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 Always Chaotic 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.
- The person who made the game actually hard coded it to prevent anyone from modding in an evil campaign.
- Even neutral and slightly good factions are unplayable!
- Downplayed:
- Hope's Campaign lets you play as the Council of Skulls and Overlord Drakan's Hordes and but not as the Daemonspawn Legions who have absolutely no redeeming values.
- Hope's Campaign does let you play as the Daemonspawn Legion but their campaign follows Gregor The Grim and the narration makes it abundantly clear that Gregor The Grim's Legion has never committed any wartime atrocities (unlike the Daemonspawn Legions featured as enemies in the Heroic Campaigns).
- There is a campaign for the Daemonspawn Legion, however it is much shorter than the other more heroic campaigns.
- 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.
- The evil faction is structured too differently from the good factions to implement a campaign without fundamentally altering their game play.
- It is a case of Gameplay and Story Integration, The Corruption removes free will from its victims
- 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.
- The Good Guy campaign is Act I, the Bad Guy campaign is Act II (and is not Spoiled by the Manual).
- At the end of the "Good Guy" campaign, it is revealed that the so-called "Good Guys" were Evil All Along.
- The game lets the player play as any faction, but regardless of what faction the player picks, that faction becomes good, warping faction characterizations so that the player is always on the good side and their enemies are always evil.
- Protagonist Journey to Villain
- Double Subverted:
- And it turns out that the secret campaign was a Holodeck Malfunction.
- The protagonist of the bad guy campaign is a Noble Demon who leads a small group of daemonspawns that think My Species Doth Protest Too Much. They make a Heel–Face Turn before the campaign even starts.
- The bad guy campaign picks up right after the Downer Ending of the human campaign. Turns out that demonspawns are The Virus. The Hero and his army were assimilated, but still retain their humanity. And so they continue fighting For Great Justice, despite being demonspawns.
- Parodied:
- All the selectable factions are complete goody-goodies; the non-selectable factions include those that Poke the Poodle.
- While the 'select faction' screen includes the 'evil' factions, actually clicking on the 'evil' factions results in a cutscene of the game's creator spending five hours telling you what a horrible person you are for wanting to play as the bad guys. After the scene, it takes you back to the faction selection screen.
- An Unwinnable Joke Game where the only "playable" factions are so
True Neutral that they never get involved in any kind of conflict.
- 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 villain'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, and you can use all of their standard features.
- 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.
- The game is set during World War II, and they aren't allowed to let you play as the Nazis so that the game can be sold in Germany.
- The game is delayed too long already and the developers are running out of funds. Removing the evil campaign allows it to be released on the current schedule.
- It's a Licensed Game, and the creators of the original material forbid the game developers from adding an evil campaign.
- The devs didn't bother to balance the evil faction, considering them to be more of an environmental hazard or a boss fight.
- 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.
- Exploited: Every game invokes this trope, so when one comes out which defies it than everyone buys it like hotcakes.
- Defied:
- The 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.
- Someone mods in an evil campaign.
- Discussed: "Don't you hate it when the bad guys are the coolest thing in the game, but you can't play as them?"
- Conversed: "Why can't we play as the Templars?" "They're the bad guys." "Well, I find them to be much more sympathetic than the Assassins."
- 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.
- 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 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!
