(Villains only) How evil do YOU want to be, really?

The funny thing with 'villains' is that they run a huge gamut, from the "noble intent but violent in action" villains to the "torture the righteous whose very existence is a personal insult to me" villains.

The one thing that they have in common? They will do whatever they please to get to their objective; they blatantly do their own thing, despite what those in authority tell them they should/should not do, and people get hurt in the process.

The trouble that I, and I think on some level other people have is this: CoV villains do NOT do their own thing. They receive orders. And their orders? These do not result in chaos and destruction that makes others frown upon them, or respect their might. Rather, their orders are to bring respect or fear to those giving them orders..it's all directly going in the face of what super-villains are about.

Me? My villains tend towards the 'are villains as they do what they please, regardless of law' type, but have many from different views. Here's some varied examples:

My main character is not 'evil' but stays alive by drinking the dreams of creatures, leaving their souls dry of care, expectations, love, or hope. As such the victims' souls wither to nothing, leaving breathing corpses behind. This is a more 'force of nature' villain, doing what it does without spite, but causing suffering nonetheless.

I have another character that is a penitent villain, his wife died when a vigilante killed his wife to get to him. He wants nothing to do with crime. And yet he'll do anything, burn anyone if it will lead him to what he wants. (Said vigilante)

I have a mad scientist character that won't rest until he pops all those annoying but smushy kittens, turns the world into a toxic heap, and can blow every city to kingdom come in fireworks explosions so grand they'll stick that way in the sky forever.

What's the commonality? Stuff gets hurt, the villains are driven to their own goals no matter what. CoV hasn't really had things where the player's character is working to build up stuff for themselves.

So on the evil scale? I don't care. Just make sure the villain isn't being bossed around, they are gaining for themselves all they can, and not just a paycheck. And anything that gets in the way gets its comeuppance.

The more I think about this, the more I feel that the game misses what it means to be "a villain" in this context by a mile. While it may be some people's "thing," I dare say that most of us don't log into a game to be belittled, abused, ordered around and made a servant basically constantly, and this is all City of Villains is. It's a game where we play someone's manservant butler. We're Recluse fanboys that the game assumes will do anything to "get brownie points with the Spiders" (you don't know how much I'd like to kick whoever wrote that in the ***) and nothing more. At all.

Basically, we're the short, fat, impotent third-rate villain in the story who spends a lot of his time plotting, a lot of his time acting big and tough and a lot of his time failing and getting his *** kicked. It doesn't matter how "evil" we are as long as we're mere lackeys of the bigger villains. In fact, the more "evil" we get, the more pathetic we become, like the disgruntled middle manager who's sitting on a dead-end career, but still tries to act tough by abusing his employees and playing big boss while at the same time shrivelling before the actual big boss who's off building a stellar career of his own.

A good villain is the protagonist of his own story. A good villain is the one you want to watch out for, the one who moves things, the one who creates all the trouble that the heroes have to face. That's what I want for my characters when I play the villain. I don't want to be second fiddle to someone else. I want to be the one the heroes are here to stop, I want to be the one who's setting down the death traps. I want to be the one's building secret military bases, I want to be the one who's managing his own evil organisation, I want to be the one who's running illegal businesses, I want to be the one who's looking for the ancient artefact that must not fall into the wrong hands. At the end of the day, I want to be the one who bosses people around and for whom people do missions. And CoV fails at this so spectacularly that it basically catapults me out of any sort of sense of immersion when I try to get into pretty much any mission on the Isles.

They talked about villains being proactive and delivered exactly NOTHING on that front. Oh, sure, we get self-starter paper missions... Half of which are mercenary work for other people anyway, and that's it. Oh, sure, we got the BAD side of proactive content, in that we have to "earn" our contacts, but the story simply ignores that.

I shouldn't be working for Angelo Vendetti for his scraps and blood money. He should come to me and beg me for my help. I shouldn't be asking Billie Heck for any dirty work I could do. I should be swinging him around by his jacket collar and "asking nicely" for information. I shouldn't be working for Westin Phipps. Period. I should be punching the guy's face in. And if recluse has a problem like that, he can kiss my ***. THAT is the kind of proactive villain that would get me excited about getting into the stories. Even when I play a villain, I still want to be cool and awesome. I do NOT want to be a slimy imp running errands for someone else.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I want to punt puppies like footballs and tell little kids there's no Santa or Easter Bunny.

One of my characters is an actual Nazi. True, he's a toned down No Swastikas Nazi like the 5th Column, but still....

Also, my main, Scythus, wants to kill every living being on the planet to please his masters in the Netherworld. And when he's done with that, he'll move on to the next reality and start all over again.

Most of my villains would like to go to a nice city and steal stuff.

Stealing stuff from other bad guys just doesn't have the same kind of appeal.

Lets see...

Doc just wants to make a fortune and be left alone (Accomplished)

Whispering Swan wants to kill anyone that is getting on her nerves at the moment (so, basically, everybody-all the time)

Gray Goddess... is insane. Good and Evil are no longer individual concepts.

That kind of covers the spectrum. All of my villains fall somewhere along there.

My villains are Chaotic Neutral, in the sense that they do whatever they feel like, regardless of morals. They lie to advance themselves, fight dirty, break the law when they feel like it, and pursue their own pleasures.

But, at the same time, they do not kill the innocent bystanders, do not murder rivals for no reason like Neutral and Chaotic Evil villains do, and would not betray any close friends.

This website here can explain it in better detail: http://easydamus.com/alignment.html

RE title: This evil.

More seriously, I was pretty satisfied with the level of villainy in CoV on the whole. Less so in some places *cough*hardcase*cough* than in others, of course, and the whole "Destined One" plot needs to die in a fire. The h8 over CoV's structure is misplaced. The game was designed with the premise that the player would be working for other characters. People who have issues with that need to either make peace with it or move on.

While I can certainly imagine a MMO in which the players were supervillains who pursued their own aims, it is not at all clear that City's software could accommodate such a design. The new arcs are, contrary to popular opinion, clumsy and ineffective at working around the system's limitations.

[QUOTE=Venture;2827731]
......The game was designed with the premise that the player would be working for other characters. People who have issues with that need to either make peace with it or move on.

While I can certainly imagine a MMO in which the players were supervillains who pursued their own aims, it is not at all clear that City's software could accommodate such a design....[/ QUOTE]

But is this a villain or a henchman? Because you just described a henchman. Heroes get orders all the time. They're 'public servants' for the most part. Villains at most will play along if there's incentive, but will double-cross given the chance. Again, go back to comic book villains. If Joker started getting ordered around, you know things would get messy. But yay, we're stuck being Harley Quinn. The draw of villainy is the freedom it gives to a character to do as they please irregardless of social standards, etc. The draw is not to help a bigger, badder bad guy shouting orders. We're not wanting to be the Toad to somebody else's Magneto.

Hmmmm, here's a thought...

What if the new Branching Dialogue tech can be plugged into old missions?

More deeply, what if they can flag something about your character (levels, current inf, badges) to trigger different levels of 'deference' or other 'emotional flavor' in the dialogue for certain characters?

So you go to Westin Phipps with Dark Puppykicker, and he's all, "I like your style". Go to him with Utopia's Fist, and he's like "You seem mamby-pamby to me, but I got work if you can handle it, which I doubt." By the same token, Utopia's Fist earns "I have been looking forward to working with you." from Hardcase, who is all "I've got my eye on you. Watch yourself." To Dark Puppykicker.

Also, it occurs that the 4 Patrons represent different paths of villainy, and be given more missions at various levels to guide characters along their chosen path.

I may be off on my lore, here, but this is just a general outline.

Ghost Widow: arcs for the player who really wants to climb through the ranks of Arachnos. Perhaps she is even grooming you to take over in the event of Recluse' fall to ensure her own continued existence. These are arcs for those who want to play the cool flashy bodyguard of the Big Bad or the Evil Organization: Crimson Dynamo, Darth Vader.

Scirocco: arcs for the player who wants a villain with a hero inside trying to get out. Arcs that involve 'ends justify the means' type stories and the grey area between being a hero and a villain. Magneto, Lex Luthor.

Mako: arcs for the player who wants a violent or even mindless villain, all about destruction and chaos and evil fun. Joker, Sabretooth.

Black Scorpion: arcs that are all about how crime pays, and flaunting the rules gets you what you want faster and easier. Juggernaut, Penguin.

That would be ideal, but I suspect it would require some significant new technology. Personally, I'm hoping for branching mission arcs, myself, or even branching missions. If I had the ability to slap every wiseass in the Isles across the mouth, I would gladly take much harder missions afterwards, or even arc failure. If it's on my terms, then it's not a failure in my eyes.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

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It... depends. I mean, you can get into philosophical discussions of just what evil *is* (and how it changes from point of view in some instances, or where it differs from 'uncivilized,' or any number of other things) but that'd take quite a bit. (It's also "Is that what you're really asking," which I don't think is the case - get to that near the bottom.)

Part of the problem, of course, is that this is a game, restricted not only by ratings but by the fact we're creating our *own* characters, interacting with the same world as everyone else's characters. It would be, I'd think, easier to "write evil" (and degrees of evil) in a single player game. Of course, even then, part of the question is "how much do you want to restrict your market" (as well as "how much heat are you prepared to take?")

Do you write in theft? Pretty lightweight.
Drug dealing? Again pretty lightweight.
Murder? We've got it implied at points. (OK, "assassination" or "taking out" people.) But you can RP around it if you wouldn't "murder" ("I'm taking them out of the picture.")

We've got an arc or two where you take someone away for implied beating, torture, etc. Would you want an arc where you were the one doing the torturing? With any degree of freedom? Want aside, would you play it? I don't mean "Yeah, it'd be cool" or "it'd fit my character," but you, personally, getting to spend anything from half an hour to "as long as you can" causing pain, psychological damage and humiliation to a target? How about "You skin them alive and deliver the results, and video, to make your point?" Fits evil, yes? I, personally, wouldn't want to see it mentioned ... pretty much any character of mine had done that, much less saying "OK, player (not character,) this is what you're going to do."

I have to admit, I wouldn't play that. *shrug*

But, as has been mentioned elsewhere, the problem many have with COV isn't that you're "not evil enough," but that you're doing someone else's dirty work. (Again, "What are you really asking," as mentioned.) You're not plotting your own schemes (AE excepted,) making a name for yourself as anything more than a "more competent mercenary." The attitude you get ("You. Scum. Go do this") makes sense early on - after all, who the hell are you and why should I be afraid of you? But higher up? You should be having people (a) afraid of you, (b) wanting to prove THEY are more of a badass by taking you down, (c) trying to get themselves ahead by working with you and surviving it. All of which, of course, make assumptions about your character... which the devs have no control over.

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