John is joined by Scott, Lorelai, and Lilith to go over the goings-on in the gaming sphere! After a long talk about Western comics, the crew goes over Konami’s fashionably late not-E3 stream, and everyone had something to get excited about in it except John’s and his Yu-Gi-Oh expectations. The crew has all played Deltarune‘s new chapters, and they have thoughts! Plus, Lorelai and the Nioh 3 test, Lilith went deep on the Next Fest demos, Scott’s Nightreigning, and John beat Xenoblade Chronicles X.
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Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.
Edited by Lorelai
Here’s an excerpt by Crystal:
[Listener Question: What is your favorite evil choice in a game?]
John: Yeah, I don’t know, I don’t have a great answer. I’m never really inclined to do that. I’m such a goody two-shoes I just want to do the nice things.
Scott: Doing evil choices in video games is fundamentally unpopular, people only want to be good.
John: And sometimes in a lot of games it just sucks!
Lilith: Most of the time, an evil choice in a video game amounts to something that’s a bad option for literally everyone involved. You’re just doing it to be a dick.
Scott: Right, games that actually embrace what an evil choice would be are games where you gain something out of it that you wouldn’t otherwise, because you’re incentivized to treat people that way. Like, that quest in Pathologic 1 where you’re carrying a bunch of food around, and you can just steal that food. Because otherwise, what’s the point? You’re not going to get much out of this otherwise.
Lilith: Most evil acts that we understand in real life come from this—as silly as it is to say, the smallest scale of it is choosing not to return the cart at the grocery store. Real evil choices are just that exploded in scale, where it’s like “I could spend $300 million to give my employees healthcare, but then I wouldn’t have $300 million.” So, if we’re really answering it that way, the best evil choice in video games is giving a poor person a gold coin and then immediately pickpocketing it back from them.
Lorelai: That’s honestly what I was going to go with. There’s so many games where you can do it, like all of the games from Larian where you spend a ton of money buying everything and you just steal it all back. Or you just steal a thing, sell it to them, then buy it from them.
John: I’ll always love that clip where it’s a Khajiit that robs you, and then they turn around and you take it back and they’re just like, “It was worthless, I don’t care.”
Lorelai: In Divinity: Original Sin, there was this one plotline with a beggar who’s like, “Hey man, I’m gonna steal from that cart over there so I can get some food. Can you please watch out for me?” And you can be like, “Yeah man, I can do it.” and then immediately tattle on him to a cop. And then you can watch him get taken to jail, for the thing you said you were going to spot him on, and you can then go to that jail, and then murder him in jail, and take the thing he stole.
Scott: I love open-ended games. It’s nice that we’re having an actual exploration of what it means to be a shitty person. You obviously should never do something like this in real life, but the fact that you can simulate it in some way… that is an achievement on its own.
John: I will say, I don’t fully think that it’s a really amazing way to do it, but I do appreciate that they give you the Accomplice option in Persona 4. Figuring out what was going on, and being like, “You know what… I’m into it, let’s keep it going.” That’s interesting. I don’t think it fully pulls it off, but I think it’s an interesting concept and I would love to see that kind of stuff happening again. If Metaphor had a thing where it was like, “You know what, this Louis guy… I’m gonna team up with him, fuck y’all,” that could be interesting!
