No Campaign for the Wicked/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Video Games that won't let you play as the bad guys.

  • Straight: The fantasy Real Time Strategy game Hope's Campaign has several playable factions, but only let players take control of the Exclusively Evil daemonspawn in skirmish mode.
  • Exaggerated: Hope's Campaign only lets the player select from the "good" factions; there are three "evil" groups that can never be used by a human player, only controlled by the computer.
  • Justified: The bad guys are freakishly bizarre Starfish Aliens; a campaign as them would either remove their air of mystery, or just plain make no sense.
    • The daemonspawn are designed to use features that just plain couldn't reasonably be used by a human player like their bizarre hyperspace movement.
  • Inverted: A game with a Villain Protagonist won't allow you to play as the good guys.
  • Subverted: There's a secret bad guy campaign.
  • Double Subverted: And it turns out that the secret campaign was a Holodeck Malfunction.
  • Parodied: All the selectable factions are complete goody-goodies; the nonselectable factions include those that Poke the Poodle.
  • Deconstructed: The reason the evil faction was unplayable was because you find out in the end that they were Hero Antagonists trying to save the world from the so-called Big Good that you were working for. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero.
  • Reconstructed: When you find that out however, you join them and from there on out there's no campaign for the previously thought good-guys anymore as you try to save the world from the Evil Overlord you helped put on the throne.
  • Zig Zagged: The game is advertised to let you play as the bad guys as a selling point. Once you actually get the game, you don't actually get to play as anyone except the good guys. DLC is later released to let you play a villian's campaign.
    • There are multiple good and evil factions. Some good factions have campaigns, but others don't. Some bad factions have campaigns, but others don't.
  • Averted: There's a campaign for the bad guys.
  • Enforced: The bad guys are really bad, and the execs are afraid that letting players control their slaughter would result in really bad PR for their series, so they don't allow it.
    • Alternately: the evil faction is structured too differently from the good factions to implement a campaign without fundamentally altering their game play.
    • The game is set during World War II, and they aren't allowed to let you play as the Nazis.
    • The game is delayed too long already and the deveoper're running out of fund. Removing evil campaign allow it to be release on current schdule.
  • Lampshaded: "I wonder what The Empire's generals think like?" "Dunno. It's not important."
  • Invoked: The game nominally offers the player several chances to join the bad guys, but no matter what choice the player makes, he winds up with the good guys.
  • Defied: Initial plans are for the bad guys to get no campaign, but the beta testers complain that they're the coolest faction, so one is added.
  • Discussed: ???
  • Conversed: ???
  • Played For Laughs: The campaign selection screen has all the generals on it, good and evil, but if you click on one of the evil ones, the good general standing next to him shoves him out of the way and the player ends up playing the good campaign instead.
  • Played For Drama: Attempting to play as the daemonspawn results in a Mind Screw High Octane Nightmare Fuel sequence of them leaping through and terrorizing less prepared worlds, ending with them assaulting your screen and an implied Mercy Kill from Archbishop McAllister.

Back to No Campaign for the Wicked, but only if you're playing as the Troperians! There's no campaign for the Wikipedians!

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