#dh2 spoilers

[lesbianshadowheart]

where do YOU place on the Arkane daughterhood scale

[presiding]

a doctor turned serial killer turned doctor again, an actor who paints, a gang leader, a mining baron, and a vice overseer walk into the room.

oh yeah and they lead karnaca now.

dishonored 2 is my fav game but i think it's mid, story-wise. here's why dh1 works and why dh2's overarching story sorta misses

tl;dr: story integration is critical for gameplay that offers audience payoff, but emily's personal arc from dishonor to honor is inconsistently demonstrated in the story, and is not an interactive part of the gameplay.

essay/long version under cut >

recap: what's dishonored's deal

[skip if you want] dh1 is an underdog story: corvo is an honorable man swept up in the machinations of a callous city, so his canonical ending being 'this child will rule over an empire' isn't about the child's rule but rather about corvo's reputation being restored in a more hopeful city, due to his & the player's rejection of the violent connotations of the tagline 'revenge solves everything.'

similarly, in dh1 DLCs, daud's story arc is that of an anti-hero: a dishonorable man who realises too late he has done irreparable harm. he sees the error of his ways after a single monumental death, and eventually a single life redeems him when he/the player stepped in to circumvent a terrible fate for a child, enabling her to rule unfettered.

daud & corvo come to a satisfying conclusion within the extent of their narrative arcs. it doesn't matter that a child on a throne isn't really a fix for a decaying empire - the player's actions throughout the city of dunwall was what mattered - and these stories could be framed as parables. in that sense, young emily as a ruler is a metaphor for a hopeful future for the city & empire.

dishonored 1 & its DLCs are also great examples of storytelling with perfectly integrated gameplay - you, the player, worked towards the outcome that redeemed the protagonists.

in your efforts to save young emily, you either achieved a good outcome (corvo) or prevented a worse outcome (daud).

bringing us to dh2 -

what's emily's arc

emily's arc is a coming of age: we're introduced to a reigning empress who questions her role & skillset ("am i the empress my mother wanted me to be?"), then her titular fall from grace occurs. from there, she learns to reject the violent, selfish connotations in 'take back whats yours' tagline (a la daud & corvo!) while rediscovering why her rule is critical to the empire.

emily's rule is no longer metaphorical, but:

a literal thing for audience assessment (is emily a good ruler?) AND

the crux of her storyline.

at the beginning of dh2, emily is introduced as a disengaged leader ("i wish i could just run away from all this;" "i dont know if whether i should sail to the opposite side of the world, or have everyone around me executed"). the antihero has a precedent for the dishonored series in daud, so it's not at first glance an issue*, however, the fact that emily has ruled poorly reframes corvo & daud's endings as being less than ideal (a moralistic retcon) *we could talk here about how ready an audience was in 2016 for a flawed women as a protagonist, hell, even in 2023,,,

throwback to the beginning of this essay when i said:

'this child will rule over an empire' isn't about the child's rule but rather about corvo's reputation

emily's story arc, unlike for daud & corvo, is literally about the quality of her rule. we're no longer in metaphor territory (ironic phrase): a parable-style ending doesn't work.

does emily become a good ruler

we know she becomes a good ruler because the game says so. it is narrated to the audience via a (literal) word of god in the space of 30 seconds, after the final boss. the outsider tells us that emily becomes known as Just & Clever.

drawing a distinction here - this narration is not the same as the player actively being involved.

the player does not throughout the game become aware that emily has made political allies. during the game, she doesn't talk to these characters about saving karnaca or being a better ruler to the empire (there's a few lines might imply it, but you need to be actively looking and being careful to wait for every voice line. it's a far cry from daud & corvo's fight to save emily being unmissable - even though daud doesn't know at the beginning that's the goal).

how does the game show it

you can coincidentally not kill most of your subjects and never be aware that emily is looking to restore karnaca by means of instating a council - it's never brought up. it *couldn't* be brought up, because that council serves under the fake duke (armando), who is the last person she speaks to before she leaves for dunwall. its her suggestion that he rules karnaca, but armando's condition is that he will rule as he sees fit.

to back up a bit, emily's canonical method of restoring karnaca is by banding together key allies - hypatia, stilton, [byrne &or paolo], pastor, under a council beneath the duke's body double. they are passionate people who would each individually make worthwhile advisors, but if you think about those characters sitting at a table trying to reach an agreement, it feels like an assortment of people that emily didn't kill along the way and doesn't feel organic (up to interpretation). it's not stated if emily herself banded this council together, but logically she must have (worth a mention these are mostly characters that you as the player had reasonable rationale to kill during a high chaos run, except pastor). the underlying concept may be that karnaca's power is returned to its people - which is interesting given that the monarchy remains and armando's decision is final.

this overarching solution could also be taken as a critique to dh1's 'put your kid on the throne,' which is another reason its worthwhile looking at how emily was shown to be a better leader. obviously my point isn't that her solution was bad given the circumstance, but i mean she has very little agency here in all. if emily was shown to be more controlling as a leader, this could be interpreted as character growth, but that's not the case.

coming of age

how do you learn & grow when you can't specify your failings? emily doesn't really touch on her shortcomings as an empress. she non-specifically worries delilah makes a better empress than her. it's hard to argue her worries are meaningful when someone good at their job will still worry when lives are in the balance.

emily's best 'aha' moments (eg. crack in the slab comment about gaining perspective) are consistently undercut by a conversation with sokolov or meagan afterwards in which she demonstrates she hasn't learned anything (before the grand palace, emily condemns 'toadies sucking up to me' and is reminded by meagan that she's part of the problem). the story is confused about what it's trying to say about emily's progress, and when she's meant to show progress, if she was meant to show any progress at all. it could be argued that emily was never even a bad ruler, she had just been fed misinformation about the problems in karnaca and been the victim of slander by her political enemies. the game doesn't make this clear - it's easier to argue that the opposite is true given that her allies only have criticism.

worth a mention here that the heart quotes about armando - a fake ruler - interestingly mirror emily's character concerns. "see how he sighs? his life is a gilded cage." but this essay is already long.

while corvo & daud spend their games (and through the gameplay) 'earning' their redemption, emily is being led by the NPCs around her to a conclusion and a fix for the political mess in karnaca: meagan & sokolov guide emily to her missions, and there's no recurring quest for emily to investigate possible allies. she is able to gather the people she hasn't killed to herself by manner of... post-game narration. during the game, she's primarily concerned with getting her throne back.

an easy fix: if there had been less dialogue & narrative focus on emily's failings perhaps the ending would have felt more satisfying. it has the feel of cut content, but i don't know what was cut to be able to comment on it.

so what went wrong?

i can't help but wonder if arkane were worried they would lose a certain demographic if corvo wasn't playable (may have been deemed too much of a risk - 2013 was a different time), and so they had to take out story elements that were unique to emily's growth as a character/empress, because the usual storyline/gameplay integration had to work for both characters - in other words, gameplay that made sense for both corvo & emily was prioritised before emily's story & character development. which is a silly problem to have in a game that added character voices for the sake of improving characterisation - maybe emily's tale would have felt more akin to a parable if she had less lines that betrayed her ignorance (to the disdain of those around her).

i wish more care had been taken with emily's story. most players will never really notice the large variety of different endings - they're not particularly satisfying in and of themselves.

it's ironic that one of Emily's complaints is about her father/protector being overbearing, when his (parallel universe) presence in the gameplay may be one of the reasons her own narrative arc falls flat.

what are the upsides here

changing tune from what didn't work - don't you think the concept is fantastic? it's a great idea overall - can you imagine if the coming of age storyline was better integrated into the game?

it's valuable to talk about the integration of story and gameplay and characterisation from a craft perspective. dh2 genuinely is my favourite game - it's beautiful, the imm-sim design philosophy makes the world a delight to explore, the combat gives endless creative options for tackling any fight, there is a far greater diversity of cast in an in-text canonical way. there's loads to love!

i love emily as a dodgy leader, to me it adds interesting dimensionality to the outsider's narrations - of course in dunwall there's never a neat happily ever after! emily, like the outsider, both work well as characters who hold ultimate power but aren't necessarily worthy of it - and this makes perfect sense for the dishonored universe's morality & critiques of power. however, within this grey area there's still plenty of room for a satisfying ending, which isn't what we ended up with, whatever the true reason for that was. and also, damn, emily's a marked assassin empress, if she can't lead well then who can?

while dh1 was criticised for its narrative simplicity, dh2 in contrast and in hindsight shows us that simplicity isn't so bad - there's satisfaction in gameplay achieves a clear, simple narrative goal.

[kiwiwinjindouche]

Masterlist of my Dishonored OCs:

(Half of them met Jindosh at some point because no one can stop me I fear) Some might be more specific to a game or period of time, and their story contains spoilers according to it. I'm linking their ToyHouse pages as well, but if you can't see it it means I'm not done yet. If you have any questions about any of them I'd gladly answer it! You can follow the tag ' dishonored oc ' on my blog, I use it to talk about them.

Thank you for your interest in them! <3

Last but not least, if you think one of your babeis could have some nice interactions or anything with one of mine, I'd love to hear about it and make some connections!

Kirin's childhood:

Adrian: My version of Kirin's big brother. He is his #1 fan and works at the mines for Aramis Stilton.

Marisol: Adrian's girlfriend at the time. Due to HHH unfortunate incidents, she'll leave Karnaca and go to Morley, only to come back around 25 years later with her new husband.

Ivanoe: Kirin's 'rival', he hated him so much. He's the only one in the friends group that actually disliked him (Kirin killed the cat he was taking care of so yeah).

Onésime: He was the Curator at the Conservatory, but before that, he was a teacher at the Academy. He was glad a young spirit like Kirin would be so interested by all that.

Ya-Hui (/Grace): Actual teacher at the Academy. She's always been by Kirin's side, until the Unfortunate Event. She taught him some bits of violin and made him growing fond of music even more.

Caleb (all 3 games): He was an Overseer, but to protect his sister (Abigail, below) he took her place and went to jail (not long before DH1 events). He'd eventually be given the chance to join the navy, but no one expected him to last this long.

Abigail (all 3 games): Witch doomed by the narrative. As you can imagine, being the sister of an Overseer was a bit complicated. Her love for the witches led her to places where she shouldn't have been.

Jennifer (all 3 games): Whaler OC, girlfriend of Abigail - a witch and a whaler was quite the duo too. They love each other dearly, despite everything.

Sybill (all 3 games): She lived on the streets with her sister, but the later got into the Golden Cat. Meanwhile, Sybill joined the Bottle Street Gang. She's the Sherlock Holmes of Dishonored.

Archibald (DH1/DH2): My first DH OC, he was supposed to be the one helping Corvo, but I ended up with the son instead (Vincent, below). He helped Sybill and worked with the City Watch.

Vincent (DH2): #1 fan of Jindosh in Dishonored events. He helps Corvo and works under cover with the Howlers.

Aldina (DH2/DOTO+): Her family are/were (for spoilers reasons) nobility in Karnaca, and had connections with the Duke, but Aldina always hated old men and find them boring. She wanted to become a witch, but Kirin found her instead and took her in his mansion to teach her things.

Nelly (DH2/DOTO+): She works for Jindosh, and takes care of Aldina too.

Octave (DOTOish): Marisol's husband. He's an artist from Morley, and works with Jindosh on the cinema and cartoon.

Sinclair (/Camille) (DOTO+): Singer at the opera, but they're into theater plays too. Their scene name is Camille Butterfly. They had the chance to play the Outsider from time to time.

Rosario (DOTO+): New Curator at the Conservatory. I still need to work a bit on them.

[silurisanguine]

A very grand wedding

Had to do the chart for my Emsider ship as featured in Through Dark Waters story

I suppose this could be considered a spoiler for it...Or maybe it is only a what if.....

Was fun finding a suitable grand outfit for Emily to wear that fit the Dishonored aesthetic of NO skirts but was still very very regal and formal. Same, giving Tyr the Asymmetric style in DH2. The flowers on the cake.....same flowers that grow on the shrine in the Conservatory district in DH2.

[poniko-w]

ut2 spoilers below tha cut (+ spoilers for the ut2 mo4 mod)

i found my diehard concepts from before i changed a few of the characters around.. i made these really late at night so i forgot they existed!! oops!! this was back when i was toying around with the idea of empress bachikin taking on marisas role, i picked them based off of the dialogue for each diehard:

the one i changed the most was DH5 (adukin), giving her stitched-open eyes (toriels eyes weren't closed, after all!), scarring, and unnaturally bent legs to resemble goat ones, though DH2 (fukurou) does also have some changes from the original, notably her torn off hands with long wires coming out of them, and her pome-tail :3 i wanted DH5 to really, like, look like it was done without marisa(or, in this case, bachikin) seeing until seriph had already ruined her.. BUT now bachikin and adukin get to be jinx and punchbuggy so yay 4 yuri

[mewmewchann]

The first of three post-chapter 1 uploads for DH2 is premiering in just under 2 hours!

WARNING THIS UPLOAD CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING OF DESPERATE HEART 2 CHAPTER 1. DO NOT CLICK IF YOU AREN'T CAUGHT UP I AM WARNING YOU

Anyway it's really cool you guys should all watch it :3

[samtrapani]

Hello! I saw your dishonored oc's boards on pinterest and I've been kind of wondering what the lore behind them is 😗 (including the two empty boards! Their descriptions sound super fascinating)! Would you mind sharing some info with us? :3

hi hi ! omg thank you for taking an interest in my silly little ocs! i just restarted playing dh2, and i never got around to filling the boards the first time, so let's have a brief overview of them >:3c (also, i have an insane canon-divergence/everyone-lives schtick going on i'm afraid, aside from their regular canon, so we're talking about that. btw big spoiler warning for DH2)

JACK FENNER

she's a morlish-born, karnaca-raised bodyguard-for-hire, usually employed by dunwall nobility. she's known as 'redgloves' because of the gloves she wears, and one of her aspirations is to win the blade verbena, no matter how many years it takes. one of her last employers were the pendletons, after her previous employers were lost to the rat plague in 1835. she marries treavor (scandalous!) a year before jessamine's assassination, but keeps the whole 'lady pendleton' thing on the down-low. by 1852/DH2, they have two children, and she acts as pendleton's bodyguard in his post as prime minister (lol).

ELIAS ALFARO

also known as 'the captain', elias is the captain of a former whaling vessel. by 1852, he's a fisherman who's living his semi-retired life in sunny karnaca. several years prior, he was commissioned to sail in imported 'goods' for jindosh's experiments, and a sort of relationship was struck up. he doesn't understand jindosh's work, but he believes in his potential/genius. elias is a simple man, who prefers to do work with his own two hands. but he's loyal, big-hearted, and sees the good in everything and everyone. by the end of DH2, elias nurses jindosh back to health from his... 'accident' until jindosh is ready to resume his post as grand inventor (although he now does it more for good). nothing much changes for elias, except the world looks a little brighter, sunnier.

VESPER RUTHERFORD

she's a village girl from pradym, tyvia, and a former scholar with the academy of natural philosophy. her primary speciality is cartography, and she's hellbent on mapping the entire empire. she has an interest in the outsider, which leads her to strike up a friendship with sokolov, which turns into a relationship of sorts. by the end of DH1, she departs for pandyssia, leaving everyone behind, and the voyage changes her forever. she returns with beatrice, an orphan girl she found in pandyssia, whom she raises as her and sokolov's daughter. by the end of DH2, she, sokolov, and beatrice return to dunwall, where sokolov opens his studio, and vesper becomes a lecturer at the academy.

LEON TIAVANI

a howler for life, leon grew up on the streets of karnaca with paolo, his best friend. the son of a grand guard and a cheerful musician, he has a gift for music and violence, inherited from his parents. at the end of DH2, the howlers + the overseers work together with the duke's double in order to rebuild karnaca, and leon helps paolo oversee a lot of projects to do exactly that. he's a bit rough, but there's a cunning to him not a lot of people realize-- or at least, realize too late.

[honourablejester]

This seems to be going around again, and I just want to clarify something: low chaos and clean hands aren’t the same thing. Clean hands is when you don’t kill anyone, and it will get you low chaos, but low chaos doesn’t require clean hands. It’s its own separate achievement. You can kill several people and still get the low chaos ending.

(In DH1, I should clarify, I haven’t played DH2, so I don’t know if it works there).

When my sister and I were playing, we killed three people and got low chaos. Lady Boyle, fully on purpose. The Torturer, by accident and out of raw panic because sleep darts didn’t work on him, and then Granny Rags, also by accident, because apparently sleep darts kill her? Or at least they kill her if you destroy the locket first. She was absolutely not intentional on our part.

I’m not sure how many people you can kill and still keep it under the high chaos line, but judging by that, it’s at least three. So, if you don’t kill anyone else, you can, I suspect, kill all of your official targets and still get low chaos. So at least in terms of the people where you get the official lethal/non-lethal choices, it is a choice. You get to choose. Keep your general chaos low, don’t kill civilians, don’t kill guards, save all your vengeance for the people who actually hurt you, and it still stays low. I’ve seen people arguing that non-lethal is the only way to get low chaos, and it isn’t. You can kill. You just can’t kill indiscriminately.

Chaos is not a morality meter. It’s a measure of your effect on the world around you, a world that was already dangerously teetering from a standing start.

Because … I’m not sure how many people fully comprehend the general horror of this setting. Dunwall is so extremely fucked, it’s kind of amazing.

The only known god in this setting was formed from a child murdered by a cult thousands of years ago, and it’s at the very least strongly implied (if not stated?) that said cult became the tyrannical church that base their power on having declared him evil and given themselves free reign to torture and abuse people in the name of keeping them free of the evil influence of the god they created. Said god, as a rather natural result, is cynical as fuck, which tends to show up in his reactions to your actions.

The current empire’s industrial revolution was powered by eldritch whale oil which results from the prolonged and brutal butchery of still-living and possibly-sentient animals, because the whales need to still be alive to get as much as possible. These whales exist in the void, and seem to be connected to the previously mentioned god. The entire empire depends on their torture and butchery to exist.

The massive plague currently ravaging the city, and creating what are essentially zombies to run amuck, was (SPOILERS) brought here deliberately as a bioweapon to clear out the lower classes a bit and help establish firmer order, only the one who brought it never figured that said lower class people would naturally resist being wholesale left to die and would therefore resist the quarantines enough to cause said plague to break containment and threaten everything.

Dunwall is fucked. On such a titanic scale. Chaos is already rampant. Good and evil are broken. The dark god watching and empowering your actions is delighted and bewildered if you decide to be as gentle as possible, because that’s so far outside his experience and expectations that he’s bowled over. The tipping point to knock this whole mess into complete chaos is so low. It’s already so close to ruined. But it’s not zero. You can be gentle enough. Not necessarily by not killing anyone, but just by not killing everyone. Kill one, two, three, it’s okay. It’s not good, nothing’s fucking good down here, but it’s okay. It’s survivable. Rack it up higher? Start killing a guard here or there on your way in? It’s starts getting more tentative. We are on the tipping point. Go softly.

Well. Should you choose to. Or just tip it over, shove the thing across the line, put it out of its misery, and see what’s left in the aftermath.

Your best result is low chaos, not no chaos, because chaos was already here. On a truly staggering scale. There’s no being good, there’s no way you can get through this without hurting someone, because we’re already so far past that point. But you can try hurting less people. You can try helping, where you can, saving someone here or there, and you can try not making it worse.

And the scripted lethal/non-lethal options …

They’re not perfect. The writing team I’m pretty sure has admitted that some of them were less well-considered than others. But they’re interesting. And they are a choice. Provided you save your lethal urges just for these specific people, you can get the best ending whether you kill them or not.

So you just have consider for yourself which of them seem better or worse than death to you.

As I said, my sister and I killed Lady Boyle, because I’m not giving anyone to their stalker to be raped for the rest of their lives. That’s just not a thing I’m doing. I’m just going to give her a nice clean kill here and now, and spare her that.

And you can argue … I mean, is sending the Pendletons to be mutilated and enslaved in their own mines not just as bad? Branding Campbell and leaving him to become a zombie? But …

The Pendletons are pimps and slavers. They did it first. And Campbell … you literally catch him in the act of murdering one of the few honest guards in this city because said guard had the audacity to start questioning the murder of some prostitutes. You brand him with his own brand, the one his church uses on the heretics they’ve tortured into confession. So. You know. Lady Boyle just gave some money to her lover. To fuel genocide, mind you, while she’s sitting pretty and untouched at her fancy party, so she’s not actually morally any better, it just … I’m less inclined to be as physically vicious with her as with them. Torture and mutilation are both things the other two have done to others, so I feel less fussed about doing it to them. But I’m not selling Lady Boyle to rape when she’s done nothing beyond being a upper class twit with zero empathy and terrible taste in men. A quick clean kill. That’s what we’re going with.

It's a question you can wrestle with. Where your morals stand on it.

Now. I have seen an argument that killing them, regardless of whether you can still keep the overall game low chaos, does still increase chaos, where the non-lethal options don’t, and that that puts a moral weight on the non-lethal option. Which. That I can see, somewhat. Why does killing them increase chaos, when brutally torturing them to violently take them out of the game doesn’t?

And part of that, I think, is the publicity of those acts and how they affect the general mood of the city. Because, again, chaos is not morality. It’s chaos. How much chaos do your actions cause.

The Pendletons and Lady Boyle are the easiest to judge, here. In both cases, killing them is a public murder that terrifies people, while getting them out of the way non-lethally involves quietly vanishing them to somewhere horrifying with most of the city none the wiser. You know it’s horrifying, but the city/world doesn’t. Yes, they vanish, but Dunwall is already so roundly fucked that that’s … part of the scenery? People vanish. They likely got the plague and died. It’s fucked up, but it’s not a new force of terror carving its way through the city.

Campbell and Burrows are where this one gets complicated. Because what you do to them non-lethally is … very public. But. Because of who they are? Also complicated.

Campbell is the head of the church, and you brand him as a heretic and force said church to cast him out to die a plague zombie or risk that brand not meaning anything. And that brand, the threat of it, is a huge chunk of the Abbey’s power. That’s. That is a ballsy, terrifying move. One that has the potential to cause more chaos than just assassinating the man. But.

But the church terrify people. And, yes, dark magic might terrify them worse, given all the madness and supernatural plagues and teleporting assassins and rat witches floating around, with the church as the bastion of sanity standing against it, but … But Campbell and Burrows have complicated that reputation. Because the church has taken the chaos as a reason to clamp down violently, since Campbell doesn’t seem to know how to do anything else, and they’re now being fairly liberal and blatant about their abuses of power. You can find a lower ranked overseer trying to protect his family from his own church. It’s swinging. So if you come in and finalise that swing, it doesn’t … it doesn’t tip too much.

There’s also no indication that the Abbey broadcast what happened. You branded him, and then they quietly threw him out. If someone recognised that this particular plague zombie was the ex-head of the church, yeah, scary, but … how many people would they have let know otherwise?

If you assassinate the head of the church, especially as a clearly supernatural foe, then that’s the forces of the Outsider physically killing the head of the church that protects everyone. If you brand him, make him a heretic, then you break his power and martyrdom and force his own church to keep what happened quiet. You limit the chaos.

And Burrows …

Which is more chaotic, which causes more panic? Publicly assassinating the second head of the Empire in less than a year, or … or revealing that said second head killed the first one, and also, by the way, brought the plague. Like. This one I can see the argument that the second option is inherently more destabilising and chaotic, because a thing like that is a massive trauma for an entire city/nation. However.

Revealing Burrows for what he is gives the city someone to blame. The plague is not the devil’s work, or some eldritch punishment on mankind, or even horrific bad luck. It was done to them. They have someone to blame. It’s not raw chaos out there, it’s not the world teetering on the brink for no reason, it was a crime. A thing that was done. And a thing that can now be punished.

So.

People get too hung up on the perception of being judged morally for their choices in this game. The chaos system isn’t about that. It’s about how much this city can still bear and not disintegrate. Because it’s so fucked. It’s so fucked. It takes so little to break the last shreds of hope and restraint and just pitch the whole fucking mess into the void. You might be morally justified in doing so. Again, this is an empire built on the butchery of sentient beings, an empire guided by a church that is at the very least morally ambiguous, and a nation with a history so dark that a dark god is pleasantly shocked if you don’t fuck it up any worse than it already is. Like. There is an argument, albeit an incredibly bloody one, that it might be better for all concerned if you just burn this empire down and let the survivors rebuild in the aftermath. And that is a choice you have. You can choose that.

Or you can try to walk softly. You can try to hold it steady. And in that cause, you don’t necessarily have to forswear killing, but you do have to forswear needlessly killing. Civilians. People just doing their jobs. People who didn’t plan any of this. You can’t kill them. You have to take the time and make the effort to get to the ones responsible without going through everyone else on the way. Maybe they’re bad people! All those guards and assassins and overseers. Maybe they’re bad! But you don’t know. And even if they are, once you start just killing everyone in your way … Well. Firstly, the difference between you and them on the morality scale is rather academic, and secondly, that’s very noticeable and terrifying, not just to evil people but to everyone. A supernatural mass murderer killing his way through the institutions of the city in the middle of a mass plague and in the aftermath of the previous empress being killed is not a recipe for anyone’s confidence or sanity or willingness to try and be kinder themselves!

You’re not punished for choosing high chaos. Provided you survive doing so (ie finish the game), nothing horrible happens to you as a result. You get off scott free, either the enforcer for a brutal empress, or free as a bird to wander a broken world. I’m not sure if you’re punished mechanically, as in the game being harder, because we only did low chaos, so I don’t know what the experience is like on high chaos. My sister did do a high chaos run, and she was baffled by the low number of enemies later in the game, so I know there are significantly more people to fight later on in high chaos. But. I mean. We only managed low chaos at all by literally saving every five feet Corvo successfully moved without being spotted or having to fight anyone. Literally. We successfully crossed a room? Save. Accidentally hit the wrong button choking out a guard and stabbed him in the neck instead? Go back a save. Low chaos, possibly depending on your skill level, is a bitch. Every time we’re playing another game, and we get to a difficult section, we remind ourselves to ‘do a Dishonored on it’ and just save every five feet.

You make your choices. If you want to be free to kill liberally, you have to deal with the consequences as the world reacts to that. And if you want to try and ease this city through this crisis mostly intact, you have to be prepared to wear out the save button making sure you’re not spotted for the fifteenth fucking time getting into Anton fucking Sokolov’s fucking house.

(Jesus Christ. Sorry. It’s just that fucking Burrows was easier. Daud was easier. How does an eldritch assassin and the emperor in all but name have houses that are easier to get into than this one fucking scientist? For the record, we got neither the Ghost nor the Clean Hands achievements on that playthrough).

Dishonored’s chaos system, at least DH1’s chaos system, is not ‘good vs evil’. It is very much as it is named, high vs low chaos. How far are you going to push this fucked up city over the edge? Morals … morals only partly come into it. You will have to be terrible regardless. You will have to hurt people regardless. You will have to kill people, or worse than kill people, and there’s no way out of that. So just … decide how careful you want to be. But morality, while it might help, saving people and helping people where you can does lower chaos, will not change what you have to do. You have to kill or brutalise at least four people. There are no truly clean hands.

Also, the Outsider? The Outsider is sad and tired and incredibly cynical. He’s bitchier the higher chaos you are, and he’s nastier with lethal options, but he’s also not exactly a moral arbiter. Nor does he claim to be. He’s tired, and he’s bored, and he’s so used to people being terrible because that’s literally how he was created. So he’s more excited by you at least attempting mercy because that’s really rare for him. The Outsider doesn’t reward or punish you for your morality. He’s just baffled and pleased if you try not to kill people, because giving someone power and not having that result in murder is a new and exciting experience for him.

It's such a toothy and interesting system. Experience. Not always perfectly implemented, not always perfectly judged, but I will always give it credit for trying what it did. It’s not a morality meter, it’s a chaos meter. Because your personal moral judgement of your actions (or even the local god’s) is secondary to the wide reaching effects of said actions on those around you. You are playing on a scale of empire, in a city already teetering on the brink of collapse before you busted loose. If you’re not careful enough, it will fall. And it’s up to you if you’re okay with that, but whether you are or not, it will happen. So if you want to avoid that, yes, you will have to be careful. You might even have to do something worse than kill someone, because it’s quieter and more efficient and causes less panic, depending on how much grace and leeway you’ve left yourself. If you kill too many guards to get to her, maybe you do have to sell Lady Boyle to her rapist.

You’re not avoiding evil actions. You’re trying to balance the evil you must do to best effect. You’ve already sold at least part of your morality. You will not get out of this without horror on your hands. What you’re trying to avoid, presuming you made that choice, is chaos.

And that … Apologies. That was significantly more of a ramble than I’d planned to go on.

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

[vole-mon-amour]

Just finished Deathloop. Felt extremely underwhelmed. Went to youtube to see other endings. Still feeling disappointed. That's what I get for avoiding all the spoilers for this game (i was so excited to play it and learn the story), and the price that I bought it on sale for feels too much for this game.

Oh well.

At least I now get to play a new game that allows to f5-f9 and doesn't erase your progress and your weapons and all collectibles if you unfortunately die or the game crashes (which sometimes happens cause the optimization on pc is so bad).

Dishonored, Dishonored 2, and Death of the Outsider still remain the greatest games Bethesda ever made. Sure, you look from a new perspective at them after Deathloop, those could also be improved. Sut DH is not about joy and bright scenery, after all, so totally understandable. If only DH didn't punish people that want to go berserk and give more opportunities to people that want to go full stealth, no kills.

Same goes for Deathloop. I went into it wishing go zero kills & it turns out it's not even an option. You have to kill. Kill every single person on the map, if you have/want to. But at the same time it's not its typical fist person shooter? A mix of it with abilities from Dishonored? But you can only use two of them during an entire loop, so most of them are useless (but you still have to infuse in them 'cause the games asks you to.) The more I think about it, the sadder I get. No rich fulfilling story, no breathtaking ending. Again, why?

I'd only recommend this game for a very low price. Very underwhelming, and after 32 hours I still have no idea why I did all those missions.

More details and impressions compared to DH2 under the cut.

Dishonored, Dishonored 2, and Death of the Outsider still remain the greatest games Bethesda ever made. Sure, you look from a new perspective at them after Deathloop, those could also be improved. Sut DH is not about joy and bright scenery, after all, so totally understandable. If only DH didn't punish people that want to go berserk and give more opportunities to people that want to go full stealth, no kills.

Same goes for Deathloop. I went into it wishing go zero kills & it turns out it's not even an option. You have to kill. Kill every single person on the map, if you have/want to. But at the same time it's not its typical fist person shooter? A mix of it with abilities from Dishonored? But you can only use two of them during an entire loop, so most of them are useless (but you still have to infuse in them 'cause the games asks you to.) The more I think about it, the sadder I get. No rich fulfilling story, no breathtaking ending. Again, why?

I still have a lot to say cause 1) my emotions are very fresh 2) I definitely had some fun with Deathloop & it made me play the entire game from start to finish cause I was interested in what comes next. But then nothing actually happened, so... alas.

[makarovspussy-moving]

googles the Dishonored writing team. googles some names. ah. that's why Dishonored is so racist. ok

[sertraliini]

[presiding]

new chapter up for the monster in the hull, dishonored 2 rewritten from meagan foster's perspective

[wallofsparks]

Death of the Outsider

[trans-corvo]

Dishonored 2

Wallpaper 3/3

[mewmewchann]

IMPLIED DH2 SPOILERS

is it too early to call that last scene with Matilda and Emiliano the peak of my voice acting career orrrrrr

[dr-teatime]

HE LOOKS WEIRD