The past few weeks while I’ve been sick, I’ve been doing a rewatch of a couple of old favorite shows and fell into a TV tropes black hole while trying to sort out which trope best suited a particular villain in one of them: an antagonist who turns out to be far surpassed by (and excommunicated by) several far more evil antagonists over the course of the show’s run, to the point that he becomes an ally of the protagonists. I think he’s a combination of a Demoted to Dragon, Dragon with an Agenda and The Starscream, and possibly also the Starter Villain turned Ex-Big Bad turned Token Evil Teammate. Turns out figuring out which trope a character fits is as hard as writing a good villain.
And that leads me to today’s Daily Grind, which is about MMOs, I promise. If villains are hard to do well in a medium that is explicitly designed to favor narration, what hope is there for online games? The best villains I’ve ever seen have been player villains (the actual roleplaying type, not the murderer-slash-con-artist type), but I bet you folks have some good ideas for PCs and NPCs alike. Who’s the best villain ever in an MMORPG — and what TV trope does he or she fit?
(Extra bonus points if you can figure out the show and character I’m talking about!)
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
