Well, Arendt was an asshole but she nailed one thing; Evil is boring.
Tyranny is the real game to ask this question with. Going on rampages in GTA has no moral value, the npcs on the street are just filler with no, idk, semblance of humanity. Plus the game forces your hand constantly. It’s very difficult to avoid killing people in the game, among other things due to the hyper-aggressive cops and very aggressive pedestrians and drivers. The game is heavily weighted to get you to kill at least some NPCs. The missions? Also no moral value. The player has no agency so when the characters have to do something evil you’re just "would you kindly"ing through the plot.
Beth games are a bad example to run with because Beth’s “morality” is so heavy handed and often ridiculous. Like nuking Megaton is just a silly thing they, idk, threw in because it’s a chekov’s gun thing? Like if you have a gun in act one it has to go off by act III? I assume they had Megaton with it’s nuke in the center and someone on the dev team was like “Well we’ve got this tower where the player has to decide what kind of racism to do, and the owner is an asshole, what if we put in a dumb quest to set off the nuke?”.
The video author makes it seem like much more of a “choice” than it ever was in the actual game. When FOIII came out people mocked the Megaton bomb quest for how silly puppy kicking evil it was. Like it just never had any moral weight when the game came out, it was just a goofy thing. Beth did the same thing with Regulators and Talon Company. There’s a good and an evil faction that hunt you down if you get high or low karma but there’s no depth to it, they’re just random NPCs who show up and attack you. Beth did something similar with Raiders and Super Mutants. In FO I, II, and NV raiders and super mutants are people with their own motivations, goals, cultures, etc. The raiders in the og fallouts are aware that the wasteland is changing as settlements become more permanent, more organized, and this is bringing an end to the raider lifestyle. The super mutants have an honest to god utopian goal and in FOII, decades after the Super Mutant army is defeated, you can meet an old mutant who will proudly talk about his past and explain why he believed his actions were justified.
Meanwhile in Beth’s games the super mutants and raiders are just cannibal goblins with no complexity or depth at all.
Another example - In the old FO games your rep is per-town and per faction except for a few things. If you chose to join the slavers you get branded on your forehead as part of the initiation. No matter what you do after that, even if you immediately turn on the slavers and wipe them out, you’ll carry that brand and the consequences of the brand for the rest of the game. Another example: If for whatever reason you kill a child, whether you do it deliberately or they get caught in your crossfire, you’re marked as child killer forever and it has consequences. It’s not a “choices matter” moment where you picked between two options that ended up having the same outcome. It’s “did you choose to fire your weapon in the street knowing there were bystanders who could be hit?”. It’s something you’ll do endlessly during the game, but one stray bullet can change your play through without the player consciously making that decision.
The OG fallout games also have a fair number of places where you can just moderately dick people over by lying, cheating, or manipulating that aren’t “Will you give this child a lollipop or shoot them?” fake moral choices. Just little day to day unethical stuff.
The video author also misses that the Legion is completely self defeating puppy kicking evil to the point that the Devs didn’t even consider it to be a priority to finish the Legion route.
I’d say Dark Souls might actually be a good example of a compelling evil player experience. Many times throughout the games characters will point out that you’re a rampaging murder hobo wandering around murdering people and sometimes unique, beautiful creatures in pursuit of personal power. The player rarely makes any choices, the only way to interact with the game is murder, but characters will occasionally point out that you’re certainly not the good guy. But if you’re evil it’s a very uncomplicated evil. There are people who have stuff that you want so you overpower them, kill them, and take their stuff.
Kenshi might be a decent example bc the way the sandbox is set up you can do a lot of really horrid things, both intentionally and unintentionally, and it will have effects on your relationship with other factions and how things play out in the world. The game never really tells you what to do or judges you for your actions but if you go around enslaving and murdering people it’ll change how various factions see you and organically lead to consequences.
Something I heard in a DnD video about good/evil playthroughs is that the “good” are usually reactive to events unfolding by the evil. Games are prescripted, so reacting is kind of the only thing you can do.
I think there’s something to this. Since Kenshi is an unscripted wide open sandbox with simple but robust faction reputation and their famous world state system you actually can be proactive. You can make meaningful decisions and plans and the plot won’t get in your way. If you want to go beat people up and sell them to slavers you can do that. If you want to capture someone and force them to fight your guys for “training” you can do that. There’s no practical reason to put anyone in the Skin Peeler machine (okay actually there are some niche uses) but it’s there and if you want to skin peel someone you can. Even if you try to do good things by killing slavers and evil nobles it can have awful consequences; Killing the evil nobles can rapidly destabilize a region resulting in bandits, civil war, or worse. And on hte time scale that the game works in you can’t put things back together again. Kenshi actually has kind of a theme going where smashing up the existing power systems without having the ability to replace it with something will lead to destabilization and greater conflict. Things might get better some day, but it’s not going to happen for a while.
eitherway, I gotta stop ranting and get on with my day. This rant brought to you by tea!
Good Post.
Wish we got a Tyranny 2. Tyranny is kind of a small game by RPG standards but they really cooked with the setting and concept.
Yeh. I remember reading that they decided to go real deep instead of real broad bc they knew they had limited resources and wanted to really drill down on the “i’m just following orders” nature of the characters job and role.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
