I too actually felt bad being bad in KotoR, but I thought that was one of the things that made the game so much fun. I've played evil in a few other RPGs, but as others have said, evil is usually the same as good, except that every quest ends with you threatening to kill the person you just spent four hours helping unless he pays you an extra 10 gold. Sometimes game evil is so detatched from reality that you become desensitized or the act is laughable, like GTA. But KOTOR actually had a few parts where it made sense to be evil, and you got to do something REALLY evil, but you still felt bad for doing it, especially towards the end of the game.

It wasn't perfect, but it was pretty good. I think when writing evil questlines, a designer should keep in mind some "favorite" evil characters, and write from their perspective, and not go the usual "I insult everyone I meet and act like a homicidal maniac when clearly it is of no benefit" route. When writing dialogue or quest options, the designer should be thinking "What would Darth Vader do?" Would Darth Vader spend hours and hours searching for a map to the promised land, and then sell it to the merchant for 100 credits just because he would get a kick out of it? No. Similarly, when finishing a "quest", Darth Vader would not throw a tantrum like a spoiled child (let's pretend the last three star wars movies didn't happen, ok?) and demand an extra five dollars. Those shouldn't be your only options when trying to be evil.

In baldurs gate 2 I felt bad on many occasions, it was interesting. For example, the PC's sister, Imoen, was so useless and annoying that I just always want to dump her, but she's my freaking sister damnit! There were some cool evil characters there too, like Edwin, he was such an arrogant badass. I wanted to be Edwin myself.[grin] But he was a minor character in the whole story line. And thats the problem in many good vs evil games.

Often, you can be a good character but you have to be a cry-baby (Fable) or put up with endless whining of NPC's. Let me be a 'just' character for once and not only a goodie-goodie christian knight of the light or whatever. And I would like to be some badass type of person too who doesn't totally lack ethics or is a random moronic sociopath without any personality. Just someone with a lot of spite, arrogance or selfishness for example, but still something human, something respectable.

But in general, I only feel something when there's a decent story and good dialogues. I don't feel sorry for murdering random sprites or polygons. It's like not feeling bad for anybody in most action movies with a lot of violence, whilst I want to cry when watching something like dancer in the dark or dogville.

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Original post by Way Walker Quote: Original post by Crazy_Vasey I felt a little guilty at times playing Fallout and Fallout 2. Selling your wife into prostitution and so on Off topic: How do you do that? I never found how, even though it said you could on the box. I didn't try overly hard, but tried the options I thought reasonable.

It's been a while since I did it but from what I remember:

1) Random encounter with trappers. You can pimp her out to them for about $200 I think.
2) The Den, Frankie's Bar, you can pimp her out there to the customers if you talk to them.

There might be other places but I can't remember.

One of the things in KOTOR2 that actually impressed me was getting punished for doing good. One of the examples I can think of was when a begger came up and asked for a few credits. If you gave him some, the old jedi lady (who's name escapes me at the moment) asked me why I did that and asked if I as truely helping him. She then shows you that some thugs saw you giving him money they waited till he was around the corner and then mugged him. It actually showed that there can be negative consequences even for trying to do good.

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Original post by Rattrap One of the things in KOTOR2 that actually impressed me was getting punished for doing good. One of the examples I can think of was when a begger came up and asked for a few credits. If you gave him some, the old jedi lady (who's name escapes me at the moment) asked me why I did that and asked if I as truely helping him. She then shows you that some thugs saw you giving him money they waited till he was around the corner and then mugged him. It actually showed that there can be negative consequences even for trying to do good.

Well I don't know if that's cool or not. I think it's just used as a plot device because if you refuse to give him money he ends up killing someone instead. It bugged me that it was a catch 22.

I hate scenarios that have the same outcome no matter what decisions you make.

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Original post by Rattrap One of the things in KOTOR2 that actually impressed me was getting punished for doing good. One of the examples I can think of was when a begger came up and asked for a few credits. If you gave him some, the old jedi lady (who's name escapes me at the moment) asked me why I did that and asked if I as truely helping him. She then shows you that some thugs saw you giving him money they waited till he was around the corner and then mugged him. It actually showed that there can be negative consequences even for trying to do good.

You're right, I really liked that part too. I think that consequences like that are very important if a game wants to portray a more mature version of "good" and "evil". In real life (more or less), good is supposed to represent sacrifice in order to uphold what is right, while evil is helping yourself regardless of its affect on others. But in most games, it is exactly the opposite. Doing the "good" thing usually gets you more XP, gold, items, and power, while doing the evil thing may get you a few extra gp in the short run, but generally leaves you with less XP and items, leaves you locked out of areas in the game due to people not liking you, and sticks you in a position where you can't get most quests anymore because people know you're evil, which makes the game boring and unplayable.

I think this is primarily because developers spend most of their time doing the "good" side of their game, and then a fraction of the time doing the "bad" side, because they assume most people will play good. The KoToR games had a much more even split in development time because the Star Wars universe offered very clean cut definitions of good and evil PCs, and because the Sith/Dark Side are very popular due to the movies, and they knew there would be a good amount of players who would try out that side of the game. In a few other cases, like in Temple of Elemental Evil, a lot of the "Evil" side of the game ends up getting cut at the last minute due to ratings board issues; unfortunately the ratings board rarely think "evil" is a good idea in a Rated T game, and there are limits even in an M game.

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Original post by Rattrap One of the things in KOTOR2 that actually impressed me was getting punished for doing good. One of the examples I can think of was when a begger came up and asked for a few credits. If you gave him some, the old jedi lady (who's name escapes me at the moment) asked me why I did that and asked if I as truely helping him. She then shows you that some thugs saw you giving him money they waited till he was around the corner and then mugged him. It actually showed that there can be negative consequences even for trying to do good.

I think that was meant to be symbolic more then anything, IMO it's to show that sometimes if you just give people handouts they won't gain anything from it anyways. Would he not be better off earning his money rather then begging for it?

I personally always have a good time taking the evil paths in games. In KOTOR 2, there is a part where you use a mind trick to convince a thug to give you all his credits and jump off a cliff to his death. That is a little more coniving than simply killing him, which is also an option if I'm not mistaken. I am the total opposite in real life, so I get my little evil kicks out of the evilness in the games!

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Original post by sanch3x I'm mostly referring the KOTOR series. I suppose there are a lot of other games where you have to decide from the light and dark side. I know that a lot of my personality was shaped by do-gooders such as Cecil in FF2. All characters I've role played with (through MBRPGs - yes, I'm a dork) were good guys. Anyways, once I finished KOTOR as a jedi I decided to go through it as a Sith. I'm telling you I thought it was rather difficult sometimes to take the "bad" decision and hurt someone. Am I the only one who's felt this way? Think people might be discouraged to play a game if they are forced to play an evil character?

I feel horrible killing people in that game(people who arn't trying to kill me obviously) I don't mind playing a thief and stealing or pickpocketing someone in games, but when you kill inoccent people I just have such a hard time. Some people I know play the evil side (in kotor)to release stress, but when I play it it gives me stress if anything.

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Original post by Scint 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 :-) ).

I did things like that too, mindcontrol the Hutt to give me a free podracer race and cheated on KOTOR 2 with the Handmaiden's clothes. But I just can't kill anyone or torture people.