Games where you are the bad guy (but don't know it)

[Stuntcrab]

Wow, how has nobody mentioned S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl yet? Strelok!

But Strelok isint a bad guy, hes neutral, you make him good or bad yes, but the main quest doesn't exactly depend on that. The military attack you because thats what their told to do, you're only defending yourself (unless you just charge into a base for the hell of it).

Spoiler: Call of pripyat spoiler? I think it would be one.

And in Pripyat, at the end of the game he helps soldiers out of the zone, despite the fact that he has been shot at by countless soldiers he still helps them, it takes a good person to not hold a grudge like that.

 

[Codeman90]

Live-A-Live. No spoilers for you =p

 

[tonyh900]

L.A. Noire you don't find out until the end but once you get there it's freakin' crazy

 

[Torrasque]

Baten Kaitos, and this is a good one...

Spoiler

You don't know that you are playing as a bad guy, until the end of the first disc, when one of the greatest plot twists in videogame history is shown to you. The character (Kalas) who you play as does come around to become a good guy however (after a confrontation battle with his friends) in the second disc, and agree's to stop the bad guys.

I still have yet to completely beat that game (got distracted by other games) but I really want to go back and beat it one of these days. I was on disc three and was stuck in the cloud world with no idea where to go =|
I also remember getting to that part and going "wait... WHAT THE FUCK?!?!?!?!"

OP: I'd say the Terran campaigns of Starcraft and Brood War count as "being the bad guys without knowing it"
In the first Terran campaign, everything you do is to bring down the "evil and corrupt" Terran Confederacy. In the name of righteous revolution, you: kill countless other Terrans that are just following orders, use the Zerg as a bio-nuke against an entire planet and a military force trying to stop you, kill a Protoss force that sets out to stop the Zerg from murderizing an entire planet, and when you finally bring down the Confederacy (when the Zerg brings them down really) what do you do? You say Mengsk is an asshole for leaving Kerrigan to die and run away.

In the second Terran campaign, you are a commander of the UED and your goal is to "restore stability in the sector for the glory of humanity". You basically go on another murder spree of a bunch of Terrans just following orders under the guise of "taking down the evil and corrupt" Terran Dominion, kill Vice-Admiral Alexi Stukov, the one guy who knew what was really going on with Duran, then put the Zerg Overmind on a leash. All of that in the name of humanity...

I'd include the Zerg campaigns, but I doubt anyone would say those are anything but being the 'bad guys'. The Protoss campaigns are the only ones that have you being the good guys throughout.

 

[daveman247]

snip

At the beginning yeah, but at the end he starts to go a bit funny And then on peacewalker he pretty much loses it.

 

[ABLb0y]

Silent Hill 2, Homecoming and 0rigins.

Spoiler

{Murdered your wife, brother and a load of prostitutes respectivly}

WET. Although it's revealed half way through, and you spend the rest of the game getting payback for it.

Siren Bloodcurse

Spoiler

{That cop at the start wasn't a zombie. He just thought you were part of the cult, and shot you. The rest of the game is your hallucination as you bleed out. Also, a more conventional example: Bella turns out to be Amanda.}

 

[renegade7]

Minecraft. Think about it. You go around devastating the natural world, cutting trees, killing all sorts of animals and creatures, and the extensive mining is probably not good for the soil. For what? So you can have a tower.

 

[albinoterrorist]

Wow, how has nobody mentioned S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl yet? Strelok!

I was gonna but you beat me to it.

"Were here to protect you from The Zone, not The Zone from you." I'm all for mining The Zone for its scientific value, but leave it to the professionals STALKERS. The Zone is not a toy. Especially when they kill each other over it.

How 'bout Clear Sky?

Spoiler

Finally reach the centre of the zone, almost to C-Consciousness, the hub of Monolith forces, which only one man - Strelok - has ever reached before...
And then you shoot him in such a way that he loses all protection from C-Consciousness's brainwashing, and gets his memories wiped, replaced solely with the mission to kill the first man to reach the centre of the Zone (ironically, himself).
You dun' goofed, Scar.

 

[EvilMaggot]

The Darkness 1 & 2 ... you're a dude ripping, shredding and slaughtering with giant tentacles and a monster inside you, through a freaking city and Jackie has no bad conscience whatsoever doing all the horrible stuff, just to save his girlfriend... now there is straight A material for a badguy you are playing

 

[Treblaine]

Oh yeah, Of course, Modern Warfare 2

Mainly for the final act, just realise.

Just take a step back and think about this. Price has just spend the past few years in a horrible Russian prison, who knows if he has defected in that time. And what happens immediately after he is released and back in service? He hijacks a nuclear submarine and fires a nuke to detonate over the United States! That is fucking insane.

Then when Shepard attacks him Price suddenly assumes "oooh, Shepard is a bad guy" never stops to considerer they are trying to arrest him as they think he is compromised. This is after Price specifically disobeyed orders and deliberately cut communications. Yes, Soap gets killed by Shepard but how do we know Shepard doesn't just think that Soap is a traitor in a foiled attack at nuking the United States.

Makarov is responsible for framing America (totally implausibly) for the massacre and not only is Shepard never implicated but at no point are the key characters ever given any reason to think he is. They don't just abandon hunting Makarov, they actually cooperate with him saying they will HELP him by killing Shepard.

KILLING SHEPARD!!!


FUCKING WHY?!!??!!!
Go to the UK, send a message to the UK, tell them what you think this crazy general has done. Price is acting UTTERLY INSANE to think that it's a good idea to go and kill Shepard. And it's not a precision strike, it involves killing dozens of allied servicemen who were your friends! Killing so many of your own side just to kill Shepard.

just look at this and consider the dialogue based on the presumption you are playing crazed traitorous assassins who have been manipulate and Shepard is just a loyal soldier:


Notice Shepard never admitted to anything. He never said he started this war... he never said he staged or allowed the massacre... just stating the obvious that with this war there will be no shortage of volunteers. He is gloating to a vanquished terrorists! YOU ARE THE TERRORIST! the person leeding ALL of this is Price who just spent the past Half Decade being indoctrinated and tortured by the Russians likely polluting his mind with doubt and to betray his masters.

 

[Kapol]

The Civilization series. You're tasked with taking over the world by whatever means you see fit. Not to mention that every time you run into a peaceful native village, they vanish off the map... and you don't always get settlers from it if you follow my meaning.

 

[Yggdraz0r]

Baten Kaitos, and this is a good one...

Spoiler

You don't know that you are playing as a bad guy, until the end of the first disc, when one of the greatest plot twists in videogame history is shown to you. The character (Kalas) who you play as does come around to become a good guy however (after a confrontation battle with his friends) in the second disc, and agree's to stop the bad guys.

I still have yet to completely beat that game (got distracted by other games) but I really want to go back and beat it one of these days. I was on disc three and was stuck in the cloud world with no idea where to go =|
I also remember getting to that part and going "wait... WHAT THE FUCK?!?!?!?!"

DOOO IIIIT! Srsly. That game, it's magnificent. Very epic OST, artwork is gorgeous as it's a GameCube game(!) and the combat is very, very awesome. There is something in trying to make the best deck possible, with the cards that you have. The aging system is brilliant!

And in regards to Baten Kaitos and this thread; You don't actually play as Kalas. As seen from the intro, and the way he interacts with you . The game might make you feel like that though.

 

[Orcus The Ultimate]

EVIL GENIUS, you actually build a base and do stuff, but governments and other agencies always comes to blow it up !

 

[wintercoat]

Baten Kaitos, and this is a good one...

Spoiler

You don't know that you are playing as a bad guy, until the end of the first disc, when one of the greatest plot twists in videogame history is shown to you. The character (Kalas) who you play as does come around to become a good guy however (after a confrontation battle with his friends) in the second disc, and agree's to stop the bad guys.

I still have yet to completely beat that game (got distracted by other games) but I really want to go back and beat it one of these days. I was on disc three and was stuck in the cloud world with no idea where to go =|
I also remember getting to that part and going "wait... WHAT THE FUCK?!?!?!?!"

DOOO IIIIT! Srsly. That game, it's magnificent. Very epic OST, artwork is gorgeous as it's a GameCube game(!) and the combat is very, very awesome. There is something in trying to make the best deck possible, with the cards that you have. The aging system is brilliant!

And in regards to Baten Kaitos and this thread; You don't actually play as Kalas. As seen from the intro, and the way he interacts with you . The game might make you feel like that though.

Baten Kaitos was awesome. It was the only card battle type game that I've ever enjoyed the combat.

OT: Half-Life. Black Mesa's experiments rip a dimensional hole to Xen, a refuge for a wide variety of species who fled their enemies, where they send heavily armed researchers to "collect" the local flora and fauna. The Resonance Cascade rips an even bigger hole in the dimensional fabric, and when the Nihilanth sends forces to try and stop whatever's happening, they're met with a crowbar wielding theoretical physicist who seems to have woken up on the wrong side of the bed. The Vortigaunt's just want the portal closed so they won't be found by their enemies. But fuck that, it's crowbar time!

 

[Taddy]

Rather easy to become a pretty big bastard in the Galactic Civilization series. If you're playing as a neutral race and everyone likes you, you'll eventually have people asking you for support in many things. Generally they ask for money, easy. However, if they're in a war with someone, and you're friendly with their enemy, you can end up funding a war on a galactic scale without notice.

 

[DudeistBelieve]

Jack from Bioshock. Yes, you end up saving Dr. Tenenbaum and the little sister (or not), but before that you're a mafia-trained assassin bred to take down countless human lives in the process of accomplishing the singular mission of destroying one of the few sane people left in a fairly isolated landscape that poses no threat to the world at large.

Luigi from Luigi's Mansion. After being round up and trapped in a small box like a stamp collection by a mad scientist, the souls of countless people trying to make their peace with the world are finally freed by a chance of fate. Gathered by revolutionary freedom fighter King Boo, they proceed to build a mansion far away from the rest of humanity to act as a boarding house of sorts where they can rest until they're ready to pass on and let go of their earthly desires. Suddenly, a tall mustachioed stranger kicks open their front door, kidnaps them in a small cramped vacuum cleaner (women and children first I might add), rummages through their rooms and steals their belongings, then traps them in portraits and sells them to the same sick pervert they tried to escape from earlier as part of his new "collection".

Pacman from... Pacman. C'mon, giant guy running around eating stuff he finds off the streets? He then finds a "power pill", which grants him the ability to shrug off pain and eat the people around him? People that turn "blue" when he goes on his cannibalistic rampages, their only crime being trying to corner and detain him? It's f*cking PCP!

Spoiler: Drugs are bad for you, kids

Mario, just... Mario. Red guy who invades a sovereign nation and kills countless soldiers and civilians on the way, destroys infrastructure, and takes over "capitol buildings" all the while replacing their flags with his own Red star? A singular Red force aggressively expanding its sphere of influence further and further?

Spoiler: Sound familiar?

I always play as an Argonian and as an act of good role-playing, I always think I'm in jail due to racial profiling.

Imperials always tryin' to keep the scaly man down, brother.

I'm with you on mario

 

[natster43]

Let me think.

Crackdown: you are working for someone trying to make an authoritarian dictatorship.

Killzone: the Hellghast are banished to a shit planet while the other people get to live on the nice world. So when they decide to fight back against their oppressors, you get to play as a group of marines who kill them and spout racial slurs at them.

Shadow of the Colossus: You make a deal with the devil to set him free.

Burnout Paradise: You are a murder bot that thrives on murdering other robots after all the humans besides one DJ were killed.

Metropolismania: You are working for Hitler trying to build utopian societies, later on you get the ability to evict anyone you want, by sending in special group of people to "convince them to leave" at the cost of your popularity.

 

[immortalfrieza]

.
Overlord, obviously. You literally play an evil overlord.

If you're talking about Overlord 2, yeah, but the first is actually the reverse. At the start of the game you're raised from a tomb, given a helmet and made into the next Overload and preform evil acts left and right but you're actually

Spoiler

Really the anmesiac 8th of the supposedly 7 heroes (now corrupted) that defeated the previous Overlord, so really the player is actually a good guy that doesn't know it until almost the end of the game.

 

[immortalfrieza]

I feel that most of the people in this thread have missed the point. He's talking about games where the designated hero can, with a different perspective, easily be seen as the villain, not games where it's dramatically revealed or presented as a choice. At least, that's the impression I got.

I think the OP is trying to say that you spend most of the game thinking you're the hero when it later turns out you really aren't, at least that's how I understand it. If you're talking about that the hero of a game can be considered a villain from another prospective, it's hard to find a game where that isn't the case.

 

[TheMann]

As mentioned the first Terran campaign in Starcraft. You think you're freeing the sector from the corrupt Confederacy just to hand it over to Mengsk, who turns out to be a total space-prick, and just as bad. You and Raynor quit when you find this out, but the damage is already done.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent? There's a reason you wiped your memory...okay, it was not a big reveal at the end, was easy to see it pretty soon, but...it's not presented as "villain protagonist" from the start.

In the same vein, Amnesia: Justine where you are the villain, but you wiped your memory just for giggles and as an experiment.

The reveal was huge and shocked me because you are lead to hate Justine, and SURPRISE!!

Ya know, I haven't gotten around to playing Justine yet, but thanks for the spoiler. I'm sure the game will be just as enjoyable now that I know the end. This game isn't all that old. Spoiler tags: They're there for a reason.