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. :)
Hmmm a day later and no one mentioned braid.
Stubbs the zombie
You can do some pretty evil shit in Baldur’s Gate 3. Definitely makes you question your morals. The Dark Urge player character story is pretty messed up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Saints Row games. They’re like GTA, but increasingly over the top in their parody. You’re the boss of a criminal gang. 2 is still “normal parody” and a bit dated, 3 jumped the shark while doing a kickflip with a jet ski, 4 is even more insane.
Sleeping Dogs you play as a cop, but you can betray the law and side more with the criminals.
Warcraft 3 (old but gold) - the human campaign of the base game gets you from a hopeful young paladin prince into a cold, vengeful psychopath; the following undead campaign is said prince (well, king now) finishing the job of killing everyone and further fucking everything. The expansion has 3 extra campaigns, none with “good guys”
Divinity Original Sin (1 and 2) lets you play as big of an asshole as you’d like. Of the Elder Scrolls games, Morrowind is the one that lets you be the biggest bad guy around (you can still finish the game even if you kill every important npc and break every quest)
Divinity Original Sin (1 and 2) lets you play as big of an asshole as you’d like.
I haven’t gone through it myself, but I think Baldur’s Gate 3 has ways to side with “bad guys”, I believe I’ve seen patch notes about expanding the content there, so that’s also an option from the same devs.
But the origin characters generally aren’t perfect and have their motivations, especially The Dark Urge.
Dungeon Keeper.
Destroy all humans.
Spec ops the line.
Braid.
Manhunt.
Oh, Spec Ops was great. I totally thought it was going to be a COD-like game all pew pew go America let’s shoot up a burger king and teabag the enemy, but holy shit.
It’s one of those things where I want to forget everything so I can experience it again.
Same, I think that’s why it never was big, everyone just saw it as another 3rd person COD shooter. I played the game like 5 years after it was released and was totally blown away by the story. It’s mediocre gameplay but the story is so damn good.
oh Braid is so fucked up once you realize the story. At the end I was like “why the hell did I help this little prick?”
At the end I was like “why the hell did I help this little prick?”
Am… I this little prick? oh fuck…
One of the books really stuck with me though.
Our world, with its rules of causality, has trained us to be miserly with forgiveness. By forgiving too readily, we can be badly hurt. But if we’ve learned from a mistake and become better for it, shouldn’t we be rewarded for the learning, rather than punished for the mistake?
Destroy all humans is so good, and they did a great job on the remaster!
Dungeon Keeper 2 was just great.
The first 2 you are absolutely unequivocally the bad guy, those were going to be my suggestions. I think the second 2 it’s a little spoilery to tell people you’re the bad guy
I don’t think Spec ops is spoilers to reveal you’re a bad guy, not in 2026: you play the US, in the Gulf. You play the US doing US imperialism, it doesn’t hide that from you. It’s just later in the game it confronts you with what that really means.
Braid absolutely, but it’s 17yo at this point, any reasonable spoiler policy* has worn off. Meets the criteria, gets you all empathetic for the little shit, Tim, then makes you question it all. I think a first play through is impactful even knowing he’s a villain… It’s not that he’s a villain that is cool, it’s how you find out he’s a villain.
*Except for Outer Wilds the spoiler policy on that is eternal.
Eh, compare Spec Ops to its contemporaries and it’s definitely an outlier for treating you like a bad guy. Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Medal of Honor were definitely treating you like a hero. Still Spec Ops is much better than those games so if the discussion gets people to play it then I’m on board
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.
Spec Ops: The Line?
They delisted this shit from Steam right before shit popped off next to Dubai in real life.
Eh, it was delisted a couple years ago because of expired music licenses. Game was banned in the UAE upon release though.
Still worth a playthrough. That game was the whole reason why I knew Deep Purple was a band.
And this is also like the third comment in a row I’ve made about the game lol
🏴☠️
you’re here because you wanted to feel like something you’re not: a hero.
This game hits hard.
Baldur’s Gate 3. Not only can you make an evil character, one of the premades is a special evil character called the Dark Urge and basically forces you into doing things that are often even more fucked up than the basic bad guy stuff.
Most cRPGs are like that, actually. Rogue Trader is another good one. Being a paragon of good is nigh impossible in that one, since you’re basically a tyrannical land baron in the WH40k universe where everyone is garbage. 😃
Well there’s always Grand Theft Auto.
Some of the better RPGs allow you to play as an evil guy (equally fleshed out as the good guy playthrough), e.g. Baldur’s Gate 3 (it even has a special evil background storyline called The Dark Urge) or (some of?) the Mass Effect titles.
Cult of the Lamb is also a great game where you play a cult leader. Although the game’s design is strong on the entertaining/funny side, it’s kind of dark also.
Stellaris is a grand strategy game where you can play anything, from a ruthless ruler trying to destroy the whole galaxy to a pacifist trader.
The dark urge can be played sort of good too. I watched the Christopher Odd playthrough and he stayed mostly morally good I’d say, although eventually did become a mind flayer.
