Another quasi-follow-up to Story vs Gameplay, this is gonna be a quick one, one of those thoughts-I-had-on-the-way-to-work things. Some spoilers ahead for Baldur’s Gate 3.
One of the notorious things about RPGs with moral choice components is that it’s remarkably uncommon for players to choose the “bad” options. As John Ebenger, who worked on Mass Effect, points out:
Yup. Something like 92% of Mass Effect players were Paragon. And we put a lot of work in to the Renegade content too :(
Baldur’s Gate 3 (BG3 hereafter) does something sort of unique for a CRPG narrative by making your main character’s plot macguffin a bad guy faction ID card (kind of). Basically, the game is constantly letting you stumble into the bad guys’ camps except all their outer guards are just bumbling enough to not be hostile and be like “uh hey are you supposed to be here?” Even if you are trying to be the good guys. This happens with the goblins in Act 1 and with several locations related to the Absolute in Act 2 where the bad guys just kind of assume you’re already working for them (or, in the former’s case, that they’re working for you), which does wonders for opening the door for you to actually do so in character.
It’s also maybe worth noting that BG3 doesn’t have an explicit alignment; everything flows from whatever previous choices you’ve made.
A lot of games struggle with this. There’s Mass Effect and a lot of the other Bioware standard good/bad tropes (eg Knights of the Old Republic1). Bioshock paved the way for generations of shallow morality mechanics in shooters2 and immersive sims3. Owlcat’s Pathfinder games come to mind, where there are evil options but they’re either poorly implemented, poorly fleshed out, or both—even in Wrath of the Righteous where there’s lots of stuff written for choosing the evil mythic options, the game’s overall writing very clearly doesn’t know how to handle them believably4 (and it’s still stuffed to the brim with frequent “[Chaotic/Evil] Kill whomever you’re talking to for no reason” options).
Obsidian has taken some more creative approaches to this. Tyranny sidesteps this somewhat by starting you off deep in on the bad guys’ faction and focuses on a mixture of the legalese of evil and juxtaposing competing conquered sub-factions. New Vegas subverted Fallout 3’s hamfisted inclusion of karma by (mostly throwing it out but also) making the primary choice between two complex political factions5.
In conclusion, I would suggest not focusing on giving the player the option of being evil versus giving the player the opportunity to roleplay a character who is already evil by putting them in situations where their evilness is either already assumed or plausibly deniable.
The first one especially, the second one does some kind-of-creative subversion of both Star Wars light side/dark side tropes and black/white morality generally.
Hilariously, they tried to balance this by making the “evil” option result in more resources—except whenever you reach a threshold of good choices you get an extra bonus that makes the good option net better anyways.
Thinking Dishonored here but the only other mainstream example I could find on a quick search was Infamous.
I did demonic for my first playthrough and nobody seems to react reasonably to you heading that direction in the first few chapters and barely do going forward after you’ve made the actual choice. The companions are a broad mix of alignments and yet nobody who ought to be uncomfortable with your character actually is early on.
I promise I didn’t set out to write this post to chain praise for Obsidian despite picking 3 examples of them doing this stuff relatively well.