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[Rolan7]

Ugh, I agree with all three of those list items.  Damn shame.
Though B&W may have been slightly arguable...  but (kinda like Overlord) it's evil-tyranny vs world destruction.  Which is something, at least.

DK and Evil Genius are pretty unabashedly evil.  Good thing they cover it in dark humor.
I haven't played Infamous.

I think Fallout 1&2 did an okay job.  You could get bad karma by going on murder sprees...  Or just by supporting bad people for your own benefit.  It wasn't just "kill puppies y/n", there were actual reasons to be evil.  Games tend to shy away from that.

Heck I had to study Bioshock 1 in college and (IIRC) at least the game rewarded you for the "evil" option, even if it didn't mean much in the long run.  And having only 2 endings was cheap.

[AzyWng]

-Xcom 2? You are terrorists who don't really terrorize.

I'm pretty sure the XCOM operatives (who are human and trying to liberate the human race rather than terrorize it) wouldn't exactly be that interested in flying hijacked planes into buildings or anything like that.

[Rolan7]

Not to get political, and I did just finish watching Colony (a show on Netflix about alien occupation with human assistance), but I was very disappointed in how little they tackled the issue of collaborators.

AFAIK killing city-citizens (with explosives) has no effect at all.  Advent soldiers are...

Spoiler: Early actual spoiler (click to show/hide)

transhuman clones

It's just such a cop-out.  Especially whatever the hell that ending was.  I was really expecting something more like Liberal Crime Squad...  Drastic measures for an even more drastic situation.
Heck, LCS, there's a game where you're definitely the bad guys.  Even though you're fighting for freedom and utopia, and the game puts a friendly filter on most of your atrocities.

Dishonored 1 also did a decent job, I think.  Your actions could shape the city a bit more in my opinion, but they certainly shape the princess's behavior.  And not just the endings, but the final mission is remarkably different.

[Neonivek]

What is funny is that Xcom 2 DOES try to explain why the aliens don't just hire human soldiers... and instead has this HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE red flag that is if these things ever lose their helmets.

And the explanation exists PURELY as an excuse... Basically the alien DNA not only makes them susceptible to mind control but it also is the only way for them to use the gateway system (you know... that system they almost never use in the game)

I think Fallout 1&2 did an okay job.  You could get bad karma by going on murder sprees...  Or just by supporting bad people for your own benefit.  It wasn't just "kill puppies y/n", there were actual reasons to be evil.  Games tend to shy away from that.

What helped Fallout is the endings where they actually go through what happened to those locations you visited. If you were an evil bastard, well... Those cities didn't really do great.

Sure... you couldn't really have any evil aspirations, but not only was the game not really about that... But the sheer villainous ways you could go to achieve your ultimate goal (well at least in the first game)

Which is kind of funny given that Fallouts afterwards don't even care about anything BUT the main story's final part and your personal companions (whose results are TYPICALLY whether or not you finished their storylines and how you did it). So did you blow up Mekton? Well who cares!

-Xcom 2? You are terrorists who don't really terrorize.

I'm pretty sure the XCOM operatives (who are human and trying to liberate the human race rather than terrorize it) wouldn't exactly be that interested in flying hijacked planes into buildings or anything like that.

Yeah... Why would Xcom operatives ever want to sabotage factories, hospitals, media centers, communication relays, attack major political figures, or anything of the sort... There are absolutely 0 story reasons why Xcom would ever want to deal with those *sarcasm*

I mean... You can attack a SORT of factory in the game... Except you attack it on a Sunday so it is completely evacuated... Because they might be alien overlords but even they have to bow to unions.

And you can blow up a statue... Which is the only act of terrorism you can do in the entire game. I mean there is Kidnapping dark VIPs but they are traitors (and thus in your jurisdiction) rather than being say... the aliens PR director.

---

Mind you I know why you are confused. You are thinking of terrorism as "Kill civilians all day and all night" but remember that... One groups freedom fighters is another group's terrorist.

If a group kidnapped the president of the USA, for example, they would be terrorists. Even if the President happened to be an evil alien overlord.

[Persus13]

The impression I always got from XCOM 2 was that there were resistance fighters doing a lot of the grunt work stuff (attacking convoys, sabotage, etc), while your guys were the elite group tackling the more important missions.

[Rolan7]

Yeah that was spelled out occasionally.  A lot of the random missions were explicitly the result of resistance fighters stopping trains, or at least spotting/causing opportunities.

UFO:  Aftermath even let you delegate low-priority missions to such forces.  That was sadly abandoned in the rest of the trilogy...  I wish it was a staple of the subgenre.  Instead, micro is king.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

Which is kind of funny given that Fallouts afterwards don't even care about anything BUT the main story's final part and your personal companions (whose results are TYPICALLY whether or not you finished their storylines and how you did it). So did you blow up Mekton? Well who cares!

New Vegas managed to cover quite a bit with its endings.  May not have been to the scale of the originals, but it had a good amount.

[Culise]

-Xcom 2? You are terrorists who don't really terrorize.

I'm pretty sure the XCOM operatives (who are human and trying to liberate the human race rather than terrorize it) wouldn't exactly be that interested in flying hijacked planes into buildings or anything like that.

Oddly enough, I'm sure as sin willing to bet that if an XCOM operative could gut the alien operations just by flying one jet liner into one of those big spires without triggering all sorts of alien AD, they'd have volunteers coming out of the woodwork all over the place, and to heck with collateral damage.  Heck, one of the generic backgrounds for your recruits is that they tried this with a ground vehicle. 

To put it bluntly, terror is a weapon, and there is a vested reason to create terror in humans in a war against aliens.  To work against human-alien cooperation, you need a two-fold approach.  The first is to make things too expensive for the aliens to continue the occupation.  The second is to make humans unwilling to cooperate.  Terrorism works on both fronts: random attacks in the "safe" cities creates the perception of a loss of control by the aliens, which may theoretically weakening collaborator trust in them.  As well, it directly increases the cost to the aliens in their own losses.  By attacking prominent human collaborators, you cause other potential collaborators to think of their own safety.  In indirect warfare (the only sort of warfare possible against an enemy as overwhelmingly powerful as the aliens are), this kind of vicious calculus is the norm, and that entirely leaves aside more human emotions such as revenge, hatred, and fear, all of which may spark attacks on targets of opportunity regardless of species.  The French Resistance, in attempting to liberate France, did not spare collaborators just because they spoke French or were born in France; a particularly nasty incident comes to mind where they killed not only the police chief of Voiron, but also his wife, mother, son (aged 10), and daughter (who was just an infant), but the most prominent case was probably where they gunned down the Minister of Information and Propaganda.  No, any "liberation movement" by necessity must go after human collaborators as well as aliens, and that completely ignores the possibility of collateral damage. 

EDIT: That said, Dark VIPs were in the game.  It's more stuff like truck bombs and the like that weren't that could certainly have been, and as noted Rolan7, the handling of ADVENT did feel like a bit of a cop-out. 

[BlackHeartKabal]

teamkillers

[Egan_BW]

So long as we're talking about XCOM 2, why no recruitable aliens? ;_;
We could have had XCOM-branded snek snipers! It would have been so beautiful!

[Neonivek]

Escalator Land Games

Ever watched that episode of Fairly Odd Parents where they go to escalator land where Timmy is waiting in line asking when they get to the line and they go "This IS the ride! Yippe!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShGRWM9dNy8

Goodness does this gameplay mentality kill me for a lot of games.

Now some games have a LOT of grinding and while you could debate on whether they have too much or just enough (Heck Monster Hunter ran the gambit), there are typically big challenges and bosses between, to test your skill and even your equipment but are also meant to be a lot of fun.

Then, you get to games where the grinding... IS the fun. Sure there might be challenges but they are more or less meant to be a roadblock in your way.

And I like grinding... but the games where I actually liked grinding that I remember fondly are games where I typically liked the game or even liked the combat.

Heck as much as I loved Ultima Online it was purely for the community. The connectivity and friendly nature I had while playing it elevated what would have otherwise been not only a fairly boring game but an EXTREMELY opaque one where you can easily get lost.

Any game where I lose friends

Yeah this... Now this wouldn't be a pet peeve.

Except even if I return to the game later... I typically aren't well disposed towards it.

It could have been my favorite game, but... yeah... it is as if the game has been tainted.

Mind you this is just human nature. Positive and negative associations are a powerful thing.

So long as we're talking about XCOM 2, why no recruitable aliens? ;_;
We could have had XCOM-branded snek snipers! It would have been so beautiful!

They explain it. All aliens are under mind control.

Except the ones who aren't... and they aren't because... no raisin.

Well except the ones who aren't and have a reason.

In many ways I kind of miss the original Xcom... Where you got a strong sense that the aliens have a genuine culture.

NewXcom? I don't even know if they do anything BUT act like mindless soldiers.

[muldrake]

But GOODNESS is there a trend of games that just flat out do not want you to be evil in anyway even when that is the point of the game.

In Sunless Sea/Fallen London, lots of the really easy and profitable options you have are downright evil, and there are lots of opportunities to do horribly evil things just for convenience's sake.  Cannibalism ends up being almost necessary sometimes, but you also have numerous options to do it just to make things slightly easier or even just for fun.  Then there's an option to sell other people's souls to devils because it's marginally more profitable than selling them to other people.

The trade in red honey in that game is one of the vilest things I've ever seen in a game.

[Chiefwaffles]

@Rolan: Well, UFO Aftershock did have the militia mechanic which pretty much was a sidegraded version of Aftermath's delegation mechanic. You could build different types of barracks for different tiers of militia. Then when a town with militia gets attacked, you could either delegate it to the militia or instead send in your own team and fight alongside the militia. (Although you did get an extremely annoying game over if your militia died.) Afterlight let you build missile silos, but all those really did was lower the amount of encounters you had to fight off.

Except terrorism really has no place in XCOM. It unnecessarily dilutes the theme. Sure, there are some cop-outs (ADVENT troopers and the fact that they didn't really ever say "What if ADVENT was good for humanity?") but the theme of XCOM 2 is saving the world from aliens. Terrorism has no place here! The primary goal that you strive to accomplish throughout the whole game and achieve at the end is uniting the populace. Against ADVENT.
A common tactic of authoritarian governments is the common enemy. ADVENT is clearly established to be doing this to XCOM, of course, but with actual terrorism attacks their material becomes much more effective. What XCOM has to do is what I've already said - unite the populace. Getting people to like you and unite against your enemy won't be accomplished by standard terrorism attacks.

We could compare this to the tactics of modern terrorist organizations today. Their tactics have two primary goals - terrify their enemies (hence the name) and gain recruits. But these recruits are extremely small in scale. The same would apply to XCOM. Sure, bombing that hospital/crowded factory/place of crowded civilians may get your local cells a dozen more recruits, but it'll work against your primary goal. While these attacks would recruit the hardliners, they would alienate everyone else. It just wouldn't work.


So in the end, the only real reason for terrorism in XCOM 2 is shock value. And shock value is an idiotic concept that doesn't belong in a game like XCOM 2.

[Neonivek]

Attacking the populous isn't what I mean.

But you never intentionally attack anything but oddly empty buildings and alien attack squads.

ALL so you never have to feel bad about the fact that you are an insurgent.

It would be... like if WW2 was fought through a series of 1 on 1 duels against german soldiers... Sorry that is too evil... I mean... Nazi German Soldiers who probably eat babies.

None of this bombing factories, killing generals, taking down communication, stopping the evil genetic experiements, halting supplies, reversing propaganda (except... at the end due to a weird... not so much plothole but weirdness...)

You are the CLEANEST resistant soldiers EVER! in a game that is trying to convey that you are a gritty on the edge resistance group needing to scrounge up what little people they can find. You are a team of Saturday night cartoon characters.

Yeah no one wants you to slaughter innocent people... I don't want you to slaughter innocent people. Yet goodness as I said, you don't even do the basic levels of resistance fighting most of the time. In spite your ENTIRE goal being to be on the offensive, you are a purely defensive unit. Sure you do occasionally get supplies and ships, but only if they are left open for you (you do not create opportunities because that would be terrorism)

[Chiefwaffles]

Yeah... Why would Xcom operatives ever want to sabotage factories, hospitals, media centers, communication relays, attack major political figures, or anything of the sort... There are absolutely 0 story reasons why Xcom would ever want to deal with those *sarcasm*

My point is that "terrorism" is an idiotic term for this. If you want what you just said in your latest post, that really wouldn't be called terrorism. That'd be like calling all military strike by countries strictly acts of terrorism.
XCOM, like I admitted, is lacking in the area of good/bad. But it doesn't have to be this morally grey gritfest.

Oh, speaking of that.
"GRR MORALLY GREY GRR"
I hate it when people praise morally gray stories and paths and games as the epitome of morality. Not everything has to be unclear and not everything has to be this stupid "CONSEQUENCES GRRRRR" thing. There are many strict rights and wrongs in this world and while many things are ambiguous morally, making everything that way in your game just makes it seem like it's trying to be edgy.