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[pisskop]

ptw, but a lot of confict is about opposing beliefs.

aggressive evil is just easier to portray and more popular than fanatic good.

If you dont act more evil than a wacked up comicbook villian, or rather you are not as detrimental to the survivability of the human/your race than it cant be helped.

i.e. fallout 1.  Why were you not worse than Master?  Different evils.
or Manhunt.  Youre a Killer on death row set free by a snuff-film director.
or most 4x games.

Any military strategy game with more than one side is completely subjective.
 .Compare Iron Hearts and Red Faction to Halo CE.

Dem aliens (besides not understanding why they have to erradicate humamity) hate/fear you.
  In military games people certainly tell their children stories about you killing the bogeyman and hiding under naughty kids' beds.


The problem is context, and that 'evil' entities tend to collide.  The antagonist of the game is actively trying to oneup you, so if they are evil theyll be a threat to even you.
  The backstory is where most of the 'evil' is hiding, in fridge horror form.

[pisskop]

What about ye good olde Harvester, an adventure game from the late nineties? You can kill everyone if you feel like it in variously sadistic ways.

Even harvester, you are being prepped by an organization that literally breeds serial killers, and tells you they will use you and you will ultimate die.  Theyre breeding suicide anarchists.

[scrdest]

(breeding) suicide anarchists

Great name for a punk band.

[motorbitch]

what about planescape: thorment?
tho playing good is a viable choice during play, the player character is a very evil figure, that just happend to have lost his memory.

[RangerCado]

I'm going to go Fable 3. Although the others are better games in my personal opinion; (Fable 1 forever!) Fab;e 3 does do a VERY good job of making you the evil ruler with all the money and power if you wish... Though you do do it all to stop a greater evil with everyone... scratch that, but worth mentioning atleast.

[Broseph Stalin]

I'm going to go Fable 3. Although the others are better games in my personal opinion; (Fable 1 forever!) Fab;e 3 does do a VERY good job of making you the evil ruler with all the money and power if you wish... Though you do do it all to stop a greater evil with everyone... scratch that, but worth mentioning atleast.

Fable is a perfect example of the problem. There's a choice between good and evil but it's always the same story, in Fable 1 you're either the good guy trying to stop Jack of Blades or the bad guy trying to stop Jack of blades, in Fable 2 you're either the good guy trying to stop lucien or the bad guy trying to stop lucien, and in fable three you're either the good guy trying to stop the darkness or the bad guy trying to stop the darkness. Most developers don't write multiple stories or stories that change based on your choices and either because it's easier or more traditional the story generally paints you as the hero.

[nenjin]

I think the issue is that most developers can't or won't embrace an evil character. It's easy to root for a hero and imagine all the things a player might want to enjoy as a measure of their success as a hero. Recognition. Property. Loot. It's easy to craft those things because developers can put themselves in those shoes comfortably.

It's easy to do these things for an evil character too, but it's hard to do them with feeling. Or to do them WITHOUT undercuttng your own theme with a) cutesy visuals b) humorous voice acting c) an obnoxious comic relief sidekick. And even if you do all those things.....there's just a tone to doing evil things, getting your way at the expense of others, that developers simply can't or won't do. Either because they worry about the market reaction or because, deep down, they just can't fully commit themselves to identify with an evil character's motivations and it shows in the stylistic and mechanical execution.

There's something to be said for not wallowing darkness, negativity and general ugliness in video games....but the counter argument is, almost no one does that, in a way that doesn't suck (Hatred.) I would easily play a game that took a serious, mature look at what it means to be bad. WHY are you bad? What does being bad get you that being good wouldn't? I'd play it just for the commitment to expressing a world view sincerely that rarely gets addressed at all.

[LoSboccacc]

In uplink you are a gray hat hacker for the most part but then the story switches and forces you to choose whether you want to save or destroy the internet

[scrdest]

In uplink you are a gray hat hacker for the most part but then the story switches and forces you to choose whether you want to save or destroy the internet

And after a certain point you can just tell missions to go to hell and rob banks until you're sleeping in your mansion while your megasupercomputer stands in a mansion next to it.

[Itnetlolor]

In uplink you are a gray hat hacker for the most part but then the story switches and forces you to choose whether you want to save or destroy the internet

And after a certain point you can just tell missions to go to hell and rob banks until you're sleeping in your mansion while your megasupercomputer stands in a mansion next to it.

You can even go meta with it, and hack the game with Cheat Engine, and just skip the middleman.

I also re-played the game where I hacked Uplink itself, got all the Uplink accounts, and depleted the bank accounts, removed credentials, and got all agents arrested for all kinds of things... and jaywalking. Oh, and after they got arrested, I labeled them as deceased.

I wear a black hat; more black than my heart.

[Graknorke]

Why aren't you getting everyone arrested for buggering herons? It is a vicious crimewave that the global police must clamp down on immediately.

[Bohandas]

I object to Tropico being on the list when Postal 2 and GTA aren't. I've played games in the Tropico series and (with the excpetion of Tropico 2 where your economy runs entirely on piracy and slavery) the optimal play style seems to be one of trying to please your citizens rather than executing dissenters and stuff.

Also, I'd like to suggest the first one and a half installments of the Destroy all Humans series for the list, as well as the free games Mastermind: World Conquerer, I Am An Insane Rogue AI, and Infectonator: World Dominator

Also invincible children is a travesty, though I suspect that's more out of trying to get past Australian censors.

Well that's an exercise in futility

EDIT:
Also, I've encountered numerous 4x games that are hard to win without starting wars for no reason.

EDIT:
Also all of the Warhammer video games (except for Blood Bowl).

EDIT:
also Pillage the Village

EDIT:
Also, Postal 2 should count. In the full version of the game you blow up a populated town with an atomic bomb just for a marketing stunt.

[Bohandas]

I don't think F3 qualifies, you have one opportunity to cooperate with the 'bad guys' i.e. Enclave but if you do so Autumn murders you for no reason because he's wacky like that Bethesda's writers have no talent

you can make a binary choice at the end of the game to do the homicidal talking computer's bidding for no reason or not, but you're still fighting da evul enclave the whole game no matter what

unless you are saying that Autumn & the Enclave are actually the good guys in Fallout 3 and it is actually the morons at the Brotherhood who are the evil ones, in that case I agree entirely

It's an odd one because the Enclave are consistently presented as the bad guys and the Brotherhood is treated as doing the right thing by opposing them. Changing sides is unexpected, late in the game, and only logically makes sense if you think that you ,being a wastelander, don't deserve to exist. However it's not really a brief flirtation with bastardom like you tend to get with a lot of BGGs it's changing sides in a way that changes the story. Now that you've refreshed my memory though you spend the entire game fighting bad guys and the only exception is a period of less than a minute directly after deciding to help them. Fallout 3 is no Bad Guy Game.

You can't side with the Enclave, but you can side with lesser villains such as the slavers or Mister Tenpenny (who's actually flagged as being even more evil than Colonel Autumn)

On that note, why aren't there any games where you get to play as a secret world power like the Illuminati, Freemasons, 4th Reich, or Scientology or whatever?

There's Illuminatus and Paranoia, though neither of those are videogames

[DwarfOfTheLand]

Check out Destroy All Humans 1-3, 3 being the latest, for PS3 and Xbone360

Pretty good game, I would buy it.

[Darkmere]

It's not in the OP but I'm lazy and didn't read the whole thing.

Rampage was pretty straightforward. You knock down buildings and kill people, civilians included, because you can. There was no real point to it other than blow stuff up. No option to be good or fight the powah. Kill, eat, smash, repeat.