I've been thinking a good deal about villains in the last few days, and I'd been wondering... just how evil is too evil? I don't want my villain to be like Sauron in Lord of the Rings, who never does anything evil (or indeed bad) in the course of 1500 pages. On the other hand, I don't want to have him be raping small children or anything like that. Also, the amount of evil that's acceptable in games seems to vary depending on how personal it is. Wiping out an entire civilization with a biological weapon seems much less evil than, say, killing a puppy. And then there's the in between, where he's killing people at random (probably in gruesome ways), but not anyone you're familiar with in-game. How much evil do you think is acceptable in, let's say, a game rated T by the ESRB? A game rated M? Feedback appreciated!

Interesting topic - ESRB follows a pattern of slapstick, comical or mild violence for say, a teen rated game. Others, such as Manhunt, are classified for more realistic and detailed violence.

What it comes down to is if your villan is more of character (ranging from Bowser in Mario, to an evil scientist) or more of a serious role (ranging from say Sephiroth to Starkweather).

The rest really depends who is seeing it.

my two cents:

I would place a "villian" characters level of evil as roughly equal to how "good" the main character is. for example, if you play an anti-hero criminal, e.g. in GTA the "villians" are the police. a villian is designed to counteract the hero- its a very old concept which has its roots in european theatre in the middle ages. the "villian" is a decendent from the "devil" character from the even older "morality plays" which in turn trace their roots back to greek theatre.
in shakespears time the villian would often be a "malcontent", e.g. one who is simply there to cause trouble, without any reasonable explanation of why. modern villians often have a story to them, like "mr freeze" from batman who was turned evil by accident.

i believe, therefore, that individual acts of evil, possibly carried out by his or her minions, should be gently administered to create the level of "evil" to counteract the hero.

Your enemies were also other gang members, who were more evil than you, and civilians and innocents who were were neutral.

In Max Payne the antagonist released drug addicts to kill your wife and child. If hero goodness minus villain evilness were to equal 0, then Max would have had to have been a shining beacon of virtue, rather than a rebel cop who did deals with the Russian Mafia to get revenge.

So no, I wouldn't make good equal evil. If anything the more evil your antagonist the grittier the game, and the more likely you are to have an antihero protagonist.

Sometimes what makes a villian evil is not what he does (like Sephiroth in "that" scene in FF7), but what his ideals are, like Kefka from FF6. (Kefka's my fave VG villian, BTW.) It doesn't take violent acts to make a villian evil.

In relation to 'how evil should my villian be?'

Let me say this. I am so sick and tired of the primitive battle between Good and Evil; of Black verses White. There isn't ever, in the real world, one side that is completely good and one side that is completely evil. It's all gray area on both sides.

Want to design a good story? Don't have villains.

Have two sides that are both fighting for their own cause and survival; don't make it so that one side is the 'good' side. Let the player determine that for themself.

For bonus points: Let the player support whichever side they wish.

Quote: Original post by Defunker
I am so sick and tired of the primitive battle between Good and Evil; of Black verses White. There isn't ever, in the real world, one side that is completely good and one side that is completely evil. It's all gray area on both sides.

Want to design a good story? Don't have villains.

Although I agree with you, I think that people expect a clear-cut "villain" in their stories - especially in games. It may be less philosophically challenging than a "shades of grey" game, but it will probably sell more. Rap may be less "musical" than other forms of music, but if rap sells, people will keep rapping. I'm not so proud that I won't write what the people want, especially as I'm just starting out.

To that end, I've decided to try and make the player hate the villain as much as possible - hence my original post wondering just how far I could reasonably take it. Although I understand what you're saying and agree, it's not a direction I see as being particularly safe.

@speciesUnknown: I have to agree with CIJolly - Villain's evil + Hero's good != 0. However, I don't think it's necesarily true that the eviler your antagonist is, the more likely you are to have an anti-hero as your protagonist.


Currently, what I'm leaning toward is sort of like in Tales of Symphonia, with the Defias (I think...) Human Ranches. That really got me mad at them... especially after you find out you've killed the old grandmother lady.

I think how "evil" you make the main antagonist will depend heavily on what kind of game you are wanting to make.

Personally, I think villains who do evil purely for the sake of doing evil only really work well in pantomime or cartoonish type games, or those without much emphasis on a plot. If you're building a colourful platformer it's fine to make the villain something like Baron von Baddenstein with a cape and long thin moustache. Likewise, if you're making a bloody action game it's fine to have the demonic Lord of Cruelty as the main foe. However both of those characters don't work well if you're wanting to have a plot with any depth.

In short though, unless your game is a cartoonish pantomime type game or your villain is some kind of incarnation of evil don't make them do evil acts purely to show how evil they are. In many cases it just comes off as looking dumb. Example: that scene in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back where Darth Vader chokes the admiral who came to apologise for losing the Millenium Falcon in the asteroid field. Personally if I was Vader I'd admire someone with the guts to take the blame for that, and let him off with a final warning (it was his first mistake as admiral, after all [smile]).

For RPG-like games, I like antagonists who have a justifiable reason from their actions. They're a bit like fallen heroes in that regard. Tales of Symphonia is a good example in that regard (hey, a console RPG I've actually played, that's rare [grin]) in that the main villain has a sympathetic goal. I don't like it when the only motivation for an RPG villain is simply power or destruction. They might have those goals, but they need some kind of reasoning for why they want them to make them interesting. Arcanum was a good example of this, in that while the main villain had a fairly cliche goal (destruction of all life in the world) he was able to put up a relatively good argument as to why this was a reasonable goal.

Quote:
Main Character/Impact Character Complementarity - Most stories will have a main character and another character who has the most impact on the first character because the two characters have either opposite goals, or opposite methods for trying to achieve the same goal. In any story one of these characters should be forced by the plot to change their goal/approch, while the other character remains steadfast in their goal/approach. This is how you as a writer present a moral about what people should do or how they should do it to your audience. The character who changes does not necessarily have to be changing from the 'wrong way' to the 'right way'; a story with an unhappy ending suggests that the steadfast character was wrong and too stubborn or blind to change, and the dynamic character got dragged down too by not being strong-willed or faithful enough.

Using the above quote, I don't believe that you really need to worry about the 'bad guy' being too bad, as long as he effectively complements the protagonist (or vise versa for bad main characters). There are plenty of movies/books/games/... that have bad guys that are so horrendeously evil its not funny (probably not even M15+!) but as long as their evilness complements the protagonist it doesn't matter...the rest can stay behind the scenes anyway (or you can just hint at it without going in to detail...possibly for realism...)

Lorenz

edit: the quote is from sunandshadow's post in the sticky "things you should and shouldn't do..." at the top of this forum

Not gonna comment on the game ratings, but a recomendation on the character.

Don't write your character based on how evil you want it to be. Write the character the way you envision it. If you force the character into a role that hasn't come naturally then it wont fit in.

If it is a main character then it is key to design it, and then design the rest of the world around that. If you want him to be evil then just start writing, dont worry about fitting a catagory.

Just go crazy with the character and have fun and create it as it comes. Don't edit as you write just flow with it.

Then you can design the game around the character.

If that makes no sense shoot me a PM and I'd be more then happy to clarify.

The last thing you want to do, as silly as this is going to sound, is think when you write. Just let things flow, if an idea comes up WRITE IT DOWN no matter what. You'd be surprised how usefull some of the ideas might be.