MovieChat Forums > Dishonored (2012) Discussion > The biggest problem with this game...

The biggest problem with this game...

posted 11 years ago by sannitti
10 replies | jump to latest

..is that it contradicts itself. In loading screens and within the plot and dialogue, you are constanly warned that killing characters will lead to a more chaotic environment and a dark ending. But it seems to me that the judgement is a little too sevre. For example, weepers, who are essentially zombies, count against you as characters you can't kill? They attack you on sight and are lethal, and doomed themselves. In fact, most of the characters you do kill attack you with lethal intent on sight, with the ironic exception of some of your assassination targets.

Everything wihtin the game skews toward killing everybody. Just look at your abilities and inventory. Lethal traps, bullets, grenades, incendiary and regular crossbow bolts, and your ever present sword. What non-lethal means do you have? An awkward choke out and precious few sleeping darts. Playing the game wihtout killing anyone seems to be incredibly tedious and soemwhat boring. To do so also would be to miss out on most of the fun and mechanics the game has to offer.

I tried being good, my chaos was low despite occasinally killing a few guards and weepers here and there when things got hairy. But then the "Return to the Tower" level happened and there was just no way. I had to kill or be killed and the result was an irrocovably high chaos level, wich i kept untill the end, despite sparing several targets.

Where's the middle chaos level? Where's the grey area that there should be, especially given the tone of this game? I understand you can play the game the way you want and the ending is just a little bit at the end, but if you do that you pull yourself out of caring for the world and the characters. It just seems that this game rails against itself in this regard.

"I am the cheese,I am the best character. I am better than both the salami and bologna combined"

[–] chambersjad 11 years ago

I did see the "good ending run" as more difficult than plowing thru as a mass murderer. And I agree that the "weeper" thing is weak... however...

I really hate the "moral choice" aspects games seem to shoehorn in these days. It almost always (dishonored no exception) exists to pad out a short game's playtime with a necessary 2nd run through to see all the content. Having said that, I felt Dishonored handled a feature that I don't like, better than most. Basing it on body count is slightly less stupid than basing it on "choices" you make in the game (infamous, fables' quest selections, etc.) Basing it on "actions" instead of "choices" just seems better to me. Or at least more suited to an interactive medium.

My first play was an attempt at good, and I didn't have too hard a time at it. You seem to have to go on real "sprees" to get high chaos and I had to kill my way out of several spottings and never seemed to get punished for it. I even opted for the kill on the high inquisitor (for the worst reason) because it was way easier. It takes actual malicious intent (for me anyway) to earn high chaos. Between being able to blink teleport, stop time, see thru walls I never even had that boring "5 minute wait for everyone to be facing just the right way before going (like tenchu.)

Now, trying to cheevo hunt for the "perfect" good run... that takes save scumming mistakes away left and right, but I do have to respect a game that gives you enough leeway to "organically" escape from the odd mistake without spamming quickload.

Yeah they saved all the good powers and equipment for the "imma murder" playthru, but being able to say I got the good ending, without quickloading mistakes felt really satisfying to me. And then getting to use the cool stuff to damien hirst my way through the game felt like a reward. I do wish there was a more diverse moral scale than "ghandi or hitler," but allowing for a more complex storyarc than a binary branching one may be asking game developers too much it seems.

"Who built this f#(%!^g police station." -- Leon Kennedy

[–] sannitti 11 years ago

My attempt at being good wasn't too bad either, until the "Back to the tower" level. I'm not sure how to get through that without racking up a hefty body count. I'm pretty sure trying to get through that again while remaining mostly undetected(which i tried once before giving up)would be the height of tedium.

"I am the cheese,I am the best character. I am better than both the salami and bologna combined"

[–] chambersjad 11 years ago

I did spend a decent amount of time in that level with time stopped or as a rat. And about 4 or 5 guards did suffer from a sudden case of neck wound/ thrown from tower. But in that level I tended to just ghost my way past them. I actually don't like doing things that way, I tend to be more methodical. But there were really just too many of them.

"Who built this f#(%!^g police station." -- Leon Kennedy

[–] sannitti 11 years ago

I actually did get through that level recently while retaining low chaos. The key is really to get inside asap and then find that stairwell. I did kill six people but that didn't put me into the high chaos range. Guess I'll play the game out from there trying to see the low chaos alternative. I hope Daud's men don't put me over, that seemed kinda unavoidable to me in my previous play-through.

"I am the cheese,I am the best character. I am better than both the salami and bologna combined"

[–] chambersjad 11 years ago

The biggest problem with Daud's guys is that they are much harder to run from and hide from. On my "good" run they were about the only ones I used sleep bolts on, tended to blink behind and choke out everyone else. If I was 100% sure on a Dowd henchmen I'd go for the "blink n' choke" (I'm afraid to look that one up on Urban Dictionary,) otherwise it was dart, then blink to a new hide spot.

"Who built this f#(%!^g police station." -- Leon Kennedy

[–] antonio-rojas2016 11 years ago

Going high is the best way to avoid detection. when you get to a new area, get to a high vantage point and wait. Watch the guards as they go through their routine and note any chinks in the armor. Make your move the next time these chinks come up. don't be afraid to spend ten-twenty minutes watching guard routines. It takes a while, but not as long as redoing a mission because you were detected and didn't know it until the mission stats came up at the end of the level. Also, the flooded district mission is the longest in the game so save often.

[–] squiike 10 years ago

You know In the low chaos ending they find a cure to the plague. So that means those you killed could be saved.

I wish cleaning up the city by killing muggers and criminals would be allowed in a low chaos ending though,

[–] chambersjad 10 years ago

That's kind of an odd take on the low chaos ending... or maybe mine was the odd one. I never got from that ending that the cure would work on someone as far gone as a weeper. Maybe we are just too zombie "saturated" in popular fiction these days, but I always had just kind of assumed that the cure would work on an infected person but a weeper was basically an infected person's walking corpse. Ahh, even in my "good" run I was going out of my way to take out weepers if I saw a particularly fun way to do so. Thanks, now you say they might have been able to be cured and I was wasting them for laughs...

Still that goes with my other point. I was able to kill several guys who did terrible things (according to the heart) and maintain low chaos. In my good run I didn't use the heart all the time, but if a gaurd was in a difficult place to take out without resorting to a kill, the heart could give me the excuse I needed to "take the easy way past." If the heart told me they did something I found especially horrible... I might not just take them out, I sometimes got vindictive and exotic with the kill. It was during one of those murders (I was displaying the corpse for maximum effect) that I had an unsettling thought. "The Stranger seems to be an agent of chaos... and I only have his word on it that the heart is telling me the truth. What if it's just telling me what it wants me to hear... and I'm just a murdering psycho?"

I mean, it's not a real dilema. In most games I AM a murdering psycho. But as a kind of role playing exercise... it was an interesting and kind of creepy thought.

"Who built this f#(%!^g police station." -- Leon Kennedy

[–] MovieGuy92 9 years ago

Well, you CAN kill some enemies, there's a limit to how many enemies throughout the game that you can kill, though I'm unsure how many that is. This is good to remember in a pinch if you keep getting caught, but if you want to be safe, I'd try to collect a large amount of Sleep Darts so that if you're spotted, you can just tranquillize the enemy and it won't count against you.

[–] migity311 8 years ago

I felt the same for the most part. I had this whole arsenal of weapons and cool super powers that I never used or tried because I was trying to use restraint to get the 'good' ending. I also assumed there would be an achievement for not killing anyone, which would have been cool, but even if I had tried really hard I think it would have been difficult because of random things I couldn't control.

One of the first missions where they introduce the wall of light thing, they give you rewire tools and suggest doing that. At the time I didn't really think about the fact that it would kill everyone. So after that mission where I unintentionally killed like 16 people (LOL oops), I started disabling all of them instead by taking out the whale oil. I also killed one of the first weepers I came across because I didn't realize they counted towards the kill count.

Then there's the mission where they want you to kill the torturer as an optional mission, but they don't give you a nonlethal alternative. It's not clear that if you finish the mission by knocking him out that it still gives you credit for disabling him. I think even Granny Rags counted as a kill, but I wasn't just going to let her kill Slackjaw or avoid that part of the mission all together (and miss the Slackjaw achievement!)

NOT TO MENTION, I was super frustrated when I thought I was playing through without killing anyone, but I threw some knocked out guards over a few short ledges to hide them and watched as blood pooled one of them after doing that multiple times throughout the mission. I didn't realize at the time that how you disposed of a knocked out person could also still kill them.

I got very good in the last few missions and killed no one, yet on a couple of them it still marked that I had killed 1 person even though I never did. Which makes me think something happened to their body by chance that I didn't intend. So I'm glad I didn't try for a perfect play through because with those glitches it may have been too much effort to pinpoint when those random deaths happened.

I did enjoy the stealth aspect though and wasn't bored or very frustrated like I was with Thief, which I played just before. Instead, my biggest issue was the money. I had thousands of coins by the end, with nothing to spend them on like 2 missions from the end of the game. Would have been cool if there was something to buy or improve other than your upgrades, because I finished that with way too much game left.