Someone like Heisenberg, Saul Goodman or Gustavo Frings would be perfect examples of well written evil characters - give them motivations, personality and a moral compass (however miscalibrated it may be) with the ability to see the use of maintaining good relations with people, not some psychotic jerk who goes around blowing up towns for fun. Villains will also give bread to the poor and shelter the homeless, because those poor and homeless may repay you with vital information and service some day.

I think the issue with Fallout is a fundamental lack of new story elements and lore.

Why we STILL don't have a bounty hunter (good/bad) faction (just copy the DarkBrotherhood radiant quest) in Fallout is beyond me. Join the Gunners, pick contracts and go assasinate a legendary outlaw or whatever. 7 years beth... 7 YEARS

I voted no. I'm too nice to be an evil character. Before anyone throws a hissy fit, I'm not saying the feature should not be in game. I'm just too nice to play the part.

Yeah, I know what an evil character is, but I'm not sure you can really play one in Fallout 4. You can be a sarcastic, greedy and cruel to your settlers, but what else? There aren't really evil options. I don't mind. I'd rather play the game in a way that portrays me as a hero.

My current character has no thefts and no murders on his sheet. He generally helps where he can and goes about killing raiders, greenskins, ghouls, gunners and even synths humanely (by headshot) which, tactically, is at risk to his person. However, behind this quite charming background, there are some serious failures too.

Jun+Marcy Long came into my character's community while suffering from acute mental illness most likely being the result of action. At the time, my character was fully aware of the nature of the mental illness, the complications and, in one case, the impact of pretty normal mid-life psychiatric issues.

Had the Longs been provided with adequate psychological shelter from flashback triggers and a focus on getting on with life in conjunction with the opportunity to mourn, this would have allowed the mental illness to dissipate naturally in its acute form. As a community leader, responsible for community design, my character is directly responsible for the Long's mental health issues having become permanent. Moreover, as the equivalent of a bearer of parliamentary office, senator or executive, (i.e. commisioned officer rank or above) it doesn't matter if my character knew or understood what was happening or how to remedy it because the only thing that can legitimize the authority of the office is the equal burden of responsibility (ethical) and liability (legal).

You see, negligence is a profoundly important form of evil. It is worth noting that failure to act is not the sole source of negligence. Quite possibly the most common form of negligence arising from leadership roles comes as a result of willful ignorance of the affairs for which one is responsible. Either way, the prognosis for the Longs is decidedly grim.

And, this is why I think that the option to be "evil" still remains in Fallout 4 - it's just not in the same place as last time. Or, for that matter, the time before.

By this logic Mario games offer an 'evil playthrough' considering you spend the entirety of the game stomping on gumbas while under the influence of mushrooms.

If you want a metaphysical debate then the notion of evil probably doesn't exist, but we don't. Fallout 4 doesn't provide the mechanics in which to release our inner turpitude, something that previous Fallout games did via slavery, the killing of children, the karma system, and many specific malevolent quest choices.

No, I think the whole evil/good thing is silly. I prefer a system where choices affect a faction or individuals.

I'm going to be starting to a new game within in the week, and I'm going to try and play someone "evil". I'm guessing before Vault 111 you're portrayed as this great fantastic dad (not sure if this is true, seeing as I'm going in blind) however I'm going to play it as someone with buried devils of substance abuse. The shock of the nuclear holocaust combined with the loss of anything familiar and the harsh realities of society afterwards has now found those devils unchained. He'll do anything to chase his next thrill or high - and will push the boundaries further and further the more jaded he gets, resulting to cannibalism in the hopes that breaking a last taboo will give him the ever greater rush he desires.

Over time he learns to like his new found savagery, becoming very much a predator - something that feels natural given the state world around him. This isn't a character who wants to kill indiscriminately or commit wanton evil acts for the sake of it, and he's unlikely to disrupt major settlements given that they facilitate his substance abuse, however I expect him to be thoroughly unremorseful for anything he does and not really care for anyone but himself. By the time he finds out what happened to his son, I don't expect him to care - that's if he ever did in the first place and pre-war he wasn't just wearing a civilised facade.

However, from what I've heard the game really isn't very accommodating for this style and I'm expecting to find it frustrating. Most rpgs make playing the good guy extremely easy, and I'm sure I'll play one next time, but playing something darker is harder to get right without the character coming off as a caricature. I'll see how it goes.

Altho I voted yes to evil, it isn't really evil that I want. It is more grey / neutral, with the possibility / option to be ruthless, if I deemed it fit because I don't like this or that. In FO4 there is only really Mr or Mrs good fella, while sarcasm option is, hmmm, often lacking in punch, and more often than not, is still a yes to accept the quest, albeit, in passive protest (sigh) Having things operate in the good / evil / neutral spectrum character-wise, could / should also open up for alternative ways of dealing with quests and npc's. While there is a few (kid in a fridge) it is by far, way too few.

the voice acting and limited dialogue ruins any chance of this unfortunately.

I tend to agree with this. It comes back to that rather clumsy statement made by Palpatine in Star Wars about good and evil being a "point of view". He's almost got it but his statement is still incorrect because it's a gross generalization (which is very much in character, considering the dishonesty inherent in the use of any form of sophistry). In point of fact, the relativism, in question, is solely confined to the range of viewpoints which are solipsistic while all non-solipsistic viewpoints tend towards objective criteria that are increasingly held in common the further the viewpoint deviates from solipsism - and therein lies the rather significant exception. A key mechanism driving this is the fact that subjective anolysis (i.e. rationalization) is a tool which psychopaths and, less frequently, sociopaths use to obfuscate dishonest arguments (e.g. ad hominem, ad hoc, straw man, generalisation and exaggeration) and, otherwise, endeavour to make their statements insufficiently clear to test against verifiable facts (i.e. equivocation). Like all other forms of sophistry, this is about being able to deceive people without getting busted for telling lies.

Reading through the very interesting variety of responses on this thread, it comes to my attention that "evil", rather than always being used to refer to harm, tends to be very commonly used to caricature whatever is at odds with a person's ideology or agenda. In the old days, waerlogas (later known as warlocks) were vilified as "evil" and I suspect, based on the etymology, that this was simply because they didn't blindly believe just anything that was pronounced by authority. Likewise, herbalists and other master peasants were demonised as "witches" just because they knew more than it was "their place" to know and, to this day, we continue to propagate this very medieval propaganda in the fictional elements revolving around cackling witches handing out poison apples and riding around on a broomsticks. Interestingly, warlocks seem to have taken pride of place as male equivalent of witches in the modern usage. The bodies may be long buried, but the etymology speaks for itself and casts a surprisingly long shadow on the motives behind the kind of linguistic abuses which result in terms acquiring unnecessary ambiguity.

In this sense, the whole good/evil scale seems to be really quite silly because this scale ultimately offers solipsists the mechanism or tool to vilify roles which are not approved of within the perspective of a given solipsist's ideology. I think this comes back to why some people find judgemental behaviour so offensive because the injustice of it revolves around an untruthfully exaggerated vilification of someone simply because the person dared to make her/his own decision. This is not to say anything, whatsoever, about people who want a good/evil option in the game because the whole good/evil alignment is, very much, a powerfully compelling fantasy element (along with the "chaotic"/"lawful" alignments) and dates back to the early days of RPGs (somewhere around 1974-1977).

Coming back to http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1577148-do-you-want-to-play-an-evil-character-in-fallout-4/?p=24776518, I suspect that even "crime" stats are just a bit over the top in the absence of faction specificity AND faction-specific consequences. After all, crime, being defined by the legal system in whose jurisdiction it takes place, cannot exist (by definition) outside a legal system because the criminality of an act is defined by BOTH the seriousness of its impact on others AND by whether it is punishable by a legitimate body of law (not necessarily proscribed - as some of the charges prosecuted at the Nuremberg Trials probably demonstrate). So, outside any faction-specific jurisdiction, acts with harmful impacts would make more sense if described in simple "military" terms like "body count" (murder), "friendly fire" (manslaughter), commandeerings (theft), initiating actions or "surprise attacks" (assaults), infiltrations (trespasses) etc. This way, players can make up their own minds about the "goodness" or "evilness" of their character's sheet in context of their character's role and in a way that's more in line with reality. In terms of immersion, this really is very important because conflicts between player ideology and game ideology really will raise objections and that's really what breaks immersion (which has nothing to do with this "suspension of belief" nonsense, by the way). Moreover, it is expected that morality/crime definitions vary substantially with faction - so what is considered a murder in one faction is not necessarily considered murder in another and there could be additional crimes like sedition (which no beneficial faction would identify with any act but which malicious and tyrannical factions would use to terrorise and coerce members). Irrespective of how any given faction interprets an act, the player always knows the nature of the act.

Anyway, I'd best wrap this up before it turns into another Great Wall of Text.

I voted no.


Looking at my stats so far, I think a pretty solid case can be made that my character is already "evil" by any sane definition, and I'm playing it nice.


In the last 245 days since my wife was murdered and my son was captured, I've deliberately shot, stabbed, crushed or detonated 862 people, 1311 creatures, and 95 synths. 84 of those have been completely unaware victims. I've stolen sixty items, picked 2 pockets, committed 4 assaults and 41 murders.


I'm allied with a fascist organization that extorts food from peaceful farmers, kills people because of what they look like, and takes any technology it wants regardless of how many bodies have to be piled up to reach it. I've wiped out entire settlements, bombed worship services, called in artillery strikes on people I couldn't identify, and rained streams 5mm fire from the sky just to watch cars explode. I shoot first based on what people are wearing, and who they're standing with. I strip the dead before they even hit the ground and move on to the next corpse-in-waiting. Anything with a pulse between the desk fan that I'm after and where I'm standing is a pile of gently steaming meat unless it runs or offers me money to assassinate someone, steal something, or exterminate wildlife.


But I'm playing it nice, dig? I'm a helpful guy. I never say no to a damsel in distress. I saved the kid who got bit by a molerat. I don't trespass. I'm housing the homeless and murdering anyone they point me at, no questions asked. I don't kill Radstags because they're harmless and I don't need to eat to live. I humor the crazed, feed the hungry, and decapitate the unworthy. I'm a job creator, a peace-bringer, and a community builder. I'm even selflessly helping this French robo-honey find a body so that I can try to make out with her. I'm on the side of the angels, kids.


TL;DR - This isn't a game that lets you play a "good guy", it's all about deciding which flavor of pragmatic mass-murdering sociopath you're going to be. "Kill, Loot, Return."

I voted no, but only because evil is kind of subjective. I mean, take a look at Loghain from Dragon age: Origins. (spoiler for the BEGINNING of the first DA game, for those who never played it) Did he leave people to die? yes, but he also did good by saving his men from being killed in a potentially pointless battle. Some would call him a hero, others a villain. Me, I say he is a man who looked out for those he led over those led by his childish king.

Personally, I would want to be that kind of character. Doing what can be bad things, but with good intentions.

Most of my characters tend to be amoral self-serving bastards hampered by an inconvenient conscience. I always set out with the intention of Looking Out For Number One, but show me a little girl with a cat stuck up a tree and the next thing I'm off on a quest to recover the Sacred Stepladder of Yendor while all the time berating myself for being a such a soft touch.

I suppose that, more than anything, is why I dislike having a voiced protagonist so much. It's hard to maintain that attitude when the tone of the voice acting is conveying something completely different.

I voted yes, and I would be more specific - I would like to have evil quests.

It is not only about roleplaying an evil character - you can do that anytime, but I tend to be bored quite fast without quests, that would support that.

But another reason, more important I think, is that it would feel more real to me if I would be able to contact evil characters, that are in the game already, and use my charisma to make them friendly atleast (if not anything else) permanently. And for realistic world, I would like to have the evil factions involved in the main quest and the fights there as support for the chosen main faction, that would send you to convince them/bribe them, so they atleast wouldn't be aggresive.

But the whole concpet of the game would have to support that. Well actually only 90% of all radiant quests would have to go and I wouldn't have problem with that at all...

Yes, yes I would.

Some people keep saying Caesar's Legion in NV was 'cartoonishly evil' and therefore a bad implementation of an evil faction into the game, but I disagree. The Legion was essentially what raiders would be if they shared an ideology under a charismatic leader. I don't see them as any more 'cartoonish' than the Fiends or any other faction, tbh. I enjoyed joining them for fun, profit and glory, and I liked how the world reacted to my allegiance, with the NCR shooting me on sight after a point in the story. I liked having quests like assassinating the president, or framing an innocent NCR soldier for blowing up the monorail. I wish there was something similar in Fallout 4.

Also, I don't see the Institute as evil at all, but since a lot of the gameworld apparently does, I wish there was more of a backlash against me after joining them. As it is, a couple of companions seem mildly angry at me... for the course of one conversation. Then it's back to everything being a-ok between us, and the rest of the world doesn't care at all. It's like I'm acting in a void.

And how come no one recognized my voice on the radio, come on, that would have been a good reason to have a confrontation with, say, Nick or Piper...

I would like the option to play evil. 90%+ of my character are 'good guys', but every now and then I want to play a Dark Brotherhood character or something. The thing is there are so many opportunities to be evil in this game and they are just not given. I think that erks me more than anything else. Every faction should have an evil path or evil counter faction. Choices. Not a bad thing.

Maybe I'm a cynic, but that puts me in mind of Chivalry (the applied discipline, rather than the theoretical)

Yep, I RP as a Dalek and "exterminate" all impure non-humans in the Commonwealth with the BoS at my side.