These thoughts were generated from the Necromancer thread.
WARNING: There MAY be some spoilers below! (particularly Final Fantasy 7, Erfworld and Morrowind)
What would be your goals as an evil adventurer/fortress? Other games and fantasy stories tend to view things from the do-gooder's perspective: someone is going to get hurt so we watch as someone struggles to stop it. This tends to be the impetus behind many games where the PCs have to learn, grow and overcome the great evil. We as players can empathise because being good means NPCs cooperate, you get good rewards and generally better reputation means prices are lower. Laws create predictability and help you, as a player, feel in control of the events in the game.
Of course, this all happens on the assumption that the player, too, wants to overcome the great evil. I'm sure many of us have played games where we didn't care about the story, it was just a challengingly fun game and there were few negative consequences or even options for alternative behaviours
(I blame the creators for not making the story engaging!).
So if you decide to play a character or fort that's evil, and you kill things randomly and blow things up and torture the living and make people do things against their will yadda yadda yadda, what exactly would be your reason to do this OTHER THAN curiosity? What sort of goals could Toady implement in DF that would reasonably fit with an evil adventurer/overlord and would also engage the player and result in an outcome that we feel we wanted, created and earned?
When I found DF I went through a manic period of non-stop DF. I didn't know why I was building a fortress, I just could. It was fun and I was learning lots of new things I had to do to make sure that I could keep building a fortress. I wasn't intending to be "good" or "lawful" or such, it just worked (and I suppose that I really my reason for being good: it helps! ) But once I learned what to do and how to do it and that you reach a point where you can't go on, I lost interest. Adventure mode was exciting, and I trained my thrower/wrestlers up to legendary and crept through numerous abandonned forts and solved quests -
- and then I stopped because I often felt helpless to giant bats and deadly archers and ultimately it resembled fetch questing.
I've asked these questions since I first started playing Final Fantasy 7. I asked then "What made Shinra and Sephiroth choose the path that made them villains?" or more simply "What makes someone choose to be evil?".
I also remember in Heroes of Might and Magic 2, how regardless of which path you chose, you were being told what to do by the respective top-knob and you went about playing the scenario and then there'd be another cut scene where you got told what to do and so on. I really only cared about what choices changed the difficulty and what choices yielded the best rewards. I frankly didn't feel any "gooder" or "eviler" in either campaign, I did the same in both for the same (player-personal) reasons. HOMM3 was better in that it told the story and the different events on both sides, but I didn't have choices while playing either good or evil that represented being good or evil. It was just two sides of the same coin.
I also think of the Hamster in Erfworld. He hasn't been given the reasons for the fight, he is just playing the game. And he would probably be playing the game the exact same way if he were on the other side. He isn't evil or good, just talented, which is all that a lot of games ask you to be.
This is like the Illusion of Control , when you think by initially choosing to be evil that you will get to continually behave evilly (but you don't, you just need to know how to play). Otherwise, you can actually behave evilly and items in stores cost more and some NPCs won't talk to you, but little you do makes a damn difference to the story until the very end when you've built up enough 'evil' points, or you have enough faction with the underworld in the score of millions of hours of gameplay to get some super title or ending.
I also think of Morrowind and the wonderfully divergent path that slowly evolved: as you learned about the prophecy and the Nerravar(?), it slowly dawned on you that you would eventually be picking sides at some point (I never got to the end because the damn game kept crashing, so I've made some assumptions about it! I'm glad you are so forgiving :roll: ). Up until then you behaved how you wanted and were rewarded and punished accordingly. And still, I don't really remember any reasons for me to pick either path other than curiosity. In the end one path meant killing evil and one path meant killing good, and for what? Just to see what would happen. Good was easy and evil was harder, but the story wasn't different either way. Good people were given rewards, evil people picked pockets for them. It still comes down to simply how well you played, not what you do. It was a good try, but not completely engaging (think also Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights - Good and Evil characters got to the same place by means that diverged little).
So what reasons could Toady program into the game that would make you want to be evil AND would be important to the plot AND be engaging for you? Why do evil characters do the evil things they do and, the big question is,
how can Toady want you to do them, too, so that an actual, new story is told?
/philosophical rant