A couple of days ago a friend shared an article discussing talking about how games, and RPGs in particular, kind of suck at creating a satisfying villain route for you to play as and how that combined with many people's empathy driving them to not hurt even those fictional characters they interact with , means that creating a evil route or villain route ultimately just tend to be waste of resources in development.
And that sparked a conversation, what games actually DO have a convincing argument for siding with the villains?
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Over my long long years of obsessively replaying RPGs and CRPGs over and over again again to squeeze out every bit of interactivity, reactivity, and replay value out of them I have come to realize something.
Game Writers as a general rule are kind of bad at writing “Ends justify the means” characters convincingly without them being laughably outrageously evil. I mostly blame it on having to write with a interactive medium.
I want to throw a pair of contrasts to y'all using Fallout 4 and Fallout New Vegas, with the Institute or Brotherhood of Steel and the Legion or House. And after that Tyranny.
Ironically I think Fallout 4 did it better with the Brotherhood and Institute then NV did with the Legion or House.
Throughout all of 4 we are shown or see or hear about the damage the Institute and their infiltrator synths and supermutants have done to the commonwealth.
With one Synth placed they destroyed a Proto-Regional government, with another they crippled Diamond City’s knowledge base and increased the bigotry common in the Commonwealth towards Ghouls entirely because they don’t like individuals from the Pre-War being around to influence the largest population center in Boston, they slaughter towns for minuscule tech, and they use the land as their own petri-dish for experimentation, let alone the inciting incident of the game where they murder your spouse and kidnap your son.
But when you descend into the Institute, you find most of their population are relatively innocent civilians, scientists held under the thrall of a Police state and built on the back of slaves.
The temptation comes when you are named the next Director, after seeing all of the damage and influence the Institute has had on the Commonwealth this is a chance to use that power, that technology, to fix things instead.
The Brotherhood route on the other hand is the violent reaction to the Institute’s evil through direct action and oppression of the surface world of the Commonwealth, a Military Order of high ideals, formed itself as a violent reaction against the Pre-War Government who committed crimes as bad and worse than the Insitute, who are being pulled in two directions thanks to their ideology and influx of Wastelanders into their formerly insular culture and society. They are the familiar, a actual dedicated army willing and able to discover the Institute and end it's threat to the world forever, even as they themselves lose more and more of their idealistic core ending up in reinforcing their own internal bigotries.
After all, the Brotherhood stands for the greatest good there is. To prevent Science from destroying the world ever again, and preventing such dangerous tech from ever being used again.
What they have is a noble goal, and outside of some strong-arming of food supplies in exchange for protection they stay morally on the up and up throughout, even as you can see the corruption seeping in; turning what was once a noble Ordenstaadt into a mirror of the Fascist Para-Military that they once opposed.
Meanwhile with the Legion, as a Fem Courier, you get warned by a slave that some Legionnaires are planning or discussing “putting you into your place”. It’s leaders are either all foaming at the mouth to do more atrocities, speak poetic about how they are hard men doing hard things because the decadence and danger of the world demand that they put things into order with no discussion of ethics or morality or ideology beyond what their god-kind demands.
Meanwhile the local power Robert Edwin House waxes poetic about being a Autocrat while destroying tribal cultures, and all he has to his name are some fancy robots and a single strip of road he uses to fleece tourists of their money, when he had the manpower and resources for decades to expand outwards and turn all of New Vegas into his Kingdom had he the vision.
He's a man who talks big, but all he shows the player what he cares for is the Strip itself, a little Snow Globe he can keep in stasis forever.
I think the only game I’ve played that ever had some equivalence with the Good and Evil routes is Tyranny.
In Tyranny there are Three factions of note to speak of.
1) The Disfavored; The Last military force conquered by the Tyrant Kyros, they are led by the Archon of War Graven Ashe and are the strictly organized ethnic Elite military order that you expect to see in Empires. They are extremely racist, extremely regimented, and brook no mercy towards any who dared spit on Kryos's peace.
2) The Scarlet Chorus; A raving band in the hundreds of thousands organized into individualized gangs and their families who follow in the footsteps of the screaming reavers, rapers, conscripted poor bastards, and repeat offenders. These Gangs largely consist of the native inhabitants of the Tiers (the area the game takes place in) and has broken as many as it has "freed" in their pursuit of conquest of the region. Led by the the Archon of Secrets, The Voices of Nerat, they are the rampaging horde you often see in fiction.
3) The Rebel Factions of the Tiers; After the conquest of the Tiers there are several remnant rebel groups willing and able to be convinced to rise up against Kyros and her dominion over the tiers. The Bronze Brotherhood, The Stonetalon Tribe of the Stone Sea, The Unbroken, Earthshakers, The School of Ink and Quill, The Vendrian Guard, and the Forge-Bound.
Each of these groups, built off of your corp of Vendrian Guards, can depending on your choices be recruited and brought into a Rebel Coalition looking to push the forces of Kyros out - enabled by a active Cold and Hot Civil war between the Two Occupying forces over control of the region.
Now, with all of this established why would one ever side with the Disfavored or Scarlet Chorus over the Plucky Rebels?
That mostly comes down to four things.
1) You might have chosen to murder the Queen during character creation and have the Rebel path locked out for you.
2) You want to spend more time with the leader of either factions because of how cool they are. The Regimented Order of the Disfavored, or the Chaotic Dangerous Freedom of the Scarlet Chorus.
3) The Rebels fucking hate one another, and unless you play the game perfectly things will quickly return to the status quo of infighting.
4) It comes down the the society and culture you observe over the course of the game. The Tiers are a place where Gender rules over how society functions, Women control the land and Men the sea, where slavery is the norm, and the constant in-fighting between neighboring kingdoms and city-states led to endless strife and starvation.
Kyro's empire on the other hand, is a place of guarantees. Guarantees of Food, Guarantees of Trade, Gurantees of Safety, the dissolution of Gender Castes, and equal arbitration beneath the law of Kyros.
It's not perfect, certainly not as the punishments of the law can be harsh and the Laws on Trade are designed around ensuring that no Merchant Class ever gains enough stable capital to ever be a force capable of challenging Kyro's power over the economy, but by and large it is a improvement on the quality of life that was previously in the Tiers in every way imaginable.
You just need to bow your head in exchange for it.
Would you be willing to kneel? Even as you gain more and more power that might enable you to someday equal Kyros herself one day? Would you bow your head to a foreign King whom you shall never meet in exchange for these guarantees?
Of course, should you play perfectly in a way impossible to do without a guide, you can usurp the Legal foundations of Kyro's Empire by stealing his bureaucracy away from them and implementing your own version of the gurantees but that requires perfect play and likely many many replays of the game to achieve.
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Those are my thoughts and examples at least. What about the rest of y'all? What are some games that are actually good at convincing you to side with the villains and have it be a genuinely satisfying experience?
