I’m replaying New Vegas and I’m always tempted to do Legion or Mr. House but they suck so I never do, but there’s #content I wanna see that I haven’t in the 12 years I’ve played this game.
Yeah I can't do it either. I can't just be evil for the sake of evil. Now, if you gave me a character that was trying to do the right thing for the wrong reasons, or felt like they had to make an evil choice "for the greater good" I might be inclined to indulge that path for the storytelling.
I don't like being mean to people. I can be grumpy bastard, sure, but actually being mean to people just leaves me hollow inside. It's like when you get into a physical altercation and afterward there's the comedown as all the adrenaline drains out and you just feel like an asshole. Once you pause to reflect you just feel hollow.
Fallout 3 was the game that cemented it. I watched footage of the game before it released (I was extremely hyped, and even pre-ordered it for my Xbox 360) and in one of those videos they show you that you can sneak up to someone and plant a live grenade on them. Well, the character they did that to was Roy, the leader of the Ghouls that want to get into Tenpenny Tower. So when I got to Tenpenny Tower I decided to do what was in the video, sneaked up behind Roy, and put a grenade in his pocket. Turned him into gristle. I laughed.
Then I got the mission from the guard at Tenpenny to solve their "Ghoul issue." Having already killed Roy, negotiation was off the table. The Ghouls opened fire on me as soon as they saw me down in their tunnel base. Well, being fired upon means I can guiltlessly return fire, right? So I pasted all those motherfuckers. No love no loss, right? Well, so it would seem, until I reached the end of their lair. There was a woman down there, a ghoul, and for some reason she wasn't hostile. Maybe it was a bug, all the rest were hostile, but she wasn't. I could talk to her. So we talked. She told me all about Roy, how she and Roy were in love, that she was waiting for Roy to return so they could have a future together. She told me that Roy always said she was pretty. I'd killed all the hostiles, I'd done everything I thought I had to do, and yet the quest wasn't "completed."
I put 2 and 2 together and realized I had to kill her to complete the mission. Oddly, I couldn't do it to her face. I waited until she turned around to walk away then pulled out my combat rifle and blew her cranium apart. I targeted her head because for some reason I thought it would be the more humane option, faster, less pain. This was a stupid videogame character and I was feeling so off about how I was about to treat her that I was compelled to do it that way. "QUEST COMPLETED" played on my screen and I just felt like an absolute monster. I felt hollow. I felt more in that moment than possibly any videogame has ever made me feel. It's been like 13 years and I still remember that moment. I still remember her hoarsely telling me that Roy told her she was pretty no matter what she looked like on the outside.
I've been playing videogames since the mid 90s, killed a lot of 'bad guys,' mowed down hordes of nazis in WWII games (still don't feel bad about that shit lmao) but there was something about that murder that rocked me. Semantics I know, but I didn't kill her, I murdered her. I murdered a woman for the crime of associating with a man that a richer man wanted dead. It was like a stain that wouldn't wash out. I never finished that playthrough.
I understand your pain, but for different reason. I can't do the genocide path in Undertale because I suck at gaming. Undyne is too powerful. After losing to her too many times, I just watched a Youtube let's play of the genocide path. I then reset the save file.
Undyne did the impossible, and saved the underground from my tyranny.
I cannot imagine doing the genocide run, for i am a good Christian lady who loves my friends too much to slaughter them.
A bad person will forever brag about the one good thing they did, whereas a good person will never forget the one bad thing they did.
spoiler
Kid saved Zulf once, but I don't think he'd make the same mistake. I wouldn't.
Don't you worry though, once the Bastion's restored - it'll all be alright.
Well, the Legion path is kind of weak regardless of your feelings about the Legion (they suck hard and not in the good New Vegas way), so it's understandable why you wouldn't go for them
House might be a tyrant, but at least you can pretend you're being bossed around by Constable Odo from Deep Space 9
Yeah house has some good dialogue I know about and never seen so I’ve been tempted to go house just to see them.
I didn’t know legions line sucked, are the quests just kinda boring?
Boo. Oh whale. I’ll spend my time better than helping the murder hungry cosplayers then
Wasn't there supposed to be like, a whole quadrant of the map that would be legion territory on the other side of the river?
Yeah, there was supposed to be a good chunk of Legion territory on the other side of the Colorado, but it got cut for time
Probably would have been kind of boring since there wouldn't have been any raiders or anything like that.
Just a bunch of people being like "Sure, they stole our son's and raped our daughters, but they made sure nobody stole our precious fork or plate"
So pretty much every Legion quest requires you to spend time at the Fort, which means you have to deal with looking at slaves
Plus, schlepping around looking for shit to save Caesar's brain is just not as appealing as trying to unite the separate groups of the Mojave
I felt the same way for years! It's gotten to the point that I can't really enjoy fictional violence anymore. A big part of it was starting to decompartmentalize and realizing I enjoyed violence and suffering in no sphere of my life.
Maybe I'm weird but I've never felt the need to replay games to see how the story would've played out had I kicked a puppy instead of petting it or whatever. I just pick choices that feel right to me to the best of my judgment and move on to a different game once I'm done. Even when I replay something I usually end up just repeating all my choices. Sometimes I do end up going in a different direction but it's less because I want to Experience More Content and more that you do things differently when you're an adult versus when you're 13
Yeah I went dark side in KOTOR once, it had the same problem as a lot of games with evil playthroughs that the bad options are often just "kick a puppy and cackle just for the sake of being eeeeevul" rather than "taking the easy option but for a 'good reason' and having it slowly chip away at your soul", but there was some well done evil side stuff (and the evil robot pal was great) and then holy fuck that scene on the beach near the end was so fucking brutal that I've never been able to do bad path stuff again in pretty much any game
spoiler
I might be remembering some details wrong, but one of your earliest followers is this earnest-but-naive teenage girl with a tentacle head who grew up an orphan in the worst slums and had a wookiee best friend who was basically her father figure, and when you save the wookiee's life he has some sort of unbreakable life debt oath to you. There's a bit where you land on a beach at the end and if you're dark side enough the girl will refuse to keep following you, and you can invoke the life debt to compel the wookiee to choke his only friend and surrogate daughter to death
The thing about New Vegas is there isn’t a lot of “kick the puppy” or “pet the puppy” decisions outside of the Legion. Most decisions in the game you have a valid argument for doing one thing or the other unlike in 3 where there was tons of “kick the puppy” decisions. Even the legion brings up some interesting moral/post nuclear societal questions. Questions you really should say “of course not” to but interesting to think about nevertheless.
Honestly, as much as people complain about them, I like pet/kick the puppy choices. When something is so obviously horrible but you can do it anyway? That's funny.
No, that's how it went down, I replayed it like a year or so ago
Also for an interesting take on evil playthroughs, I can recommend Tyranny as a pretty cool game that tries something different (even though it doesn't entirely stick its landing). Mechanically it's Pillars of Eternity except your character is a mid-ranked functionary in the army of the evil overlord after the heroes failed to save the world, and there's a bunch of every-option-kinda-sucks-but-maybe-you-can-make-things-a-bit-less-awful moral decisions in the factional infighting during the mopping up phase of the world conquest.
was reading this thread and thinking the same thing. Tyranny is probably the best game I've played for exploring shades of gray in an evil playthrough
I usually end up watching a playthrough of the evil runs in games. I'm just too much of a goodie two shoes to do mean things in videogames :x
i was playing some SWTOR doing the sith juggernaut campaign. (it's free and basically solo game until level 50)
some of those evil choices even had myself being like ddaaaaaaaman fuuuuuck.
i had sex with lord gratham's wife while vette watches. it was weird
The Sith Lightside Inquisitor playthrough is pretty awesome though, placing emphasis on the Sith code as a force of liberation
Peace is a lie. There is only Passion.
Through Passion I gain Strength.
Through Strength I gain Power.
Through Power I gain Victory.
Through Victory my chains are Broken
The Force shall free me
KOTOR is so good with its dark side choices. You can get dark side points for ratting out dissidents, murdering people, instigating a family feud into an all-out war, but then also get it for just being a bit mean.
i can't do pure evil, but i love being a fucking asshole. there's that one soldier in the former las vegas airport with a stutter, and during my first ever playthrough, as soon as i saw that i could make fun of his stutter, i went for it. i just HAD to man! it was right there
i read something, i think a greentext, a few months ago that made the argument (very very very shortly summed up here) that aligning with Mr. House is the path that a devout Marxist should take, because he has the unique ability (among the different routes the player can go) to develop the productive forces of the wasteland through his technology and capitalism, which in turn brings us closer to communism. This stands on the assumption that the material conditions & productive forces of the wasteland aren't developed enough for communism in this moment. Also, that the player alone isn't capable of wielding enough power to force it to come about, a la great man theory, on an unaligned playthrough
This stands on the assumption that the material conditions & productive forces of the wasteland aren’t developed enough for communism in this moment.
Sierra Madre vending machines go brrrrr
Also, that the player alone isn’t capable of wielding enough power to force it to come about, a la great man theory, on an unaligned playthrough
If the option is taken, they have the force of an army of missile-wielding security bots, which House himself thinks to be enough to repel the Legion and NCR. And of course, the R&D potential of Big MT.
As much as I love New Vegas I always found it fucked up that you can join a faction of rapists and slavers.
