...and that's what I'm reading from a lot of the negative feedback for evil playthroughs. Players expecting they could commit a very specific sort of evil, like burning the mill with Barcus attached, or whatever, and then get disappointed because the game wouldn't have it.
From what I've read, and my own personal take on evil playthroughs, it's less that you aren't a specific sort of evil, but more than the specific sort of evil that actually gets implemented is bad.
Most evil routes that games use are focused around the "Chaotic Stupid Murderhobo" type of evil.
Where it's all about doing heinous things for no reason. There's no logic behind the actions, it's just "Here, kick these puppies because kicking puppies is evil and you're evil right?"
Contrast this to good routes, where helping others has the logic of they will help you in return. You save Halsin and he joins your party. You help the kids and Mol helps you out later. You do quests for literally anyone and they give you a reward in return.
This is not just your everyday stupid either, this is advanced stupid because of the fact that "Evil" is more about personal gain than cruelty. The very core of evil is all your actions are preceded by the question "What's in it for me?"
Even ostensibly cruel acts are all about personal gain. Lord Vader will force choke a guy to death. Why? Because he leads through fear. His position as Sith Lord is entirely based around others being kept in line and not wanting to try to usurp him, so cruel acts like killing some random nobody is a tool to secure his position. He's not choking the guy to death just for the heck of it, he's not doing it because he gets sadistic glee from it, he's doing it because the person is not worth anything to him alive while killing him furthers his own goals.
Meanwhile in BG3:
"Hey, go torture Liam!"
"Why? What for?"
"To find the location of the Grove!"
"But I already know the location of the Grove. I literally can't be here without finding it because the game shoehorns its discovery into a bottleneck that cannot be bypassed without exploits"
"... Torture him anyway!"
We can go further into this rabbit hole of stupidity in terms of evil route design by factoring in the freedom that players are granted in modern games. That being, you can make your OWN murderhobo path by killing NPC's without the story mandating you to do so. With the ability to initiate attacks on NPC's, combined with no stupid things like essential tags making everyone noteworthy immortal. You very much can just kill bunches of NPC's if you wish (Which can have innate story consequences by said NPC's not returning later into the game)
Thus, why would you make the actual story path one of being a murderhobo when you can access that kind of route by default using the already built in game systems (Like, you can even do it while following the "Good" route too).
Then even deeper into the rabbit hole, we get to the nitty gritty of what an "Evil" character would actually do. Given that evil is predominantly about personal gain... This leads to a lot of the cases, where in a game a choice between good and evil is presented, the evil character would take the good option because that leads to more personal gain (Quest rewards, experience gains, more allies to aid them, trust with a group people etc).
Like, take the Goblins vs Tieflings scenario. Upfront you're told that Halsin knows about the tadpoles. Your goal at the time is to deal with the tadpoles. Ergo, an evil character would want to rescue Halsin to find out more information about the tadpoles, as that is in their best interest.
But the actual "Evil" route has you go ally with the goblins and kill the Tieflings. Why? Some rambling about being a "True Soul" and at least 1 act of being betrayed. Will you gain anything from this alliance? Minthara suggests maybe power? (Though in a meta gaming view that "Power" being offered is just some tadpoles you'd otherwise have looted off the corpses of Minthara, Gut and Ragzlin)
