Do you need to be the good guy?

[Ceremonius]

I would stop in Atlas to help the NPC that was being robbed all the time.  I just like to help (even though the NPC's were pretty dumb.  I mean, what were they doing alone on the roof top in the first place?).

Basejumping?

But yes, I did also serv the greater good. Helping people might gives you something back in the future. Thinking of: Hero gets old, has to retire and is getting inside a nursehome. It's better to be known to be the good guy. Otherwise someone would say "Hey! That guy didn't save me! He laughed at me while I got robbed! Payback time!"

[Nos482]

[doc7924]

The thing for me that made playing a villain in COV useless after a while was that you were villians and 90% of the time you just fought other villains.

[dwturducken]

But villains are inherently distrustful and often would fight amongst themselves. Even when they would team up, it was an uneasy alliance. When your goal is world domination, or even just the tri-state area, you don't tend to want to share that.

To that end, I would generally stick to soloing on red side.

[JaguarX]

The thing for me that made playing a villain in COV useless after a while was that you were villians and 90% of the time you just fought other villains.

yeah I noticed that too.

Now I know the path to "World domination," although in COV it mean working for arachnos and dominating a piece that isnt already claimed by one of the LTs or LR, tends to involve having to fight off other villains when the time comes, 90% of the fight should have been against heroes, with the 10% making sure no one rises against ya or hold ya down. Instead of the other way around 90% fighting other villains 10% longbow and PPD

[Rust]

Yeah, Redside content didn't work for me. I felt more like a Enforcer - a Super Powered "Tough" - rather then a legitimate world dominating Super Villain in my own right. Then again, how do you write dynamic content for a world dominating Super Villain?

There were some gems here and there though. The Cloning Facility being a big one, but another being the "hidden" mission chain where you worked with the spirit of a Muu sorcerer for mutual gain. Sadly those were few and far between the usual "You work for me" kind of stuff we normally got.

[JaguarX]

Yeah, Redside content didn't work for me. I felt more like a Enforcer - a Super Powered "Tough" - rather then a legitimate world dominating Super Villain in my own right. Then again, how do you write dynamic content for a world dominating Super Villain?

There were some gems here and there though. The Cloning Facility being a big one, but another being the "hidden" mission chain where you worked with the spirit of a Muu sorcerer for mutual gain. Sadly those were few and far between the usual "You work for me" kind of stuff we normally got.

I dont know. good question. I guess a start would be less and less arachnos and achonos affiliated people and more and more "gained" enforcers of ya own and or informats.

Like "boss, I hear longbow set up shop around the corner."  Or "boss, longbow raided one of our spots. We are out manned out gunned."

Then I'm dead on the one that may fit a lone wolf looking for domination.


Probably why there isnt many villain games unless ya go the GTA route.

[Electric-Knight]

I really enjoy playing either side of the Hero/Villain dynamic.

My enjoyment of these games is more from the mentality of a writer and/or an actor, so I love exploring the psychology of the character and examine what that might teach me or, just simply, what fun it might bring.

As with acting (and writing too), sometimes the most fun comes from being the villain.
Both in a fun and/or grand sense, but also in a very serious, psychological exploration.
When you can create a fictional being that is twisted and terrible... but you understand how that (once pure) being became that way and/or why and how they do what they do... and what they think and feel about it and/or how they avoid facing the reality of what they do...
It is actually a powerful experience that can help you in dealing with people and problems of the real world.

Don't get me wrong. I can find just as much depth in a hero character as well.
However, I've never had any qualm with exploring the darker side.

I want to say, "within my fiction" at the end of that sentence, but it's more fun to just leave it like that, hahaha. 

While I have a few seemingly shallow thugs, brutes and killers in my roster, really, they all have a layer of depth which created those aspects within those people.
My main villain, Malfaz, however, is an example of a very deep and tragic persona, tortured by physical and psychological ailments, that is both psychotic killer and a delusional, misguided vigilante, in a sense.

Then I have Zox'Oculox, who is an alien who is mostly a product of his evil, barbaric and disgusting culture. Zox is likely my most simplistic of villains.
I have many others that fall in-between he and Malzaf, but every single one of them is just a person/being whose experiences, personality, faults, quirks, weaknesses and strengths (plus consequences, circumstances and all) led them into being who they are.

Regardless... in terms of personal/player morality... it's all just pushing keys and buttons and making enemies' numbers go down while keeping your numbers up.
The rest is poetry, whether dark or light.

 

[Castegyre]

"I don't play monsters. I play men besieged by fate and out for revenge." ~Vincent Price

I have no problem with being the bad guy at all in a role play setting. I just need the right motivation.

[JaguarX]

Yeah this remind me of something a couple of my friends told me. Now at first I found it funny, but then I found it a bit chilling.

First it started off I loaned someone a good deal of cash, they never paid it back, in fact they started to avoid me. This person was afraid to come forward because they were serious convinced I was going to bury them out in the desert. Now I said I dont look like a scary guy and not big enough to look intimidating but my friends said, "That is what makes you so damned scary." Now curious I asked "How?" Their reply in a nutshell was "You could kill us all right now and no one will take our word for it due to our looks and criminal record. You're clean and you probably wouldnt even be a suspect." 

I couldnt help but laugh. These guys, many been in and out of jail since they were in middle school thinking some dude from the surburbs never been arrested (been questioned) or convicted think that I could take over the criminal activities in this city and no one getting wise. But at the same time chilling, they are right. If they jay walk, they probably will get hassled and searched. Me, aint no cop going to pay attention because visually I dont fit the look of a criminal. I wonder how many people get caught up merely because they look the part of a villain and how many people get away with even murder because they simply dont look like  they could do it and simply could claim self defense if they are questioned and no one thinks anything more of it. Of course I wouldnt do a thing like that or murder someone although sometimes to get a point across, I did "bend" the rules a bit, but never broke a law. Only time I ever actually got put in hand cuffs and taken down to a station was off one beer coming through a check point got blew and got dropped back off at my vehicle and told to have a nice day and nothing more within two hours.

[Taceus Jiwede]

I have actually always like games that there isn't a black and white good guy bad guy type thing.  That the villains may not be evil as much as their are just products of their enviorment and were born out of necessity.  And like wise, that heroes are not always good just because they wear a badge or fight for the right side.  For example a person of wealth could easily become a "hero" because they never would have to steal to eat or would never have to join a gang for a family.  Sometimes things that seem good are really bad, and things that seem bad are done to survive.  And sometimes good people have to do bad things for good reasons.  So while I tend to always gravitate to the good side because it is more in my nature to help, I like to see situations where the line gets blurred because it is not always black and white.  For example would someone really be a good guy for putting a person in jail for stealing some apples to feed their family?  It of course is wrong to steal and there are alternatives but it is always wrong to take the provider from a family.  Now if only games offered more options like "Pay off the mans bill and help him find work" although that would probably be a boring game....

[JaguarX]

I have actually always like games that there isn't a black and white good guy bad guy type thing.  That the villains may not be evil as much as their are just products of their enviorment and were born out of necessity.  And like wise, that heroes are not always good just because they wear a badge or fight for the right side.  For example a person of wealth could easily become a "hero" because they never would have to steal to eat or would never have to join a gang for a family.  Sometimes things that seem good are really bad, and things that seem bad are done to survive.  And sometimes good people have to do bad things for good reasons.  So while I tend to always gravitate to the good side because it is more in my nature to help, I like to see situations where the line gets blurred because it is not always black and white.  For example would someone really be a good guy for putting a person in jail for stealing some apples to feed their family?  It of course is wrong to steal and there are alternatives but it is always wrong to take the provider from a family.  Now if only games offered more options like "Pay off the mans bill and help him find work" although that would probably be a boring game....

That is why I always say no one or nothing is all good or all evil is 99.999999% of the cases.

[Shenku]

Generally speaking, my natural reactions when playing any types of games that offer moral choices is to do what I would do/say what I would say in real life. Often, this means I always end up firmly blue in spectrum.

Granted, I can force myself to go against my nature when needed, and I can "become" the bad guy to enjoy a series of guilty fantasies, but it feels weird when I do this...

A good example is in the Knights of the Old Republic games(and more recently, SW:TOR which I'm now playing...). For some reason, almost every time, unless I intentionally go against my first instincts, I always end up gaining light side points, and become such a picturesque idealism of what it is to be a Jedi(assuming the choices aren't confusing from lack of context of what your choice means... Less of an issue in TOR since they have indicators of whether you gain light side or dark side points from conversation choices...).

This was especially weird for me when I joined SW:TOR's beta, and rolled my first character as a Sith Warrior... You think Sith, and instinctively think "evil" right? Well, I didn't actively force my choices of actions, I just let them happen... I didn't get far in the beta before it ended, but the direction my character started moving in was very distinctly unbecoming of a Sith Lord, since I not only had removed Vette's shock collar(and quickly at that...), but I was actually choosing to be merciful, and letting people live, and helping people, and.... Well let's be honest, I doubt a Sith Lord cannon-wise had ever been so Light Sided before my character came along....

Suffice to say, when I jumped back into the game when it eventually went free to play, I resurrected that character as a Jedi Councilor instead, and made it much further in level already that way, and it feels nice to not be constantly worried about punishment for being "nice", as Sith are very unforgiving of the concept of "mercy"... Although, due to the character's history as formerly being Sith during the beta, she occasionally ends up being a bit of an impatient smartass... (Although that could be more related to feelings of frustration, anger, and impatience from my current job, and not at all attributed to the character's origins... For the sake of pride, I'd rather it was the former, but my always-self-honest side says that the latter is not entirely without influence on this...)

I think the most difficult time I had with moral choices in any game though, was with CoH's Going Rogue. I was so conflicted on what my character was doing with the Resistance, even though out of character wise I knew that Cole's empire was evil and needed to be stopped and that the Resistance was right to be fighting Cole's empire, but the methods the Resistance was using left me so morally conflicted, I never actually managed to finish going through the entire Resistance storyline. It was great writing, but perhaps too great because it was so morally ambiguous that I wasn't able to get through it all...

[crayehal]

I'm the opposite and prefer to be the bad guy.  If I want to beat somebody up, I don't need a reason and I just beat them up.  If I play hero, I somehow feel out of place.  In the end, I had about over 50 villains and just a scant 3 heroes.

[CheerGunbunny]

I mostly made villains.  But always with a reason...Main villain, Pinnacle, was DM/FA Brute...she was a demon.  Her "evil" was a product of being pissed off at being stuck here, and a towering contempt for the "lower beings" around her.  Another was a redneck as hell "Girls Gone Wild"  type videos "star", who found some alien tech (Corruptor, DP/Therm), and was looking for payback at all the "good" people who'd always scorned her for being white trash/redneck/ignorant/slut.  Main Virtue Villain, she was pissed at the government and society in general...her closeted girlfriend suicided at prospect of being outed by "Coffee Caucus" (Tea Party knock) people in charge at her cutting edge nanotechnology research job and getting fired...so Decaffeinator swiped some combat nanotech after the funeral, ingested it, and started running wild.

I like to to be the bad one.

[Epelesker]

I'm a good guy. I did have a character on redside previous to i17, but villains were always something I could never do.

[Mantic]

No, I don't need to be the "good guy." Heck, I'm more balanced than that in real life.

What I don't like in games is being forced onto rails. Of any kind, but most particularly being told my motivations, forced into doing things I don't like in order to progress, or worst of the worst, fed a completely lame and two-dimensional morality path, like in the Fable games. If the game were a simple side-scroller, sure, I don't mind pattern and predictability, and motivations hardly play a role. But in a game like CoX, where creativity is so broadly encouraged, I felt that I sometimes had to just ignore what the developers decided to write me into.

AE, though limited and often frustrating, was awesome for getting away from that kind of dissonance and playing games designed specifically for my various characters (I even had a mission for my anthropomorphic chicken superhero, where he could run around collecting his stolen hens and then battle the fox who scattered them). But, of course, you don't get all the badges and other rewards doing things that way, or much teaming action...

The thing for me that made playing a villain in COV useless after a while was that you were villians and 90% of the time you just fought other villains.

That, too. Same problem: rails.

[Thunder Glove]

The thing is, I always loved villain-vs-villain stories, so taking down other villains to prove I was the top dog?  I didn't mind that at all.  I relished it as much as I did taking down the Second String Hero Brigade (you know the guys I mean) in Morality and Mayhem missions.  I didn't mind my villain taking on Mot or Tyrant, because they represented a threat to my character's own world domination plans, and you threaten a villain at your own peril.

True, I don't think they set the proper tone for villains when CoV opened (the newspaper missions, the most noticeable holdover from that, are especially badly-written, presenting your character as nothing but a low-tier money-grubber living in a crummy thin-walled apartment, fencing away every item of power he gets), but they had grokked onto what players wanted after that, and the Redside writing had improved by leaps and bounds since then, culminating in the villainside SSA2 (where you form your own villain group to rival Arachnos), and I'm sure it would have continued to improve if not for... you know.

I'm generally awkward and introverted in real life, and I'm often overlooked in crowds, so I enjoy playing these larger-than-life villains who stand (or hover) in the center of things and demand (and, more importantly, receive) attention and respect.

[JaguarX]

yeah just wish there was a little bit more actual world domination on the villain side. Felt like I was taking out villains that wasa mroe of a threat to Arachnos than to myself.
Like when I kidnap scientist I wanted to kidnap them for my use not to turn them over for the use of ARachnosof the contact at the time.

[Electric-Knight]

This is all why I pretty much only ran newspaper missions (and then AE, later on).

I don't mind generic mission content, in fact, I tend to prefer it over more specific story arcs, because my imagination and own creations take over to fill the gaps/blanks and make it my own.

Villain-side, running newspaper missions, allowed me to decide what I was doing and to do things for my own reasons/desires/gains.

Then again, I tended to enjoy just doing radio missions on blue side, hehehe...