What game allows you to be the most evil?

I used to only play games roleplaying as a goody two shoes, whether it was abiding traffic laws in GTA, peacefully resolving conflicts in Bioware and Obsidian RPGs, staying faithful to my cherubic wife in Fable 2, or embarking on pacifist playthroughs of Deus Ex and Dishonored.

In the last few years, however, I've come to enjoy my second playthroughs as an emotionless psychopath almost as much. My question is: which of them has the most heinous possibilities? Not necessarily vulgar, it could be cartoonishly evil like Overlord or the Darklings in the Darkness if you want.

I can't remember all the options specifically, but there are specific evil choices you can make in the infamous games. I remember some of them being pretty messed up.

Disco Elysium lets you go pretty far with the fascist decisions.

It's probably the Sims. Because nothing screams evil quite like trapping a Sim in their own house just to watch them burn to death, or you can drown them, or electrocute them etc etc. The options are endless, it's like a sandbox of torture really.

When you're forced to destroy a tenant building in Tropico to build a mansion or a hotel.

You can be incredibly evil in the KOTOR games just because, heck in the first one you if you go full evil you can make certain party members kill other party members.

I don't know about evil, but every single way you can execute someone in Manhunt with a plastic bag is extremely cruel.

@christoffer: I was going to say either this or Sim City where you destroy a city

For chaotic evil like RAMPAGE in the old 2D GTA's I guess it's the Postal series (Postal 2 is the only one I played and probably the best?) or Manhunt (that I've never played). Murdering civilians in Hitman is pretty evil as well.

If you want lawful evil you could side with the "evil" factions in Fallout 3 and New Vegas but blowing up Megaton wasn't that interesting IMO. I think you end up having the option to take over Caeser's Legion if you side with them and I don't know if you consider that evil. Outer Worlds has some evil options as well but I guess you already know that when you mentioned Obsidian. I've never done a full renegade playthrough in those games and the farthest I got was doing missions for the slavers in Fallout 3 before I lost interest.

I played through Dishonored without killing anyone, and I think that several of the non-lethal boss takedowns are WAY more fucked up than just killing them.

As Panfoot mentioned, the first KOTOR has an extraordinarily evil thing you can do at the end. It's kind of shocking for Star Wars.

Some 4x games allow you to be a monster on a scale that is orders of magnitude greater than other games. Of course, it's much more abstracted at that level. I used to play Master of Orion 2 and get the stellar converter (basically the Death Star laser) and systematically destroy every planet that I didn't control.

OG Legacy of Kain has to be up there, right? And harvesting the kids in Bioshock is probably the one thing in games I couldn't do. Fallout 3's nuking an entire city would be pretty high up on the list of big evils.

Tyranny has a wide variety of very evil things to do throughout, given that it's (on paper) a game about playing as the villains in a CRPG.

Grand Strategy in general in part because there is nothing in the interface there wagging it's finger at you in judgment, so it's easy to find yourself doing absolutely heinous maybe without realizing how far you've gone.

KOTOR is hard to top for that big singular "Wow that was fucked up" moment.

that was the first (only?) game that made me feel dirty in a bad way after playing it. No other game made me feel actually sickened by my own actions like Manhunt did. Pretty rough on a sheltered 15 year old.

@development: Yeah. Even when you know you're killing terrible criminals, it still feels kinda awful. But the plastic bag was something I always avoided, because those kills are super cruel.

Hatred, maybe? You're literally a mass murderer gunning down hordes of innocent civilians. Never played it myself, but the Quick Look was...something else.

Has to be Civilization.

@development: Manhunt was the only one of 'those' games I played. And after that, I actually liked. I cheated though and didn't do the real 'good' deaths till I was forced to, to continue the game in the insane asylum. It was a sick game that actually had a pretty decent plot and characters.

Will never ever forget Drug Whore...

Sometimes I think of Batman. Rocksteady's series was a very dark tale of the most passive/aggressive revenge tale that I can think of at the moment. Batman's whole commitment of not killing was based on the narrow premise of not directly doing to others as was done to his parents. But that just meant he would not intentionally slay. If a thug fell to his death, or any other means after being impacted, that wasn't on Batman. If an evildoer became a quad or head damage or anything like, too bad. Implied I thought is that it was no argument just dues. And quite fine with Batman, also.

All of the later Ultima games has a spell called Armageddon. True to its name, it kills all life in the game world except the caster and sometimes Lord British. The spell was usually difficult to get and there was no point in casting it unless you just wanted to kill everything.

That's pretty evil.

Life.

Crusader Kings II is a game that allows you to coordinate an assassination plot against a baby. You can also blind or castrate prisoners, there are multiple ways to torture people, and you can be VERY racist (you can take out a loan from Jewish merchants...and then expel the Jewry from your kingdom thus nullifying your debt. What happened to the Jews after they're kicked out of your lands? Meh, not your problem, right?). It's all shades of fucked up - just like real history!

Fallout 1,2, and the original Deus Ex deserve mention for being some of the only games (that I know of) that allow you to directly kill children.

When playing open world RPGs (mostly talking about the Bethesda stuff here since I am playing through New Vegas again rn) I always find it extremely difficult to be evil because it doesn't really make sense for a lot of quests. Like a lot of quests in those games are just people approaching you and telling you their problems and then asking you to solve them.

As a good character it makes sense for you to help because good people generally want to help others. Even if the person asking turns out to have evil intent or there is an evil way to complete the quest that often doesn't come out until later in the quest.

As an evil character it often doesn't make sense. You can kind of look at it as you are just doing it for the award but that only really makes sense if an award is offered up front or you have an option to ask for one. Otherwise what is my in game explanation for helping you? This often leads me to accepting quests that I don't think my character would actually accept just because I don't want to miss out on seeing content, especially on a first playthrough.

There is of course content designed for evil characters, such as the Brotherhood stuff in Elder Scrolls, but it seems massively outweighed by content that fits with good character builds.

I know this isn't really an answer to your question but it was something I was thinking about.

It is true that if you play Crusader Kings long enough you will come to understand that the best move for everyone is to order a baby to be murdered.

@insomniak08: I'm exactly the same. So many games are narratively built on the foundation of being helpful and virtuous, as games have conditioned us to help people and earn a reward. I used to be much more enthusiastic about replaying a game and going full renegade, but now as an adult I just don't find choosing the most evil option to be particularly fun or interesting. I always default to being a paragon. Even in my given example, Crusader Kings II, I rarely use most of the more evil options that the game presents to you, because there's often a more ethical solution to a problem that doesn't involve murder and subterfuge.

TBF, I'm quite lawful good as a person, which I think is quite rare for people to self-identify as because it's nowhere near as cool as being chaotic good.

In KOTOR, I remember killing a lot of wookies.

This person has the right idea.

@theoriginalatlas: Also because maybe 2% of people roleplay Lawful Good in an interesting way so you gotta figure that carries over to reality.

I've felt like being evil is the best way to min-max in the more recent Fallout games. i.e. Complete task, kill the task giver. Take all their stuff. Win win.

Completely breaks the logic and narrative.. but it's fun.

You can solve multiple situations in Dragon Age Origins by killing kids. There are at least two instances of kids being possessed in the game and in both cases you can just not give a fuck about doing the work of separating the demon from the kid and just straight up off the kid.

You can murder pretty much any npc you come across in Divinity: Original Sin 2 and just end up with empty towns.

As bybeach said Manhunt is probably the game you're most evil,

Not only you're playing a convict and a murderer, the options in dispatching the henchmen blocking your progress is either by killing them violently or extremely violently.

Fun game tho.

No it's definitely The Sims.

Easy answer Hatred.

@bybeach: Sometimes I think of Batman. Rocksteady's series was a very dark tale of the most passive/aggressive revenge tale that I can think of at the moment.

So I take it you didn't play Last of Us 2 that might be the most brutal revenge story so far.

Stellaris lets you enslave or genocide entire races on a galactic scale. I'd say that's pretty up there.

On a side note, I started playing Assassin's Creed: Odyssey this weekend and doing a ruthless Kassandra playtrough let you go farther than I expected on the moral choices. Especially from a Ubisoft ~No politics™~ game. There's nothing quite like letting a religious nuts murder a whole family (Kids included) because he's scared of the plague. And then telling the kid that idolizes you (and whom explicitly asked you to go there and save his friend in the first place) that you let them be slaughtered because "Meh, it wasn't my job".

Prototype, you're pretty much destroying everything around you.

@djredbat: No, I didn't. But I have read much of TLOU2 in the comments. And I actually had TLOU2 in mind when I wrote 'passive/aggressive revenge tale'. Ellie sounds like a focused straight on murderer, no passive about her at all. If there is another dynamic that fulfills the passive part, say with the other character you play, then I missed it.

But brutal, yes, I did get that, but not completely what I was laying out.

I think @ulfhedinn had it right. You suffocate people with plastic bagss in 'Manhunt'. That seems twisted.

You all should play Tyranny if you're into RPGs. You're playing a bad guy of some sort who is doing something awful along the way, from choosy about who gets your wrath if not extremely and calculatedly evil. You're a cog in a big evil Empire so you really only have so much wriggle room in that machine at all.

I think it's really underrated. It has a really fresh vibe and perspective compared to a lot of recent cRPGs.

In the latest Hitman games at least, it's quite easy to become a legitimate mass murderer. You can hide in a shed, let people come to you, and watch as the bodies pile up to your knees. It was kind of fun at first, but I eventually got a very sick feeling in my stomach. Now, I try to play as cleanly as possible.

@toughshed: There's a pretty clear "Good" route in that game that I feel like most people ended up doing and I always thought it was kind of a shame.

Yes, I can definitely agree. In my latest Stellaris game I was playing a very peaceful and passive species. But as I eventually noticed that I was running out of time and will not win the game, I invaded my neighbor empire, wiped out their fleet and conquered about 70% of their territory.

In Civilization I would play on the Earth map, start somewhere in the old world, and cross the oceans and colonize the new world ASAP. Of course that meant wiping out all of the indigenous people there (who in the game were classified as "barbarians" without a proper civilization.)

... In hindsight that is pretty fucked up.

I have solved so many Crusader Kings problems by paying a nurse to smother a child in his crib.

I love them so very, very much, but Paradox games in general are a hotbed for this kind of stuff. For another example, Europa Universalis IV has multiple, explicit genocide mechanics ("Do you want to increase the growth rate of your colony by eradicating the indigenous Guarani population Y/N?"). It comes as absolutely no surprise that the Paradox fanbase is infested with Nazis.

Yeah, I picked that game up because of the interesting premise. Ended up playing the good guy the whole way. My fault for not experimenting, but I kinda wish the game forced me to make some uncomfortable choices. Also the cliffhanger ending is a major bummer that will probably never get resolved.

Its not an RPG but the answer to this is Spec Ops: The Line.

@aktivity: Yeah sadly it kinda bombed pretty harshly in sales so it seems unlikely to continue.

In Fable didn't you grow horns and and red eyes if you evicted people from their homes and murdered and stole things. That was awesome. I remember loving causing shit in that game.

Yeah Civilization bar none. Commit genocide on indigenous peoples, destroy local cultures, inflict horrid climate change on the world, control your own citizens through fascism and reduce entire nations to rubble through unprovoked nuclear war.