I’d like to ask for some advice about writing evil choices in my wip project. I’m having some trouble writing them since it kinda it’s not the tone/story I want to tell. I know I could just not write them, focus on the story as I envision it and then problem solved, but still… I think having evil choices gives more meaning to the good choices. And also these games are all about choosing, so I kinda think it’d be good I avoid railroading a good path if possible. Plus, my (reaaaally) early testers all said they wanted evil choices xDD
The only solution I’ve come to is to kinda write the game with the good path and endings, maybe the gray too, and then after that, write the evil paths (or decide if I’m writing them).
Have you guys faced similar struggles? Could you share some advice? Thanks in advance.
I’ve run into a similar issue as a new IF writer. One thing that helped me was reframing “evil choices” as “choices that make sense to this character in this situation,” rather than trying to write a path where the player is just cartoonishly evil (unless you want that).
A lot of the most interesting darker routes come from understandable motivations like fear, selfishness, ambition, resentment, desperation, loyalty to another person, etc. Players often enjoy those choices because they feel believable and not because they’re trying to be a mustache-twirling villain (again, unless you want that).
I don’t think every game needs a fully developed evil path. If the story you want to tell is fundamentally about heroism or redemption, it’s okay for the game to focus on those themes. Agency doesn’t necessarily mean supporting every possible moral direction equally. Your idea of writing the good and gray paths first also sounds sensible to me. Once the core story is working, it may be easier to identify places where darker choices naturally fit. Sometimes the best “evil” options emerge from existing scenes rather than being planned from the start.
One other thing I’d consider is whether your testers actually want evil choices specifically, or whether they want meaningful freedom. Those aren’t always the same thing. Sometimes giving players opportunities to be selfish, ruthless, dishonest, pragmatic, etc. etc., is enough to satisfy that desire without needing a full villain route.
This is great advice and to me the crux of the point - what are the themes of the story and who is the MC navigating that story?
Putting aside the question of evil for a moment - in my mind, the different options an MC has are opportunities for us as authors to reflect different angles on those themes.
A superhero story about corporate-owned superheroes, a la the Boys, where the MC is one such hero? Maybe their options define where they fall between idealistic hero, professional who sees heroing as a job, sellout who loves the attention, and seething hero supremacist - all viable angles in the world that still work for a singular character.
A big political intrigue story where the MC is a rookie politician? They aren’t likely to be kicking many puppies publicly - maybe their less moral options relate to taking crooked bribes, or prioritizing their loved ones over their constituents, or pushing for dangerous foreign policy angles to get international allies.
As long as the different lenses each MC can put on the story a) suit the story you want to tell and b) are things you actually want to write, I don’t think you can go too far wrong.
Instead of a good/evil dichotomy try thinking instead about trade-offs. What should the main character prioritise in tough situations?
If you want evil choices then the situation needs to be more desperate. The evil choices should be the path of least resistance.
I have a choice in my game where you can either stay behind to help out a city after a disaster or you can get the hell out of there. If you stay, you lose a year of game time, you’re locked into a long and painful and unskippable sequence where you only very infrequently can make choices, and later on it significantly limits the time you can spend with your family and the characters you care about because you were gone for so long and your time is now quite limited. In return, you get nothing.
If you leave, you get +5 relationship with a key character, you get +5 health as a reward, and you get to spend more time with the people you love before the climax of the game hits.
There’s no good or evil choice, but one of them requires selflessness and the other does not.
I played Bioshock where the “good” option is more rewarding than the bad, and felt unsatisfied. I played Mass Effect where the fantasy of Renegade is making the tough choices, except Paragons can have their cake and eat it too and everyone wins and Renegade can eat worms. I played Baldur’s Gate 3 where the “evil” choices rob you of half the game’s best content and make your character worse off overall. These are my biggest criticisms of three great games and it’s all the same criticism: cowardice!!
Doing good is taxing and painful and dirty and tiresome and unappreciated! The point is that we do it anyway because it’s the right thing to do!
I may be misremembering but I actually thought Bioschock landed this really well. iirc, being good makes the gameplay harder but the ending better, which is pretty realistic IMO. It’s just natural that when you put the effort into sacrificing for others that people tend to like you better. It’s not all work with no rewards (especially if you believe in something like the afterlife).
Can’t really disagree about Mass Effect though. KotOR I think did a lot of things better, including some of the light/dark side mechanics. There are real benefits to being evil in that game, and it even comes with a different skillset (one skill in particular makes the final boss sooooo much easier), but you still lose some allies in the end if you’re going to go full Anakin. But a satisfying ending of its own where you feel super powerful.
I am reminded of Yoda’s response when Luke asks him if the dark side is more powerful, and Yoda’s like, “Easier? Yes. Faster? Yes. More powerful? No.”
Evil is expedient. It’s a short term benefit. It’s lazy and cowardly and it does come with consequences, though you may not see them for some time, or even in this life. There’s a lot to play with there as a writer, and many different ways this could go.
Lame. It should have made the gameplay harder then. Full approval of the ending itself (still got warm fuzzies over a decade later), but I agree that there should be an added challenge to doing the right thing.
I tend to find ‘evil’ options stop at the first, possibly a superficial version of the second (e.g. evil person you side with says thanks for the help dude), but rarely anything substantive. Conversely, the downsides of good options tend to be superficial (e.g. the way a couple of Paragon good deeds can backfire in ME, but in ways that basically amount to codex entries in ME3) whilst the upsides are more likely to be meaningful. So the opportunity cost of evil feels too high.
I can guess how this happens, too - most players prefer playing good characters, so feedback from testers is going to skew overwhelmingly towards ‘that evil thing looked cool, can good characters do it too?’ BG3 is a great example of this - Minthara was a unique companion for evil runs of act 1, and arguably an evil player’s biggest content / narrative reward before the end of act 2 (and at the cost of losing a lot of other content!), then feedback led to her becoming available on good runs.
It takes a lot of conviction, or some very clever structuring (plus a lot of time / effort arguably better spent elsewhere), to resist making a change that will objectively make 90% of players happier in order to protect the payoff of choices made by the remaining 10%.
Arguably this is a bit of a feedback loop - I do think players are trained not to expect great outcomes in games from being evil - but I suspect even a perfectly balanced game would still see a massive majority of people playing heroes. Maybe a reason for optimism in the world…
I think this is a phenomenal take. At the end of the day know one wants to just feel like their the bad guy outright. There is usually a reason someone takes the “evil” or “bad” path something thats enticing enough that they can abandon the “good” choice. And that could be like you pointed out (because it requires less sacrifice and less suffering). I’m actually gonna try to keep that in mind and try to stick to it while working on my work. Thanks. Haven’t played the games you mentioned, but I feel like the Bioshock feeling you have is something I can relate to. There’s a WIP novel right now that is my favourite or at the very least top 3. And the ONLY issue I have with it, is that only the morally “right” options are rewarding. So a lot of the times only one route feels like its worth enjoying.
I like this commentary a lot. When I write opportunistic or ruthless paths, I think a lot about what might tempt the PC to take this easier or more rewarding route. I generally offer major material rewards (and often social ones as well) for players who do this, eg in Honor Bound the way to get the biggest promotion is to take one of these pragmatic paths at the expense of some relationships with those who disapprove of such actions; in some cases in my games you can potentially keep it secret from people who won’t like it, so if you play your cards right you can get away with it altogether.
I think allowing these kinds of paths is fun for players who enjoy being ruthless, and it also makes selfless paths feel more meaningful because it’s a very conscious choice rather than the default.
I think it depends on what sort of story/experience you’re trying to craft. If you’re writing something more on the dark and gritty side, having good deeds go unrewarded could be a powerful way of showing that. But not every writer wants to create that kind of story; some will want to create something more uplifting, where good deeds reap good in kind even if they still come at a cost. I would put BG3 and Mass Effect in that category: they’re stories in part about how cruelty, greed and ruthlessness might reap short-term rewards, but those rewards are ultimately hollow; the rewards of kindness and generosity are greater in the long run. Maybe you think that’s naïve, but at that point it’s a philosophical disagreement, not a game design one.
Yes, I’m experiencing some struggles of my own. Not just between good or evil, but between assertive and passive, or daring and cautious.
The way I think of it is this: the game I’m making is a reflection of the player’s choices. The MC in my story is THEIR avatar, one that should be given the opportunity to reflect the choices they would make. If they’d be the aggressive type, then I should include a choice that reflects that. If they’d rather play it safe, they should do that too.
BUT (and it’s a big but) I’m the one that controls the consequences of that choice based on the story I want to tell. If they want to act terribly when I don’t want them to, I have to let them make that choice and punish them for it
I tend to disagree with that attitude – yes, absolutely it’s your game. And I think most people will agree that not only do they not want to write murderhobo paths, they also don’t want to attract murderhobo players.
However – you are the ultimate authority of the game world; nothing happens without your say-so. And as such, you have a responsibility not to be a tyrant.
If you’re going into it with the attitude that you intend to “punish” your players for their choices – that’s a red flag.
Consequences for actions are one thing – in fact a good thing, because it makes player’s choices more meaningful when they actually affect the story.
But when you when you have an agenda? That’s limiting the story they’re allowed to play and telling them that their choices are wrong, their playstyle is wrong, and possibly even that they as a person, are in the wrong.
Real people have different values. They often have different moral codes – always ensure you are not attempting to overwrite somebody else’s with your own: you wouldn’t be too pleased if you were made to live by one you with which you disagree.
If you’re writing a choice with the intent to punish a player because you don’t want them to act a certain way – everyone might be better off if you don’t write it, because that’s not giving the appropriate respect to the agency of other individuals, and their inherent humanity.
We’re not talking evil for the sake of evil, like murder-someone-in-the-street-on-a-whim. But if you give someone a ‘hard choice,’ with one route you’ve already decided is ‘correct,’ and that the others are lesser and people who pick them should be made to feel the pain for being so much lesser, that’s bad design: it’s Choice of Games, for a reason.
It’s taking effort to put together other paths. So if some paths are ‘not valid’, and not satisfying to play for the person who made the choice to pick them (again, we’re talking tough choices, not ‘deliberately being evil with that as its sole motivation’) — why go to all that work?
I don’t really even think about “evil”, as a writer, evil is usually merely the pathological result of something logical that was taken too far. For example, your character might decide to use more force than necessary in a fight because he fears for the life of someone close to them whose survival is directly at risk by the other person, and as a result the MC maims or kills the attacker. Is this an evil choice? Hard to say, you could argue that it might’ve been evil or just better safe than sorry. But keep acting this way, and you will start assuming the worst about people and being needlessly cruel - as that happens, the world and other people will actually become meaner in reaction to your viciousness - now you hate everyone more and more and want more power to either dominate or destroy them all. Now we’re at the evil point
Yeah I do think it’s good to provide players with rewards no matter what they choose, but the rewards for “bad” choices is going to have a different flavour. Like if I’m going to give players the chance to go on a drunken ramble to the kingdom’s most important people, I’m going to warn them that on a gameplay level this is not a good idea, but on a role play level I aim to make it a fun time. And at least one RO will like your ramble so there’s that (as a fairly specific example).
Similarly if they choose do do evil things, I want to give them the reward I assume they’re looking for: feeling powerful, in control, feared. They’re going to lose some relationship stats along the way but they’ll get what they wanted.
There Will Be Blood I think is a great example of this kind of writing: Daniel Plainview gets everything he aimed for in the end but you can also tell he’s kinda lonely and miserable. But like lonely, miserable, and mega rich and powerful.
Sometimes the biggest downside of being evil is getting exactly what you want.
So where is the difference between consequence and punishment? If you betray a shady ally, and that robs you from powerful support, it is obviously a consequence, but doesn’t it also read as a punishment?
Precisely this! You look at Postive/Negative character arcs in writing and the Want versus Need – just because you got what you wanted, does not mean it actually put you where you wanted to be.
@LiliArch , that’s an excellent question. I believe you would best manage this by trying to carefully balance the ‘feel’ of those consequences – does it seem like an outsized reaction and the author wagging their finger and saying “You are bad and you should feel bad,” or a reasonable result of what you did, that was effectively communicated could be a possible outcome? Also, were you able to accomplish in the story what you made the choice to try, or at least get the flavor you were presumably after by going there?
You don’t necessarily have to succeed at something (common on stats-based checks), in order to get a meaningful result. There are some choices I choose to repeat knowing full-well it’s considered a ‘failure’ – simply because I find it to be the more satisfying outcome.
So I was trying to think on whether there was an answer other than ‘it depends’ (on how it’s written, players’ expectations, usw.) that could be generalized to help judge ‘badness’ of consequences.
So I slapped together a quick set of criteria and took a brief glance to check the abbreviation didn’t say something it shouldn’t and ah, crud. We’ve got to use the ORC model.
Maybe that’s appropriate. ‘Don’t be an Orc and bash on your players’
When assessing possible responses to the choices on the same decision menu, consider:
Outcome:
How does this play out? Are the players’ wishes taken seriously?
Reward:
What do they get out of the result? Do they achieve success or something else they seek – do players receive something they value?
Cost:
What do players miss out on by not taking an alternate route? Are costs/rewards comparable; or is another path literally more rewarding? If one of them is more powerful, is that balanced by trade-offs within that path to get it?
If it’s a case of success vs fail, the failure response should provide a compelling outcome, not attempt to induce shame for ‘not being good enough.’
In most books, a protagonist is expected to fail (to overcome the antagonist) many times, in order to tell an interesting narrative (until they achieve success, shortly after which it ends). Present the reader something engaging though they miss out on the prize.
I mean, my problem here is that I write thrillers, which means I deal in incomplete intel, shifting allegiances, and unforeseen consequences. The point is that you won’t know what will happen, beyond the most direct effects (if that).
It’s mostly individuals reacting to what you’ve done (or what they’d be doing anyway but you didn’t know what their actual agenda was), so I’d like to think it at least follows logically once you have all the pieces (unless it’s just the character having weird priorities).
So take that shady ally: they claim to be on your side, but their reputation suggests otherwise. Are you going to trust a professional liar’s word? If you do and they’re lying, they could do a lot of damage to your side, but if they’re genuine, they could be a lot of help. If you’re not trusting them, and they’re lying, you’ll protect your side; if they’re genuine, they obviously can’t pull you out of fire in the field if they’re stuck in a prison.
