I find the biggest problem with playing an evil character is any game that gives you a choice doesn't Really give you a choice.

"Be good, we'll give you this shiny sword of honor!"
"Be bad, and we'll sick every city guard on you!"

Games that make it easy to be evil either don't give you a choice, or makes being evil just so much easier than being good.

I think that it comes down to gameplay. "Evil" play always cuts down on possibilities and alliances, and there's a ton of "peer pressure" from the NPCs to be good.

In Fable, if you go "evil", then you don't really see a change in the story or gameplay (until the end), and it just costs you money every time you want to go into a town. It's nice to get houses and shops by killing the legal owners, since there's no other way to do it, but it's so expensive that it really isn't worthwhile. You get punished for being evil, so you don't do it.

In GTA, pedestrians are just polygons in the middle of the road. They're meaningless, and they'll spawn just as plentifully next time I barrel down that road. The odd star I get is just an inconvenience, and not as annoying or as much of a hindrance to gameplay as driving responsibly would be, so I just hit the little spedestrians and move along.

SO it all comes down to my gameplay experience, but there's a little bit of feeling in there, too. For instance, in Resident Evil 4 (one of my all-time favorite games), I have often amusied myself by loading my obscenely maxxed-out game and blowing Ashley up with the various weapons (Mine launcher is the best, because she totally doesn't notice the plinking bomb sticking out of her eye socket until it detonates). It's fun to kill her, because she's so annoying and useless throughout the game. But I have never, ever, in all my times through RE4, refused to set the dog free in the first level. I've never even pointed a gun at it. I don't need it, since my super-guns can kill the boss it helps with before the dog actually shows up, but I always free it, and feel good as it scampers off into the woods.

So what does that tell you?

what's kotor?

Knights of the Old Republic.

Star Wars RPG.

Nah,
I enjoyed killing the Cow King and slay all his subjects.

I've never really felt bad about being bad in a game I guess its just because it was hard to think of the little polygons as anything more then that there for my amusement, in kotor I wasn't evil to be evil, I was evil to see what reaction being evil would cause. I should have played more of that game when I had the chance...

As for why its ok to be evil, like someone said, little GTA critters are

(1) nameless you never find out anything about their lives except the obscene things they yell at you, or their general profession

(2) Faceless, theres like 700 of the same type of person, all yelling the same obscene statements.

(3) Inconsequential, you can run over dozens of them before you even get some felony thats worth any gried, and anyone you mowed down comes back.

You know, picture if it was something like a happy couple enjoying a picnic, and you barreled them over in your haste to deliver drugs, then you might have reason to feel bad. But then again, if a game makes us feel truly bad, then we wont want to play it.

Quote:

Original post by BleedingBlue You know, picture if it was something like a happy couple enjoying a picnic, and you barreled them over in your haste to deliver drugs, then you might have reason to feel bad. But then again, if a game makes us feel truly bad, then we wont want to play it.

Correction: If a game makes us feel truly bad regardless of what we do, then we won't want to play it. Deus Ex made me feel truly bad for killing some of the characters, so I stopped killing those characters and continued playing the game.

When I played KOTOR, I generally stayed good. But then this one merchant tried to sell a droid to me for an obscene amount of money I didn't want to spend. I said to the merchant something along the lines of "How about I just take this droid and spare your life?" I may play a nice guy, but I'm not going to get ripped off. I never felt bad about it. (The game's good/bad detector never picked up that I was cheating in Pazzak with quicksave/quickload :-) ).

Although I didn't play Fable very long, I definitely went evil with no regrets. Well, when I first played it I was good, but the NPCs annoyed me so much I started over again and did every bad thing I could.

Oh, and in Star Wars games where you get to pick either the Rebels or Empire (like Rebellion, or X-wing vs. TIE Fighter), I always went Empire. How else would I get my beloved TIE Defender? And Darth Vader is a much cooler companion than that whiny Luke Skywalker.

Oddly, in GTA, I tried the best I could not to kill innocents. That game is mostly bad guys killing other bad guys though, which is fine by me.

I don't seem to have a problem playing evil in most games, except in cases where it involves injuring women or children. I must have some kind of mental block that makes me feel terrible for it. Even the women assassins in the original half-life I felt bad for killing though they were annoying.

I do wish however that evil options were more subtle, they always tend to be more on the psychopathic killer side and not at all subtle or intelligent.

I really liked the Thief series, a game where you could play an intelligent bad guy who wasn't forced into slaughtering every person in sight.

Dungeon Siege, the guilt trip..

You add a guy to your party, you notice he is falling behind, remember this is an NPC. He is not as good as the rest, you need to drop him.

He gives you 2 paragraphs of pleading, begging, and an "I'll be here waiting if you decide to come back."


You just can't do it on a good conscience. :\