When I was a kid I would always play evil characters, especially remember in KOTOR playing full dark side and the dark side options in that are fully “steal the baby’s ice cream” “kick the hungry dog” kind of evil options. Now doing those things makes me feel guilty 
DAE KRAEIA SO SMART TOTALLY BLOWS MY MIND GREY JEDIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII!!!!!?!?!?
She's not though lol
KOTOR 2 spoiler
She was both Jedi and Sith in the past, and over time she came to despise the Force and the effect it has on people and pretty much everything else - her goal is to destroy the force and let people have free will (by proxy. She doesn't care, but that would be the effect, were the death of the force not mean the death of all living beings in the galaxy). Far from a "lol fuck the light side, fuck the dark side, balance is the best" viewpoint.
She's far from perfect; a peak Machiavellian with contradictory beliefs - and focused entirely on her feud with the force, completely uncaring of the lives of the people of the galaxy. She is, however, a very fascinating character and it's a shame the money people rushed Obsidian into an early release date.
KotOR 2 is still one of my favorite games of all time.
Amazing character with stellar writing (with some of the restored content it’s even better), who is absolutely wrong. I love that she can have complex layered motivations for her actions, can cause players to question why they make certain moral choices, and still be absolutely wrong in the end. It’s great, and I feel it’s missing from a lot of game media.
When I was a kid, I used to pick all the super outlandish dialogue options just to see how far the game would accommodate absolute incoherence.
But then they stopped making games like Fallout and started making games like Mass Effect.
Nowadays I don't really have time to do novelty runs and I don't find it fun to play as an asshole so yeah, it's communism time in Disco Elysium Baay-beeeee! 
(And my Baldur's Gate 3 character is a goody-two-shoes so now Astarion won't bang me, THERE ABSOLUTELY ARE BLOODY CONSEQUENCES 
)
Hint: All games have no consequences because they are games.
guy who has never experienced carpal tunnel
But but but the psychic damage!
Counterpoint; The things you do, even in fiction, write physical changes in to your mind. Games are practice for life.
I always play Paladin because i can heal people and make them feel better and hit cops so hard THEY EXPLODE.
There was a DnD game I played a while back as a rogue with maxed charisma and smarts who focused more on white collar sorta crime and scams and stuff rather than pickpocketing and sneaking. By lugging around a suit of paladin armor that slowed me down and made me useless in combat, I tricked a village into starting a peasants crusade and went village to village building an army of religiously zealous followers and just kinda did a quest with several hundred peasants at my command.
There are like 5 games ever that are morally complex. Most games that let you choose between two sides let you pick between a faction of fascists or ineffective cultish hippies. It's rare for games to present better ideology than those.
Off the top of my head, I can only think of a handful. Disco Elysium, Fallout: New Vegas, Planescape: Torment, Frostpunk, Caves of Qud, Vampire TMB. All of those have writing that allows the player to explore what good or bad are in the right situations. DE is probably the best I've ever seen in a game, an absolute masterpiece that shows you the consequences of the bad moral choices, and yet also explores why you might choose the good ones.
I haven't played Baldur's Gate 3 yet but I'm told the writing is actually pretty good, so I'll check that out.
BG3 doesn't really do politics, and the "evil" choices are late-2000s/2010s being a dick for no reason.
I would say there's a definite theme of refugees being scapegoated by bigots and xenophobes, and those bigots and xenophobes falling into evil. Kagha, Bahl cultists, the people of Baldur's Gate, etc. are all blaming everything on the tiefling refugees. There's a definite positive theme of inclusiveness and not being close-minded
Morrowind as well, all the factions suck (except the anti slavers), and hate each other, but complex material systems of oppression and co dependence trap them in a decaying structure and have caused even the more noble institutions to be corrupted. And now that system is no longer capable of defending itself.
You may or may not be the Nerevarine, and even if you are it's unclear what that actually means and if it's prophecy or you taking it "by violence". But you can use the fact other people think you are to break the cycle.
Of course once you have there's no guarantee of anything better on the other side, you're just some guy, you know.
Broke: you are the Nerevarine, the chosen, the prophesised
Woke: you're just some guy
Bespoke: the Nerevarine was always just some guy and the Tribunal was always fated to pay for their crimes at the hand of the common man
Some of the Shin Megami Tensei games are really interesting in that regard, because even as they portray the ideologies in their super-dogmatic form and in some cases as everyone-sucks (including the status quo supporters), games like Devil Survivor 1 or Strange Journey actually have writing so good that they make choosing sides not obvious and feel like they actually have weight on the future of humanity in-universe.
Others either flop on their face (SMT IV), or have very clear biases (SMT I or II)
But hey,
SMT II
choosing the Chaos ending, allying with Lucifer and the Demons of the Abyss to destroy the Abrahamic God's flying Noah's Ark, to free the world's oppressed and left-to-their-own-misery subclasses from a theocratic, hierarchical dictatorship... leading to a world where both the mutated humans left on the surface after 1's events and the demons could co-exist in relative harmony - all while rejecting the title of the Messiah.
...is a great ending and it doesn't matter if the other two don't compare.
(I fucking love this game, I eagerly await the day when the translation of the PS1 port comes out)
Since BG3 exists within the lore of Forgotten Realms, evil isn't nearly as complex as, say, Disco Elysium.
Like sure siding with the slavers is easier than siding with the slaves or X Y Z amoral choice may give you an otherwise unobtainable reward for doing strictly the good thing, but it's not that deep.
Still, great game
I mean, in a game with no consequences, why play the bad side?
For the Sans fight
All main quest endings suck ass
Did you just describe Skyrim? (Seriously, I can't get behind the major conflict being between Nord ethnostatists and the get of fucking Septim.)
The major conflict is about killing Dragon Satan, the civil war is a side quest.
Nah I'm playing The Whispering Hillock in The Witcherino 3. Pls no spoilers
Critical support to the nationalist Nord regime in throwing off the imperialist yoke.
Death to Cyrodil!
Hmm, I dunno about this one, I think I'd take the mostly multi-ethnic Empire over the Nordic ethno-nationalist fascists who are set up to weaken the Empire by the other ethno-nationalist fascists, the Thalmor.
Critical support for the Empire?
Critical support for the Empire in their war to stop the Thalmor from dancing atop the tower and unmaking the Arena of Nirn.
We can do communism after we stop the mythopiec dream-engineers from ripping reality apart and throwing us all screaming in to the eye of Sithis.
The Empire is an extractive regime funnelling wealth into the imperial core of Cyrodil at the expense of the provinces. Not only that, but the provinces are extorted for the majority of the manpower of the imperial legions, with the officer core being made up of the Cyrodilian nobility.
The Empire knowingly permits slavery amongst it's subjects, and it's history is one of a succession of revolts.
The proto-fascist Stormcloaks are preferable to the extant fascism of the Thalmor and the mature imperial project of the Empire because it still has the potential to move in a less harmful direction, as the feudal regimes of the west and south of Skyrim do not share most of the exclusionary value of the northern holds.
Tamriel is not a capitalist country, the Empire is not characterized by a peculiar imperial extraction regime, just a continental system of legal suzerainty and tributaries ala the Ming or Tang. bethesda is very confused which vibes they wanted to evoke, so they're aesthetically romanesque, but the content of client kings and psuedo-feudalism is not Roman whatsoever. they're even on-paper against slavery, the most roman thing ever.
Pretty sure they abolished Slavery following the Red Year in Morrowind, as the Dres that were the biggest reserve of support for slavery were all eaten by the Argonians when they bulked up on Hiist sap so the Hlallu king had enough influence to end the practice without the possibility of a Dres-Redoran-Indoril uprising.
Also, Ulfrick is a huge dork and is not good enough at break-dancing to defeat the Thalmor in the one arena that truly matters. He's also presumably racist towards monkeys, and we're gonna need the Imga if we're going to pull this off. Even with Numidium Tiber Septim could only force a draw with the old Altmer. What chance do we have without a bunch of ballet-doing gorillas?
I really think our best chance is quickly putting down the Stormcloak revolt then using the death of Emperor Mede to steer a charismatic Bosmer leader on to the throne, then use mixed loyalties in Valendwood as a lever to break Elsweyr off from the Dominion. If the Empire can demonstrate that it's a credible challenger to the Dominion we can probably get the Hist on board purely through shared interest in maintaining the status quo of reality, then start constructing Battlespires in the northner parts of the Tamriel in preparation of eventually invading Summerset Isle from the one direction they're not expecting; ~~space~~ Oblivion!
If we can figure out where Vivec fucked off to and assemble a strategic mythic alliance of Paarthunax, Vivec, the Mane, the Dragon Born, the Nerevarine if they're still around, and whatever other quasi-divine pro-existing legends are wandering around I think we have a good chance of yelling "TAMRIEL EXISTS" loud enough to deafen the Aldmeri high wizards to all other possibilities.
The proto-fascist Stormcloaks are preferable to the extant fascism of the Thalmor and the mature imperial project of the Empire because it still has the potential to move in a less harmful direction
We're gonna push King Ulfric left, any day now he'll allow the Dunmer out of the ghettos of Windhelm and the Khaijit to trade inside the walls!
Nah the nords are like the nazi hungarians in the 50's trying to start an ethnostate. The imperials are like the soviets rolling 
in to quash the uprising. The imperials are also in a cold war conflict with a much greater enemy (The elven ethnostate)
Also this is all a bit of course. All the countries are feudal at the most. I prefer the empire because they're the only "not-ethnostate" group in the conflict. I also think the Stormcloaks are shown to be hypocritical throughout the game by way of Markath having it's own ethnic minority wanting independence from Skyrim, but the nords - despite being these rugged freedom wanters, seeking to throw off the imperial yoke - instead choose to suppress this group.
Because the evil path is the one they write after writing the story and it's never dedicated enough resources and it honestly kinda sucks most of the time
I agree. The american storyline in Black ops: Cold war was incredibly boring.
Plus evil guys tend to not let you cooperate with them very much. They might begrudgingly be neutral to you but they don’t follow you from area to area with game long plot lines like the deep gnomes, tieflings, Halsin, etc. They are more like NPCs that just stand in the lair.
Minthara basically doesn’t have a plot line or story except “I’m a hot drow you can have sex with”. She should have some type of vengeance she’s after that is more compelling and goes through the game.
Evil is definitely underwritten, there’s no social evil route. You can go full mass murderer killing everything in sight, and you can act unpredictably and in a cruel way. But you cannot really be a villain in a way that intersects with the story except for the handful of major plot decisions where you can act wildly out of character and do something majorly dastardly for the whole world.
Wish there was more opportunities to be a thriving piece of shit sellout, a sniveling cowardly henchman, a manipulative mastermind amassing a huge army and fortune, etc. Why can’t I form a gang and take over a huge chunk of Baldur’s Gate territory to sell drugs, etc
I got a game recently where you play the begrudging assistant of the bad guys. It's one of the few games where going with the outright evil choices rewards you heavily. I can't bring myself to do it.
Every DND game I end up just trying to do comunism. Evil king needs to be replaced with a good king? Nah, hand out rings of free food/water to the peasants until the monarchy collapses.
creating a union of mages to pump out Power Word Kill scrolls and distributing them to the masses
When I played Goldeneye 007 as a kid, I would massacre all the civillians and scientists, reset the map, then do it again. 
I agree with the last commentor in this old tumblr screen. I don't enjoy being cruel to others, even just video game characters. I made myself once for Dragon Empire and just felt bad since I'm neither a sadist nor a massochist.
Yes, they are not real and I'm not judging those that do evil runs. My brain isn't wired that way, however, and is prone to feeling empathy, even towards the non-sentient, scripted bundles of pixels and data.
It turns out when the options are Comically Evil and Generally Decent, most people will choose the latter. The Mass Effect devs reported that 90% of people chose the "good" route in that game.
The problem is they BARELY actually let you do self-interested evil. It's all just pointless cruelty, often with nothing but downsides. Doing bad shit should push you towards doing more bad shit because people stop trusting you
BG3 just needed more time to cook unfortunately. The endings all suck, not because they are bad endings it's because they don't exist. It just ends suddenly. There's a massive hole of missing content right at the end and it's not hard to write, everyone knows what they want to happen with their party and maybe a bittersweet twist. Act 3 just really starts to break down part way through it, despite it being quite beautiful of an area. You can tell content was hacked out of it, there's weird missing chunks and it doesn't play like Acts 1 or 2 at all
Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
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