It's true that the evil roles in the MMORPG family is just not fully fleshed out yet. It would indeed be very interesting to see how you could out-vile your supposed comrades of your dreadfully uncouth faction with creativity. Without all the cheese and FedEx, that is. However, this yet unexplored path has lots of ethical problems later on. I could almost hear it: Mother Condemns Online Game for Truly Evil Ways. Delusional Teen Reenacts Necromancy in Basement. It's the perfect food to feed our favourite video game jock Mr. Thompson, and all the parents' associations of et cetera. Surely we'll say "we can control it", but that's just not how the highly sensitive bunch sees it. I'm not personally condemning it, but there has to be a way not to create potential bad press for the game that dares to innovate such. What do you guys think?
I think that things are changing in the regard of voices against video games with violence or evil. The gamers are becoming the mothers and the parents are playing the games with there teen in the basement. Video game violence and its influence was a better argument for grown ups 15 years ago when it was all kids saying they are wrong. Now the gamers are grown up, and we have kids of our own. We know that game violence or evil is not going to make huge masses of kids think they are necromancers.
Gamers aren’t a group that gets pushed around by PTO’s, mature ratings, and bad press influencing our parents anymore. We are in the PTO's, we are old enough to buy mature games, and we use our dollars to vote for news organizations that don't print garbage about games affecting us. I don't think bad press about evil in a game is going to scare the game industry anymore. Just look how GTA took off after some press about how "evil" it was. It wasn't the kids that went out and bought it. It was us.
Whenever I do a quest to kill some NPC 'bandits' I question whether this is a good or evil act - sure they're bandits to the quest-giver but maybe in reality they're starving after having being exiled, or maybe they're enacting their revenge for being kicked out. Luckily I usually play a mercenary type so if these bandits don't have a quest NOT to kill them then they're dead meat, and they never have this counter-quest.
LOTRO monster quests are nice and get you into spirit of things - I don't think we can expect anything more than taking good quest mechanics and rewriting the dialogue to make them evil. It's interesting that LOTRO originally had a corruption system so you did have to make moral choices that would affect your character.
The factions in VG give some good/evil options and I've seen a couple of quests for the corrupt side of my civilisation. My char is from a so-called good race but I can hang out and do missions with the evil ones after a bit of work and vice-versa for them. Same sort of quests again, but it's nice to read the different POV.
Other games go down the route that your faction is good and the others are evil, so no option there.
For true good/evil gameplay you need a sandbox game like EVE or Roma Victor - here shades of grey are possible. I think the main limitation in playing your alignment is restrictive quests in the first place. WAR, AoC and PotBS look promising but they all still rely on this flawed game mechanic.
For true good/evil gameplay you need a sandbox game like EVE or Roma Victor - here shades of grey are possible. I think the main limitation in playing your alignment is restrictive quests in the first place. WAR, AoC and PotBS look promising but they all still rely on this flawed game mechanic.
Well, I can only talk about WAR, since that's where I'm informed (Stopped reading about AoC after the "The game starts as single-player" Part).
And yeah, there are discussions going on that no race can ever be evil from their PoV. That's because the Race usually believes in what they do, and things they consider as evil are not worth doing, so they won't. Sure from our PoV, sacrificing babies by drowning them in a Pool of Blood sounds outright evil for us Humans, but it's just usual business in Dark Elven society. They don't think "Woah, we're soooo evil because we sacrifice Babies", they think "We need to sacrifice babies because our god demands us to do so...what's wrong about it?". In Dark Elven society, an "evil Character" would probably NOT sacrifice things, would maybe not kill a hurt High Elf he meets, but instead will heal him up.
THat having said, I think the only evil we can discuss is the evil that the general public thinks of as evil (i.e. murder, theft, slavery and so on). And based on this, at least WAR will have three pretty evil races going.
It ain't easy being evil. Or good, for that matter. Generaly, most every day folks who try have a hard time telling the difference between playing a villain and being a dick to fellow players. Ganking someone and taking their junk isn't evil-- the good guys do that. Total genocide of all the spawns you're farming falls into that same category. It's not evil, it's not good, it's the status quoe.
True Evil (with a capital E) requires setting others up for failure at one's own personal gain. You have to be able to pretend to be good long enough for all the orphans to trust you, then betray them, sell the orphanage, put them onto the street, then mock them for being gullible enough to trust you and enable your nefarious deed. It takes the creativity of a writer to come up with that stuff on a daily basis, and a hard-coded reward system to encourage it.
We can say similar arguments about the forces of Good. The way MMOs exist now, neither Good nor Evil has a place. What agent of good truly solves problems by killing X number of creatures? Or advancing himself by killing and looting-- which is the primary economy of any MMO world. But who wants to play boring old truley good? Do you want to get your xp by volonteering at a soup kitchen for unerprivlaged NPCs?
Good and evil are merely the MMO equivilant of black and white chess pieces in the worlds we play in. These alignments won't be much more than that until devs put enrgey into more dynamic storylines that give players alignment based options for their completion, rather than the standard take-it-or-leave-it quest delivery methods.
On a side note, is this the only guy writing articles anymore? Is the domain name going to change to www.mmowtf.com?
I wish there was (and maybe there is) a MMO where you could for example start out as a warrior along with other players in the same starting zone but during making decisions with quests from NPCs and your actions toward PCs your alignment would either move toward good or evil and then at some point, like a climax of all your character's decisions and actions, you would make the ultimate decision such as maybe completing a quest that asks you to betray your General on a battlefield, assasinate an important leader(s), slaughter a village, poison a city, or something like that which would then make your alignment fully evil and then you would go from being a warrior to a shadow knight, death knight, or something like that, and for the next half of your character's progression you would become part of the evil faction and quests would consist of committing evil acts through PvE and PvP. I think the PvP aspect would be fun since you would have players who chose evil and others who chose good because the quests for evil and good could cross paths and create PvP situations such as an evil quest requiring the destruction of a town and good quest that requires the players to defend that town. But I like that idea of being allowed to make decisions that cause alignment adjustments since it adds to more flexibility and freedom and it may be good for RP too.
Some good discussion in this thread about the nature of evil -- good stuff.
I don't know if it was mentioned or not, but I think it's possible to be really diabolical in EVE Online, provided that you've enough cash, firepower and smarts. From manipulating the economy to outright killing and thieving... you're limited only by the bounds of your moral code, as it were.
Part of the problem with playing an evil character in most in MMOs is the whole reactive/proactive part of games. MMOs are pretty much reactive. You get a quest or whatever from some NPC complete it, get xp and rewards and move on. The problem is that to be a real world domination evil type is that you need to be the one coming up with the quests. In other words you need to be proactive. Game mechanics are reactive, which makes it pretty tough to be the true evil overlord type that would be the most fun to play, as opposed to the psychopath random murderer.
Part of the problem with playing an evil character in most in MMOs is the whole reactive/proactive part of games. MMOs are pretty much reactive. You get a quest or whatever from some NPC complete it, get xp and rewards and move on. The problem is that to be a real world domination evil type is that you need to be the one coming up with the quests. In other words you need to be proactive. Game mechanics are reactive, which makes it pretty tough to be the true evil overlord type that would be the most fun to play, as opposed to the psychopath random murderer.
Agree, evil characters would need a different game mechanic and clearly defined set of goals. In most stories evil just "is"...it seems to be senseless, and having no purpose. That's not terribly realistic, all beings need objectives...but I can't see killing 10 vultures as being the right ones.
Wizard IV, Return of Werdna ( http://www.mobygames.com/game/wizardry-iv-the-return-of-werdna ) was one game I played a long time ago (yes, back in 1987) that let the player be evil and do evil things.... been a long time since then that I could be truely evil w/o severe consequences.... would be nice to see something new along those lines.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
The first is just mission depth and variety. In WoW for example, the similar quest issue is definitely present but I feel like a few of the missions are still pretty evil. In one you poison someone's dog so it turns into a monster, in another you assassinate important townsfolk to lower morale of a human village. However the only evil seeming faction in the game are the forsaken, the rest of the game is more like cowboys vs indians rather than good vs evil. (Although the blood elves seem kind of evil in some cruel passive aggressive way - like that really mean popular girl at school that secretly had a drug problem and slept wiht every guy on the football team and a couple teachers) Most WOW quests are similar anyways so for this at least it doesn't seem an issue of allowing you to be evil as much as incorporating variety in quests.
In EQ2 the situation is pretty similar. If you start in the evil city you will quickly find that most of the NPC's are more likely to threaten to kill you (or eat you in some cases) rather than help you. You often recieve quests like obtaining poison reagents for someone planning to kill their adulterous husband, or extorting shop keepers, but in the end you usually end up killing creatures and returning the parts. Again the issue just seems to be one of more quest variety.
Another poster has stated that perhaps to truly feel evil you would have to be the one coming up with the quests. This makes a lot of sense to me as evil characters typically have an agenda more complicated than helping the local shopkeeper obtain their goals. If you just go with the flow around you and do as your told, your not really evil just naive...
The pvp social outcast
The second issue I think has to do with PVP. As you say some just allow you to run around killing everyone even brand new players. I agree that isn't really roleplaying evil though - at least not when everyone can do it and there are no penalties. I think the trick is finding a balance between just trying to create a fun enviornment for everyone and allowing people to roleplay evil social outcasts viably.
Every game I have seen that has allowed this in the past ended up turning overly "carebear" or eliminating the evil character as a viable choice. The problem seems to be that most MMO developers are bandwagoners and lack an understanding of the human psyche required to create a balanced situation....
UO implemented stat loss on people considered "Murderers". They were also killed on sight by infinitely powerful NPC guards near any city. Evil characters already have to contend with angry mobs, why should they be forced to have their characters deleveled as well? The game did allow for some self sufficiency to evil players by allowing them to craft weapons etc, but this took away from combat ability which every evil character sorely needs. An alternate universe was provided that mitigated these penalties, which everyone simply avoided because there was no additional benefit for going in there (other than the excitement of being attacked, which people will choose when faced with 2 different servers but not 2 equally useful hunting grounds in the same server) As is often the case, careful manipulation of the game through using mule alts and transfer methods might have allowed an evil character to be more viable, but not by much.
The atmosphere in the game neocron did much to add to the feeling of "roleplaying evil" as you skulked in sewers, overlooked enemies from moutains, or lay in ambush in outer city ruins waiting to attack unsuspecting adveturers by sniping them through windows, climbing out from under sewer grates, or sending flying death drones from your hard to reach moutain location with your crazed looking one eyed character and scary and high impact sounding weapons. You could even do this to enemy factions without penalty, though if you killed your own faction you would lose reputation and would temporarily be "KOS" to city gaurds. In the beginning every encounter was adrenaline packed as you had a 1 in 10 chance of losing your valuable main weapon or getting theirs. This game too was evetnually "carebeared", where pvp drops were locked such that only very specialized players or the person who dropped them could recover them. Low "soulight" players who had attacked people from allied factions or in hunting areas would eventually lose all of their equipment instead of a single piece, and much less specialized players could access it. They would also lose faction allegience and then become "KOS" in any faction controlled part of the game all though not all guards were capable of instantly killing you. Some anarchist vendors in the ruins provided low level equipment to evil characters, but it was much less powerful than what could be bought in the city. (later on various smugglers were hidden througout the wasteland.) This game would almost allow for evil characters were it not for the HUGE difference in pvp drops which required forever to recover from.
EQ2 allows people to play an "exile" faction who are allowed to kill everyone, but again members of this faction are greatly limited in what kinds of goods and services they can access.
The general theme is "You can play an evil character, but we are going to make your game experience miserable" Basically you will have to spend 5 hours getting ready (recovering all your lost equipment and stat damage) for one evil act which will probably fail due to the fact that your victims can run to infinitely powerful guards that will kill you on sight. I will never understand this, as evil characters already have the huge disadvantage of having all players out to get you.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------PROBABILITY(YOUR STATEMENTS BEING MOTIVATED BY FEAR(I>U)) > .5
Part of the problem with playing an evil character in most in MMOs is the whole reactive/proactive part of games. MMOs are pretty much reactive. You get a quest or whatever from some NPC complete it, get xp and rewards and move on. The problem is that to be a real world domination evil type is that you need to be the one coming up with the quests. In other words you need to be proactive. Game mechanics are reactive, which makes it pretty tough to be the true evil overlord type that would be the most fun to play, as opposed to the psychopath random murderer.
I hope this is one of the things that will soon change in MMOs.
How cool would it be if you could actually give quests yourself?
Create a system in wich players can create their own quests.
These could be very simple auction house like quests. You're a crafter and need 10 steel. So you create a quest to get you 10 steel. But they would also open the possibility for better things.
What about a guild leader creating a complicated quest line leading his guildies across the land in search of items, slaying monsters and visiting places. Now those would be events.
But it can go much further. How sweet would it be if guilds could actually own cities/castles/whatever. Then with some proactive AI you could have monsters attacking those cities/castles/whatever. So the guild leader puts up a quest to slay those creatures. After a while they're no longer a threat! With some 'mother nature' like AI to dictate the spawnrates of creatures depending on how many have been slain, the proximity of other creatures and players etc. You could actually have quests that influence the game world. If you kill too many bears then they'll spawn less. But since wolf spawns were hold back by bear spawns but there no longer are that many bears you'll see a whole lot more wolf spawns.
Or making the bears migrate since they're getting killed too much. If a creature type is killed too much then they'll move away trying to find a spot where they're killed less. You could have whole zones moving around like this. If a high level zone gets killed too much then those mobs will move to a low level zone. Low level zone mobs will be getting killed by the high level ones and the low level ones will go to the previously high level zone.
And it's not all that impossible to program, very hard. Not impossible. Instead of having the usual wander like you've been clubbed on the head movement AI seen in too many MMOs you could determine the direction of creatures based on other creatures, cities and players. Merely scan the area around a creature like you would do for an AoE spell to see who gets damaged to see wich creatures, players and cities are in range. Then modify your direction based on that.
Let's say we have a wolf. He likes to eat bunnies but hates bears. He also likes to eat low level players but hates high level ones. So it scans the area around him. Some bunnies are north, 5 points to north. There's a bear to the west so -2 points to west. South there's a newbie. 3 points to south. And to the east there's a really high level player so -7 points to east. North has the most points so the general direction will be north. West has more points then east so we'll move slightly NW. We move there for about 5 seconds and then we scan again. Maybe this time there's a bunny in attacking range so we attack it. BUT the bunny now noticed the wolf and hates wolfs. So the bunny runs away! Let's say the wolf chases the bunny but suddenly they're faced with a high level player. Bunies like players so it'll move towards the player. Wolves hate high levels so it will break off and flee away!
You could advance on that. How about basing wether or not a creature likes something on how many times he was killed by it and how that thing's level compares to his. You could add even more variables to that like the nature of the beasts.
There's still soooo much to do for MMOs....
We are the bunny. Resistance is futile. ''/\/\'''''/\/\''''''/\/\ ( o.o) ( o.o) ( o.o) (")("),,(")("),(")(")
First off , Dungeon Keeper was the great to be evil game of it's time.
Second, I know CoV was supposed to be the "evil" twin of CoH but the developers said it would be comic book evil and not "real world" evil. Which is true if you think about it, villains like Doc Ock, Magneto and such are "villains" but aren't as evil as they could be made.
There is a new game coming out called Overlord from codemasters, supposed to let you be an evil tyrant while you conquer areas. They even said you can be as evil as you want to. Either just sack the town or burn it to the ground if you so choose.
Although in theory people could make an "evil" RPG I'm sure developers are aware of the anal morality types out there that will overreact to any such evilness in a video game. Little Billy was such a sweet kid til he played Evil Sociopath Online... *sniff*
OP have you ever played an Undead character in WoW?
Probably not, Alliance noob....
They are all about creating poisons and plagues, and then you get to test them on prisoners. Heck and that's in the first 2 hours.
It's rare, but it does exist. Undead are probably the only true "evil" race in WoW, even the orcs are more about honor and all that crap. But the undead are quite evil.
WRT the MMOWTF column, just a comment: I do agree that evil in a lot of games is just the same as good, only with different names. What's worse, IMO, is that the writting in most MMORPGs is so atrocious that the in-game text (from NPCs, etc.) often comes off as a Snidely Whiplash, campy kind of evil that's evil for the sake of being able to say, "Ooooh! Look at us! We're EEEVVVVIIILLL! Mwahahahaha!"
Blah.
WRT to Heerobya's post: I played Horde side in WoW, but I just didn't find the undead repulsive enough for my tastes. I just didn't *feel* the evil in the undead. They were more like scientists gone bad. Not really bad, though. Just kinda bad.
I kind of felt sorry for them, really, even while I was playing an undead mage.
Being a Horde player, I think it is pretty easy to make the case that the Horde, over all, wasn't evil at all. I think it is pretty easy to make the case that the Alliance was the evil side and the Horde was victimized by them. (The smug self-righteousness of many Alliance players sure seems evil to me... but that's out of game evil, isn't it?)
((EDIT: Typo. Oops.))
... This is where I draw the line: __________________.
You really cant play an evil character in game these days.
To play an evil character one must have ... an OPEN game world with FFA PvP. Thats right. Only game I know that has done this was (and still is) Shadowbane. (Although UO might be one but I've never played it.)
Let me tell you an example of playing an Evil character.
Shadowbane had many different guilds which formed large and small nations or kept to themselves without forming any alliances. Usually every single server ended up with a Zerg nation consisting of few large guilds, subdivided into smaller guilds which owned their own cities. The leaders of these large nations, could pretty much do anything and get away with anything.
There were also merchant cities in Shadowbane, or "open trees" that allowed you to instantly travel to these cities with your characters and look through the shops for any equipment being sold or train your character at some class trainer they might have. The merchant cities are usually not more than one or two people that keep the cities running and make profit from entire server.
One time, a guild leader of a large guild came on his alt and tried shopped around in the cities. He was ganked by some other high lvl character shopping around. So the guild leader gets pissed off, and tells the owner of the trade city that the owner owes him so and so amount of money OR leader's guild will put a bane (lay siege and conquer or destroy) on his city. The merchant city owner ended up paying.
Best true-to-life diplomacy. The evil character in this situation was most likely the ganker. However, the true Dark One, the Sauron, the Emperor Jagang, and many other names is the guild leader of that one zerg guild.
Thats why I love FFA, open PvP. Your evilness is only limited by the you! The guy is in your guild and talks smack and just plain annoying? Just kill him ( in game, of course! ).
Killing 100 mobs, gathering 100 mob tokens or bringing 1 token from A to B will still be that no matter how much text they cram into the excuse to pull you through those grinds.
Oblivion on the other hand, as the first reply says, really defined an evil sub-questarch well.
Spoiler warning: Oblivion. The joy of experiencing a 70s thriller plot first hand with a bunch of people volountering to a house stay because of a possible treasure and an unknown murderer hiding amongst them The Dark Brootherhood puts you there and it makes you dive into an evil, plotting kind of mindset (not to mention sort of sadistic).
WAR are trying, with you slaying villagers to spray their body parts over a tower using a cannon. of course, it is just a gather quest, but because the actual RESULTS of your evilness is graphical (ie the cannon actually fires) it is a step in the right direction. We can only hope it's a teaser of what else they have in store for Chaos, I guess.
You want evil? Guess what, it's not going to happen. Look at all the incredible fuss over titles such as Grand Theft Auto. Just imagine the brooha over an MMO that allows players to perform truly evil acts (kidnapping, murder, torture...). Even half-assed evil outlets like WoW's Horde and EQ2's Freeport are still rated G (the box may say RP-13, but dont believe it.) Ever heard of the 'Horde Mentality'? It's an excuse that allows the victims of failed parenting to be jerks and a-holes. Do you think a company will produce a game that allows that kind of behavior to the n'th degree?
It's all about money, cash, moolah! Every game company wants to produce a game that every mommy will buy for her brat.
If you truly want a depraved, evil and sadistic community then go play Second Life.
Hmm, All this discussion and... Define Evil? Its like trying describe Infinity. No matter what you say its still limited.
Imho "evil" is multi dimensional in that sense you perceive things to be evil when it hurts your persona´s ego vs moral or sense of security etc. That means it depends on who is defining what is evil. Im guessing the fundamentalists of the world ( no religion in particular ) would have a longer list of what is evil contra none fundamentalist.
See how people state evil is ganking newbies, and some belive they must be evil in real life as well. Its game evil we are talking about here and no earthly morals have anything to do in a game when it is called an "mmorpg" you roleplay something you are not. I will violate cows in game but as i know im playing a game i would not want to do that in real life. And why would i do that in a game ? Well because im roleplaying something im not.
So please stop making people evil in real life because they want to "play" with you in a Game-evil way.
If you havent got the freedom in a game to interact fully with all players you are forced interact with the static environment. This locks down player dynamics including the epic battle of good vs evil. You can pretend the ogre is evil and you can pretend you are a good hero when you slay the dragon and rescue NPC damsel in distress.
Its the player interaction that makes people do evil things, the framework today ( the majority ) have removed that freedom in order to produce the same scripted "heroes" over and over again. This is mainly because of the lessons learned in UO where the majority of players felt virtually violated when the freedom was given to the player. ( this is allmost 10 years ago )
What defines Evil is how you abuse the freedom and when there is no freedom there is no Evil..
There is no roleplaying when there are no choices unless you like pretending there are But thats like playing Football without the ball.
So is the true evil roleplaying not defined by what you do in the game that has a negative impact on other players ?
What i noticed in UO was the amazing player interaction be it evil or good. I enjoyed being the Evil guy and the Good guy. I think i just enjoyed being in a framework that made me a part of the world and didnt insult me by putting a safety net up.
Imo UO before the trammel incident is still the best mmo system i have seen.
I just cant see evil anywhere if there is no freedom to express it. We had the freedom but we stupid humans cannot handle virtual freedom in eyes of the developers. So lets pretend to be evil and good and follow all those supplied script and type /dance /dance when we turn in lame quest number 513 "making no impact on your environment 35"
Another thing to consider is the limit to evil. For example, there is no end to what I can do as a good guy. There's no quest too mundane or too dangerous for me to do, because I'm a 'good' guy. But, if I'm evil, then there definitely has to be limits. I hope we can all consider rape to be an 'evil' crime. Should there be a game that allows the character to rape npcs or pcs? And let's say there is a game that allows this and more? How many people could honestly play a game where you perform acts that turn your stomach, day in and day out?
So what I'm saying is that it's easier for a dev to make a series of 'good' quests, because there's no limit there. But evil quests can only be 'so' evil before they just start going against good taste. Ever notice how there aren't any kids in the GTA series?
Hmm, All this discussion and... Define Evil? Its like trying describe Infinity. No matter what you say its still limited.
Imho "evil" is multi dimensional in that sense you perceive things to be evil when it hurts your persona´s ego vs moral or sense of security etc. That means it depends on who is defining what is evil. Im guessing the fundamentalists of the world ( no religion in particular ) would have a longer list of what is evil contra none fundamentalist.
Supreme Chancellor: Remember back to your early teachings. "All who gain power are afraid to lose it." Even the Jedi.
Anakin Skywalker: The Jedi use their power for good.
Supreme Chancellor: Good is a point of view, Anakin. The Sith and the Jedi are similar in almost every way, including their quest for greater power.
Anakin Skywalker: The Sith rely on their passion for their strength. They think inward, only about themselves.
Supreme Chancellor: And the Jedi don't?
Anakin Skywalker: The Jedi are selfless... they only care about others.
Supreme Chancellor: Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis "the wise"?
Anakin Skywalker: No.
Supreme Chancellor: I thought not. It's not a story the Jedi would tell you. It's a Sith legend. Darth Plagueis was a Dark Lord of the Sith, so powerful and so wise he could use the Force to influence the midichlorians to create life... He had such a knowledge of the dark side that he could even keep the ones he cared about from dying.
Anakin Skywalker: He could actually save people from death?
Supreme Chancellor: The dark side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.
Anakin Skywalker: What happened to him?
Supreme Chancellor: He became so powerful... the only thing he was afraid of was losing his power, which eventually, of course, he did. Unfortunately, he taught his apprentice everything he knew, then his apprentice killed him in his sleep. It's ironic he could save others from death, but not himself.
Anakin Skywalker: Is it possible to learn this power?
Wow...for the most part, I totally agree with these articles that I read every so often and this one is no different. I believe that a while back I read an article about factions and how there is no good and evil and that there is no real different ways to play these RPG's these days. I mean yeah for instance world of warcraft has the horde but then again they're not really bad they just do things in a different way. There are no games out there that allow you to join a faction or do things in a manner that allow you to be evil or just plain old stray from the norm. I haven't really though about this in months, so thank you for bringing it up. I can only hope that with all these developers contests for regular gamers to have the opportunity to make their own suggestions to become reality, that someone gives this 'evil' thing a go.
Fable was a great game where u could be evil. shame it was only single player. Basically u can go into a town and kill the people and take their money etc and u can have side effects like u grow horns and npc and other people are scared of u when u talk to them, i always wished they made that game into a mmorpg
UO(Ultima Online) was greatest mmorpg what i've played and yet to come i havent found any other game where you can be pure evil or pure good guy... why i think so? i've played UO over 5years starting from the beta. In UO you were able to poison food,weapons and trap some boxes what some helpless suckers opened and died(^^) and loosed everything what they we're carrying(tho trammel and insurance fcked up those things)
You we're also free to kill other players anywhere even in towns with penalty of death bcos of guards ofc, but outside of guardzone you we're able to do anything... rob other players houses(exploits yes i dont care what you say) and kill miners for valuable resources to maintain your own items and resources. As Ultima fan(YEAAH RICHARD GARRIOT) that game was something what showed me what is hard and easy to get...
To those who keep reading this post i'm a littlebit griefer but still dont like it as much as pvp. Oh yeah almost forgot that you we're able to _steal_ items from other players backbags even in towns tho sometimes you failed and sometimes you succeeded... and yet still i see ppl in WoW(not anymore cos i dont play it anymore) who cry about killstealing, scamming, how hard is it to obtain something but i can only laugh at these guys.
Now ppl can find me from Lineage 2 as it has nice pvp system on it and cant find any other good mmorpg with such hardcore community(i dont care what you say). But even in L2 you cant be "pure evil" as you were able to be in UO and those who've played UO in official shards know alot of it.. even those who were "carebears". These mmorpg's what some companies create atm are making ppl to cry about killstealing,scamming and griefing bcos you cant defend yourself ingame mostly bcos they're on the same "side" and in lineage 2 you have to fight for your exp spot and in UO you had to kill some players in order to to get items and defend yourself...
thnx for reading and comment if you want.
P.S. I hope some new mmorpg will give me same kicks and adrenaline in to my blood like UO did. high hopes for AoC
yes while you were evil in UO... it was just your own spirit and mind what made you do those things. why? bcos i was able to do almost anything
Well, essentially dungeon keeper wasnt evil. Not really. What did the heroes do: they invaded your home and wanted to rob you. Mostly you fought against other Keepers also. Did you see the good realms really invaded, stained and twisted?
Evil... quite an interesting subject. (seriously) I think we really havent seen evil as a real player option. Take all the D&D based games. Sure, you can make a character evil, chaotic evil oder lawful evil, but what does it change in Baldurs Gate, in Neverwinter Nights? Nothing. You save the world and get the grannys cookies back for the XP and coin anyway.
Usually evil is mistaken for stupid bruteness. Simply killing everything is not evil, its just mad. For me the epitome of evil always was Palpatine. He schemes against everyone, uses everyone to his goals and removes everyone against him, with the only really evil goal: getting control of everything. I havent seen that anywhere yet. The "evil" we see is either the stupid "kill all" or some very toned down caricature as in "evil Genius". Ok, in City of Villains you can do evil things. Rob a bank, catch poor victims for biogenetic experiments. Thats quite nasty.
The big question is, SHOULD a game allow the player to be evil. I am over the fence in that. It has some appeal to me, I admit. But in reality, the players always do some evil but never really see the consequences, and essentially he shouldnt, because it would end in a very dark place. Playing something can influence ppl of weak mind, it can cause damage to a persons character, so there is always the question, how far a game can go. Take the Star Wars evil: the dark path of Anakin is not some noble duels against Jedi. Its butchering children. It was good to hint that the evil path is not funny. But also the movie didnt show the actual slaugter of kids. It walked a thin line between shock and what we can accept. Making evil appear too harmless would do not good. But still, I am very uncertain if we should allow evil in games, really. Where is the line when we say "stop, thats too gros?" Who decides that? Where does it start to get dangerous, influencing ppl where at the end another school massacre stands because some weak minded person got the wrong ideas?
Essentially I think evil will always only be a caricature in games, and maybe it is good in that way. But it could definitely be made with more style. I quite enjoyed the way in City of Villains - Dungeon Keeper... I never felt evil there somehow.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Comments
I think that things are changing in the regard of voices against video games with violence or evil. The gamers are becoming the mothers and the parents are playing the games with there teen in the basement. Video game violence and its influence was a better argument for grown ups 15 years ago when it was all kids saying they are wrong. Now the gamers are grown up, and we have kids of our own. We know that game violence or evil is not going to make huge masses of kids think they are necromancers.
Gamers aren’t a group that gets pushed around by PTO’s, mature ratings, and bad press influencing our parents anymore. We are in the PTO's, we are old enough to buy mature games, and we use our dollars to vote for news organizations that don't print garbage about games affecting us. I don't think bad press about evil in a game is going to scare the game industry anymore. Just look how GTA took off after some press about how "evil" it was. It wasn't the kids that went out and bought it. It was us.
LOTRO monster quests are nice and get you into spirit of things - I don't think we can expect anything more than taking good quest mechanics and rewriting the dialogue to make them evil. It's interesting that LOTRO originally had a corruption system so you did have to make moral choices that would affect your character.
The factions in VG give some good/evil options and I've seen a couple of quests for the corrupt side of my civilisation. My char is from a so-called good race but I can hang out and do missions with the evil ones after a bit of work and vice-versa for them. Same sort of quests again, but it's nice to read the different POV.
Other games go down the route that your faction is good and the others are evil, so no option there.
For true good/evil gameplay you need a sandbox game like EVE or Roma Victor - here shades of grey are possible. I think the main limitation in playing your alignment is restrictive quests in the first place. WAR, AoC and PotBS look promising but they all still rely on this flawed game mechanic.
And yeah, there are discussions going on that no race can ever be evil from their PoV. That's because the Race usually believes in what they do, and things they consider as evil are not worth doing, so they won't. Sure from our PoV, sacrificing babies by drowning them in a Pool of Blood sounds outright evil for us Humans, but it's just usual business in Dark Elven society. They don't think "Woah, we're soooo evil because we sacrifice Babies", they think "We need to sacrifice babies because our god demands us to do so...what's wrong about it?". In Dark Elven society, an "evil Character" would probably NOT sacrifice things, would maybe not kill a hurt High Elf he meets, but instead will heal him up.
THat having said, I think the only evil we can discuss is the evil that the general public thinks of as evil (i.e. murder, theft, slavery and so on). And based on this, at least WAR will have three pretty evil races going.
True Evil (with a capital E) requires setting others up for failure at one's own personal gain. You have to be able to pretend to be good long enough for all the orphans to trust you, then betray them, sell the orphanage, put them onto the street, then mock them for being gullible enough to trust you and enable your nefarious deed. It takes the creativity of a writer to come up with that stuff on a daily basis, and a hard-coded reward system to encourage it.
We can say similar arguments about the forces of Good. The way MMOs exist now, neither Good nor Evil has a place. What agent of good truly solves problems by killing X number of creatures? Or advancing himself by killing and looting-- which is the primary economy of any MMO world. But who wants to play boring old truley good? Do you want to get your xp by volonteering at a soup kitchen for unerprivlaged NPCs?
Good and evil are merely the MMO equivilant of black and white chess pieces in the worlds we play in. These alignments won't be much more than that until devs put enrgey into more dynamic storylines that give players alignment based options for their completion, rather than the standard take-it-or-leave-it quest delivery methods.
On a side note, is this the only guy writing articles anymore? Is the domain name going to change to www.mmowtf.com?
http://erickveil.com/
I wish there was (and maybe there is) a MMO where you could for example start out as a warrior along with other players in the same starting zone but during making decisions with quests from NPCs and your actions toward PCs your alignment would either move toward good or evil and then at some point, like a climax of all your character's decisions and actions, you would make the ultimate decision such as maybe completing a quest that asks you to betray your General on a battlefield, assasinate an important leader(s), slaughter a village, poison a city, or something like that which would then make your alignment fully evil and then you would go from being a warrior to a shadow knight, death knight, or something like that, and for the next half of your character's progression you would become part of the evil faction and quests would consist of committing evil acts through PvE and PvP. I think the PvP aspect would be fun since you would have players who chose evil and others who chose good because the quests for evil and good could cross paths and create PvP situations such as an evil quest requiring the destruction of a town and good quest that requires the players to defend that town. But I like that idea of being allowed to make decisions that cause alignment adjustments since it adds to more flexibility and freedom and it may be good for RP too.
Some good discussion in this thread about the nature of evil -- good stuff.
I don't know if it was mentioned or not, but I think it's possible to be really diabolical in EVE Online, provided that you've enough cash, firepower and smarts. From manipulating the economy to outright killing and thieving... you're limited only by the bounds of your moral code, as it were.
Wizard IV, Return of Werdna ( http://www.mobygames.com/game/wizardry-iv-the-return-of-werdna ) was one game I played a long time ago (yes, back in 1987) that let the player be evil and do evil things.... been a long time since then that I could be truely evil w/o severe consequences.... would be nice to see something new along those lines.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Well there seems to be 2 issues,
Quest Variety
The first is just mission depth and variety. In WoW for example, the similar quest issue is definitely present but I feel like a few of the missions are still pretty evil. In one you poison someone's dog so it turns into a monster, in another you assassinate important townsfolk to lower morale of a human village. However the only evil seeming faction in the game are the forsaken, the rest of the game is more like cowboys vs indians rather than good vs evil. (Although the blood elves seem kind of evil in some cruel passive aggressive way - like that really mean popular girl at school that secretly had a drug problem and slept wiht every guy on the football team and a couple teachers) Most WOW quests are similar anyways so for this at least it doesn't seem an issue of allowing you to be evil as much as incorporating variety in quests.
In EQ2 the situation is pretty similar. If you start in the evil city you will quickly find that most of the NPC's are more likely to threaten to kill you (or eat you in some cases) rather than help you. You often recieve quests like obtaining poison reagents for someone planning to kill their adulterous husband, or extorting shop keepers, but in the end you usually end up killing creatures and returning the parts. Again the issue just seems to be one of more quest variety.
Another poster has stated that perhaps to truly feel evil you would have to be the one coming up with the quests. This makes a lot of sense to me as evil characters typically have an agenda more complicated than helping the local shopkeeper obtain their goals. If you just go with the flow around you and do as your told, your not really evil just naive...
The pvp social outcast
The second issue I think has to do with PVP. As you say some just allow you to run around killing everyone even brand new players. I agree that isn't really roleplaying evil though - at least not when everyone can do it and there are no penalties. I think the trick is finding a balance between just trying to create a fun enviornment for everyone and allowing people to roleplay evil social outcasts viably.
Every game I have seen that has allowed this in the past ended up turning overly "carebear" or eliminating the evil character as a viable choice. The problem seems to be that most MMO developers are bandwagoners and lack an understanding of the human psyche required to create a balanced situation....
UO implemented stat loss on people considered "Murderers". They were also killed on sight by infinitely powerful NPC guards near any city. Evil characters already have to contend with angry mobs, why should they be forced to have their characters deleveled as well? The game did allow for some self sufficiency to evil players by allowing them to craft weapons etc, but this took away from combat ability which every evil character sorely needs. An alternate universe was provided that mitigated these penalties, which everyone simply avoided because there was no additional benefit for going in there (other than the excitement of being attacked, which people will choose when faced with 2 different servers but not 2 equally useful hunting grounds in the same server) As is often the case, careful manipulation of the game through using mule alts and transfer methods might have allowed an evil character to be more viable, but not by much.
The atmosphere in the game neocron did much to add to the feeling of "roleplaying evil" as you skulked in sewers, overlooked enemies from moutains, or lay in ambush in outer city ruins waiting to attack unsuspecting adveturers by sniping them through windows, climbing out from under sewer grates, or sending flying death drones from your hard to reach moutain location with your crazed looking one eyed character and scary and high impact sounding weapons. You could even do this to enemy factions without penalty, though if you killed your own faction you would lose reputation and would temporarily be "KOS" to city gaurds. In the beginning every encounter was adrenaline packed as you had a 1 in 10 chance of losing your valuable main weapon or getting theirs. This game too was evetnually "carebeared", where pvp drops were locked such that only very specialized players or the person who dropped them could recover them. Low "soulight" players who had attacked people from allied factions or in hunting areas would eventually lose all of their equipment instead of a single piece, and much less specialized players could access it. They would also lose faction allegience and then become "KOS" in any faction controlled part of the game all though not all guards were capable of instantly killing you. Some anarchist vendors in the ruins provided low level equipment to evil characters, but it was much less powerful than what could be bought in the city. (later on various smugglers were hidden througout the wasteland.) This game would almost allow for evil characters were it not for the HUGE difference in pvp drops which required forever to recover from.
EQ2 allows people to play an "exile" faction who are allowed to kill everyone, but again members of this faction are greatly limited in what kinds of goods and services they can access.
The general theme is "You can play an evil character, but we are going to make your game experience miserable" Basically you will have to spend 5 hours getting ready (recovering all your lost equipment and stat damage) for one evil act which will probably fail due to the fact that your victims can run to infinitely powerful guards that will kill you on sight. I will never understand this, as evil characters already have the huge disadvantage of having all players out to get you.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------PROBABILITY(YOUR STATEMENTS BEING MOTIVATED BY FEAR(I>U)) > .5
I hope this is one of the things that will soon change in MMOs.
How cool would it be if you could actually give quests yourself?
Create a system in wich players can create their own quests.
These could be very simple auction house like quests. You're a crafter and need 10 steel. So you create a quest to get you 10 steel. But they would also open the possibility for better things.
What about a guild leader creating a complicated quest line leading his guildies across the land in search of items, slaying monsters and visiting places. Now those would be events.
But it can go much further. How sweet would it be if guilds could actually own cities/castles/whatever. Then with some proactive AI you could have monsters attacking those cities/castles/whatever. So the guild leader puts up a quest to slay those creatures. After a while they're no longer a threat! With some 'mother nature' like AI to dictate the spawnrates of creatures depending on how many have been slain, the proximity of other creatures and players etc. You could actually have quests that influence the game world. If you kill too many bears then they'll spawn less. But since wolf spawns were hold back by bear spawns but there no longer are that many bears you'll see a whole lot more wolf spawns.
Or making the bears migrate since they're getting killed too much. If a creature type is killed too much then they'll move away trying to find a spot where they're killed less. You could have whole zones moving around like this. If a high level zone gets killed too much then those mobs will move to a low level zone. Low level zone mobs will be getting killed by the high level ones and the low level ones will go to the previously high level zone.
And it's not all that impossible to program, very hard. Not impossible. Instead of having the usual wander like you've been clubbed on the head movement AI seen in too many MMOs you could determine the direction of creatures based on other creatures, cities and players. Merely scan the area around a creature like you would do for an AoE spell to see who gets damaged to see wich creatures, players and cities are in range. Then modify your direction based on that.
Let's say we have a wolf. He likes to eat bunnies but hates bears. He also likes to eat low level players but hates high level ones. So it scans the area around him. Some bunnies are north, 5 points to north. There's a bear to the west so -2 points to west. South there's a newbie. 3 points to south. And to the east there's a really high level player so -7 points to east. North has the most points so the general direction will be north. West has more points then east so we'll move slightly NW. We move there for about 5 seconds and then we scan again. Maybe this time there's a bunny in attacking range so we attack it. BUT the bunny now noticed the wolf and hates wolfs. So the bunny runs away! Let's say the wolf chases the bunny but suddenly they're faced with a high level player. Bunies like players so it'll move towards the player. Wolves hate high levels so it will break off and flee away!
You could advance on that. How about basing wether or not a creature likes something on how many times he was killed by it and how that thing's level compares to his. You could add even more variables to that like the nature of the beasts.
There's still soooo much to do for MMOs....
We are the bunny.
Resistance is futile.
''/\/\'''''/\/\''''''/\/\
( o.o) ( o.o) ( o.o)
(")("),,(")("),(")(")
First off , Dungeon Keeper was the great to be evil game of it's time.
Second, I know CoV was supposed to be the "evil" twin of CoH but the developers said it would be comic book evil and not "real world" evil. Which is true if you think about it, villains like Doc Ock, Magneto and such are "villains" but aren't as evil as they could be made.
There is a new game coming out called Overlord from codemasters, supposed to let you be an evil tyrant while you conquer areas. They even said you can be as evil as you want to. Either just sack the town or burn it to the ground if you so choose.
Although in theory people could make an "evil" RPG I'm sure developers are aware of the anal morality types out there that will overreact to any such evilness in a video game. Little Billy was such a sweet kid til he played Evil Sociopath Online... *sniff*
OP have you ever played an Undead character in WoW?
Probably not, Alliance noob....
They are all about creating poisons and plagues, and then you get to test them on prisoners. Heck and that's in the first 2 hours.
It's rare, but it does exist. Undead are probably the only true "evil" race in WoW, even the orcs are more about honor and all that crap. But the undead are quite evil.
Robbing graves? Yep. Unleashing plauges? Yep.
WRT the MMOWTF column, just a comment: I do agree that evil in a lot of games is just the same as good, only with different names. What's worse, IMO, is that the writting in most MMORPGs is so atrocious that the in-game text (from NPCs, etc.) often comes off as a Snidely Whiplash, campy kind of evil that's evil for the sake of being able to say, "Ooooh! Look at us! We're EEEVVVVIIILLL! Mwahahahaha!"
Blah.
WRT to Heerobya's post: I played Horde side in WoW, but I just didn't find the undead repulsive enough for my tastes. I just didn't *feel* the evil in the undead. They were more like scientists gone bad. Not really bad, though. Just kinda bad.
I kind of felt sorry for them, really, even while I was playing an undead mage.
Being a Horde player, I think it is pretty easy to make the case that the Horde, over all, wasn't evil at all. I think it is pretty easy to make the case that the Alliance was the evil side and the Horde was victimized by them. (The smug self-righteousness of many Alliance players sure seems evil to me... but that's out of game evil, isn't it?)
((EDIT: Typo. Oops.))
...
This is where I draw the line: __________________.
You really cant play an evil character in game these days.
To play an evil character one must have ... an OPEN game world with FFA PvP. Thats right. Only game I know that has done this was (and still is) Shadowbane. (Although UO might be one but I've never played it.)
Let me tell you an example of playing an Evil character.
Shadowbane had many different guilds which formed large and small nations or kept to themselves without forming any alliances. Usually every single server ended up with a Zerg nation consisting of few large guilds, subdivided into smaller guilds which owned their own cities. The leaders of these large nations, could pretty much do anything and get away with anything.
There were also merchant cities in Shadowbane, or "open trees" that allowed you to instantly travel to these cities with your characters and look through the shops for any equipment being sold or train your character at some class trainer they might have. The merchant cities are usually not more than one or two people that keep the cities running and make profit from entire server.
One time, a guild leader of a large guild came on his alt and tried shopped around in the cities. He was ganked by some other high lvl character shopping around. So the guild leader gets pissed off, and tells the owner of the trade city that the owner owes him so and so amount of money OR leader's guild will put a bane (lay siege and conquer or destroy) on his city. The merchant city owner ended up paying.
Best true-to-life diplomacy. The evil character in this situation was most likely the ganker. However, the true Dark One, the Sauron, the Emperor Jagang, and many other names
Thats why I love FFA, open PvP. Your evilness is only limited by the you! The guy is in your guild and talks smack and just plain annoying? Just kill him ( in game, of course! ).
Edit: sorry for long post
WTB Shadowbane 2
I won't argue with this article
Killing 100 mobs, gathering 100 mob tokens or bringing 1 token from A to B will still be that no matter how much text they cram into the excuse to pull you through those grinds.
Oblivion on the other hand, as the first reply says, really defined an evil sub-questarch well.
Spoiler warning: Oblivion. The joy of experiencing a 70s thriller plot first hand with a bunch of people volountering to a house stay because of a possible treasure and an unknown murderer hiding amongst them
The Dark Brootherhood puts you there and it makes you dive into an evil, plotting kind of mindset (not to mention sort of sadistic).
WAR are trying, with you slaying villagers to spray their body parts over a tower using a cannon. of course, it is just a gather quest, but because the actual RESULTS of your evilness is graphical (ie the cannon actually fires) it is a step in the right direction. We can only hope it's a teaser of what else they have in store for Chaos, I guess.
Hmm,
All this discussion and...
Define Evil?
Its like trying describe Infinity. No matter what you say its still limited.
You want evil? Guess what, it's not going to happen. Look at all the incredible fuss over titles such as Grand Theft Auto. Just imagine the brooha over an MMO that allows players to perform truly evil acts (kidnapping, murder, torture...). Even half-assed evil outlets like WoW's Horde and EQ2's Freeport are still rated G (the box may say RP-13, but dont believe it.) Ever heard of the 'Horde Mentality'? It's an excuse that allows the victims of failed parenting to be jerks and a-holes. Do you think a company will produce a game that allows that kind of behavior to the n'th degree?
It's all about money, cash, moolah! Every game company wants to produce a game that every mommy will buy for her brat.
If you truly want a depraved, evil and sadistic community then go play Second Life.
Imho "evil" is multi dimensional in that sense you perceive things to be evil when it hurts your persona´s ego vs moral or sense of security etc. That means it depends on who is defining what is evil. Im guessing the fundamentalists of the world ( no religion in particular ) would have a longer list of what is evil contra none fundamentalist.
See how people state evil is ganking newbies, and some belive they must be evil in real life as well. Its game evil we are talking about here and no earthly morals have anything to do in a game when it is called an "mmorpg" you roleplay something you are not. I will violate cows in game but as i know im playing a game i would not want to do that in real life. And why would i do that in a game ? Well because im roleplaying something im not.
So please stop making people evil in real life because they want to "play" with you in a Game-evil way.
If you havent got the freedom in a game to interact fully with all players you are forced interact with the static environment. This locks down player dynamics including the epic battle of good vs evil. You can pretend the ogre is evil and you can pretend you are a good hero when you slay the dragon and rescue NPC damsel in distress.
Its the player interaction that makes people do evil things, the framework today ( the majority ) have removed that freedom in order to produce the same scripted "heroes" over and over again. This is mainly because of the lessons learned in UO where the majority of players felt virtually violated when the freedom was given to the player. ( this is allmost 10 years ago )
What defines Evil is how you abuse the freedom and when there is no freedom there is no Evil..
There is no roleplaying when there are no choices unless you like pretending there are
But thats like playing Football without the ball.
So is the true evil roleplaying not defined by what you do in the game that has a negative impact on other players ?
What i noticed in UO was the amazing player interaction be it evil or good. I enjoyed being the Evil guy and the Good guy. I think i just enjoyed being in a framework that made me a part of the world and didnt insult me by putting a safety net up.
Imo UO before the trammel incident is still the best mmo system i have seen.
I just cant see evil anywhere if there is no freedom to express it. We had the freedom but we stupid humans cannot handle virtual freedom in eyes of the developers. So lets pretend to be evil and good and follow all those supplied script and type /dance /dance when we turn in lame quest number 513 "making no impact on your environment 35"
I better stop
/Cheers
So what I'm saying is that it's easier for a dev to make a series of 'good' quests, because there's no limit there. But evil quests can only be 'so' evil before they just start going against good taste. Ever notice how there aren't any kids in the GTA series?
Imho "evil" is multi dimensional in that sense you perceive things to be evil when it hurts your persona´s ego vs moral or sense of security etc. That means it depends on who is defining what is evil. Im guessing the fundamentalists of the world ( no religion in particular ) would have a longer list of what is evil contra none fundamentalist.
. . .
LOL,
Wow, good responce.
Supreme Chancellor: Remember back to your early teachings. "All who gain power are afraid to lose it." Even the Jedi.
Anakin Skywalker: The Jedi use their power for good.
Supreme Chancellor: Good is a point of view, Anakin. The Sith and the Jedi are similar in almost every way, including their quest for greater power.
Anakin Skywalker: The Sith rely on their passion for their strength. They think inward, only about themselves.
Supreme Chancellor: And the Jedi don't?
Anakin Skywalker: The Jedi are selfless... they only care about others.
Supreme Chancellor: Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis "the wise"?
Anakin Skywalker: No.
Supreme Chancellor: I thought not. It's not a story the Jedi would tell you. It's a Sith legend. Darth Plagueis was a Dark Lord of the Sith, so powerful and so wise he could use the Force to influence the midichlorians to create life... He had such a knowledge of the dark side that he could even keep the ones he cared about from dying.
Anakin Skywalker: He could actually save people from death?
Supreme Chancellor: The dark side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.
Anakin Skywalker: What happened to him?
Supreme Chancellor: He became so powerful... the only thing he was afraid of was losing his power, which eventually, of course, he did. Unfortunately, he taught his apprentice everything he knew, then his apprentice killed him in his sleep. It's ironic he could save others from death, but not himself.
Anakin Skywalker: Is it possible to learn this power?
Supreme Chancellor: Not from a Jedi.
Good and Evil just a point of view!
http://www.forceofarms.com/index.php
------------------------------
UO(Ultima Online) was greatest mmorpg what i've played and yet to come i havent found any other game where you can be pure evil or pure good guy... why i think so? i've played UO over 5years starting from the beta. In UO you were able to poison food,weapons and trap some boxes what some helpless suckers opened and died(^^) and loosed everything what they we're carrying(tho trammel and insurance fcked up those things)
You we're also free to kill other players anywhere even in towns with penalty of death bcos of guards ofc, but outside of guardzone you we're able to do anything... rob other players houses(exploits yes i dont care what you say) and kill miners for valuable resources to maintain your own items and resources. As Ultima fan(YEAAH RICHARD GARRIOT) that game was something what showed me what is hard and easy to get...
To those who keep reading this post i'm a littlebit griefer but still dont like it as much as pvp. Oh yeah almost forgot that you we're able to _steal_ items from other players backbags even in towns tho sometimes you failed and sometimes you succeeded... and yet still i see ppl in WoW(not anymore cos i dont play it anymore) who cry about killstealing, scamming, how hard is it to obtain something but i can only laugh at these guys.
Now ppl can find me from Lineage 2 as it has nice pvp system on it and cant find any other good mmorpg with such hardcore community(i dont care what you say). But even in L2 you cant be "pure evil" as you were able to be in UO and those who've played UO in official shards know alot of it.. even those who were "carebears". These mmorpg's what some companies create atm are making ppl to cry about killstealing,scamming and griefing bcos you cant defend yourself ingame mostly bcos they're on the same "side" and in lineage 2 you have to fight for your exp spot and in UO you had to kill some players in order to to get items and defend yourself...
thnx for reading and comment if you want.
P.S.
I hope some new mmorpg will give me same kicks and adrenaline in to my blood like UO did.
high hopes for AoC
yes while you were evil in UO... it was just your own spirit and mind what made you do those things. why? bcos i was able to do almost anything
Evil... quite an interesting subject. (seriously) I think we really havent seen evil as a real player option. Take all the D&D based games. Sure, you can make a character evil, chaotic evil oder lawful evil, but what does it change in Baldurs Gate, in Neverwinter Nights? Nothing. You save the world and get the grannys cookies back for the XP and coin anyway.
Usually evil is mistaken for stupid bruteness. Simply killing everything is not evil, its just mad. For me the epitome of evil always was Palpatine. He schemes against everyone, uses everyone to his goals and removes everyone against him, with the only really evil goal: getting control of everything. I havent seen that anywhere yet. The "evil" we see is either the stupid "kill all" or some very toned down caricature as in "evil Genius". Ok, in City of Villains you can do evil things. Rob a bank, catch poor victims for biogenetic experiments. Thats quite nasty.
The big question is, SHOULD a game allow the player to be evil. I am over the fence in that. It has some appeal to me, I admit. But in reality, the players always do some evil but never really see the consequences, and essentially he shouldnt, because it would end in a very dark place. Playing something can influence ppl of weak mind, it can cause damage to a persons character, so there is always the question, how far a game can go. Take the Star Wars evil: the dark path of Anakin is not some noble duels against Jedi. Its butchering children. It was good to hint that the evil path is not funny. But also the movie didnt show the actual slaugter of kids. It walked a thin line between shock and what we can accept. Making evil appear too harmless would do not good. But still, I am very uncertain if we should allow evil in games, really. Where is the line when we say "stop, thats too gros?" Who decides that? Where does it start to get dangerous, influencing ppl where at the end another school massacre stands because some weak minded person got the wrong ideas?
Essentially I think evil will always only be a caricature in games, and maybe it is good in that way. But it could definitely be made with more style. I quite enjoyed the way in City of Villains - Dungeon Keeper... I never felt evil there somehow.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert