video game is a wild take. Go play in an evil TTRPG campaign if you want to get those kicks. It’s way easier.

I love BG3, but I’m doing a durge run for the first time and have been really disappointed in the evil option. Like, it wants you to be a crazy, egotistical murder hobo. The dialogue options with your party are so over the top I never choose them, because my character is more of the DL serial killer than murder hobo. There’s zero subtlety if you go down the murder route.

I tend to fall into the same patterns of gameplay, but more because it feels good to see the effect it has on the ending. I love stories where your choices have knock on effects that become part of the denouement. Like in Fallout 2, you see how your story affected each area’s outcomes.

It feels more genuinely heroic to have satisfying evil options on the table regardless, because it does feel rather as if the baddies in BG3 are trying too hard to seem evil. The way Gortash is written is that he’s a handsome charismatic psychopath on his way to return some video tapes, but the guy you meet is a salaciously grinning neckbeard wearing an entire Hot Topic. Orin is about as two dimensional as baddies come. It really feels like the only baddies with believable motives are the ones tied directly to the players’ stories (like Mizora), and Ketheric.

I’m trying to get through a Dark Urge run, and the way these games work leads me to play mainly with an eye to authorship rather than gaming per se. I’m less interested in optimizing than I am in telling the best story I can, and so the evil path from an already evil character who has a real chance at redemption feels like no story at all.

I can’t tell whether the most satisfying evil gameplay in modern gaming is in Disco Elysium or Among Us. But it’s definitely a hard one to get right.