> "Best RPG evar!!!1!!one!!" > looks inside > All main quest endings suck ass

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

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.

I always play Paladin because i can heal people and make them feel better and hit cops so hard THEY EXPLODE.

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.

I mean, in a game with no consequences, why play the bad side?

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.)

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 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.

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.

When I played Goldeneye 007 as a kid, I would massacre all the civillians and scientists, reset the map, then do it again.

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

That's why I never finish my genocidal empire Stellaris playthroughs, it just feels bad, I'd rather implement full galactic communism.