Why is it Hard to Be Evil in Video Games?

It's hard to do an evil playthrough when all the truly hate-able characters are marked as essential and thus can not be killed.

Good character: Ok, I'll help this Town to get rid of some bandits for absolutely nothing. -You get valuable loot from the bandits -Earn reputation with the Town -Unlock more quests Bad character: I won't help this Town because i'm evil -You get nothing -You lose -Good day, sir

In Fallout 3 you can actually max out your karma by selling slaves, and donating half the caps to the church. You'll get rich and get positive karma at the same time

The issue with evil playthroughs is that most directors/writers can not write a story that is multidimensional for an evil player. It’s almost always just being a terrorist with no conflict. You can’t grow your character because the story was written to be for hero’s, and the player given the option to be a killer.

Being evil in video games is usually being a cartoonishly evil mustache twirling villain

I think a lot of writers just make the bad route into the stupid route. Real evil is not just randomly murdering people to your own detriment. Real evil is enriching yourself to the detriment of others.

Two words: Soul Nomad by Nippon Ichi Studios. You can only do the evil playthrough after completing the game normally, and oh boy, that context makes a huge difference. You only need to make a few decisions at the start that aren't really evil, they're just not overly self-sacrificial and altruistic. Then it catapults you into a story that very explicitly changes because you're not showing up at places at the time you normally would have. While joke characters and affable goofball villains all become serious characters throwing aside their differences and conflicts to stop you, just making it to a certain town a few months later than you would have in your normal playthrough throws you a little context you weren't ready for. It makes you stop think about half the "good guys" you were helping before, and maybe decide that while you might be doing it for the wrong reasons, you might be doing the right thing when you slaughter them. You're evil, but not for no reason, or a stupid reason, and until the predictable out-of-control plot spiral into eating god that you really should expect from the Japanese by now, you can kinda jam with the evil route.

I see a lot of people talking about how being evil is unrewarding because being good gives you better loot, but that’s such a one dimensional view. In many rpgs, most players default to making the best choices because it’s a power fantasy. Saving people against difficult odds, and doing the right thing in a world that’s expecting you to do the opposite is often the most narratively rewarding choice. Being evil in games isn’t nearly as popular because sane people don’t interpret going on murder sprees and being an asshole to everybody as power fantasies. Role playing as a mustache twirling bad guy can be hilarious, but in doing so you’re refusing to meet the material at face value, and you’re treating it as a joke. Games with really good writing make the bad decisions justifiable in some way, by having the ends justify the means, or character flaws drive worse outcomes. In other cases, there’s no one best answer to a problem, and you have to weigh the pros and cons of each decision against your own moral compass. These are the best ways of writing evil characters, but lots of games aren’t well written enough to actually pull that kind of writing off.

For me the short version is that "evil" choices in RPGs usually boil down to "vicious self-destructive idiot", plus there's rarely ever any worthwhile rewards on evil paths anyway. Also, the good choice is usually too easy and too obvious. Often it involves going on guilt-free killing sprees pro-bono, yet the loot you get is worth more than the reward you turned down anyway. So the player gets their dopamine hit for being the good guy, while sacrificing nothing.

I think the issue people have is how they define evil in games. I play a lot of Lawful Evil characters in games which, to me, usually means that I'm not a good person, but I have lines I will never cross normally. It seems like many people's idea of evil is just psycopathic murderer and nothing else

Evil option in theory: Oh you want me to save you from bandits? Give me a very big reason to. Evil option in practice: Oh you want me to save you from bandits? Ok, I'll kill you myself. It's almost like rpgs just want to force players on the "selfless hero" path whether they like it or not

The Bioshock games are a great example of the Evil Choice being "Bettern't". Harvesting little sisters grants you more Adam in the short term, but once you account for every gift you get for Rescuing them, the morally good choice is actually more mechanically beneficial to the player as well.

I think the real reason evil doesn't often feel that fun in RPGs is because the choices are immoral as opposed to amoral. The evil choice is always explicitly cruel and malicious, as opposed to simply selfish and apathetic. And like... No one wants to really feel like they are actively a bad person.

I think the "good vs evil" duality suffers from "good" being the point of reference no matter what. Good is meant to make things better and often unambiguously helps the people/place you're in; it's clearly the "right" option. Meanwhile, the "evil" option isn't an alternative viewpoint, it's just "I don't want to do the good choice" option, often with some money or other reward offered as a weak attempt to prop it up. It feels shallow and one-dimensional, because it's not a viable worldview but rather a petty "I don't want to be a good guy." You're not choosing to be evil as much as rejecting being good, and you can see how lopsided the results are.

The only game I can remember that not only does evil right, but does it fun, is Dishonored. Dishonored is an immersive sim where you are given a skill tree with various powers and gadgets you can employ in many different ways to dispatch your enemies and traverse the environment. It makes you feel like a demigod, summoning swarms of rats to eat your enemies alive, fling them to their deaths with powerful gusts of wind, and even bend time and possessing their bodies to place them in their own lines of fire, for example. You have a pistol, a blade, a crossbow with different ammunition types, grenades, mines, etc. But there is a catch. Dishonored's morality system is tied to your body count. The more you kill the worse the ending, so in order to do “good” you must avoid bloodshed. But the most powerful abilities at your disposal are quite lethal, and your non-lethal options are usually ill-suited for combat, so a low chaos run inevitably involves stealth, completing optional objectives to avoid murder and a quite a bit more patience. Fortunately the DLCs and the sequel added a few more non-lethal options to help you achieve that. But Low Chaos runs are still the most challenging ways to play the game, as opposed to wreaking havoc and killing enemies in gnarly and creative ways. And that’s what makes the “evil” in this game both fun and believable. Evil is more often about opportunism rather than pure sadism. People do bad things because it’s easier and more profitable rather than causing suffering for suffering's sake. And the abilities you get in Dishonored makes completing the objectives easier indeed. But abusing those abilities carry a price, not to you, but to the world around you.

When a game forces you to choose between two evils, like battlefield 4’s campaign forcing you to sacrifice either Irish (your long-time friend) or Hannah (a female refugee fighter who joined your squad) to end the mission, you lose the ability to choose self-sacrifice as squad leader, and thus all good options are taken. Hannah has been helpful the whole time, providing useful information, and Irish has been your best friend. Who do you sacrifice? I didn’t want to kill either, so I never finished the campaign. Apparently though, EA said that Hannah was supposed to die, because Irish is in a sequel game, Battlefield 2042.

I think evil options not allowing for some pragmatism also has an effect. Like, you can be evil and still save a village from some bandits, especially if you're a Lawful Evil character who still believes in some semblance of order. You get loot, and a village in your debt that can be useful for your purposes. Another thing I think is that it's harder to justify an evil playthrough if you're a naturally empathetic person who has difficulty stomaching the thought of hurting innocent people just to "reject" the obvious good option. People don't often run on the good or evil binary; there's tons of nuance that video games just don't usually replicate effectively, if at all.

I think the main problem with being evil in video games is that so many games being evil is a rewardless options which doesn't effect the story and is just a side activity of killing everyone and nothing else

There is much simpler answer - being evil is boring because most of the time the "evil" routes only exist to meet the quota in the first place. Evil options are barely functional, you gain nothing by being evil, and you loose all the lore you'd get by talking with people instead of killing them, so it's ultimately less content than you'd get by playing good.

There's something extremely satisfying about exploring a world and seeing positive changes around you, or the absolute heartbreak of when something you thought was the right choice has horrific consequences.