The reviews make the gameplay sound like an exact clone of Deus Ex:HR in the "You can win without killing anyone!" sense, which I find to be the most profoundly stupid design choice imaginable.

Sneaking through a game is immensely boring. Your experience is reduced to long periods of waiting punctuated by short periods of crouch-walking behind people with accents of easter egg hunting.

But in DEx:HR and presumably Dishonored, the alternative is essentially failing repeatedly, killing people and being punished by the game for having fun. In classic stealth titles, violence was an equally viable path, it had clear downsides, but also benefits that set you aside of - but not behind - the pure stealth path. Modern stealthers seem bent on punishing anything but a pure stealth approach. That isn't much of a choice at all.

Picked it up, but haven't gotten to it yet. How do they punish the non-stealth approach? Is it like Deus Ex where they give you 9 bullets for a warehouse full of bad guys?

I've never played a second of dishonored, I was just ranting about the failings of modern stealth titles I have played.

What I do know about dishonored is that just about every review or interview is spraying orgasms over this "non-violent option" as though it were a revolutionary new idea, rather than a stupefyingly boring bone that only the most OCD gamers will care to chew.

Um. Not sure why you're drawing a parallel between those 2 games like that, but Stealth is the Challenge and is entirely optional.

If I were going to compare Dishonored to another game... Thief. You have the options to sneak, and the challenge in that is quite good from what I've played so far. You can go overt and just slice people up (or shoot them if you like, or use some other nasty abilities later on) if you want.

Yes it does somehow tie the Kill/Pacifist choices to something in the end game (haven't quite pinned that down, but they tell you pretty bluntly it has an effect overall) but that's more or less the way they want to handle a "Moral Choice" system. At least it's a different approach....

So far I haven't been punished in any way for my choices to kill or not kill. If I feel like it, I sneak by and let people live. If I feel like being a dick I sneak far enough to get the head shot and then it's back to the Fallout 3 "your head is now 20 feet from your corpse" type affair.

edit - RIG beat me to it.

Vin~ fucked around with this message on 10-12-2012 at 12:11 AM.

I'm applying my usual "kill everything that moves" method. Sometimes I take a few minutes to just review the area before moving on, catch a few stragglers. I don't feel like my fun has been lessened. Whether or not you kill people simply affects the outcome and tone. There are perks you can buy centered entirely around killing. Pacifist is only for the people that get off on being a pacifist. That big ole knife they give you doesn't exactly have a foam cover.

I imagine with a lot of dead bodies around, the effects of the rat plague are probably going to be worse at the end if you go around killing everyone.

RIG laid it out. This is the spiritual successor to Thief. And I haven't been able to stealth everywhere, but the game hasn't punished me for it. Even if I don't hide bodies, I don't have a ton of guys that mob me if I kill one of them.