joebthegreat said:
There will be no heavy handed morality where people learn to put aside their differences and tolerate each other. We will be witness to otherwise kind, caring people who act with dignity and respect be driven to bloodlust and rage when confronted with the enemy. There is no reconciliation. There is only war against "evil". It will become obvious that many of the things we hate the enemy for are lies, but nobody but perhaps the player will be willing to recognize this, and pointing out the lies and wrongness of the campaign is suicide (literally, and if it is brought up then the player character will DIE absolutely and with no hope of escape, at the hands of his comrades).
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But seriously, I think we need to see a pure incarnation of good fighting against other perceptions of the pure incarnation of good in a fight to the death over what is really "good"
Cool story bro.
But uh, based on that big paragraph, you wouldn't happen to be a massive fan of the
GRIMDARKness of Warhammer 40k would you?
Anyway, good vs good done properly could be even cooler than evil vs evil.
Lately I've been thinking about a few protagonist ideas.
One of these is of a guy, lets call him...Jim, who was sent with millions of others to colonize a planet, but for whatever reason he got separated and ended up on one side while everyone else ended up on the other. A few years later Jim has become one with the unique ecosystem of the planet, becoming a sort of crazy jungle man with no contact with other people for 5 years. And he loves the damn place and if he was given the chance would never leave.
Then aliens show up and attempt to take over the planet, which puts them at odds with the human colony already there. At some point the aliens and humans get into a massive fight within Jim's jungle, destroying huge sections of it as a result. Jim becomes enraged, and decides to force both the aliens and the humans off the planet entirely.
As more and more aliens and humans show up the planet becomes more of a warzone, with more and more of it getting blasted and burned as the game goes on. Jim begins a sort of one man resistance, fighting both sides at once and being so damn good at it it essentially becomes a three sided war, with the Humans, the Aliens, and Jim the crazy jungle man.
Eventually Jim does so much damage that both sides leave the planet for good, but as a result of the fighting all the forests, jungles and oceans and whatnot have become a complete wasteland. And so Jim's paradise is no more, until new, bizarre life forms to which Jim adapts and becomes accustomed to, and becoming even less human in the process.
Another one is an alien sent as part of an invasion force to invade Earth about maybe 50 years or so into the future.
The aliens at first wish to take over the planet, move all its people offworld and incorporate them into their big Evil Empire of sorts and then completely strip mine Earth, with the process of capturing it intending to take only a few weeks at most.
Initally the aliens only attack military targets with the goal of forcing them to surrender rather than outright destroying them, but then regular people begin a Red Dawn style resistance killing as many aliens as they can, despite the fact the aliens, in their eyes, are only trying to help them and thus far haven't committed anything close to a war crime or atrocity, which leads the aliens to retaliate which makes the people retaliate even more.
The protagonist himself is a young naive guy who wants only to get the job done and go home. But as more and more of his friends are killed he develops a genuine hatred of the humans, and begins to use the same harsh methods. Like the whole 'He Who Fights Monsters' idea.
The human military becomes increasingly desperate, eventually resorting to carpet bombing and nuking its own cities.
Because the aliens didn't anticipate the people to be so resistant they sent only a rather small force, and believing that the constantly dwindling aliens already on the planet are already doomed they don't attempt to evacuate them, believing that will only result in more ships being destroyed.
Eventually the protagonist and a group of other alien survivors make a last stand and are all killed, but not before the protagonist wonders why things needed to get so screwed up in the first place and if humans were really worth incorporating (rather than disintegrating) in the first place.
