I just realized evil characters are very limited in TES

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After finally unfucking my Oblivion mods and getting everything in perfect working order i can enjoy my vampire character in Oblivion. About the furthest i’ve gotten with an evil character in Oblivion the Dark Brotherhood questline. And turning into a vampire. I always thought Skyrim was lacking when trying to play an evil character because i only tried doing it for an entire character seriously with Skyrim. Then i realized that the entire series really limits what you can do if you like playing the bad guy. In Skyrim, it’s pretty much over once you’ve done the Thieve’s Guild and DB questlines. Same goes for Oblivion. These games are extremely biased and just predominantly contain content for the good guys.

Fallout 3 is pretty much the game. I can’t really think of what else to do other than take the evil choices in some quests/questlines. Nuking Megaton is just about the climax of evil in that entire game. Nothing comes close, as much as i hate to say it. And i hear FO4 is WORSE in terms of choices.

I’ve just finished the Dark Brotherhood questline in Oblivion. Moving onto the Thieve’s Guild. There doesn’t really seem like there’s much else on offer for evil characters. And when you’re playing the good guy (as i have ALWAYS in these games) it may as well be looked at as the definitive experience. I just wanted to share my thoughts. I really think games like this - and Bethesda in particular - need to rethink how the roleplaying experience will play out depending on what kind of character you play. The game world as a whole should change more. As it stands, it’s just far too limiting and lacking.

Thoughts on playing the bad guy? Which games got it better than Bethesda’s games? Anything worth mentioning?

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Really the only TES or FO game you can be “evil” and still have a game is New Vegas, and that’s really just because of the whole Legion slavery/killing thing.

FO4 has just about zero options to be evil, FO3 really only has Megaton, and TES games only have dark guilds. And the latter has almost no effect since they don’t interact with the main questline nor do they stop you from joining the other guilds.

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Bethesda has never really been good at that. At worst your character is moraly flexible, they save the world from the oblivion gates, or end the dragon threat. But they steal everything that isn’t nailed down maybe kill an emperor or two and steal a few priceless artifacts.

I think Bethesda’s bigger problem is their decisions good or bad, rarely have any visible effect. Killing the emperor should be a big deal, but it isn’t, literally so few care most people don’t even notice he died.

And the solution sure as hell isn’t just removing all choice like they did in Fallout 4.

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vegas is the best when it comes to being evil. vegas was NOT made by bethesda.

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This was something I was going to post about in my old Skyrim thread from a while back. That quote right there is such an understatement.

The game world as a whole should change drastically.

Sadly, Bethesda is moving away from player choice, faction relations, consequences in general (positive and negative) outside of a few voice overs from guards and the rabble in empty city streets. Every TES game is guilty of this even Morrowind but to a much lesser extent.

To this point, I have never played a game similar to TES that really nailed any of the points in the quote.

In regards to evil characters. Quite wise, the DB and TG are about as ‘evil’ as one can get. At least in Morrowind NPC’s, factions and the environment hated your guts when you became a vampire. There was even different factions of vampires that opened up, albeit there were small and limited.

What would truly be great is if in the next Elder Scrolls, Bethesda really fleshed out Daedric quests and made factions for them. Imagine a long, in depth quest where you slowly, overtime become the champion of Mehrunes Dagon. As you rank up within his faction his daedric enemies (I think Ebonarm is his only enemy) factions will dislike you more and make that part of the game unavailable to you as a consequence. Upon becoming a champion, you are permanently turned into a Dremora. The final part of a Mehrunes Dagon questline would be opening oblivion gates and defending them until you take over the province. Citizens in cities are replaced with scamps, claanfears and other daedra. Some cities are destroyed and stay this way. The longer a gate is open, the area around it changes to look more like the plane of Oblivion until the entire province is covered. Currency to buy items in conquered cities is altered…maybe the currency is the ears from the corpses of Mundus. NPC inventories change dramatically. Eventually the legion steps in and tries to retake the province/cities. Each wave is harder than the last until you are defeated and everything is returned to normal but the conquered cities are still in rubble but functional. You as the player are slain. Maybe you can be revived so you may resume your game from before but the citizenry is still frightened of you. Or you can be sent back to Oblivion and the game is over for you.

Another great addition for a evil character would to bring back the politics of a province. Maybe you become a spy for a great house trying to gain an advantage over the emperor for succession to the throne. It could even be as simple as the great houses from Morrowind which was really interesting and one of my favorite parts of the game.

The East Empire Trading Co. could bring you aboard for mercantile espionage of competitors and you drastically change the face of the economy around the province. Farms go out of business, others prosper.

If you choose an Argonian race, maybe you can be recruited into a drug smuggling faction that focuses on secretly supplying and setting up dealers in other parts of Tamriel. Cities where you or your dealers do very well there is a change in the behavior and attitude of the citizens. Cleanliness in the streets becomes and issue. Theft runs rampant.

Just some ideas…

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Define evil…
If you side with the Empire and start working towards their goals, you are evil towards the stormcloaks. And vice versa.
If you start the dark brotherhood quests you are evil in general, and there is a specific sequence, that allows you to be evil towards the dark brothers.
Skyrim specifically, since I haven’t played the earlier games, allows you a couple sides for a specific questline.
Even in the DLC, you can side with or against the Dawnguard. This automatically makes you evil to the other side.

I honestly don’t think Bethesda have really ever been good in anything, other than world building. Their games was always buggy and badly optimized, their story telling is not that good and their RPGs barely have any R anymore…

Yeah, and it shows. Continuing my argument from above, the game may not have the greatest largest openest sprawling world, but have enormous R in the RPG…

If you, OP, want to be evil, play Tyranny. As far as I get the premise, the world is consumed by evil, so there is literally no choice but to be evil.

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Well how did you miss the main point of what’s being said here. Although it should be painfully obvious is you’ve played these games. There just straight up are NOT many evil things to do as an evil character.

Other than the little mundane bullshit like stealing. Some questlines. That’s it. These games really need work. You’re rewarded more thoroughly as a good character. But bad characters just have some choices to make and that’s it.

Like right now in Oblivion. I finished DB. I still can do the Thieve’s Guild. Then what? I steal from people’s homes? It’s not nearly enough. At the end of the day, it’s just your aesthetic and what you perceive your character to be. It’s honestly lame as hell.

As a good character, there are many little things that comes together and create the experience. Just being out in the daytime in the game world and exploring. One thing you’re limited in as a vampire. You can travel by night, but the ambience is half the game in TES. But that doesn’t really hit the mark. The games just give you options. And that’s that. There are real ramifications when you’re a positive character. When you’re not, err… there’s nothing, really. And plus, the content is just NOT THERE. I hope it’s obvious enough.

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I’ll never forget Morrowind… one thing I could never understand in Oblivion and Skyrim is when you’re in a vendor’s storefront all the items they have for sale are hidden but in Morrowind I remember everything being out in the open. So if you happen to be invisible…

Never understood why Oblivion departed from that recipe.

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Well that was random. We’re talking about RPing in Oblivion and how evil characters get the shit end of the stick.

But that does sound cool. Although i reckon some vendors don’t have enough space to display all their stuff. I’m starting the Thieve’s Guild questline. And don’t know wtf to do.

If people are talking about ideas. One things that comes to mind is traveling to different realms of Oblivion. If they were to actually have enough gameplay and depth in these areas, then evil characters would be awesome to play as. Oblivion introduced traveling through Oblivion gates. Kathutet the Dremora mentions “Ganonah” (Kvatch Oblivion gate where you meet him). But it really is just a generic area with enemies to kill and Sigil stones to collect. If it were given a name (as Kathutet suggests) and some purpose and NPC life, then the realms of Oblivion you go to would be so much more.

And in retrospect when you look at games like this, it actually hurts looking back at these things and wondering how it could have been so much more. A shame, really. Oblivion is still great, but if they have covered some more avenues then it really would’ve been masterful. Just look at how much they improved the game from a technical standpoint when they released Fallout 3. I ran Oblivion at the time on an old, whoopty-ass Phenom X3 8550. A FIRST generation Phenom at 2.2GHz. Triple core. Oblivion didn’t run that well despite 3 cores at a moderate-ish frequency. I bought FO3. “Optimized for Multi-Core” said the back of the box. I just shrugged and didn’t expect much. I ran the game this better looking game with equivalent settings and it ran BETTER. Noticeably better. But the performance is kind of a blanket statement. They really need to improve the games in terms of RPing.

As it stands, Bethesda’s games are biased towards being the good guy and deliver a definitive experience when being the good guy. “Evil” choices are superficial at most at this point. And it pains me to say. I only realized it now after finally WANTING to play evil. “Yes, i blew up Megaton, Dad.” - Cool…

And?

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Both Skyrim and Oblivion are very poor at reacting to what the player does. You’re the Archmage, the Dragonborn, the savior of the world, and guards still warn you that they’re keeping an eye on you, etc, and the majority of NPCs react no differently to you than the way they did when you first started the game.

BTW, I just reinstalled Skyrim SE and I’m playing through Beyond Skyrim: BRUMA with my old character, great mod for fans of Oblivion!

Oh, and someone mentioned Tyranny, it’s fun for the first 8 hours or so, then it gets very repetitive.

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I find the impact of any decision in TES inconsequential. There are, most certainly, games about being evil, but none I can think of focus on role playing except in the most superficial ways.

This might be unrelated, but I really liked playing Dragon Age: Inquisition, and I think that Bethesda should take some cues from that game when trying to make player decisions impact the game-world. The ability to change the world around you felt very tangible in DA3, much more so than TES, but I wouldn’t classify DA3 as a sandbox either.

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A lot of this has to do with restrictive story telling. I don’t mean a story that gives limited options, I mean a story designed in such a way that it can only be told (and make sense) one specific way. Very particular types of stories can get away with less restrictive narratives, if the core of a character always remains the same.

Take Witcher 3. No matter how many stupid things you make Geralt do, for the most part, he always acts in character. It’s a choose your own adventure with a limited path system.

But that’s hard to do because how Bethesda chooses to tell their story. Because the main goal is to make the main character be a nobody, a blank slate, a person with no past or a past that doesn’t effect the story in a meaningful way, Bethesda writes themselves into corners. It’s the classic ‘choose your own adventure’ adventure book problem, where characters in said books very rarely have anything beyond a basic cardboard-cutout personality. When Bethesda gives the player a persona like in say, Skyrim, it forces them to tell the story a certain way. Which is fine. There’s nothing wrong with doing that, but because Bethesda still does the whole ‘we want personality but also a blank slated main character’, they force themselves into writing a player that can’t do certain things while also not having a personality.

In laymen’s terms, take the Dragonborn: A generic mystical creature with the soul of a dragon bla bla bla who’s the savior of the bla bla and will kill the [insert generic demon/bad guy here] and he’ll save the bla bla bla from him. As a result of this, Bethesda can’t write quests that both make the Dragonborn (or let the Dragonborn) do bad things, while also having them mean anything or be consequential to the end-game. While at the same time, because Bethesda insists on creating blank-faced main characters, they also force themselves into limiting the actual-cannon personality of the main protagonist.

As a main point to what I’m saying, think of Geralt again. If you’ve played Witcher III, you could probably tell me his personality to a T. What about Courier Six? The Dragonborn? The Vault 111 Lone Wanderer? They have the personality of ‘hero’, some generic dribble I’m semi-convinced they stole from a fan-fiction somewhere, and that’s it. Morrowind got as close as Bethesda could get, because all the interesting things happened ‘to’ the main character or ‘about’ the main character and his/her role. This only worked because Morrowind felt alien, and it didn’t care if you killed characters. But that’s no better. Sure, they let you ‘be evil’, but it was evil without any real consequence because the story just didn’t progress. If you killed X, the story just stopped. I murdered and looted the entire starting town, and the guards didn’t even so much as glare at me.

Anyhow, I just figure I’d explain why you might be seeing what you’re seeing for good and evil choices. It’s not inherently a Bethesda issue (not that such has been noted), but that Bethesda doesn’t know how to write characters. That’s really what it comes down to. They don’t know how to write a character while also balancing a story while also having the main character be changeable and modifiable enough while also still having a personality for said character that the story can follow and change.

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The original Kotor was amazing at letting you be evil.

You can literally threaten random NPC’s into giving you money to not kill them, force persuade people to commit suicide, and leave a woman and her child forever stranded on Tatooine by taking the only thing of value she has and selling it, then pretending like you don’t know her at all.