I Can't Do That, It's Against My Alignment

Aligments. Many games have them, RPGs in particular. Alignment usually just boils down to good versus evil. Most of the time, aligment choices are that simple. You can be a good person or a bad person. Some games put a small twist on the terms be renaming them paragon and renegade. Other games, have two aligment axes that they judge you by. Dungeons and Dragons has a good versus evil axis and a lawful versus chaotic axis. This means you can be chaotic good (freespirit who still does the right thing, eg. Robin Hood) or lawful evil (stick to strict guidelines and rule with an iron fist, eg. Sauron), or any other of the nine possible combinations. Fable II has a good versus evil and a pure versus corrupt axes. Unfortunatly, I have never been able to have a corrupt good character or an evil pure character since actions will often shift your alignment on both in the same direction.

Which leads me to the problem with these systems, moral choice systems are bad. It's not that they're a bad idea, but their implementation is often incredibly poor. The frequent problem is that your character is supposed to be the hero of the day (or galaxy) and so the story writers have to come up with contrived reasons that everyone would put their faith in such a bum. Personally, I would not trust someone who murdered three villages worth of people to save the world. At least when I'm good aligned the evil people are smart enough to shoot me on sight.

Speaking of the evil people, where are they? Often times there is no real hub purely for evil people. If there is, all too often it is under supplied and lacking in work and quests compared to the good areas. Which leads to the next problem, it's hard to be evil. I can understand if it's a little more difficult, needing to stick to the shadows in cities and avoiding mercenaries hired to chase you down, but often being evil is outright crippling. Usually in the games where it's not, being evil feels no different than being good. You just get spat on in the street more often.

Some games counter this problem by having you be an evil overlord as the main story of the game, an example case would be the appropriatly named Overlord games. The problem here, is that when the game expects and requires you to be evil, it kinda takes the fun out of it. I enjoy playing evil characters when I'm given a true choice in the matter. When it's all evil all the time, you might as well be playing an all good all the time game.

Then, there's a lack of depth problem. If you want to be the ruler of an evil empire in a game, you go cut someone's head off. If you want to be the ruler of an evil empire in real life, you pretend to be good and benelovent until people trust you, then BAM! You can't do that in a game. Of course, the first counter argument to such a system is that it would be complicated to implement. Well, yeah. Of course it would. People's motivations are complicated and good versus evil is certainly complicated. But, if you could put together a working system based on that, players would appreciate it.

All of these point me towards a statement I think many developers are making (intentionally or otherwise), be a good person. Don't be evil and bad. Well, okay thanks. It's not like my parents didn't teach me that when I was little. It's fine with me if you want to reiterate that, but the problem I have is: why are you holding the flag of ultimate freedom up high when you activly discourage the player from a full half of what that freedom should represent?

Now this Overlord knows how to be evil AND get all the girls!