So I agree with the threads and essays about how it's not super clever of video games to present people with violence and then hit us over the head with "See? See how your violence is Bad Actually?" but... after playing through Dishonored one and a half times...
...I really have to say that I like the way that this game in particular handles things in so far as you are put into a world that embodies the "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" view of life but where you can choose, to an extent, to be better, and make things better.
And the way the game's world reflects your choices and the game mechanics shape them are surprisingly deep and multi-layered. The game's lore is full of stuff about how the available magic corrupts people, but there's no "corruption" attribute that afflicts you.
The easiest path through the game is not the path of pacifist or the path of violence, but the path of... avoidance. You'll have fewer conflicts to resolve *either way* if instead of going for 100% completion or more magical and material power, you focus on your one goal.
But the game gives you a compass that provides compelling narrative hooks and deep lore, while also pointing you constantly to things outside your straight path that will make you more powerful.
blog.radiator.debacle.us/2012/11/dishon…
blog.radiator.debacle.us/2012/11/dishon…
And it's easy to tell yourself "I'm going for this rune over here because it will make me more powerful and thus make future challenges easier", but the quest for the runes means you face more challenges for your power to overcome.
And in fact, in the very first mission map in your life after the prologue, the heart points you to a rune that is very easy to collect, no real challenge at all, but it also introduces you to a character who will offer you two more. Three runes, right off the bat!
And the first thing she asks of you is... well, it's not bad. There's a gang of vicious street criminals pounding at her door, demanding protection money. She wants you to run them off. Killing them is the easiest way to deal with them but not the only one. They're not innocent.
And after you have done this very reasonable, not at all evil thing for her, she gives you another quest with the same reward promised.
This one is more involved. Requires you to infiltrate two locations where you will encounter conflicts otherwise avoided.
This one is more involved. Requires you to infiltrate two locations where you will encounter conflicts otherwise avoided.
Aaand it requires you to do something that is definitely evil: poison a bootlegger's still. Not just that, but it's bootleg (effective but watered down) medicine for the Zombie Plague. And you're poisoning it with the Zombie Plague.
And if you do it, you get that third shiny runestone.
And you make the world materially worse.
And you create more conflict for yourself to deal with in the next mission.
And you make the world materially worse.
And you create more conflict for yourself to deal with in the next mission.
And you're also halfway to creating a situation for yourself late in the game where you have to kill a helpless man or fight a sort of boss battle, which is a rarity in this game. And killing the helpless man is *easy* (he's helpless!), and he's not innocent, and you get a rune.
The typical fantasy story is the devil offers you a favor and then you're in debt. I've talked about how in reality, the quickest way to corrupt someone is to get *them* to do *you* a favor. Granny Rags does this. Dishonored does this.
And one of the features of Dishonored that makes it so replayable is that even if you collect *all* the runes, the magic powers you can buy with them... okay, it's not very expansive as a "spell system" goes but there's enough of them that you *have* to specialize.
There are six active powers, "spells", that you can learn. And you don't have to learn any of them but the first one that is unlocked, Blink, an "instantly traverse empty space" form of teleportation.
All of them can be used to varying degrees both to help you avoid conflict or to help you deal with enemies with ruthless efficiency or creativity.
Only one of them I would say is explicitly offensive.
Only one of them I would say is explicitly offensive.
Like, you can kill someone with the gust of wind power, but making it fatal is situational and easier if you pump enough runes in it to upgrade it to gale force. It's also good for distraction and "get away from me".
The attack power is called "devouring swarm". It summons a pack of the deadly voracious plague rats who in the lore spread the Zombie Plague and whose in-game presence helps mark how bad the situation is getting in response to your actions.
Once the rats are summoned, you can't control them. They won't attack you or the one NPC who is exempt from your friendly fire (from which we can read things about how the PC sees her - either it's a protective impulse or a possessive one, as in she's an extension of himself)
So it's a power that according to the lore of the game makes the world measurable worse every time you use it, it's hard to deliberately use it in a non-fatal way... I mean, you can drop it on a whole group of guards and they'll be distracted but *probably* not dead.
But if one of them is more swarmed than the others, they could die. And if you left anyone knocked out but alive, the rats will mercilessly overwhelm them.
And the lore notion is backed up mechanically by the fact that more kills = more chaos = more evidence of plague and elements of dystopia and misanthropy as you go.
And since runes are such a precious resource and you *can't* get enough runes to fully level all the spells and skills... if you buy Devouring Swarm, you're going to use it.
It's frankly overpowered. It's precision targeted indirect fire that doesn't give your position or even your *presence* away. You throw a grenade or an oil tank and everybody in the area not killed by it knows that something is up and starts looking for you. Rats are everywhere.
If you've got the DLC charm pack then you've also got items that allow you to regain expended magic points by absorbing the white rats from the swarm. Especially if you get the charm that makes more rats white, you can use Devouring Swarm to refill your MP at will.
And the rats don't leave evidence. No body to hide when they're done.
And once you start using it... it's kind of viscerally addictive? If you're not a person who is utterly put off by the stylized video game rendition of the utter violence of it, it's just enthralling to watch enemies you struggled to avoid/defeat be removed from the world?
The game doesn't *make* you take this power. I got it halfway through my first playthrough and I didn't feel like I was missing anything before I got it. But once I did, it was almost always part of the easiest path past any enemy.
Isolated guards? Rat swarm takes care of them. Heavily guarded checkpoint? Drop rats to make the guards all rush together to fight them off, throw a grenade.
It makes most of the problems that simple.
It makes most of the problems that simple.
But if you're going for a no-kill approach or even just the low chaos ending (which allows for some death but requires you to avoid a lot of conflict or resolve it non-lethally), it's really to your detriment to even sink points into the rat swarm at all.
Oof. It's hard to say? It's almost a decade old so it's like $5 even without a sale and was on Steam Sale as of a few days ago. My boyfriend who mostly likes Sims and Animal Crossing but also played all the Dragon Age games is playing it now.
I mention the price point to say it might be worth taking the gamble if you're intrigued, because you won't be out much.
But anyway. The game doesn't require you to use the rats, it's possible to play through without it and not feel like you're missing anything, it's not designed around the Devouring Swarm as a mechanic... but learning the one offensive spell will tend to shape you towards chaos.
And I've been talking about this with @dynamicsymmetry who got me into the game and has played the expansions/sequels and they pointed out: no other playable character, with the same eldritch patron, has a power quite like this.
At least one of the other series leads has a summoning power but it's not calling upon the very same physical force that is destroying the city.
As far as I know, the only other magic-user in the series shown to use the rats is the same one I mentioned who can so quickly corrupt you in the first mission.
And I think part of this is emergent, I don't know how deeply they planned out the themes and the fact that you use rats in your offensive/summoning spell might be down to they had the assets and they had the cool swarm mechanics so might as well make full use of them...
...but I think it really *works* with what they're saying about the setting and what they're saying about the character (a silent protagonist whose motivations can be viewed through the lens of the choices you make) that if you embrace offensive magic, you're spreading the plague
Yes, this. The mission you're returning from at the start was to find a cure for the plague and if you get the best ending your actions do result in a cure for it.
But this is not *necessarily* even *part* of Corvo's motivation.
But this is not *necessarily* even *part* of Corvo's motivation.
Because the mission he was sent away on was at the behest of the Empress, whom he loved, and even if he didn't want to go, the political fictions necessary for him to keep his position *and* his family intact would have limited his ability to say no.
And while you are potentially saving the city and curing the plague, it's *possible* to play as though his motivation is solely either or both of "revenge on those who wronged him" and "save his own daughter and hang the rest".
Within the constraints of the setting, it is possible for you to play Corvo as a super good guy. Judicious, restraining the bloodlust of his co-conspirators, setting a good example for the future empress, bringing together bitter rivals who can only cure the plague working as one
(My headcanon is that the cure for the plague is literally just both of their elixirs together, it's that simple and the depth of their rivalry and brand bickering is what stopped anyone from realizing it. Think of how rarely you find anyone with both potions.)
But if you take the devouring swarm power then you are probably not playing Corvo as a super good guy. This is a Corvo who really doesn't care if the whole world rots. His rage is made manifest in the embodiment of everything that's wrong with it.
And that rage is all-consuming. It will devour his sworn enemies, it will devour the people just trying to keep things running, it will devour helpless victims and bystanders.
Basically... your choice of spells influences what kind of game you are playing and thereby what kind of a person Corvo is.
You can choose to play a very ruthless game with the other powers. But you can't really use Devouring Swarm for great justice.
You can choose to play a very ruthless game with the other powers. But you can't really use Devouring Swarm for great justice.
The other spells slow or stop time, let you traverse distance instantly (teleportation but you can't teleport *past* anything but empty space that could accommodate you, and don't try to teleport through a disintegration field), let you track people and their field of view, etc.
And all of these things *can* be used to kill your way through the game in brutal and creative ways as you might imagine, but those three in particular also lend themselves well to getting out of trouble without hurting anyone or avoiding it completely.
Yeah, it can be used non-offensively *with* possession for infiltration or to refill MP with Gutter Feast, but note that both of those uses assume you are relying on other powers.
It's part of the nature of "Immersive Sim" gameplay that there's no one way to make use of anything in the mechanics or environment. Crossbow bolts and even bullets and grenades can be used as part of distraction/luring tactics without hurting anyone, for instance.
If you're quick enough and skilled enough you can use Possession and Bend Time to Quicksilver people into the path of their own bullets, but that's *hard* compared to just using Bend Time to power walk through a room full of armed guards while flipping them off.
Anyway. Again, I don't think it's super compelling when a game just presents you with violence and also a judgment on violence, but Dishonored doesn't really do that.
Dishonored is a game where *other people* decide you are an assassin and you can decide you're not. You *can* decide to be their assassin. You can refuse to kill and accomplish your goals by other means. Or you can be a straight-up monster, a chainsaw where they wanted a scalpel.
And the game that tells you to be an assassin doesn't actually judge you for being an assassin. I believe the "low chaos" threshold is something like a 20% conversion rate for warm bodies to cold. If you simply take out all your actual targets, the game doesn't scold you.
And in fact if you wind up killing some guards who have the misfortune to notice you or whom you can't see another way around with your current level of in-game and out-of-game skill, you can still wind up way under the threshold.
Like my first playthrough I was not specifically trying to kill or trying to avoid killing anyone who presented as an enemy, and my missions were all "low chaos"... until I got Devouring Swarm, at which point "not trying to avoid killing" ran into the fact that it was so easy.
So it feels less of a forced moral (especially as the game doesn't really moralize at you about your actions, it just presents you with consequences that feel organic) when the assassin game that tells you to be an assassin isn't like "You fool! You were an assassin all along!"
...just realized you can sum up both of the most extreme paths through Dishonored with the sentence "I refuse to be your weapon," depending on which of the last two words you place the emphasis.
I mean, that's a complicated question because I think they hit the mark in very different ways on the characters. It's very Poe/Count of Monte Cristo.
I will elaborate in subsequent tweets.
I will elaborate in subsequent tweets.
First of all I will say that I see most of the non-lethal takedowns of your targets as being *more* vengeful, but potentially cold rather than raging vengeance, in comparison to simply killing them.
Apparently each of the main targets have unique and brutal kill sequences if you kill them close up, which I think emphasizes the hot vengeance aspect of it.
My first playthrough I picked the "fate worse than death" for the men but killed Lady Boyle quickly and relatively painlessly (and also lit the guy who wanted me to kidnap her on fire).
This was based on my take on the character as being vengeance-driven.
This was based on my take on the character as being vengeance-driven.
Now, Lady Boyle is not innocent, she is complicit in the atrocities of the Regent and makes the horrific police state possible with her money, but A of all I don't see Corvo having the same visceral vengeful feelings towards her, as her hand acted at a distance...
...and B of all, her other possible fate struck me as less poetic than the others. E.g., the nobles are sent to work the mines where they enslaved others and worked them to death, the High Overseer is debased and punished through the brutal, inflexible rules of his own church.
Now, I have to say, the line reading/delivery for Lady Boyle's "admirer" was not what I was expecting? And I think it would be possible to read this not as a sex slave situation but "I love her but I understand that free, she is dangerous and in danger."
But it's *probably* not.
But it's *probably* not.
Which is why I lit him on fire.
And the thing about all the non-lethal takedowns for the men is they're not non-lethal fates. The High Overseer contracts the plague and even if he survives until the cure it's *illegal* to treat him. The Pendletons are being sent to be worked to death in dangerous conditions.
And the Regent? I mean, he's super gonna be executed.
I've read about that, but the thing is, the outcome is completely separate from his intentions and Corvo's in participating.
So the morality of a "non-lethal playthrough" where you send several people to their deaths by other means is not as simple as "Well, *I* didn't pull the trigger," especially as the game itself counts it as your death if someone you knock out is eaten by rats, exploded, etc.
But this right here is a big part of it. "Chaos" is about making the world worse through your actions. Even evil, corrupt powerful people being murdered in front of people, in their places of power, spreads fear. Makes everyone nervous.
If the Pendletons just go away it's not quite the same. We can imagine Treavor could be telling people they're traveling overseas to inspect the mine holdings close up. The High Overseer was *not popular*, he got his position through blackmail...
...and you have probably left the entrance to his Papal Pleasure Playhouse with ample evidence of his sins against the laws of Ungod and Man open, and if not, you can find notes implying other people know where the entrance is.
Letting the watch arrest the Lord Regent is the system righting a wrong, and in a more twisted way, forcing the Abbey of the Everyman to expel its corrupt and sinful leader is doing the same.
None of this is to say that it's objectively right, objectively virtuous. When I said that your Corvo can be a super good guy given the constraints of the setting, this is the kind of thing that I meant.
The least twisted fate is reserved for the man behind it all, the one (Daud aside) Corvo would have the strongest vendetta against. He's simply dealt with by-the-book, as a criminal who committed the highest of high crimes.
And given that his position is the highest in society, I think for the idea of low chaos meaning you are working to preserve the fabric of society (and give your daughter a stronger and safer city/empire, as @dynamicsymmetry has noted), it is a very important outcome.
There's also something in... okay, I have compared Dishonored to an abbreviated Count of Monte Cristo. In that book, by the time the titular character has caught up to his main enemy and chief architect of his downfall, he has started to rethink a few things.
Edmond Dantes begins his quest believing that God himself has empowered him as an instrument of divine justice, has elevated him to act as the hand of divine Providence dispensing goodness to the good and paying evil until evil.
And it is all fun and games until someone loses a child, and he also almost kills the innocent and beloved betrothed of a man he had singled out as Good in order to punish a man he had labeled as Evil.
And if you go with the alternate resolutions for all of the men in the conspiracy, you can read Corvo's decision to let the guards lead the High Regent away to face purely conventional human justice rather than the Hand of the Outsider as being the result of a similar maturation.
Ahhh. See? I never happened upon the boiler room looking into it. This is such a *big* game for being a relatively short one.
Corvo has literally been singled out and elevated by this maltheistic, Lovecraftian world's most accessible god, but if you choose not to kill the Regent yourself then you are making the decision that other humans should decide his fate according to human rules and human reasons.
So again it's not straightforward to say these are moral actions or not.
My view is that good and evil aren't complicated. They are very simple.
The problem is, people and situations and the world are complicated.
My view is that good and evil aren't complicated. They are very simple.
The problem is, people and situations and the world are complicated.
The fact your choices are "kill these people in all manner of creative ways, including a specially crafted up close finishing sequence or by any available means and (mis)direction concocted using the tools available" or "this specific fate" is a limit of the ludonarrative frame.
That is to say, the game makers cannot construct an immersive and responsive sandbox that is big enough and detailed enough for you to actually come up with your own way of getting these dangerous people out of power permanently. They have to be among the rare scripted elements.
One last observation about Dishonored and its messages about the world - in a game whose story is marked by backstabbing and betrayal among allies, the cure for the locally apocalyptic plague driving it all only comes if you bring two bitter rivals together in cooperation.
And it's not like the game hits you over the head with this, either. At no point in the actual gameplay are you presented with "Find a cure for the plague" as a goal, which would be beyond your abilities. You were sent a wild goose chase after a cure in the backstory.
But if you fail to make the world worse enough by your actions and keep two flawed, petty little men who despise each other alive long enough for them to work together, the plague is cured anyway.
