So, I put a solid 20ish hours into Tyranny. Enough to have a taste of the endgame without knowing exactly how much of it is left unplayed, and enough to be fairly certain that I could not give less of a shit exactly how it ends. I made the (unwise?) decision to play Tyranny the way I thought it was supposed to be played. I chose a side (The Chorus, mostly because their forced conscription was the closest thing to "integration" the game offered) knowing that it would be flawed, and "evil", and that I would have to do reprehensible things to stay in their favor. And all of these things were true, as it turned out. The leader of the faction was murderous and traitorous and I became progressively less interested in working with him as the story went on and he put more of the people I managed to conscript on stakes.

I won't pretend I didn't have opportunities to have second thoughts, though they were less perfect than I would have liked. I couldn't just out and out challenge the leader to a duel for control of the chorus when he told me something insane, I would have to randomly defy some hapless questgiver far away from his seat of power. And though I told my real boss, the arbiter of justice, of his traitorous deeds, this did not bring down the wrath of Kyros as I hoped.

But I didn't come here to complain that I wasn't the good guy. Like I said, I knew I wasn't going to be. I made a choice not to be. I came here to wonder why it is that being evil just didn't click with me, and how games where it did click differed. Here's the answer I came to: exposition.

The world of Tyranny is well-developed, and it makes every effort to ensure you understand what's going on, whether it be through the game's helpful encyclopedic tool tips or lengthy expository dialogue you can extract from purpose-built NPCs in the game's second location. But none of that text can give you experience that feeds your determination to stay on the crooked path.

I think the best example of "evil" being attractive in a video game is probably Mass Effect. The renegade path is not explicitly called evil for a good reason - you're still fighting for the good guys - but you make some hard decisions that you can feel the consequences of, whether it be the alien fleet that's wiped out by Sovereign in the first game, or the fate of Wrex should you choose to go against him in either game 1 or game 3. But being a renegade was easy, and not just because it was fun hitting RT to throw a guy out a window. You saw how ineffective the counsel was. You witnessed how shortsighted and destructive the Krogan were. It was easy to come to the conclusion that the power that be weren't willing to make the hard choice, and it was in your power to make it for them.

This is not true of Tyranny. It is missing a first act. You are forced to make decisions between the two militant factions of Kyros' army before you understand what your character's motives are. Why does he work for Kyros? Is he resentful or grateful? Has he witnessed the futility of resistance, or better yet, the flawed system that his harsh order is replacing? Some of this stuff is written into the character background you choose during creation, but it has all the narrative heft of a picture book.

I suppose that the reason for the game's limitations, if you choose to think of them as such, is simply one of scope. A game about choices can't introduce your character and then not give him the choice to refuse recruitment. But without that well of experience, however abbreviated, to draw on, I don't understand how anyone manages to roleplay their way through the choices the game presents. I'm beginning to think that if I play Tyranny again, I'll break the rules and refuse to side with evil, because in my first playthrough I witnessed more than enough of the main two factions to justify opposing them. even if I didn't encounter much of anything to encourage supporting them.