Edit: holy shit I turn my head around for one second and I got 40 replies? THANK YOU ALL :D <3
I just rewatched Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy and following Bane’s and Miranda’s story made me realize that I’m a bit saturated in regards to playing as the hero, the protagonist, the “good guy” in PC games. While I love saving the world as much as the next person, I’d love to play as some perhaps self-righteous villain, or antagonist, or simply somebody portrayed in a way that’s meant to make the player sympathize with questionable morality or, at the very least, be conflicted about why you suddenly find yourself rooting for them.
I’m mostly looking for story driven open world single player games, but any recommendations are welcome. :)
Helldivers games, you’re the exploitative, fascist empire who creates its own problems.
Mafia series - You play as a murderous mobster
Tropico series - You play as the dictator of a small banana republic
Red Dead Redemption - You’re Arthur Morgan, an outlaw who kills for money
I loved playing trópico 4 good. Just trying to do the best for my little Sims and never squirreling money away to the swiss bank account.
Buuuuut I kill bad guys when I play RDR2 so I feel good about it!
While you do get to feed KKK members to the gators and gun down anti-sufferagettes, you also loanshark and rob innocent people amongst other things
Yeah I didn’t like the loan sharking business… and there are some innocent people that get robbed, but much of that is from the story, and there isn’t much you can do about it
Factorio, you literally colonize alien species and pollute their worlds because you feel like it.
Satisfactory in the same regard as well. At first I felt bad about disrupting the natural landscape. But then I needed more power, and land for my factories. And then more land for more power for more factories on more land. It’s a fun cycle.
It’s like a different kind of bad guy… a real world kind of bad guy, really.
Well, maybe not just because you feel like it.
I think the premise is that you crashed on an alien planet and need to build a spaceship to return back home?The fact that you are destroying the entire ecosystem of the planet to do so is just a slight inconvenience.
I think that’s Factorio.
In Satisfactory you’re a Pioneer sent exactly for the purpose of exploiting the planet.
Ig mincecraft in the same vain, if you want to interact with mc villagers in any meaningful/efficient way.
To get cheap villager trades, you can traumabond them to you by repeatedly letting them get killed by zombies and then resurrecting them.
If you want your villagers so be safe, as well as have them all near eachother and sorted after traids, you build a “trading hall” where each villager is trapped in a one by on by two big area where they only have a workstation in front of them as well as a window for you to talk/trade with them. (They would probly die sooner or later if you let them run around the world freely, so building this is kinda a must if you spend a significant time getting the good villager traids, which you kinda have to do if you want good enchantments on your tools cuz all the other options to get them suck compared to villagers).
Villagers are also a good/the only way to automaticaly farm iron or crops, for crops you just trap them in a field and let them work for you. For iron you repeatedly scare them with zombies, so that an iron golem spawns, which you immediately kill in lava, so you can get the iron that it drops.
Hmmm a day later and no one mentioned braid.
Spec Ops: The Line
The willy pete scene fucked me up for a while.
The GTA series might be a good example. All of the protagonists of the games commit exceedingly worse crimes as the game progresses but they’re made to be sympathetic since they just want success in a world with not much other opportunities.
Games with karma systems may work as well if the bad option isn’t overtly evil. I’m thinking games like Dishonored, Fable 3, Undertale, or any Bethesda game.
Anti-hero protagonists like Kratos from God of War, Arthur Morgan from Red Dead 2, and V from Cyberpunk could also somewhat fit the bill.
Edit: just watched an Outside Xbox video that summarizes a few games with just this premise.
Peacemaker The Game.
Shocked to see no one’s suggested Tyranny yet which is an isometric RPG where you specifically play one of the bad guys. Yeah you can make some “good” decisions but ultimately, you’re a foot soldier for the bad guys. It’s got plenty of that conflict about what’s right and wrong that you’re looking for too!
I admire Tyranny from afar, but I think it’d depress me too much.
I thought so as well but it was pretty funand the plot lines are versatile.
You can enslave the younglings, you dont need to murder every one of them however delicious they may be.
Maybe I have gone soft. I should just turn up my GWAR collection and rock that funky chicken.
Disco Elysium’s protagonist is a walking disaster and there are a lot of ways you can play him. Honestly playing him as a totally morally upright professional is one of the harder ways to play. You definitely don’t feel like a hero while you’re playing
Honestly playing him as a totally morally upright professional is one of the harder ways to play
Oh so I was just playing it wrong lmao
Yeah, it’s a little spoilery to say but the game tries to force you to learn that lesson. Trying to be a good cop and being straight edge is pretty frustrating. Then once you take a morally gray choice and it advances the plot, you use some drugs to meet a check and there aren’t really consequences. Then by the end of the game you’re high on 4 different drugs punching children and you understand the point they were making
Wait what point is that
I think that might have been my problem with that game as well. I felt like I was going absolutely nowhere about 1 or 2 hours in.
I should probably restart.
I’m too dumb to play that game. I tried and kept dying during dialogue.
I didn’t know you could die in a game from saying the wrong thing. But I did multiple times. A few hours in. I was playing on switch and it made me restart from beginning.
So I gave up and just watched a YouTube on the story.
Idk I’ve never played a game like that and I’m not sure how the mechanics work. Obviously too dense to figure it out.
Very cool art style and world building though.
A few hours in and you restarted from the beginning? That’s weird considering the game has autosaves, unless there’s a quirk about the switch version.
Do you remember what dialogue you died on perhaps?
Yeah it made me start completely fresh both times I died. I was like. Okay well fk this.
It was on the switch and the way saves work on it are generally different. It didn’t have a “load a specific save” option.
It just has one save. Automatic.
Not even one mention of Prototype. What have the world become.
Prototype. Man. What a fucking BLAST that was. The super powers you had by the end of the game combined with the techniques you could use.
Surfing corpses, eating people alive to clone their appearance. Slicing, smashing, or just tearing apart tanks. Throwing cars. It was just absolute mayhem and I doubt we will see another game quite so unhinged.
Yeah, when Activision still make good and innovative game. Prototype is a rare gem that escape a lot of people’s radar somehow, despite that game selling quite well back then. I blame the name.
I somehow only remember that like a fever dream.
minecraft
you show up in a mostly peaceful world and just start destroying it, enslaving villagers and treating peaceful mobs inhumanely to farm them so you can go kill more mobs that were leaving you alone
This should go on their wiki.
Command & Conquer 3
Kane was really rocking that Evil Abed™ look before Abed even existed
Cruel. Cruel cruel cruel.
Kane just copied the look of Derek Vinyard.
Basically Westwood game
No one’s said Infamous yet. Shocking. Well Infamous. You get to choose if you’re going to be good or bad and it’s super satisfying either way. Dishonered has that same sort of choice, also amazing whichever way you go.
Infamous 2 was my favorite of the series, but it’s stuck on the PS3 and doesn’t emulate well.
Infamous
2Second Son (corrected from 2) was my first time seeing someone from a North American indigenous tribe as the protagonist in a (edit: video game) story. Also not an “Indian” archetype of any sorts and without clichés.Cole was in Infamous 2, and he’s a white guy. You must mean Delsin from Infamous: Second Son. I liked that as well! Connor Kenway of Assassin’s Creed III is half-Mohawk, if that counts.
Ah, yes, thank you!
The original Prey was an excellent game, and the protagonist’s heritage was a large part of the game (though fairly heavily clichéd).
Is that the one where you had to spray paint stuff by holding the controller sideways like a spray can and acting like you were spraying in the air?
No, that was Second Son, the one that took place in Seattle. Infamous 2 was New Marais (New Orleans).
Great games.
And this reminds me of Prototype as belonging here.
This game isn’t exactly niche, but Red Dead Redemption II is a really good one. You play as an outlaw on the run from bounty hunters while your gang is falling, their ideals are crumbling, and society no longer wants them. Arthur Morgan is part of a dying way of life.
The game also has an honor system where your status is determined by how evil or good you are. Help strangers = high honor. Rob and murder indiscriminately = walking nightmare
Stray. You’re a cat. Cats are evil.
