Evil Review: Choices Part 1

Hello.

I'm Evil.

The subject today is choices.

Choices are becoming much more common in videogames. Choices between good and...


...I thought it would be fitting for my first review.

But to be entirely honest, I dislike games that offer the choice between good and evil.

Why? Because there is never any motive.

Why did you kill those 500 villagers in Oakvale? Why did you walk away instead of disarming that bomb? Why did you steal that hat, it's not like you're going to use it?

For the evil points, of course.

Even worse, it is such a distraction from the real story that it annoys me that they offered some choices at all. For example, in any game with choices, the main character will have absolutely no character development. They'll be an evil bastard from the start, and they'll never change.

It's entirely possible to create character development by changing your characters alignment based on the actions in the game, but when the player has to add content to the story himself, the game has failed.

Though I would personally find it interesting to explore the consequences of a measurable force of good and evil existing in a universe, especially if there were powers linked with the forces. Imagine a universe where hundreds of people die every day just to provide "Evil points" to the evil characters.

But moving away from that, most games don't understand evil properly. Fable, for example, gives you evil points for killing people and good points for helping people, fair enough, but it never gives you the chance to be cruel.

Cruel is not killing people. Cruel is watching them squirm, then killing their children and force feeding them the remains. Cruel is the evil that all of us fear and love to be.

Instead, games just provide us with a choice between pacifism and killing everyone in sight. It's not evil, it's just violent.

Knights of the Old Republic II managed to avoid this. The Dark-side Light-side meter only goes up and down, but there are actually three branches. Light-side, Dark-side, and what I like to call the "Palpatine" meter.

Characters react slightly differently whether you are on the violent version of evil or the Palpatine version. The violent serving as the normal videogame evil choice, "Kill this guy because he's pissing you off" but the Palpatine evil is much more cruel. It doesn't involve killing people meaninglessly, it involves manipulating them from the shadows without them even realizing it. Siding with both sides of a conflict, then killing the victor before they realize that this battle was yours from the beginning.

One of the reasons I love that game.

Before I end this short review, nobody ask for my opinion on Mass Effect's choice system. It is not good or evil, it is Optimistic or Cynical.

You may have noticed the "Part 1" in the title. I will be doing a part 2 tommorow. For now, goodnight.