RETHINKING ANTAGONISTS

I think the reason Kefka stands out in peoples' minds so much (bar that he was there and interacted with the party a lot through the game) was that he became, essentially, a Force of Nature and actually succeeded in destroying the world.

He went from being a character to being a Natural Force, from one villain type to another. Towards the end of the game his characterisation just falls off when he actually becomes a god. It's an interesting idea - taking a personal villain and changing them into something else.

Something like finding out that zombies all had a hive mind with a personality, for example - so at the start of the game there's just a zombie apocalypse scenario but over time you realise that there's a definite personality to them and eventually you meet the one in control, the queen zombie... Suddenly what seemed to be a Force of Nature villain has become a Single Character one. It's an interesting concept. I might explore it at some point.

Well yeah, but most of the time you have to resolve stuff with the 'villain' anyway, whether it be by getting over your internal strife/learning the truth/changing society or your own views/growing the fuck up/punching that one douche in the face/learning to deal with the consequences of actions (whether they be yours or others). I mean, the world is still fucked afterwards so that's something that still needs to be dealt with, you just got to put an end to the Force of Nature/Act of (literal) God that was fucking things over and over again (which is where Kefka's ever-punchable face comes in).


I've always been big on experimenting with villains in games, and not just personal/character villains. Am I any good at it? Not really, but I do enjoy the idea of villains that aren't villains or villains that just exist.

For example, Dungeon Crawl's villains are your fellow adventurers, but it's your actions over the course of the game that make them villains or allies so really your choices make your own villains for you.

In Celdran's Curse there are terrible people, and good people, but the true struggle for the heroes isn't against one person or even a group of people but instead against a disease and their own accountability for what happens due to that disease.

In RealmS the villain can be considered the invading empire, but really it's not. The hero made a mistake that doomed two worlds to oversect and thus we become the villain whose choice will destroy one world - and you have to choose the one that is destroyed, along with all the people who live within it. No merging of the worlds in this story.

Sometimes there isn't an evil, just a choice that turned out to be a mistake and rectifying that choice is the challenge. I like that theme a lot myself.


Of course, I also like the laugh-out-loud evil too. ;p

I've actually never seen hive-mind zombie horde used before, so it's a fresh idea to me. Usually zombies are just mindless cannibalistic body-gore beings that are unstoppable and everywhere, acting on momentary whim and desire and you're never going to beat them because of how wide-spread they are and how quickly the disease spreads once bitten.

That's part of the horror - there's really no way to beat such a thing (well, apart from extreme cold/heat due to body degradation, of course. Science beats zombies, but I've never seen a one vs one zombie queen match. Would actually be pretty neat. XD )

I think I've seen maybe one example of hive-mind zombie-type thing* and in that book they ended up destroying the queen only to have the creatures in question turn out to be even more vicious and horrible than when they were controlled, so... (Man, I really feel like rereading that book. It had some gnarly ideas that my 14-year-old mind just didn't appreciate at the time.)

Hive-mind != brainwashed/controlled forces of evil

I mean real hive-mind as in one being is in control so the creatures act as they would act. They are all that one person/being.



* Two, actually. The Girl with all the Gifts was the other one, though that was not based on a single person controlling, but ...spoilers... spores that spread through the world so there was no way to actually fight them and humanity ended up existing only as zombies. Yay?

I don't understand what you mean by "hive mind" if the Lich King from Warcraft doesn't count. You say "controlled by one person" is what you mean and then go on to say "brainwashed/controlled forces of evil don't count." I don't get it, those are the same thing.

Then you start talking about "real life hive mind" but a real life hive-mind doesn't have a leader or a controller. It's a group of individuals all acting together synchroniously for their common good and disregarding their individual wants and needs.

hive mind, noun
1. The property of apparent sentience in a colony of social insects acting as a single organism, each insect performing a specific role for the good of the group.
2. A collective consciousness, analogous to the behavior of social insects, in which a group of people become aware of their commonality and think and act as a community, sharing their knowledge, thoughts, and resources.
e.g.: "The global hive mind that has emerged with sites like Twitter and Facebook."

Are you thinking, like, the Borg? Where they can literally all hear each-others' thoughts at all times? Except with necromancy instead of technology?

Edit: In related news, I'm on board with making a game where the Twitter Collective is the game's primary antagonist.

Liberty, what you're saying reminds me of 1984. Individuals within a rigid hive-mind culture. They are conditioned from birth to accept diabolical roles within society, with some personality traits slotting well into particular jobs. People are stripped of their true individuality but paradoxically inside room 101, or whatever it was, their most personal & primitive fears are used against them when the more abstract intellectual abuses don't seem to work to mould the victim. So if you destroyed one person, you wouldn't destroy all the rest, because they've all been conditioned and all work together in spite of themselves for survival. So kind of what you're talking about.

Games like Gadget: Past as Future, Bioshock, We Happy Few, etc. work from that sort of idea in an overt way... by which I mean there are more than likely other games that incorporate those sorts of themes into a non-kafka/orwellian-esque setting. Like with orcs and stuff.

I'm not either. I haven't played We Happy Few, I just got that impression from reading about it.