I love video game factions for the same reason sports fans love their teams despite their team not winning a match for decades. There is something strangely energising about being part of a greater whole, immersing yourself in a crowd and allowing yourself to be carried along with the current.
Joining a faction generally means conforming to its rules and behaviour standards. You wear matching clothes and hang out in the same places. You associate with the same people and war with the same enemies. You share the same overarching goals and represent your purpose with the same symbol.
You may lose some of your individuality. But you gain clarity of purpose and the support and camaraderie of the group. The faction’s victories are your victories. When the faction suffers a defeat, every member shares the grief. Factions simplify the world, taking a mass of disparate individuals and categorising them into groups.
Identifying too strongly with any group in the real world probably isn’t a good idea. But in video games, as in sports, it can be a lot of fun. Painting maps, fighting alongside friendly NPCs, changing worlds by deciding the outcome of wars. Factions are an excellent tool for establishing conflict and allowing players to express themselves by who they join and who they destroy.
I will now talk about some of my favourites, explaining what makes them great, memorable, or interesting to me. I will focus on games that incorporate factions into the gameplay, not just the story.
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
Vice City contains my first memorable experience with factions. Gang members congregate in small groups and stroll through the streets. Their colour-coded outfits make them easy to tell apart from other gangs. Over time, you come to learn the boundaries of their territory.
Occasionally, gangsters wander into another gang’s territory, and a fight breaks out. In addition to being really funny, these street fights give the impression that the world exists beyond the player’s interests. NPCs live their own lives, fight their own battles, and give their lives for causes that have nothing to do with your scripted missions.
Your missions do affect them in some ways, though. Initially, all gangs are neutral towards Tommy. But after Tommy works with the Cubans, the Haitians become hostile to him.
After killing Diaz, you get your own faction—the Vercetti gang. Members of your gang appear around your money-generating properties. This fact simply yet effectively shows how the player is changing the world. The player is not just told their gang is growing. You see the growth as your gang members claim more and more of Vice City.
Disappointingly, you have no control over your own gang. Also, the gang interactions do not go beyond random street clashes that usually devolve into endless revive-fight-revive cycles. Your goons are also hostile to every other gang, including Tommy’s friends like the Cubans and the Bikers. They must just really like fighting.
Regardless, this small taste of faction conflict inspired my love of factions in video games. I still remember hanging outside North Point Mall when I was a kid, blending in with the Streetwannabes and joining in their fights with the Patrol Invest Group as if I were one of them, firing my pistol with deliberate inaccuracy, and then fighting with the police until I died or ran away.
For some reason, that was my favourite place to roleplay as a gang member.
Bully: Scholarship Edition
I didn’t play Bully as a kid, and I deeply regret it. I was too soft as a kid. When I heard the title ‘Bully’ and saw the mean-looking kid on the cover, I immediately assumed you spent the game bullying kids for cruelty’s sake. As a school kid, I guess I felt that was too real.
It’s funny coming from a GTA fan, I know. The irony was not lost on me then.
My aversion was foolish. Bully is an amazing game. If I had played it back then, it would have easily become one of my favourite games.
What I mourn the most is missing out on the chance to roleplay as a student at a time in my life when I spent hours in Vice City and San Andreas roleplaying as gang members and other NPCs.
Bully has an excellent faction system. It is even more dynamic and interesting than San Andreas—and on a much smaller and more compact scale. Bullworth High School and the surrounding area are populated by many factions (or cliques, as the game calls them).
Each of these cliques is a comic stereotype of kids in 80s America. As in the GTA games, each clique is visually distinct. But unlike the GTA games, the cliques are often mixed together. They do not kill each other on sight. Their interactions are more varied. They will fight, play pranks on each other, have nonsensical conversations, follow the school’s schedule, mess with the prefects, throw each other into lockers and trash cans, among other things.
Each clique behaves in different ways. Bullies, for example, often start fights. This makes it all the more exciting when their favourite targets, the nerds and the non-aligned students, refuse to flee and fight back.
The interactions between these factions are dynamic and produce endless entertainment. Whether you observe their behaviour, ignore it, or interact with them in the variety of ways Rockstar provides, the cauldron of clique interaction that is Bullworth High makes the world feel more alive and interesting than if every student was a generic NPC with no allegiance or clique-based behaviour.
Sadly, Bully’s handling of cliques is not perfect. The story missions often affect your reputation with the cliques. Some make them like you; others make them hate you. This changes the way they treat you, which is great in theory. The problem is you never have any choice in how to handle each clique.
Before you start a mission, you have no idea how it will affect your reputation with each clique. The game gives you a table to track your reputation with each clique, but you cannot affect this outside missions. How each clique views you depends entirely on the shifting tides of the plot.
Bully has the potential for an interesting clique system that responds to player actions. Hopefully we’ll see something like this when Bully 2 comes out in 2054.
Now that I’m an adult, I don’t really roleplay among NPCs anymore. In the interest of time, I finished Bully and moved on. I can only imagine how immersed I would’ve gotten in this game if I’d played it as a kid. One thing’s for sure: my love of factions would have been even greater now if I had played Bully back in the day.
Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction
Mercenaries revolves around two things: blowing things up and factions. I’ve talked about why Mercenaries is so good in my top 10 most wanted remasters article (still no news on that front, sadly). But here’s my opportunity to talk in more depth about that game’s factions.
Mercenaries takes place during the Korean War. Several factions are involved in the conflict: the Allied nations, the Chinese, the Russian Mafia, the South Koreans, and the North Koreans. The North Koreans are permanently hostile and feature as the main antagonist faction. All other factions offer you work as a mercenary.
The soldiers of each faction have easily distinguishable appearances. They occupy different parts of the map. They use different weapons and vehicles. Their disposition towards you changes depending on your actions towards them.
Occasionally, factions come across each other on the roads. If they are enemies, as the North Koreans are towards every faction, they start fighting. This usually occurs between two machine-gun-equipped vehicles occupied by two or three soldiers each. Passengers will disembark and shoot at the other team while one man per group will fire the machine gun attached to the back of each truck. You get that weirdly satisfying numbers game of each side plinking away at each other until one side is wiped out. You can take part for fun or stand back and observe the chaos and see if more patrols join the skirmish.
The faction fights in Mercenaries’ open world are usually quite tame. The intense fights are reserved for the story missions in which factions sometimes clash in massive battles by PS2 standards involving many troops, tanks, and other vehicles. In true Playground of Destruction fashion, lots of things blow up and lots of people die.
When I played Mercenaries as a kid, I saw its use of factions as the military version of the gangs in Vice City and San Andreas. If you were to give the Ballas and Grove Street Families tanks, machine guns, helicopters, and APCs … you’d get Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines
Bloodlines makes factions an integral part of its worldbuilding. It divides Vampires into nine clans, each of which comes with different aesthetics, cultures, and abilities. Choosing a clan for your character is one of the first decisions you make; it determines how you look, how characters interact with you, how you interact with them, and how you fight.
While a clan is not specifically a faction—because a faction requires organisation—it still fits the faction vibe—a group that is visually, narratively, and mechanically distinct from other groups and non-aligned individuals in the game. And clans do often form legitimate factions. The Nosferatu, for example, have their own subterranean society.
Beyond clans, Bloodlines features several legitimate factions. Moreover, the story requires you to choose one faction to side with near the end of the game. In preparation for this, the game gives players plenty of opportunities to interact with all the factions, learn about their history, get to know their members, and figure out which one meshes best with the character they’re playing.
Although there is conflict between the factions, there are no dynamic interactions between their members. Instead, all interactions between the factions occur at scripted points in the narrative. While it would have been fun to witness and participate in dynamic faction clashes on the streets, the factions are interesting enough as they are. Each faction is wildly distinct from one another and full of well-written characters. Endless discussions can be had about the flaws and merits of the Anarchs vs the Camarilla. The Kuei-Jin are less developed, yet still interesting. The Sabbat are insane, but every world needs a totally evil insane faction to cause a bit of chaos.
Overall, Bloodlines provides an excellent example of factions with heaps of narrative and mechanical depth.
Sacrifice
Of all the games I’ve played, Sacrifice is the one that made faction choice matter the most.
Sacrifice is a real-time strategy game where you play as a character on the map as you command your units. It is an incredibly creative game, both visually and mechanically. The unit roster comprises many weird creatures with different attacks, strengths, and weaknesses. Battles are waged on floating island worlds that certain spells can damage and cause to fall into the void below. It’s an old game, yet no other developer has attempted to do what this game did (except Palworld, kind of, in the sense that you can capture and convert creatures to your side … I can’t believe I just compared Sacrifice to Palworld).
One of Sacrifice’s most innovative features is its faction system. Before each battle, you are treated to some dialogue (usually argumentative) between the five Gods of the Sacrifice world. You can then choose which of the Gods you will fight for in the coming battle.
The location of the battle and who you fight depends on the god you choose. This choice also decides the creature and power you unlock. Winning a battle for a god changes the strategic position between each god, forcing the story down a different branching path. Ultimately, your decisions cause certain gods to die, others to live, and your final spell book to contain a different combination of spells and creatures than the vast majority of other people who played the game.
Sacrifice demonstrates how factions can enhance replay value and make each player’s playthrough unique. The ability to choose which factions you fight with gives you much control over the game’s world and your experience within it. The choices you make are meaningful in a gameplay and narrative sense. The fact that you are not locked into any faction after your first choice makes your decision to stick with one faction more emphatic. It also allows you to dramatically switch allegiances if you so choose. Or, if you can’t decide, the ability to choose allows you to express your chronic indecision by serving everyone.
It is a shame the gaming industry forgot about Sacrifice. If this game were to return or developers were to start using it as inspiration, the status of factions in gaming would advance rapidly in a more substantive direction.
Empire Earth
Empire Earth was my first PC game. It probably came with my family’s pre-built PC—I don’t know how else it came to be on there.
Empire Earth is basically Age of Empires crossed with Civilization. It has building, resource gathering, and combat like Age of Empires, and a tech development system like Civilization that takes your empire from ancient times to the near future.
Like all building and combat-based strategy games, Empire Earth is built on factions. You control all units in your faction and battle against other factions from a birds-eye perspective.
There is something satisfying in controlling a faction, helping it build, shaping its story, and then watching its numbers grind against the other factions’ numbers. I love the simple, zerg-like mentality of faction members in many games. This mentality is best illustrated by strategy games like this. You tell a group of soldiers to attack another group of soldiers, and they will get into range and fire at each other without hesitation until one side is dead and the winning faction either falls back or continues on.
Strategy games allow you to change a map in ways other games do not. You can change map colour and gang member placement in San Andreas. But Empire Earth, Civilization, and Paradox games feature maps deeply tied to the factions fighting on them.
In Empire Earth, you can destroy enemy bases and establish a resource-gathering hub. You can lock a region of the map into an attritional stalemate. You can expand your base and grow your faction’s strength—or lose it all in a slow decline against a more powerful foe.
You don’t get that with factions in other genres.
Destroy all Humans 2
This game probably doesn’t pop into your mind when you think of games with factions. But its use of what could be loosely called ‘factions’ is interesting to me, at least.
Like in Mercenaries, Destroy All Humans 2 focuses on sandbox destruction and was made by Pandemic. It focuses less on factions, but it does have a few.
Throughout the map, there are locations where groups of hippies congregate. It is possible to convince them to join the Cult of Arkvoodle, the Furon god, and thereafter worship Arkvoodle at that spot. Over time, you turn more hippie hangouts into places of Arkvoodle worship.
This game stands out to me as one of the first games I played that let me make a permanent mark on a map with the presence of my own faction. True, you can do the same thing in Vice City and San Andreas. But the Cult of Arkvoodle is cool in a different way—a silly kind of way.
The Cult of Arkvoodle never fights with anyone or fights for any territory. They just chill out and worship Arkvoodle. It was nice to see as I went about the map. It was also pretty cool how your cult members don’t freak out when they see your human form as normal pedestrians do. It gave the sense that your cult members were, in a way, your friends. And that was refreshing in a game where every human is an enemy who needs to be destroyed.
There are also a couple of ninja factions on one map (one black, one white), and seeing them fight is hilarious.
Honourable Mentions (Because there are too many games to mention and we’ve almost hit 3000 words, oh my god)
Fallout: New Vegas: Much of what I said about Vampire: The Masquerade also applies here. Both games are very similar in terms of factions. Every Fallout game has factions, but few games have factions as well developed as Fallout: New Vegas. Having had time to learn about each faction, you are given the choice to choose which to destroy and which to side with. These are meaningful choices—both in gameplay and philosophical terms.
Mount and Blade: Bannerlord: A more realistic strategy game with a big map and lots of factions to fight over it. The lesser diversity of the factions relative to Total War: Warhammer is made up for by the up-close perspective you get with the soldiers, towns, and castles that populate the strategy map.
Oblivion and Skyrim: I’ve always thought of the guardsmen in these games as factions. I prefer the factions in Oblivion (because the city guard uniforms are colourful), but Skyrim technically does them better because of the quest that allows you to choose how the cities are distributed between the Empire and Stormcloaks—two actual factions that dynamically skirmish in the open world.
Total War: Warhammer: A strategy game with wonderfully diverse factions and a big map on which to vie for territory.
GTA: San Andreas: I mention this game multiple times in this essay. I also wrote about its faction system here.
Metal Gear Solid 4: The two early missions feature rebels and PMCs fighting each other. How Snake handles them affects the progress of their fighting and their behaviour towards him. This is a very interesting concept; the battle between the two groups constitutes a secondary plot that runs parallel to the main story. It’s just a shame warring factions did not reappear in MGSV: The Phantom Pain to add some life and excitement to its otherwise lifeless and static world.
If you want to read about my idea for a faction-based game mode in GTA Online (which will never happen), check out my wishful ramblings here.