Games often make it blatantly clear whether you're playing the good guy or the bad guy; if you're the good guy, you run around fighting bad guys. If you're evil, you run around fighting good guys.

It just doesn't work this way.

Very few games actually manage to convince me that I'm actually being an evil person, and rather convince me that I'm playing a good character with reskinned enemies and a different story. This is exactly where games go wrong; by actually telling the player what to do, they completely violate the core rule of evil; it doesn't play by the rules.

Let me simplify it for you; being evil should never be a choice presented by the game, it should be a decision made on the players own time. There should never be a physical option in a game of choosing between a good campaign and an evil campaign; evil is undefined. It has to be decided by the player.

Oblivion utilizes this concept quite well; you are never asked whether you'd like to play an evil character or not, it is simply something you decide to do based on game mechanics. You have the option of killing anyone and taking anything, and what you do with that is up to you. Additionally, upon doing so, you receive the consequences that come with it. That is the second important idea; evil only exists by breaking rules, which only exist because of the consequences that enforce them.

Take Bioshock as an example of what not to do. In Bioshock, you can either kill or save the little sisters, choosing to be good or evil. Are there any consequences other than a little cutscene for being evil? No. And by presenting this as an option with no consequences, the game has basically told you that you are following the rules, and thus, no sense of playing an evil character is felt.

Does this mean games should never suggest being evil, then?
Of course not. However, they can still make you feel evil while keeping it as a main part of the game. Take GTA. You can kill people and steal cars, and doing so is a large part of the game. However, you could also not, and not have the cops on your tail all the time like they would be if you had killed someone or stolen a car.

In conclusion, stop asking me what side I want to fight on, and just hand me the damn gun.

Why does it feel like I'm the only person who knows about this game. It's really a damn shame.

Anyway, Teeworlds. Awesome game, and version 5.2 came out today, so stop wasting time and go
download it.

Anyway, Teeworlds is a 2D online arena shooter, and it's porbably one of the only games to actually combine platforming and shooting gameplay into something coherent. The core mechanic of the game is your ability to use your grappling hook to maneuver around your opponent as you fire, and it makes for some awesome gameplay. Moreover, there are a ton of awesome mods.

Despite the fact that this game is pretty old news, I found it amazing that it has never been mentioned on Destructioid. So, if you havent played it yet, go check it out, and look for me on the servers.



I hope those BBcodes work. Dunno if I uploaded em right.

Gee whiz, I sure wish I had a picture to put that applied here.

You've probably all heard the rev rant about nonlinearity, and how most sandbox games claiming to be nonlinear really just make you run around with nothing special happening. Now, I do enjoy tromping around a city via car or foot or special power, but there is really nothing rewarding about it. The only real way to advance a storyline is to do the missions given out to you by certain characters on the map, with what you do in between meaning virtually nothing, except perhaps leveling up your character, or finding a new car.

The nonlinearity only comes in during small missions, if that. Sure, you could try several fancy ways of killing someone in a mission, but at the end of the mission, he's still dead, and you get the same reward nonetheless. Nonlinearity needs to be applied to the overall game, not in small chunks of nonlinear possibility that really make no difference to the overall experience.

A game like Oblivion, for example, shows what is wrong with the current way we deal with open world gameplay. The first time I played it and arrived in the city, I unknowingly stole something, and after one thing led to another, I had all the guards on my tail, and I ended up roaming the countryside, looking for NPCs to kill. Needless to say, it was rather fun, but even when I killed most NPCs, they got back up as if nothing was wrong. It was as if the game was saying " well, since you aren't playing the game the way we intended you to play it, we're going to assume you aren't serious about it.

If this game had large scale nonlinearity, my mass murderings would have affected something, anything. But no, the NPCs still talked to me the same way, and in the end, nothing was accomplished. Open world games need to stop being so focused on getting the player to do one thing and one thing only, and instead just place the setting around them, and let the player do with it what he will, and then have the game react accordingly. Games with so called 'moral choice' or games that have multiple endings or decisions need to stop having the decisions be made via a text decision in a cutscene, and be more subtle, allowing physical actions taken in game slightly alter the environment, having the NPCs react differently to the character, and show the player that what he has done in game has made a difference. If Oblivion did this well, I could have had bounty hunters after my head, or perhaps the ability to recruit henchmen of some kind, but no.

In conclusion, this sort of thing needs to be applied better to story and setting driven games like RPGs and Adventure games more, if people really want to have a game that plays like a sandbox game but actually feels rewarding or important.

This is my first article, so it probably wasn't very good. Ah well.