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So-called "Evil" in games
spydermr2
Member Posts: 336
I'm looking specifically at WoW and EQ2, since they both are designed around concepts that separate the game into two sides, supposedly aligned with "good" and "evil". EQ2 offers up Queynos as a nauseatingly goody-goody city, and Freeport as the dirty evil place. WoW has the Alliance (good) and Horde (evil).
But beyond having grime on the walls and having people speak "gruffly", what is it in Freeport that's evil? What can any player do that's actually evil? Not much. Can't be a thief who steals from vendors (unless a specific quests enables that power as part of the quest). Can't be a thief who stalks NPCs and certainly can't stalk or steal from other players. Can't be a warrior who delights in taking "trophies" from his kills, or anything else that would be actually "evil" or at least "darker" behavior.
WoW? Please. They even take most of the Horde races and make them "misunderstood" instead of evil. Even the Undead have a "misunderstood evil" quality, since you can't play the really evil Undead, you can only play the Undead who are fighting the really evil Undead.
Let's be blunt: I know, people are going to argue many different points. Stealing from other players would make people angry, boo-hoo. Why shouldn't we able to develop our skills and steal from each other (or have the chance to, if we mastered pickpocketing), if only on PvP servers? It would certainly add to the roleplaying aspect of being a THIEF, for crying out loud. If we're going to offer the opportunity to serve or play Evil races/characters, we need to at least be doing things that are believably evil in nature.
And yes, from the conservative nation comes: but that would encourage people to BE evil, because they PLAY evil. Um, no. Sorry. Never once had an urge to go out and rob someone, after literally decades of playing RPGs as thieves. Never once had an urge to gnaw on someone's bones, after playing Undead characters. Try targetting the real source of society's evils and not the simple, easy targets like games that are only peripherally involved and involved more as a facet of the problem and not the problem itself: poor parenting, a social environment that doesn't encourage people to give a whit about one another, a congress that passes laws and a justice system that says you're not responsible for your own behavior. Games, no matter how vile we make them, don't make killers -- they may offer an outlet, or exacerbate an already-existing inclination to behave that way, but they won't take a well-adjusted person and make them not well-adjusted.
Nor does that mean that I want to be able to play an Undead character and graphically go around gnawing on other people's limbs, brains, etc. We can create games like EQ2's Freeport and WoW's Undead (or Horde) that actually get to behave in ways that are evil or at least believably bad. First and foremost on the list are having thieves who can actually STEAL things (who would have thought that??). And again, I don't mean the very limited times during specific quests -- I mean an interactive world where the player can choose to use their pickpocketing ability on NPCs and PCs. Or where that same Thief (sticking with this one motif, but it applies in principle to all other vocations) can sneak into a palace and steal something (of course, that would require that we actually put items into the gameworld, as in being able to see the sword we drop, etc. -- which rules out EQ2 or WoW).
Anyway. Just my rant for today. I love how "evil" Freeport is supposed to be, and how utterly NOT evil it is.
Oh, yeah. Very interested in hearing from PvPer's, who seem to love bashing each other and having the ability to bash each other at a whim, on the concept of actually enabling a thief's skills in the gameworld at the player's choice -- like, since you exist in a gameworld where you can just walk up and bash someone, then you also exist in a gameworld where a trained thief might try to lift your purse. ???
Comments
In general, i agree with you. Evil races/classes should be able to do "evil" things.
On a specific, i don't agree with a "thief" character being able to pickpocket items/money from other players freely. I'm not saying it should be ruled out, but more on the side of limited instead of free. I certainly don't want to play a game where all the high lvl "thief" characters pickpocket all the lowbies, preventing them from making money. And then almost everyone will be a "thief" character because of that ability. If it is balanced, and limits were imposed upon it, then i'd be all for it. Say there was a certain lvl +/- your own limit imposed (i.e. lvl 30 could pickpocket lvl 26-34) to protect the low lvl's. And one of the "good" races has an ability to combat it (don't really know exactly how, but this would be to balance the classes out).
This is just my opinion though..
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The pen is mightier than the sword, and authority is mightier than the pen, but the sword is mightier than authority.
If you can't beat 'em, hold 'em off 'till you come up with a better plan.
I have noticed the same thing about many of the online games available today. One of the things that really seemed to bother me was the whole 'you can't attack me cause i'm in a non-pvp area'. If you are going to have 'evil' characters in a game then allow them to be just that without restrictions.. let me clarify.. not without restrictions, but with consequences.
The best example i have found to date is eve online. If you want to be a pirate, you can. If you want to be a carebear, you can. You have to play either one fairly smart though. PVP can occur anywhere in the game... whether you are in 'secure space' (means that the 'police' in the game are there to protect players who are attacked by other players) or in unsecure space. I've seen pirates come into systems and engage people fully knowing that they will be attacked by an army of police ships, but the fact remains that you CAN attack someone if you choose too. You ship will probably end up as space dust (i know from personal experience
), but you just might get away with it. Thievery is a valid option too.. not going in to that, but it is there. As well as many other open ended options.
Open gaming = ie.. mimics real world scenarios, is what we all really want i think. Just playing it safe all the time can get a bit boring. Having other people around you that could just as easily help or hurt you makes online gaming more interesting for everyone, and i hope that is where most online games are headed.
Playing an evil or good character is fun, but being told you can only act the way you want in specific instances is too limiting. It's why i decided not to play many games. I wanted the freedom to choose.
Yar!
Caeruleus Ardea
The Black Fleet
Horde arent evil. Well maybe undead, but they shouldnt even be horde.
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Playing evil in a game certainly won't magically change you to an evil person in real life, that's for sure. A healthy mind can seperate fiction from reality, plus the action on a virtual world isn't actually evil since it has no real consequences.
However, there are gameplay issues to consider. The more bad effects your actions have on another player the more problems may arise from bad sentiments, like griefing. Killing another player in PvP is fine, he just has to resurrect and perhaps lose a small amount of cash (for item repairs). However, when a player loses something he has invested a lot of time in, then the situation changes. Imagine losing a sword it took you 5 raiding hours to acquire or having your character perma-dying. Is there any fun at all in that? A game is supposed to be fun for all the participants, therefore a balance between realism and gameplay requirements is needed.
Many ideas that increase realism sound nice at the beginning, especially for the roleplayers. But do we really want that much realism in games, to the extent that the game can cause bad sentiments, failing its role to entertain us?
Apart from that, I do agree that most games fail to give a pure evil role to certain races. Sure, dark elves hate every other race, the Sebilisians dream of their old superiority and the trolls are higher than some races in the food chain, but no gameplay elements reflect that, only their racial background. Some initial quests in EQ2 do ask that you do evil acts (including theft from NPCs), but in high levels most content tends to be the same for both Qeynosians and Freeport residents.
On the other hand, I do not like the whole epic "forces of Good and Evil" ideas, I prefer a certain sense of realism concerning opposing factions. In EQ2's example, the Dark Elves understand their evil nature and gladly accept it. They know they're evil and they like it. That kind of fantasy is not my taste, I prefer worlds where good and evil are relative, the opposing factions have different points of view. Anarchy Online is a good example. Heck, even in Star Wars, a Stormtrooper doesn't think he's evil, from his point of view he is fighting for a just cause (due to the whole Imperial propaganda). Of course, in Star Wars case, the good and evil sides are clear for the reader.
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I wasn't trying to limit the discussion to thieves, just using them as the easiest to exemplify. Nor would I want a 100% "free" environment where it's all-go free-for-all. I like the concept of thieves being able to actually CHOOSE to use their skills without having to be on a specific quest. I like the idea of thieves being able to pickpocket shopkeepers AND PCs -- but I'd also advocate a robust consequence system at the same time. Police/guards should be summonable if, for instance, you, the thief, "fail" your effort. It should also, to use current vernacular (and WoW's specifics), automatically turn on your PvP flag. There should also be a system that for lack of better words "puts your poster on the post office wall" the more you get caught. But that's the point of all things: the challenge of doing, the skill, learning for yourself... and (unlike WoW's "honor" system) actually having consequences for your actions should be part of any and EVERY RPG out there. That's one of my biggest gripes with WoW: the death system isn't a deterrent, a thing to teach you to pay attention to your environment and THINK before acting, it's such a lightweight-to-nonexistent penalty that I, at least, was, when last playing, actually USING a deliberate death as a form of moving rapidly across zones. That's utterly inane -- and it's probably why so many people play WoW, it's the easiest to get into and has the LEAST consequences-for-actions.
But there's more to this than just thieves. Freeport LOOKS awesome, looks the part. But there's nothing there. I'd like to see you be able to get on the wrong side of the myriad "opposing groups" in Freeport, be stalked by NPC assassins if you get too much attention, etc. The problem now is that "evil" is just a static look, an appearance.
Anyway. More fodder for the conversation.
Horde are not evil
The Forsaken hmmz still don't see how they ended up in the horde anyway 
I totally agree with the OP for the most part, two small quibbles:
1. Giving thieves an entire route for item acquisition that isn't available to any other class/ archetype would tend to overpower them. Would it be fun? Yes! Would it make sense? Yes! Would I play a game where that was an option? Yes! Will a dev ever do that? No, probably not.
2. While I agree that the hoard is in general pretty fluffy in WoW, a few of the undead quests do actually make you feel pretty evil. Especially the quests that involve trying to develop a poison that will wipe out all the humans in Azeroth. Yes, it is a pretty lighthearted cartoony sort of evil, but I can't think of too many other MMORPGs where anything I did felt even remotely evil.
I'd like to see a MMORPG where I have the freedom to commit atrocities that I do in say, Morrowind, Fable, or GTA. Of course if randomly killing people for no real reason counts as an atrocity, many MMORPGs offer you that freedom. But somehow it doesn't really feel like anything you do makes any real difference in most games. I can hit a newbie town and kill guards and vendors till my mouse finger freezes up and my eyes start bleeding, and it still doesn't feel like I've done anything particularly "evil" except make myself a big pain in the ass to newbies. And that's not evil, that's just being stupid and annoying (imo).
I don't want to write this, and you don't want to read it. But now it's too late for both of us.
The only thing is, if you have a choice been having to be a good guy that follows all the rules and a bad guy that can do what ever he wants, what are 90% of players going to choice?
This leaves the balance of power all out of wack, so they have to limit "evilness" to an extent. I am not saying I agree with it, I am just saying that's why they do it.
You make a good point Sparks.
The way this is handled in most PnP RPGs is that being a sadistic evil bastard carries the same penalties that it does IRL. You are shunned by society, hunted by the law, and lead a generally miserable life outside of the bounds of the subcultures that accept your behavior. And those subcultures are ones that are filled with individuals that would screw you over for their own personal gain without batting an eyelash.
On the other hand, a "good chararacter," or one that is at least good at advancing their own agenda while not stepping outside of the boundaries of good behavior in a public way, can eventaully hope to have the power of a nation behind them. A trully good character will have the selfless devotion of numeorus friends and admirers. In other words, being good is a much easier road to personal power and widespread imfleunce than being evil. When you hit town and everyone treats you like a celebrity, and you know that none of them would still be free and happy without the heroic deeds you've performed, it feels good (npi)!
It's very hard for MMORPGs to embody those sorts of trade-offs in a static mechanical system of interactions with NPCs, and so designere by and large don't try to.
I don't want to write this, and you don't want to read it. But now it's too late for both of us.
i like evil lol most of those things would discust me in real life but in a game there fine :P
Spydermr2,
Very intresting post. First, I want to congratulate you on trying to make points to back up your reason for wanting evil. (Instead of just saying "I want evil!" and leaving it at that.)
IMHO no mmorpg has real evil. The closest IMHO is Anarchy Online. You can take other people's land. The closest thing to stealing is mission blitzing. Where a player takes an uber-hard mission in which he can't kill anything (because everyting is too lethal) and using only stealth to sneak around, he is able to steal the loot, unlock chests, disable traps, and steal the main reward at the end. THEN try to make it back out alive LOL!
Runescape gets special mention. In it one can loot almost everything their enemy has after one kills them. Also, if one subscribes to RS, one gets the pickpocket feature. As far as I know, one can only pickpocket NPCs.
BTW, can you think of more things to list that would make a RPing player evil? Other than pickpocketing?
Watching the collectors edition DVD that came with the game we are told (I think you can read about it on the site as well) that The Forsaken only joined Horde because it was "convinient" for them. They were fighting 2 battles vs the humans and elfs. Pretty cool story actually if you can find it.
My guess is that companies don't want to encourage griefing.
I think being evil is a matter of how you play your character. From the each of the MMOs I've played, I can rattle off a few notorious names of players that have cheated people out of items, led the opposing faction to victory by providing inside information, etc. None of these people exploited the system, but each acted in a way as most of the community considered them 'evil'.
Ico
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I was also extremely dissapointed with the complete lack of "evil" in Freeport. When I pictured the evil city of Freeport I thought of it's population of downtroden every day citizens starving in the streets, I thought of theives in dark alleys waiting to sink a knife in you for coin, I pictured freeport guards snapping a whip behind a stream of shackled slaves. Instead what did they give us ? A bad paint job, uh thanks !
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And I have no problem with having "theif" classes in a game, so long as it's somewhat limited. Put in context, I would certainly notice someone stealing a few gold from my purse but if that theif was smart and wasn't greedy, he/she could take a few copper from my stack and I'd never be the wiser. So long as it works the other way around too, if I catch the little snake, you best give me the ablity to teach him a good leason to not ever try that on me again.
I also think you need to balance it out for the good side of the equation though, the happy shinny people need to have some sort of hero rating, the nicer and better you are, the more well off you are, little missions inside city's establishing yourself as a pillar to the community would do nicely. Thus letting the bad people be real bad and the good people be all nice and squeeky.
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That aside there is an even more annoying quality to todays good vs evil, one that annoys me for more.
Why the bloody hell is evil=ghetto and good=rich and fluffy?
That is just illogical and stupid, if you are standing screaming "STOP dont steal my castle, or I'll scream stop again", im gonna friggin steal yer castle, and force you to live in shack. But nooo, if you go evil you go ghetto, and that just do not make any sense.
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Originally posted by Jerek_
I wonder if you honestly even believe what you type, or if you live in a made up world of facts.
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There is one point that no one has addressed directly in this thread about WoW. The focus of WoW is not targetted towards any/most of the people who are on these boards. WoW is targetted on the "casual" gamer. The "casual" gamer does not like pvp, serious death consequences (such as perma-death, xp loss etc.), or leveling grinds. The Horde is about as evil as Blizzard believes their target audience wants. Look dirty and rough, grumble and growl a bit, "Tee Hee aren't we naughty???" Looking at WoW from that perspective, it is well designed.
The simple fact is that there are far more casual then hardcore gamers. Leaving aside for the moment issues of quality, etc., look at the games designed with more "hardcore" appeal; games with pvp, the subscriber numbers just aren't as large.
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Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
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I just used thieves as the easiest example, and pickpocketing as the easiest within that example. There are tons of ways to achieve at least a little "badness" in supposedly evil settings. Remember, the games i used as an example also portrayed those two areas (Horde, at the very least the misunderstood Undead; and Freeport) as the more-evil of the sides/cities.
Pickpocketing. Backstabbing. Open PvP in the streets, but with CONSEQUENCES. That's part two of any good place. Even an evil city like Freeport would have to have a dictatorial police force, since wild anarchy and blood in the streets wouldn't be "manageable evil", as any warlord would want. Consequences could be a way to yell for the local militia, tagging of a PKer as a "wanted" character (with its own support system for what it means to be "wanted") after killing or pickpocketing or whatever -x- players/NPCs. Quests (Freeport and the Undead in WoW already have some of this) that require you to perform less-than-nice deeds. AKA What's the difference between Queynos and Freeport? You're killing things called skeletons and brigands and squatters instead of bears and rats and bats and "evil" poachers. It's a little more than that, but not much.
Faction settings, where your "activities" that would qualify as "evil" move you up and down in relation with those factions -- and those ratings should translate into actual behavior of NPCs of those factions (higher prices, won't sell to you, alerts the "faction" where you are to send assassins, etc.). Preferably, it should also translate somehow into things that other PCs can react to -- if PC-x- is aligned with the Professional Organization for the Advancement of Ourselves and PC-y- has achieved a "reputation" wiht the POAO of high enough stature (in a negative way), then the PC might earn status and rewards for EITHER going after PC-x- OR for bringing PC-x- into the organization (with the corresponding negatives to the organizations that PC-x- was part of before the switch).
The list can go on. It actually doesn't take much thought to come up with a much more textured experience for so-called "evil". The key to remember is that "evil" behavior should exist in, using EQ2 as an example, both cities -- but the penalties and reaction time of the guard in Queynos, for instance, should be much much higher/faster, since the city has a built-in interest in keeping its nice, pristine streets clean of such "vermin".
In a way, some of this could tie into Guilds, but the guilds would have to have more of a presence and more flexibility in what they can do/can't do in the gameworld than they currently have.
At any rate, more thoughts for the ongoing conversation. Have fun!
I concur about WoW, but it lends itself to example, since it incorporates the Undead as a playable race (Undead, um, by definition, would be evil; and in support of your comments, they even manage to make the Undead be the "misunderstood, more-good" version of their Undead instead of letting people play in the "really-bad Undead").
Strangely enough, I usually tend to support many of the arguments of the more-casual gamer (casual does NOT automatically equal carebear, contrary to many opinions). At the same time, I look for the games I play to be IMMERSIVE. When a game like EQ2 sets up two polar-opposites like Queynos and Freeport are supposed to be, it's not unrealistic to expect Freeport, then, to be "evil" in nature and in how the experience in Freeport plays out. Instead, we just get "ghetto" (as someone else here called it), grime, mud, a few foul-speaking NPCs, and that's about it. It's immersive -- on the surface only. Don't scratch the surface, 'cause there's not much below the surface in Freeport that lets the player actually act in a manner befitting Freeport, as they've defined Freeport.
My preference: I like WoW's ability to choose to turn on/off a PvP flag, just not the way it's implemented. Let's the casual player exist in the same world with the hardcore -- that said, there should be more of a penalty for choosing to go one way or the other, since we can all see the exploiters coming, choosing to keep their flag off until the right moment, going PvP to achieve their aims, then outrunning/outhiding the timer until their flag goes back on. That's not the goal (that is how it works in WoW), and some mechanism should be in place to make the decision have tangible consequences. Perhaps once a player turns on the PvP flag in the city, the guards REMAIN PvP for one full day after the timer goes back to non-PvP, which would translate into the player's actions going against a rating with the guards that is based on those actions (reputation; botched theft attempts; botched or successful PKing). Oh, and once they go PvP, it also activates their STEAL rating, which then means that THEIR inventory is exposed to a more-capable thief. And let's be rational -- you couldn't steal the cuirass off a person's body using pickpocket, but you might lift a purse, or a small bag, etc.
More for the grist.
For some strange reasons this reminds me of UO. I haven't played in ages and I have no idea what is the current state of the game is, but I know that you could steal objects from PC's and NPC's. Yes it was a high risk profession and had quite some fun with it.
So far, I haven't found any MMO's that gives me the "feeling" I had when I was playing good ol'timer UO. This game had everything ; complete freedom, many professions, good crafting, pvp by the time was only PK ( maybe it has changed since? ) but hunting them down to loot their equipment was quite some fun.
It's true that games nowadays are missing that "evil" thing. Publishers aiming the casual gamers just to make more money..
BUY THE GUARDS IN THE BANK ( UO Style )
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EQ2's simplistic and confused notion of good and evil is exposed whenever you do a betrayal quest. Betray "evil" Freeport for "good" Qeynos and you are given the task of proving what a reformed individual you are by butchering hundreds of gnolls. Going in the other direction, you prove what an evil monster you are by doing the same thing to hundreds of orcs. Are orcs somehow more "good" than gnolls that slaying 500 of them is a more evil act than wasting 500 gnolls? If not, it seems to me that good and evil here are identical. The fact is that as long as MMORPGs are based on the concept of commiting wanton acts of violence to progress your own selfish aims, then every player character is "evil" regardless of how their side chooses to present itself. The problem isn't with being "evil" in games, it's with so-called "good".
OP & followup posts: In breif, I agree with you.
Commentary: The problem really boils down to one simple and very real evil of our society in general, political correctness. Playing evil does not equal being evil, amen to that, but most bible thumpers will never have that level of awareness, and it is them that most companies try to appease. It is a mideval mindset, react with hate and angst to anything that uses trigger words, rather than try to learn and understand the differences in the use of certain words.
Game companies prefer to automate things, to a certain extent, i can see their point. Less effort equals less $ spent, at the same time, less effort = mediocrity. The day that a MMOG will rule the industry is the day a Dev Team realizes one thing, if you create a true online representation of a PnP game, then you will have a player base totally hooked. THat means that you do more than just grind on mobs earning xps, loot, and access to "end game content". It will include PvP both good and bad (bandits vs guards, vigilante vs criminals, templar vs infidel, etc), theivery, con games, religion, politics, war, commerce and hell, even virtual physical intimacy. Involve players, let them explore alternate personalities and ambitions, with a consequence for every action. But that will mean being less politically correct than either WoW or EQ or any other MMOG currently is.
(warning: Political plug to follow)
There is a prevelant culture of griping followed by inaction that leads to all this. If you're not going to vote for politicitians that see things more your way, then vote the easiest way you can, with your $. Stop supporting medicore games with that lifeblood of renewed subscription. Bored with the lack of depth that Freeport has in supporting what you hoped for? Hit the cancel button. Devs neglet your class beyond a reasonable period of patience? Hit the cancel button. Stay on top of the game, see what changes occur after you cancel, if they meet with your approval, renew. Devs and their companies are just like any other monkey, take away the banana and they're more likely to pay attention and do what you want for another one. Because if a game doesn't entertain you, what are you missing out on by not supporting the company's paycheck? What else could you do with that time that you feel you're wasting?
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