Is it true that you can't be evil, and forced down the same path no matter what starting life you choose?

[♠️ Morgan Le Fay 👑]

A lot of unpromised stuff has been missing. I wanted to go down the evil corporate path but in reality everything is the same. Your background doesn't matter and the dialogue is useless.

[Whisperill]

Try to overload cyberware, go outside and shoot some cops. You will not be just evil also taste the insanity cyberpsycho lol

[Zebedee]

The base game kind of tries not to lock you into things from the background, but leaves it as occasional options - with most backgrounds it tends to be either world building or to open an alternate route through something. Something I think didn't help make them feel distinctive enough - especially when relatively rare and easily missed. So if you want to be 'evil' then you're going to have to find a way to do it yourself through options not tied to background.

The expansion is different, corpo dialogue options can be pretty interesting in results, and the 'Saka background is referenced a fair bit for story reasons. Think it has been an improvement, although probably fair to say that it needs a whole game done like that to get the right quantity of it going on.

[Sentient_Toaster]

The main story is pretty set, but you can certainly be a vicious, heartless bastard while you go about it -- deciding not to help certain people or outright betraying them (and not just minor NPCs), being willing to break your word in various places, committing far more violence than is necessary even when the client requests discretion.

Like, in my post-2.0 run, when investigating a chain of unfortunate events, there was a situation in which I led a particular NPC to think that it'd be in his interests to be forthright and communicative with me in order to save his life -- and after I got everything I could out of him, I executed him anyway. The next in line took a bit more coercion to talk, but he, too, was executed afterwards. The next in the chain wasn't even all that closely involved with what had happened, other than selling something that happened to relevant evidence and rather illegal for good reason; the merchandise was bought, and I left him with a bullet hole in his forehead, too (earning a wanted star, but that was easily shaken). That evidence led to a building, and I scoured the building and ensured that everybody associated with the goings-on there, was killed, regardless of whether I could have easily bypassed them entirely or whether I first dropped them with a non-lethal hack.

In a different mission... hm, to keep things thoroughly vague, one NPC belonging to one faction wanted to manipulate me into dealing with but unknowingly betraying the members of another faction. With the way I worked the situation, I quite deliberately screwed over the first NPC and the leader of the other faction (didn't fight them, but basically arranged that the leader would be replaced by somebody who very much would have been holding a grudge against him).

[JaPhiSo]

You play as a violent criminal. How much more evil do you want to be?