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| 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 post
1 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.
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| A guard getting knocked into an Arc of Light |
My first playthough of Dishonored was low chaos, just like that poster’s. My first thought after reading their post was that they’d missed the point: to enjoy this pacifistic approach, the player had to feel an intrinsic reward for limiting themselves to it in the first place. To keep chaos low meant you had you avoid killing, and that basically meant stealth. If you didn't enjoy stealth, then why did you choose to play it that way, and why did you choose to buy a game about sneaky assassins in the first place? My other thought was that although the tools and powers a low chaos player could use was limited, the variety for those players came from the environment and level design instead. The alt-Victorian steampunk world that Dishonored takes place in is expressive and expansive. Exploration is encouraged and rewarding. Players could choose what route to take, could carefully study enemy positions and patterns in order to decide whether to risk getting spotted in order to silently take them out one by one, and could search the environment for secret pathways. Do you risk trying to disable the Arc Pylon (basically an auto-turret) when there are three guards patrolling the area in front? Do you sneak through the alleyways or the sewers? Can you make it to that doorway before the guard turns around? If you take out that guard, where do you hide his body?
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| The screen explaining Chaos |
But then I thought about it more: although I'd enjoyed playing stealth, hadn't I also been put off by the amount of grenades, springrazors, and rewire tools that I found, gadgets that I never really got Chaos, explained as much as it would be in-gameto use, never even got to pick up after a while because my inventory was so full up with those items by mission four? Or what about how I spent what felt like 95% of the game with a stock of full mana and health potions, every mana elixir I came across but was unable to pick up reminding me that the only powers I ever really used were Blink (which teleports you a short distance forward), Agility (which lets you run faster and gives you a double jump), and the Dark Vision (which lets you see enemy locations and sight), which I'd finally fully invested in halfway through the game because, hey, what else was I going to spend the runes I'd been dutifully collecting on? None of the rest of the powers were useful in a stealth playthrough, not without investing getting into powers like the ability to slow down time or to possess animals, and those weren’t tools for the stealthy, they were magic spells that bypassed stealth altogether. They didn’t seem to fit, or seem fair, and most of all, they didn’t seem like they’d be fun.
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| List of gadgets you can purchase |
The rewire tool I had tried early on on a watchtower, just to see what it did, and I’d enjoyed watching as it mowed down enemy after enemy. But at the end of the mission, my kill count stood at something like 9, so I never tried using it again. And I remembered looking at the screen where it listed all the powers you could invest in, and wondering what people would actually invest in a power that turned killed enemies into ash, or the one where you could summon an army of rats to attack your enemies, or the one where you could fill a meter by killing enemies, and then once the bar meter full you could one hit melee kill them. I went into Dishonored prepared to play a stealth game, and in the stealth game genre, the objective should be to sneak through a level without alerting any guards or killing anyone. Right? Sure, those unused contraptions and destructive powers could be explored in a second playthrough, but surely, most of the people playing Dishonored their first time would play it the “right” way, the stealthy way? In my mind, the first time through, with you figuring things out and making the choices without having any idea what might happen next, that should be the game proper. That was the pure and true experience, and subsequent playthroughs were non-canonical experimentations, what-ifs, and trophy/achievement hunts. I was playing an assassin, not Rambo, and what was stealthy about a hand grenade, a re-purposed turret mowing down enemies, or an army of rats? But then again, one of the big goals the developers seemed to have when making this game was to make their game appeal to as many people as possible in a genre that’s had a stigma of being a bit niche.
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| The Dark Vision power |
Most games boil down to this: you are trying to progress through the levels/missions/scoring system, and there are obstacles that are there to slow you down or stop you. What most games use as your main obstacles are enemies – humans, robots, aliens -- that you have to dispatch through violence of some sort of the other: punch them, stab them, shoot them, or blow them up, but get rid of them in some way. Stealth-based games, historically, have differed from these other combat-heavy, action-oriented games: instead of testing the player’s reflexes and dexterity in order to kill the enemies before they killed you, stealth games asked the player to employ patience and observation instead to sneak past these enemies without them ever being alerted to your presence. They were games that made you feel smart, because they asked you to study enemy patrol patterns, figure out your route past them, and then enact your plan, all without getting spotted. And stealth games also meant that developers could tell different stories: instead of games about soldiers or warriors (or physicists?), you could tell stories about spies, assassins, and thieves instead. So the genre developed a fanbase which liked these games which emphasized outsmarting the AI over blowing them to bits.
But there were also people that found them boring and frustrating, who just didn’t think that stealth games were “for them.” These people especially didn’t like the trial and error, get-spotted-and-reload cycle that could happen, especially in some of the earlier entries in the genre. Getting seen by the enemy was punished heavily because these games didn’t want you to be able to shoot or fight your way out of every situation; they were trying to be something different. Metal Gear Solid would make you hide and wait through extremely long alert states once you got spotted. Killing all the guards wasn’t an option because it would just keep spawning in an infinite amount of enemies; hiding was the only option, and instead of waiting, I’d often just let my character die and restart. Fighting guards in Thief: The Dark Project meanwhile was slow and not particularly fun, and your character couldn’t take many hits. Guards could be easily knocked out with one blow to the head with the blackjack weapon, but only if you could sneak up to them. These two games were both released in 1998, and are arguably the ones that really popularized the genre and served as the inspiration and foundation for later stealth games (You could argue for Tenchu too, released in the same year, although it was less well known).
Instead of combat, developers of stealth games focused on relaying enough enemy information to make it easier to avoid getting detected in the first place. The only non-obvious thing you might possibly need to know about an enemy in a combat game is the amount of health they have left. Enemy type, armor and weapons, that sort of thing can be otherwise conveyed through the actual enemy model. But that’s not enough in a stealth game, because you’re not necessarily trying to kill them before they kill you; you’re trying to avoid being detected by them entirely. Their senses matter. Metal Gear Solid gave you full awareness of what the enemy guards and cameras could see via a mini-map in the corner, so you could more easily avoid them, and Thief gave you an indicator to let you know how easy you were to be spotted by enemies based on how well lit the area was. Enemies in stealth games also tend to give obvious verbal and visual cues to no one in particular (actually, they’re solely for you) if they spot you, or they hear something, or they’re going to stop searching for you. And because so many stealth games starred infiltrators and super-spies, it made sense to give the player access to more and more tools to play around with: radars, surveillance cameras, night vision goggles, and the like. All of these different indicators and tools were there to try to help alleviate the frustration of being spotted in a stealth game and not knowing how or by what.
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| A Mission Summary |
With the stealth genre’s focus on not getting spotted and with such a clear point of failure to avoid, players started challenging themselves to get through a level or game “perfectly”, without ever getting spotted. Or they'd try getting through without ever killing someone. And then there were ghost runs, in which players would try to get through the game without a guard ever knowing you're there, without ever even interacting with any of them. And as the genre continued to evolve stealth game developers recognized the challenge aspect that so much of their fanbase liked so much, and built their games with that in mind.
They introduced non-lethal ways to dispatch enemies, and they acknowledged pacifistic and ghost runs through levels and rewarded players that could get through their games while keeping killing at a minimum. Hitman 2 (2002) gives you a ranking of “Silent Assassin” if you kill no one other than your intended target on a level, and Metal Gear Solid 3 (2004) rewards you with special items if you dispatch the bosses non-lethally. Dishonored, too, does this: there are in-depth post-mission summaries showing you your chaos rating, if you killed anyone, and if you managed a ghost run, and there’s a trophy/achievement for Ghosting through the whole game.
During the early-to-mid 2000s, Hitman and Splinter Cell were the big stealth franchises alongside Metal Gear Solid, enjoying solid sales and fostering a fanbase for the genre. But both of those series seemed to find the transition difficult switching from the XBox and Playstation 2 era to the Xbox 360 and PS3 one, as they both went on hiatus in 2006, while Metal Gear Solid had a four-year wait between MGS3: Snake Eater in 2004 and MGS4: Guns of the Patriots in 2008. All this time, combat games and especially shooters continued to grow in sales and popularity, with franchises like Halo, Call of Duty, and Grand Theft Auto becoming bestsellers. Combat games became the dominant mainstream genre, and were being developed with subsequently heightened sales expectations in mind, always with an eye towards the mainstream audiences who were mostly looking for escapism and pure power fantasy more than challenge and perfection. And as game budgets grew exponentially with each new console release, developers of stealth games couldn’t help but look to the popular kids at the combat games table and consider how to get more visibility and attract more people to their own offerings, even as they tried to tackle some of the other design challenges of the genre.
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| The list of powers you can choose |
All stealth games have had to tackle a question: if the whole point is for the player not to get spotted, then what happens once they do? The nearest analog in a combat game would be getting shot (or damaged, but let’s go with shooters) by an enemy. Most of the time though, you’re not going to get die from getting shot by one burst of gunfire or one hit. They’ll stops firing, the situation is reset, and your objective before and after getting shot is the same: shoot the enemy without dying. That can’t quite happen in a stealth game; you’ve been spotted, and you need to stop being spotted. It wouldn’t make much sense just to deplete a “got spotted” meter a bit then have the enemy forget you’re there. Immediately giving a game over would just fall into the fail-and-reload cycle that frustrated so many people. Forcing the player into hiding and making them wait it out can be boring, as it was in Metal Gear Solid, and well, it still isn’t very realistic to just have enemies return to their normal routes after they’ve just spotted and then lost track of an armed enemy spy/thief/assassin in their base. So what then?
Trying to find a solution to this that is both fun and which makes sense is difficult. Series like Hitman and Splinter Cell have approached this issue in a way completely antithetical to the way earlier stealth games did: they give you lots of guns, and made it so that you actually can shoot your way out of sticky situations if you had to or wanted to. When Splinter Cell got another franchise entry in 2010, one of the goals the creative director of Splinter Cell: Conviction (2010) had was to bring more accessibility and openness into the series. Stealth gameplay in prior Splinter Cells was really hardcore, Maxime Beland said in an interview with Gamesradar, and he wanted to change that. "To me the stealth action genre has always been delivered in a very non-permissive and difficult way. If you run, people are going to hear you and it’s game over; if a camera sees you, the alarm rings and it’s game over. This is okay but it’s old stealth to me. [...] Why do we have to make a game that only appeals to a certain number of people?"
2 There was a focus on making the combat more fun and visceral, with gameplay elements like mark-and-execute, with elaborate stealth kill animations, and by granting you enough of an arsenal to run-and-gun your way through whole levels of enemies if you so wished. They moved in the direction of the combat-focused games, because they wanted to reach as wide of an audience as possible. And they could do that, because the expectations for stealth games and how most players approached them had been established by then.
For the experienced stealth gamer drawn to the challenge aspect of the genre, getting spotted was the failure point, and they would ignore the huge arsenal of noisy guns and distracting gadgets at their disposal, so developers didn’t need to worry about trying to force a stealthy playstyle by punishing getting spotted as severely. For the players that wanted a challenge, they’d enforce their own rules, so long as the game still supported and acknowledged that playstyle. This is where Dishonored stands: it encourages stealth, but the developers also focused on making the combat fun. If you get bored of sneaking around, or if that’s just not your thing, then you can go in swashbuckling. Sword fighting includes a fun block-and-parry system and also encourages hit and run tactics. There are flashy gadgets and powers for those that want to incite some chaos, and if you want to kill, you can kill with style. The marketing for Dishonored doesn’t even refer to it as a stealth game, even though that’s what I thought of it was while I was playing through it; on its Steam page, it’s called an “immersive first-person action game”. What it is, is whatever you want it to be. Low chaos or high chaos? Ghost or Rambo? Do you place limits to challenge yourself, or do you just want to have fun with powers and gadgets galore? You got to choose. And in this player-granted freedom of playstyle choice, Dishonored seems to draw a design philosophy from is not a stealth game, but on a game outside of the genre.
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| The guards have meters showing you how suspicious they are |
In Dishonored, you can see the gameplay elements it picked up and refined from even the earliest games in the stealth genre. Metal Gear Solid's developers spent a lot of time thinking about the amount of information you needed on your enemies in order to avoid them. They gave you a radar in the corner which didn't just show you where the enemies were, but also their cones of vision showing how far in front of them they could see. Dishonored replicates this with the Dark Vision power, which shows you the same thing. In Metal Gear Solid, if a guard spots you, a flashing exclamation point appears above their heads and an alert sound plays, and if they're confused, it's a question mark. Successive stealth games have mostly gone for more realistic, less within-the-game-world signifiers of enemy awareness and state, but Dishonored shows a multi-tiered detection meter above a guard's head if they see or hear something amiss. Thief: The Dark Project is an even more overt influence, with the focus on light and darkness, the ability to take out light sources, eavesdropping, levels which encouraged exploration, the distinct sense of atmosphere, the first person perspective, and the use of sound (both Thief and MGS had ways to distract guards through noise).
But the game that Dishonored most reminds me of isn't either of those games: it's Deus Ex. Deus Ex (2000) was a game that was hard to fit into a single genre, in a time when cross-contamination across genres was rarer. It was a game set in a cyberpunky alt-future, and perhaps the best way to describe is to call it a first person Role Playing Game. It was also a game that Dishonored co-director Harvey Smith also worked on, so it's more than just inspiration at play. As you start the game and you complete mission objectives, you would get experience points which you could put into various skills: things like firing small firearms, explosives, and computer hacking. If you didn't put enough points into firing rifles, then your character's aim would be extremely poor with that type of weapon. Not enough in lockpicking, and you'd have to waste several picks to get through a lock. Levels were large and open, and would have different alternate paths depending on what approach the player wanted to take. The first mission you get is to get inside the Statue of Liberty which has been taken over by terrorists. The front doors are locked, but you can meet a contact at the docks who can give you a key. Or you can shoot the guards and pick up a key from their bodies. But then there's a patrolling robot near the front: do you blow it up, do you disable it with an EMP grenade, or do you avoid it? Do you hack the computer terminal and take over the enemy's turrets? Or you can climb in the back way using some handy crates and bypass all of that completely. Deus Ex gives you the freedom to pick whatever approach you wanted to take for its levels. It asked you to choose what type of game you wanted to play, and was willing to accommodate whatever you chose. Stealth is always an approach you can choose: levels are rife with ways to avoid head-on conflict, with air vents, hidden back entrances, door locks to pick, computers to hack, and keys and keycodes to find, and both sound and shadows playing a role in how easy you are to detect. You are given the choice of a weapon at the beginning of the first level: a sniper rifle, a crossbow with tranquilizer bolts, and a guided rocket gun. Pick the sniper rifle, and you'll be given a lecture on how this isn't a training exercise, but real people you'll be using it on. Pick the rockets launcher, and you'll be told about the enemy robot patrolling the front of the statue. Pick the crossbow and you'll be praised for picking a non-lethal weapon. After the first mission is over, different people will comment during your debriefing about whether you killed a lot of people or not; Deus Ex wants you to know that the gameplay choices you make will have consequences. The open-ended levels, the choice of the player's approach, the moral consequences of killing, all these aspects in Deus Ex are all also there intertwined in Dishonored's DNA, but in a more streamlined way. Less overall choices perhaps, but what was there was more finely tuned, more stylish, more focused, and could be applied in more ways.
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| Stalking a guard |
Here’s the thing: despite some friction between the playstyle choices Dishonored gives you and the ways it’s designed to accommodate them, what makes Dishonored stand out, not just from its stealth predecessors but from most any other game out there, is how it felt, just going around levels. Most stealth games are grounded, and generally reflective of the real world. Dishonored has much more of a fantasy feel; movement feels fluid and carefree, and even running across rooftops feels lively. If you duck while running in Dishonored, you’ll slide, perfect for diving underneath a table just before a guard enters the room. Jump off a ledge, and there’s a bob of the camera as you land that makes you visualize your character absorbing the impact with his legs as silently as possible in a way that you can see without actually seeing it. I can think of few games I've played that control as smoothly and precisely: Mirror's Edge, Journey, Burnout 3, and Infamous 2 -- when you're in certain grind-heavy areas of the map -- come to mind. Blink is probably the single best thing in Dishonored. Honestly, taking every other power out would be fine, but without Blink, Dishonored would've been a much different, much worse game. With Blink in play, you don't see levels the same way. Anywhere you looked now, you could teleport forward to a set distance, including straight up. Architectural embellishments weren't just there to make the levels prettier any more; every beam, every buttress, every outcropping and ornament was a potential landing spot. And streets? Streets were for the plebeians without powers; you operated on a plane above, measured in terms of leaps and bounds. In my playthrough, my character spent a lot of time perched on rooftops and the top of lamp posts, surveying the guards below. I felt like a ninja; I felt in control; I felt like Batman. I wasn’t a lone infiltrator, outnumbered and vulnerable, trying to get past all the guards with only my patience and my wits; I was a hunter stalking its oblivious prey.
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| Surveying the scene |
The thing is, I’m not that into stealth games, really. I’ve enjoyed some games in the genre, but I don't feel compelled to play every one. I'll re-try a section a couple of times if I get spotted, but if I'm getting bored then I'm fine with shooting my way through at some point. Dishonored felt like a cheat in some ways, a stealth game in theory but not exactly in action or in design. Because a lot of the time, I wasn’t ever in danger of getting spotted, and it didn’t really feel like I was doing that much sneaking. With Agility and Blink, it felt more like a platforming game, as I leisurely figured out how to jump and teleport about the rooftops, far from the gaze of the guards below. The only reason I needed to go down was to fetch collectibles. There were other parts of the game where you couldn’t do that; any levels that took place indoors, for example. But the overall effect is that Dishonored feels empowering in a way that lots of stealth games don’t. I didn't feel the enemies closing in, like I did in other stealth games. I didn't feel the terror of every new, foreign area I entered, with me stuck in the corner peering over boxes and trying to piece together the surroundings and locate all the enemy patrols and surveillance there. I didn't feel the claustrophobia of every enclosed area, the ever present sense of danger, or the tension as I finally made my move through an open area, where armed guard A’s gaze had just swept across moments before and where armed guard B’s gaze would soon land. In Dishonored, I was literally above my enemies so much of the time, where they couldn’t see me but I could see them. Turn on Dark Vision, and I could even see their fields of vision. I could take all the time in the world to plan my approach, because they'll never look up.
In a genre all about not being seen, this tension between watching and being watched is something that's always pretty central to stealth games, in gameplay and also in the stories, which tend to revolve around shadowy organizations working in the background unbeknownst to the public: MGS, Hitman, Splinter Cell, Deus Ex, and Dishonored all do. In so many stealth games, you (need to) know more than the guards, but above you your bosses or your targets will in turn know more than you, and the plot will be about either learning that information or about controlling the clandestine power these organizations wield. With the escalating, modern anxieties about privacy and the surveillance state (see NSA, Google, Facebook, Snowden), we see recent games like Infamous: Second Son (2014) and Watch Dogs (2014) trying to address these concerns , but stealth games have always been right there talking about these things, and I think you can see how the stealth genre's evolution has been affected by all of this. Splinter Cell (minor spoiler) had you as part of a shadowy organization in the first couple entries in the franchise, but in Splinter Cell: Conviction in 2010, Ubisoft flips the script and the organization becomes the bad guys instead (this is all from Wikipedia by the way. I've never played these games outside of demos). And it's the gameplay where we see even bigger changes. Dishonored, and modern big budget stealth games, are about power now, it seems. The prevailing feeling isn't the tension of being spotted; you might still be a solitary figure, but you are the one in control, you are the one surveying options; you are the one who is free. This is what developers are presenting in their stealth games. Is this what the players want?
I enjoyed stealthing in Dishonored more than in any of those older, "purer" stealth games. This new breed of stealth? At least here, in the hands of Arkane Studios, it's working.
Actual power is Dishonored though, as in the actual crazy, flashy, powers, don't work quite as well. I played around with the other high chaos powers after my first playthrough, and they didn’t seem like they would make the game more fun; actually they seemed like it would make it more boring, because they were so overpowered. That's the thing: I had fun playing low chaos in Dishonored, and sneaking around. It was just hard not to think about the grass on the other side, and wonder if I was missing out. So I loaded up the last level, and I just slaughtered everyone. I stopped time, and I stabbed a bunch of people, turning them to ash. I blasted away guards with wind, I threw springrazors everywhere, I blew people up with grenades, I stopped time, and I stabbed more people. Alarms sounded, and it didn’t even matter. It wasn't enjoyable. It wasn't challenging. I needed the restrictions of stealth, or at least a version of stealth, in order to have fun with this game. But then again, I also made a choice; I chose to play it on normal.
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| Blowing away enemies with the Windblast power |
Dishonored is a stealth game that only remains so if you let it. If you actually use every single power and gadget the game gives you, then it’s a playground, where you can toy around with all the nifty equipment at your disposal and use the enemies like moving target dummies. To play stealthily, to get a low chaos rating, you have to purposefully limit yourself. The game still encourages, with its self-contained levels, non-lethal options, and the mission summaries at the end, those perfect stealth runs. But the game wants to also accommodate the players that don’t want to sit and watch enemy guards slowly trudge along their routes, those that don't like replaying levels, those that want to Just Have Fun. It’s an interesting design choice: they dangle these options in front of players, and expect swaths of people not to use them. Trying to play through the game silently, without killing too many people, the screen of powers, most of which I couldn’t use, only felt like it was taunting me, as did my full inventory of gadgets and my almost always full mana bar. But then, for those that do choose to embrace chaos and murder, the story rebukes them. There are multiple endings to Dishonored, and if you finish with too high of a chaos rating, you will doom the city of Dunwall to plague and bleak despair. Play through Dishonored like it’s a combat game, and the story lets you know that that’s the immoral choice, that it leads the city to ruin. Stealth, in the end, is the moral way to play.
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| Emily |
(Story spoilers)
The actual story of Dishonored, the thing you're trying to do, is to go save Emily, who is the Empress's daughter, after the Empress herself is killed and you, the Empress's bodyguard, are framed for her murder. Your empire, apparently, is a monarchy with hereditary rule, and your goal is to restore Emily's rightful place on the throne. Emily, in fact, is who can be impacted by your choice of whether to play low or high chaos. If you kill too much, she will learn that ends justify means, and rule with an iron fist. Play non-lethally, and she will be a benign ruler. The game is asking: just because you have power -- whether to kill or to rule -- does that really mean you should abuse it? That's great. It's a socially responsible decision the designers have made to integrate such messages about murder and the abuse of power into their game, and beyond that, any game semi-coherently being about something at all is worth noting, rare as it is. Combat and killing are so ingrained into most games that it’s sort of become the default verb, so stealth gameplay, with its foundation in NOT killing everyone in sight, is a sensible vehicle for such themes. Having gameplay choices have in-story consequences is also something that developers should strive to do in this interactive medium, but it's not something games have tended to do, so much so most of the time developers have had to make it obvious.
I do wonder what the reaction would've been if the game hadn't told the player about the chaos system and its consequences, if they'd removed the loading screen and the chaos rating after missions, and players would've had to face the consequences of their choice of playstyle without those explicit warnings? As the game currently is, most people who would've got the bad ending probably wouldn't even realize that there'd been a branch point; they would've just seen a downer ending. Moral choice in games have tended to be spelled out, given in discrete multiple choice, and color-coded, not literally in black and white but close (generally red for evil, and blue or white for good). I'm thinking without giving such blatant warning, the backlash would've been pretty severe.
Making the player’s choice of playstyle impact the story sounds great, but if most people consider their first playthrough to be the canonical one like I do, and most people generally want to play as good (on first playthrough at least)
3, then, in a game trying for mass appeal, sacrificing the artistic choice for the sake of an explicit warning was probably the right decision by the developers. It makes the hidden choice obvious, and players generally don't like making choices if they don't know exactly what the consequences are. People wants a happy ending.
In Deus Ex, it really doesn't matter how much killing you do after the second mission or so; the game front-loads the people that will reprimand you or praise you depending on your murder count, but after that, no one cares, and the effect it actually has on your game is minor. It still sticks with you though; you've been told that this is something the game can track. Murder matters; the game is watching. In Episode 2 of Season 1 of The Walking Dead (The game by TellTale, not the show), you are given a choice near the end to kill someone who is a threat to you and everyone you're with. Most people end up doing so (59%). Then the camera pans over to one of the people you're travelling with who you didn't know was there, and that person just saw you murder someone in cold blood. What seemed like a pragmatic choice in a post-apocalyptic wasteland of zombies suddenly looks much worse reflected in the horrified eyes of someone else. The game flashes a message on the screen: [character] witnessed what you did. Given another choice after that to kill someone else who's a threat, most people end up sparing the second person (80%)
4. Even in a game all about story choice and consequence, that tells you every step of the way as such, and this moment is the reminder that stuck in my mind as I considered every other moral decision afterwards: your choices will have repercussions.
In Dishonored, it's much easier to forget the story and focus only on the game, all too easy in fact. The story doesn't stick, and the execution doesn't really sell the premise well enough. I couldn't tell you exactly why I was killing all the assassination targets I was given, glazed over all the between mission parts where you go back to headquarters and listen to your fellow revolutionaries ramble. Who cares about the why? It didn't matter; I wanted these people trying to justify what I was doing to stop talking, and I wanted to return to the open mission levels. There, you can break into people's houses and rob them, eavesdrop on conversations, and kill or otherwise eliminate all your political enemies in favor of putting a teenage girl on the throne. Or not really your political enemies, but the ones of that secret cabal talking to you between missions -- their's. None of those actions have story consequences, only any extremely liberal murder sprees do. That's the thing: you can't really assume real world moral values in most games, because so many of them centre on virtual violence. Try playing Grand Theft Auto without breaking any laws, and you won't get very far. Dishonored's world doesn't follow real rules; it's all creationism. The developers laid down every brick, every guard, every grenade and power. So the player has to assume that anything that's there is there to be played with, right? There is no free will in games, only what the developer allows you to do. If there's forbidden fruit, then, well, putting warning labels on them would be nice, you know? Or if you don't, you'd better be able to justify it later, or else the consequence is gonna be a lot of confused people angry at you, or at least two.
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| Dishonored urges you to play your way |
Stealth, though? Stealth has changed. The genre seems to have hit a sort of second reconnaissance recently, after slowing down a bit between 2006 and 2010. Hitman, Splinter Cell, Metal Gear Solid, and Thief (and Deus Ex) have all either recently released new entries or have additional ones in development. But all of them are also facing criticism from stealth purists for going too action-y and of being untrue to their earlier, sneaking-over-shooting predecessors. The genre which used to serve as an alternative to all the other combat-focused games keeps moving closer and closer towards action as it chases after mainstream accessibility and appeal. Still, there’s nothing that prevents those games from still being fun, even as they try to find the balance between honoring their past while trying to ensure a future for themselves. Dishonored, in the end, was really fun. And it, too, is getting a sequel, but since it's always had that action DNA in its blood, it faces less scrutiny than those other games that have an older, purer stealth lineage. Perhaps Dishonored 2 will be able to better balance between its stealth and combat. And hey, I'd love to see a more balanced and broad set of powers and gadgets, a narrative that better sells the limits-and-abuse-of-power dynamic (or whatever theme they go with), and perhaps a more complex set of moral consequences, but it should be fine even if it doesn't do any of that. In Dishonored, the power dynamic between the player and the enemies was different than what stealth games had before, but the challenge aspect was still there, and the open-ended freedom the game gives you is bracing. That's something that's always been there in there in the DNA of stealth games: it's all about the approach. Choose carefully. At the beginning of Dishonored, you are given a sword and a gun. What you decide to do with them after that is up to you.
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| Do you stab this guard in the throat, choke him out, pick his pocket, or leave him be? |
SDG. (2012) Dishonored sets itself up for failure by discouraging high chaos play. Retrieved from
http://steamcommunity.com/app/205100/discussions/0/828925849353779838/
Gapper, Michael. (2010) The making of Splinter Cell: Conviction. GamesRadar. Retrieved from
http://www.gamesradar.com/the-making-of-splinter-cell-conviction/
Lange, A. (2014). “You’re just gonna be nice”: How players engage with moral choice systems. Journal of Game Criticism, 1(1). Retrieved from
http://gamescriticism.org/articles/lange-1-1
Starved for Help - Walking Dead Wiki. Retrieved from
http://walkingdead.wikia.com/wiki/Starved_For_Help/#In-Game_Decisions
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