When No One's Watching: On Dishonored (2012)

A view from high above in Dishonored

After I'd finished Dishonored, I was curious to see how its chaos mechanic worked, exactly, so I looked it up. Dishonored was a game released in 2012, developed by Arkane Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. You play as an assassin, and there was a “chaos” system in play that wasn’t fully explained within the game itself, only a screen that told you that killing more people would mean a “darker outcome”. I was wondering if it was simply a case that killing more enemies would = higher chaos and a worse ending, and yeah, it basically was. I also came across a forum post¹ that argued that Dishonored discouraged players from engaging in a high chaos playstyle, and that that was a mistake because killing was a lot more fun in the game than stealth. Dishonored gives you a range of gadgets and supernatural powers, but most of them were either noisy or lethal. Dishonored only allows the player to take out enemies non-lethally in only two ways: choke them out from behind, or shoot them with a sleep dart. The poster found enemy encounters boring because of this limited interaction with them; they found himself reloading often once they got spotted, because enemies are difficult to take out non-lethally head-on, so they found it easier to reload the game instead. Then they watched videos of other people's playthroughs; they watched other players kill enemies with their own bullets by stopping time, possessing them, and moving them into the path of the bullet they'd just fired. They saw players shoot grenades out of the air by stopping time, and they watched other players incinerate enemies by wind-blasting (that’s a magic power you can get in the game) them into Arcs of Light (which were electrical force fields that electrocuted anyone that touched them). But more than that, the game included a morality system, and it explicitly tells you in loading screens that the story would get darker and that there would be consequences if you went the high chaos route and killed too many people. The game was telling you that the “right” choice in this game was to avoid killing whenever possible, but to play the game “right” would limit the variety of enemy interactions and the creativity you could use, and all of this was something that the developers had built into their own game.