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[RamSteelwood]

i think Paul probably nailed it in the first response.  The problem is that the antagonist is usually either too much of a buffoon to take seriously to actually hate, or the hatred is 'forced' by making them hugely irritating. and if the antagonist is neither of those then they usually end up too cool to hate!

Extra bonus hate points if they trick you into trusting them as well.

I think this is probably the key to making a 'hated' antagonist, someone you had helped and looked after in the game and considered part of your 'team'.
I never really played much FF7, so i'm sure it wouldn't make much sense specifically, but as a possible example maybe if Aeris hadn't been killed, but betrayed the player and revealed that she was the 'baddie' all along...might have stirred even more emotion in the players and created a genuinely hated antagonist

[Kyle O]

Gary Oak.

That is all.

[Dragonmaw]

Bit of a huge necro, but I'll bite.

Antagonists, to truly be good characters, have to be innately likable. The problem is that people tend to empathize with others when they are genuine characters rather than two-dimensional facades, and they will do it even when the person is a complete monster. I'm sure if you met Hitler or Stalin you could empathize with them, even though they were total and utter monstrous human beings.

Nothing hurts more than having a character you like do terrible things, because you don't want them to be evil. But they are, and you understand why. But you can't let them.

[Enker]

Is it me or does there seem to be a trend toward 'misunderstood' villains at the moment? I love a balls-out baddie who's not afraid to be hated and (usually) mad as a hatter! That said Kuja from FFIX was really annoying -  enjoyed every second taking him down.

[PompiPompi]

I think frienemies are the ones you will hate the most. People who are nice to you but screw you in some subtle ways.
The antagonist can even be a friend of the player character, and somehow betray him or do something that would make you hate him.

[Enker]

I find that the 'friendly rivals' employed by games like Pokemon that can't just have BADDIES are always annoying. Are there any games that really do take a friend character and slowly change them? I know that 'Star Ocean: The Last Hope' tried it, but it felt really forced and last minute.

[stevobread]

This isn't related to the "friend turning evil" thing, but Pokemon actually most certainly does have a villain that is very despicable. In Black and White, Ghetsis manipulates the sympathetic villain for his own ends. So when you finally get to fight him, it feels rewarding.

[7Soul]

Pretty much all Pokemon rivals that appear after you beat a dungeon, and nearly all your pokemon are dead
And Ghirahim (skyward sword), he is a bitch

[VespyrGames]

Have you ever played a game that made you hate its antagonist so much that you wanted to defeat him not only for the sake of finishing the game but mostly because you really wanted to kick his ass ?

How do you think a game can induce the player to get this kind of feelings ?

I've had plenty of them, though recently in the Star Wars: The Old Republic as I was leveling my Sith Inquisitor on Taris, I forgot her name but it's the complete pain in the ass girl who is through the story line there. She wasn't a boss, but I wanted her dead in every cut scene.

[forwardresent]

If anyone played Bulletstorm, General Serano is completely unlike-able for me.

It's not even the fact he's a murdering dictator who's been using you to silence innocent people, it's just his attitude, and what the game does really well is forcing you to put up with that attitude when you're forced to fight side by side again.

In a game primarily driven by the protagonists drive to murder the antagonist, forcing them to cooperate was really well done.

[gigimoi]

Space Pirates and Zombies spoilers (Highlight to read)

In SPAZ, one of the main Characters, Don, turns out to be a final boss type creature. The game starts by building trust for the 3 main characters of the game, to the point where you feel like you're playing as them. When Don turned on me, I went into a rage mode and played for 14 hours straight to beat him.

[Miko Galvez]

Space Pirates and Zombies spoilers

Megaman X Command Mission pretty much did the same thing.

spoiler
Spider is invited to the party where you use him for quite a while and love everything about him (because he's fucking cool and has cool attacks) but then he leaves for a while and you face him in the end as Redips (Spider backwards how can we all have been so blind) i hated him so.. i leveled him up and this is how he repayed me

[JWK5]

My favorite villains are Kefka (Final Fantasy 6), Sephiroth (Final Fantasy 7), and Dhoulmagus (Dragon Quest . The all have a vendetta-fueled madness stemming from a tragic past but they operate with such cold detached surgical precision that everything they do in the game radiates with true villainy. The way Kefka's laugh and Dhoulmagus' sinister "What a pity..." signal they're about to do something evil or serve as the exclamation point for something evil they just did are pure genius.

One thing that makes the 3 villains especially effective is that they don't just burn down the main character's village and then slink off into the shadows, they hit the main characters hard and keep taking shot after brutal shot at them escalating the damage every step of the way until that final confrontation becomes something more than just beat the boss and save the day, it becomes payback.

[Miko Galvez]

what about Braid? you played as the antagonist in that lol

[Nillo]

Off the top of my head, the only truly "hated" villain I could think of was Luca Blight. He's the kind of guy who only knows how to do horrible things. Kefka was at least funny while doing horrible things, and that made him more likable to me.

I think it's fine to have a completely evil antagonist if you do it right. It largely depends on what kind of game you're going for. In a game like Diablo, for example, you don't want to sympathize with the enemies you're killing. It is a dungeon crawl, pure and simple, so forcing the player to think about the consequences of their actions would only slow them down.

[Graham-]

Kefka - he was original.

The dude who hit me with his car in GTA? Fucker.

That dude who threw me out of his car after I threw him out of it, in GTA? Fucker.

The bitch who called me a name (in GTA)? I'll show you....

Dr. "Eggman"? Meh.

Pokey from Earthbound? Hell yes. Hell, yes.

My recipe:
  1. Make an interesting character.
  2. Give this character a goal that will regularly conflict with the character's goal.
  3. Have the antagonist's, and the protagonist's, journey's towards their goals develop, so their point of conflict and nature of conflict shifts.
  4. Root this conflict in the mechanics.

Pokey? Interesting because he's rooted in reality. He's cocky without being cliche. Spoiled by his parents, a friend in some ways, legitimately, but also kind of fake. He cares for his family, but also looks down on each of them in interesting ways. Dislikes Ness for his ease of making friends. Has a stronger work ethic. Is more practical, less idealistic. Doesn't fit in with his surroundings, dreams of a bigger life - like Ness. Comes from the same hometown; contrasts with the main character.

Pokey is real, filled with detail, subtle, and driven. I can understand who he is. I have expectations of how he should behave but don't know nearly enough to not be surprised by what he does.

His goals evolve over the course of the story. What he wants changes. How we gets it changes. We can't predict how we'll conflict with him next, or if we will.

Pokey's behaviour directly affects gameplay. The knock at the door in the middle-of-the-night at the beginning of the game is incredible. He makes decisions in battle, forces you to do things, to lead him places. His family life is accentuated by his parents' reaction to Buzz Buzz (they kill him). You have to face him occasionally. He is behind circumstances that impede you.

[Angrymatter]

It all depends on what he DOES, not what he says. If people were defined by what they say and not what they do, then nobody should be left alive. I was so pissed when Toroko died. The thing is, most games want to have the antagonist be "EVIL" not corrupt. Being evil is like saying "Mwahaha, Im soooooooo evil byorka byork!!!" While being corrupt is more like contemplating "This person is not what he once was. He was probably an innocent kid once. Wtf led to this!? Why is he doing thins that hurt others?" kindof like that.

[Sir Wolf]

Have you ever played a game that made you hate its antagonist so much that you wanted to defeat him not only for the sake of finishing the game but mostly because you really wanted to kick his ass ?

Dahlia Hawthorne in Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations. For what she did to Terry Fawles. I never thought that I could feel like that towards a video game character.

How do you think a game can induce the player to get this kind of feelings ?

For me personally the trick is to first make me either like or get invested in something in the game, and then make the villain take that thing away, do something bad to it. Destroying cities or countries I've never been to in game has no effect, but killing my sidekick who's been with me for three previous games (assuming likable sidekick)?

For instance, revenge stories such as some dude killing the main charactrer's family at the start of the game don't really get to me, since hey, the family has been dead since the beginning of the game, I never met them. I don't really care. But someone I meet at the same time as the player character meets them. spending time with them, and then see them be killed, that's something that gets me motivated and aligned with a game's storyline of revenge.

Being conflicted by a game is so much more interesting (and difficult to induce, I think) than being mad at it

To me they both seem equally difficult - it involves getting me to care about something in the game. Anger or conflicting feelings, either way I need to care enough about the game world or its characters and their fate, and that is not too easy to pull off. One way to cause this that comes to mind is to make me work for something, make me go through gameplay for something - if I've seen effort to gain or achieve something, and it's then taken away from me, chances are I'm going to be pissed.

[_Tommo_]

Have you ever played a game that made you hate its antagonist so much that you wanted to defeat him not only for the sake of finishing the game but mostly because you really wanted to kick his ass ?

How do you think a game can induce the player to get this kind of feelings ?

This guy here from Phoenix Wright:


He is introduced as a "legendary attorney"; he costantly acts superior, alters the evidence, uses confusing rethoric and corruption in the court, later recurring to downright intimidation and even violence when you step too far.
Fortunately he is later found to be [SPOILER]the actual murder after a quite satisfying investigation[/SPOILER] so you can get some righteous revenge

He is a villain that you really hate imo because he constantly breaks the game's moral rules, playing above the law and using a power that you don't have. It just feels so wrong, and makes you feel powerless and useless. And destroying him means winning, but also restoring your faith in your values of correctness and whatever (in the game).

Also I didn't expect to find an antagonist as interesting as Ghirahim in Zelda, as zeldas are made of canned cliches in that respect.

[mono]

For me to hate the antagonist the character has to be fully unsympathic. I have never truely despised the antagonist unless it's just a terrible character. Characters like Wheatly and Glad0s are really interesting antagonists and well realized. They have human resemblance but at the end of the day they are just robots. In Portal 2 I felt truely deceived and backstabbed by Wheatly. I also like villains you can sympathize like Skullkid from LoZ:MM.