Antagonists: Neverwinter Nights 1

Neverwinter Nights 1 was BioWare's first game that came with a toolset. Now, it wasn't the first RPG game I'd modded, as way back in the days of the 486 I'd dabbled with a 2D RPG creating toolkit. Admittedly I was in primary school at the time, so didn't produce a masterpiece, but it certainly gave me a taste for making my own game worlds. So NWN held a great deal of promise for me. Unfortunately the original campaign left me a little disappointed, and that was in no small part was due to the mediocre antagonists... spoilers to follow.

The game starts off with a plague killing off many people in the city of Neverwinter. You play a young adventurer academy recruit undergoing basic training, and you graduate in a ceremony attended by Aribeth de Tylmerande, a famous elven paladin. Yet suddenly you're plunged into a battle as enemies assault the academy, which for some reason is being used to house creatures to be used in a cure for the plague. Why they're stored in a recruit academy and not protected by trained soldiers, I'll never know. Regardless, the creatures escape and are quickly distributed across the city. As a result, it comes down to you to track them down.

"You, brave adventurer, must find the magical macguffins to cure this plague!"

So you collect the four creatures (or the relevant ingredients from their corpses) for a cure, but they are immediately stolen by a traitor named Desther whom you then chase. Upon capturing him and returning to the city, his friend, Fenthick, who is also Aribeth's lover, is put to death. Unwittingly supporting a traitor is apparently sufficient cause to be hanged. As a result of this escapade, you leave the city to find out information about the cult behind the attack.  Your investigations eventually lead you to someone called Maugrim and "The Old Ones", an ancient powerful race attempting to return and conquer the land. Aribeth's bitterness at Fenthick's treatment along with the magic of the Old Ones cause her to betray Neverwinter and join her former enemies. Thus it is then up to you to find four "runes of power" which will prevent the Old Ones from returning. Yes, that's right, both the first and third acts of the game have you collect four items to further the plot.

More giant bug beasts... wait, who is the antagonist again?

You spend the entire third act running around defeating a myriad of enemies in bizarre situations that actually have nothing to do with the Old Ones. Yet no sooner have you collected the runes and sent them to Neverwinter for safekeeping than Aribeth assaults the city, paving the way for their invasion anyway. Thus you must defeat Aribeth, Maugrim and finally travel to the dimension in which the Old Ones are imprisoned in order to defeat their leader and save the day.

Ahhh, the bad guys. The ones I haven't seen for an entire act. I forgot about them.

I have several problems with the story, from Fenthick's trial to the repeated "magical macguffin" finding main plot, to the fact that much of the plot revolves around Aribeth and not the player. But one of the biggest issues for me is that the antagonists are so muddied and weak. It's Desther, then his cult, then Maugrim, then Aribeth, then the Old Ones... yet none of it makes any sense. The secondary antagonists have at best slim reasons to follow the Old Ones, and your actions in all but the last act have very little to do directly with those antagonists.

Those alien features must ooze charisma to wannabe villains.

In the first act, the cult causing the plague virtually has no involvement in the location of the animals except for setting them free in the first place. In the second act, you spend all your time investigating the cult, but do very little to actually track or combat its leader.  What's worse is that Maugrim is introduced in the second act, but you don't face him until the last, and the same goes for Aribeth with her betrayal.  The third act is then entirely about collecting the "macguffin" runes, but you don't deal with your antagonists at all, so it just feels like a pointless distraction.

Only in the fourth act, which is very short, do we actually start dealing directly with the antagonists. All the three major antagonists were saved for the last 5% of the game, and as a result, you don't really care that much about any of them.  The reasons for Aribeth's betrayal are shallow, Maugrim is a mindless servant to an evil power yet lacking any motivation whatsoever, and Morag (the Queen of the Old Ones) is just a vanilla "destroy and rule the world" villain with absolutely zero character depth. Your enemies are so one-dimensional that it is hard to muster any significant degree of anger towards them, and your collective ire for the three of them is so diluted that it lacks any potency except for the desire to finish the story.

This is the fourth boss fight in the last 30 minutes. Please just end...

The game pitted you against a great evil, but never gave you a personal reason to want to defeat it. Certainly, wanting to save the world from the Old Ones is a noble cause that you want to achieve (unless you're an evil mercenary type, in which case you're only doing it to save your own skin), but there's very little to make you personally invested in it. The only way you could have a direct link with the antagonists was if you were romancing Aribeth, but even that felt very tenuous. Without that personal connection and drive to want to see your enemies defeated, the climatic battle felt more like a showy letdown lacking substance than the epic battle with the forces of evil that it was made out to be.

The antagonists are one of the major failings of Neverwinter Nights. The player is forced to want to kill the antagonists simply "because they're evil", and the antagonists have virtually no motivation beyond "I'm evil".  Their irrelevance to much of the story and their complete absence in major portions of the plot mean that even when you do finally meet them, you don't really have any reason to want to defeat them. As such, they make the entire game, and particularly the ending, flat and lacklustre.