Sauron's third cousin, pi removed

While glancing at the achievements list for Pathfinder: Kingmaker (the better to bitch about it) I noticed one entry titled:
"Yet Another Ancient Evil"

This reinforces my general impression that Kingmaker seems invested with little designer enthusiasm. It was likely selected as the company's first title for overwhelmingly pragmatic reasons, to meet Owlcat's necessity for making a name for itself with a generic, relatively wide-appeal product.

But more to the point, after a couple of decades of such games I find ancient evils are getting old. I'm getting sick of cracking open tombs to release/de-feet some perfectly fermented Sealed Evil in a Can. Seems like just to maintain the system's momentum I should spend half my time digging holes and dumping genie bottles and magic rings into them to be discovered by adventurers in another thousand years. Maybe I need to play more SF-themed games, which are paradoxically more likely to bank on Luddism and xenophobia with their alien invasions and mad science gone all too predictably wrong.

Central to the F / SF divide, fantasy looks back to grandiose pasts while scifi looks forward to grandiose futures. Grandiose threats in each case follow that central theme. But it gets a bit annoying when you start being able to finger every villain as either the wizard with the longest beard or the nerd with the newest-fangled gizmos. Even Tolkien knew enough to mix and match (the ancient Enemy vs. Curunir) and in general the better representatives of speculative fiction are less prone to pigeonholing themselves. Games inspired by such works on the other hand seem to go out of their way to establish a formulaic worldview.

Just once, can't we get a SciFi game where the reactionary masses (and their Luddite rabblerousers) are the bad guys, as they are in real life? And the technocrats the good guys trying to keep an overloaded world's stitches from popping? Conversely, can't we get some fantasy games in which reckless rabblerousing upstarts making false promises of easy progress threaten to destroy the world by upsetting its wise, ancient balance? And they have to be countered by an ancient good in a can, a last march of the ents?

Even better, can't we admit than in either case, the real enemy would be the average Joes and Janes, the idiotic majority alternating between bloodthirsty greed and stultifying stagnation? Stupidity kills. The villain in any story from high fantasy to high tech should not be any superior individual, no matter how malicious, but his followers' willful ignorance, the primitive instincts of the degenerate mass-market vermin.