2024-09-03 2:24:34 ¶ ● ⬀ ⬈

honourablejester:

> hunterofthehunters:

> > hunterofthehunters:

> > > the thing about the dishonored morality system people don’t understand is that it’s actually the only one that makes sense regarding morality in killing people

> > like the game isn’t about to start making you sit there and agonize like “oooh you killed those guards”, or “ooooh do you wanna KILL this politician who ruined your life? or……”. dishonored is a game that will basically treat you like a sane, reasonable little assassin until your body count starts going concerningly high. because yeah, maybe you needed to kill those guards. maybe you needed to kill a few of them. maybe some of them deserved it.

> > but as you go from double digits to triple, the world’s naturally going to respond. people get worried about you, corvo. did you have to do all that? is all this really justified?

> > obviously, you can do whatever you want. you have all the power in the world. no one can stop you.

> > just be wary that filling a city with corpses in front of your daughter may give her the wrong idea.

> I do like it that the system isn’t ‘good vs evil’ it’s ‘high chaos vs low chaos’. Because what you do snowballs. Mostly realistically, yes, but also a bit metaphysically too. You can see the effects of low chaos as early as the Abbey, when all you’ve done so far is decide how violently you wanted to carve your way out of prison. The plague infected Abbey guard admits his illness in low chaos, and hides it in high chaos. It’s a little early for your actions to have affected that, and it’s not the sort of consequence that one-to-ones with your actions, the way more corpses = more plague does. So there’s a bit of a metaphysical thing happening too, mercy and responsibility rippling on a slightly non-literal level, but it works. Especially given the setting, the void and the dreams. Ideas ripple, as much as actions. Dunwall is sick, morally and literally, and poised at a tipping point. Your actions and your ideals ripple outward, because Dunwall is teetering so precariously that anything at all will topple it one way or another. Your choice is, do you want to keep it mostly intact, and affect change the slow way? Or do you want to tear everything down, violently put the diseased system out of its misery, and see what’s able to start again? With some in between. Perhaps you’d like to slaughter your opponents and put your now-tyrannical daughter back on the throne either, in a median between the two (I do like the differences between the high chaos ending where you save Emily, and the one where you don’t). The end states of the game are, the system mostly restored towards an ideal, the system more darkly restored under a new tyrant, or the system completely torn down.

> The non-lethal options are also fascinating, morally speaking. Because they’re not better. At all. In at least one case, I believe the non-lethal option to be fully worse. So there’s the question of what is mercy. Is death always the least moral option? You can kill select people, and still get the non-tyrannical or explosive ending, because it’s possible that a few deaths are still required, and that’s up to your conscience to decide how you stand on it. Or you can kill no one, and instead sell people to slavery, mutilation and rape, and decide how your conscience stands on that. But you do have to get rid of some people, regardless. Which is morally interesting in itself. If you want to fix this city, for given values of ‘fix’, you are required to kill or otherwise violently remove from play at least some people. Despite the achievement, there are no clean hands in this game. You will have to do horrible things, just as horrible things were done to you and to everyone around you. It’s just up to you to weigh who and how much and to what end.

> Which might be part of why it’s not ‘good vs evil’. Because you can’t ever manage fully ‘good’, though you try your damnedest. All you can manage is to limit the chaos.

> It’s such a toothy game. You can do things the slow, painstaking, painful way, limit your effect, try to hold things as steady as you can, while still having to bloody your hands one way or the other. Or you can fully let rip and just tear it down, and leave whoever survives to make their own way in the aftermath.