Thread by @AlexandraErin

So I finished Death of the Outsider this morning. I think Billie might be my favorite player character in Dishonored? Though her power set challenges me. It's more bare bones, doesn't have as many "I Win" setups.

The thing that is interesting to me is that the game in the franchise that is the most explicitly about choice offers you the fewest. No mark to refuse or accept. No choice of powers or how to develop them. No chaos system.

Where Daud and Corvo can kill a crowd of enemies in the blink of an eye and Emily can enthrall or take out up to four, Billie doesn't really have any "combat ready" powers until she gets the blade. Even her teleport isn't as good for escape as Corvo's realtime Blink.

Billie's powers make you work, and if you get caught in a fight, then by and large you are fighting your way out of it. She can't summon rats or magic assassins or shadow doppelgangers to fight for or alongside her. She's on her own.

I feel like my fighting skills in Dishonored 2 will have leveled up considerably next time I play it just because playing through DotO forced me to learn how to fight.

Of course, she has better gadgetry and weapons. I know it doesn't take place long after Dishonored 2 but I like the feel, throughout the series, that Fantasy Industrial Revolution is progressing, as supported by the better gadgets available.

Playing the Original Game+ mode with fully upgraded Domino and Blink powers really emphasizes how much scrappier she has to be in the canonical playthrough, when she can't stop time to teleport or use magic for quick takedowns.

The last couple chapters of the game, with the void strike and the time dilation charm giving offensive magic and time manipulation, did feel like the kind of game-changing power boosts you could get through rune upgrades in the other games.

As far as the choices go... I do feel like the decision to not have a chaos system makes sense. Billie is not a public figure, there's no public drama. As far as the public knows it's *mostly* criminals killing each other, street gangs.

The Joker maxim "Nobody panics when things go according to plan." is in full effect. If you kill the beloved singer (and secret murdercultist) Shan Yun, you can hear his grieving fans talk about how his music touched, even saved, their lives.

But mostly, your actions in the early chapters would read as gang violence. The cops take credit for whatever you leave behind in your first mission. The Spector Club covers up whatever you do on their premises.

Most of your choices are practical, like whether to take the skiff or the carriage, which way you go into the bank. The lack of the kind of big decision points that happen along the way underscores this theme:

https://twitter.com/dynamicsymmetry/status/1276208929748500483

I don't know that Death of the Outsider will ever be my favorite game in the franchise, if only because I can't see myself playing it to relax unless I maybe go into easy mode. The other games, you can take powers that make almost every challenge in them trivial.

But the fact that Billie Lurk has to Billie Work for everything she does, the fact that this game *requires* a scrappier or more ruthless playstyle whether you're being gentle or brutal, I think, is an important part of its tone and theme.

Like, the Spector Club is an entirely optional area that has two optional quests that both require getting one particular person out unconscious but alive (one is hostile, one already incapacitated) and taking them to another location.

It's possible to infiltrate the club in such a way that the heavily armed inhabitants aren't immediately hostile, but as soon as you take down the bartender or try to carry out their unconscious victim, your cover is blown.

In any other Dishonored game, you would have multiple abilities that could be used for crowd control, mass death, or immediate exfiltration of the site.

But Billie Lurk doesn't have the same options.

You can use traps and tactics to avoid fighting a whole room full of people at once... as long as you're careful not to kill your kidnapping target in the process. While the game doesn't penalize you overall for murder, they put *one* person in this scenario you want alive.

And actually that's a trick the game uses more than once, because a couple chapters later you get hired to kill all the hostile NPCs in the level *except one*.

Anyway. My overall point here is that despite having fewer powers and completely ditching multiple subsystems (chaos, runestone/power tree) that defined the previous 2.5 games, this one is more complicated in ways that aren't obvious on the surface.

Outside of trying to complete totally optional side jobs, whether you kill a character or not is entirely up to you as player, which means the decision to be merciful or even just restrained has only story weight, no mechanical impact.

It's kind of the "When nothing you do matters, the only thing that matters is what you do." type of spin on the traditional Dishonored formula. Billie Lurk's decisions aren't going to set the course of an empire. They're hers and hers alone.

I'll probably thread on this again on another day when I don't feel so tired and mentally burned. But basically: I enjoyed the game, I like the protagonist. I do hope that we get future Dishonored games that open up the power choices more again, though.