What I can’t stand is the chaotic stupid choices being your only option for evil. Offer an evil route but make it more interesting than playing a character with poor impulse control and access to infinite puppies.
Cough cough Baldur's Gate 3... You either agree to help or aggro everyone.
If you've never tried it, the Wasteland series does evil very well. The game lets you go murder hobo, but that's not the actual evil route. The evil route is very interesting, and while the options are morally grey there's a clear good and bad choice
Offer an evil route but make it more interesting
And not just railroad you into being good.
I played Fable during a dark time in my life. For the first time ever went pure evil. Fought and beat my highschool best friend when we found ourselves on the opposite side of a mission. Executed her when she admitted defeat and begged for mercy. Fought and beat her jock brother when he wanted revenge. Executed him when he begged for mercy.
Found a door that told me to do the worse thing anyone had ever done to let me in and be granted a trinket. Found a random kid in a place across the world who wanted to be my sidekick. Told him I thought he had what it takes to be a hero. Took him all the way across the world to the door. Attacked and killed him. The door says not evil enough.
I say wtf do I have to do a look it up in the Internet. Apparently eating 5 recently hatched chick inventory items is worse than what I've done.
W.t.f.?
In any case, I'm much happier now. Not evil. Though definitely a pirate...
Satan wants to know your location
Meet me at the door satan
My first run isn't really good or evil; it's "how would I handle this if I was actually in this situation?"
A good RPG will feel natural the whole way through and never make you feel like you had to pick an option you didn't exactly want but was "close enough" to what you wanted. It is kind of weird, tho, how a couple older games (ahem Fallout 2 is one ahem) let you use this logic to actually break the game and end up with outcomes that are technically bugs; despite the fact that the logic used to end up there is completely sound and should have probably been accounted for in the writing.
But the second time I'm a prick. It's fun being evil. Or extremely stupid. Like a sub 3 int FO character annoying the shit out of Rocket Man Renesco. :3
Mass Effect series choosing renegade options for Commander Shepard will sort them out. Everyone still likes you, they just think you're a total fucking jerk. The majority of it is social choices and being a total fucking jerk to galactic arseholes balances it out.
"Hey, that's Shepard! Didn't they brutally kill that girl that showed remorse for betraying us?"
"Yeah, but he also told the council to fuck off and saved the galaxy."
"Oh, that's cool."
Spoilers, but compilation: https://youtu.be/sy-eRfupYbA?si=2E0umTpzrzR7mfbK
This is why I can't do a renegade run in Mass Effect
The problem with renegade, at least in 1, is it mostly just means racist. Even if I want to enjoy being bad/evil, it doesn't feel cool being racist
I'm playing Disco Elysium as a hardcore white supremacist. Why? Because fuck you game, you give me an obvious bad choice I'm taking it out of spite because I know you don't want me to.
What's the point of moral choices when the invisible hand of the developers have already decided what's "really" the right thing to do? That's just dogma, you might as well have omitted it altogether.
Me during Dark Urge run in BG3
Could not progress with dark urge after my character killed the >!bard!<
why do you always play the good guy in video games where there are no consequences for your actions?
because my power fantasy is helping.
--some twitter screencap I'm having trouble finding
