It sounds like I’m incapable of expressing my point in a way that you can understand.

It is not that there are consequences I take issue with. The chaos system is fine. It’s a matter of framing.

I’m really not interested in dragging this out further. How about you just decide that I’m dumb and we both get on with our lives?

Let me put it another way then: They made the creative choice to build the game that way. I think it was a bad choice and hurt the narrative experience significantly and can think of multiple better options that would have made it a better game. Evidently I am very much in the minority on this but my experience playing the game is just as valid as anyone else’s.

I’m not some strange creature that has emerged from an undersea cave with no understanding of narrative conventions or game structures. I’ve been playing games since the early '90s, including plenty from the '80s, and have continued playing since, across many genres.

I think the way they chose to structure their game could have been better and I was actively annoyed by the way they went about handling “high chaos”. Other games before and since did it better.

You are more than welcome to disagree with my opinion! Most people seem to!

…but it is not me being some idiot who doesn’t understand gaming and I’m frankly rather tired of being told I’m the problem here.

Centralised platforms trying to be all things to all users are a terrible idea.

The notion of it being one pool is insane to me. I’m a bit too tired to get into it so “tremendously exploitative and problematic” will have to suffice.

Sick days and paid time off are the same thing? That’s horrifying.

Other countries are communist?

A better equivalent would be a GTA game giving you a mission with a tank and then the mission givers seriously, not for comedy, giving the player shit for doing anything but driving on the road avoiding all cars.

My problem is with the tonal dissonance of giving the player weapons designed to be fun only for the game to complain when they’re used.

The opposite being a Bond game. Really he should only be using sneaky spy weapons but he’s given a ridiculous arsenal and expected to use it. If you give me a machine gun then why would you expect me not to use it?

To be fair, that’s the best explanation I’ve seen. It’s been too long for me to remember the specifics.

Whilst it’s been twelve years I remember returning to the between mission hub and characters literally complaining. The boatman in particular.

I think you’re confusing getting and agreeing with. I understand what it was going for, that doesn’t mean I like it.

Much like in Spec Ops: The Line the player can just stop playing. I mean, you’re not wrong, but it seems silly to me.

Some games handle this by making it the ultra-violent approach essentially non-viable but that’s not how Dishonored decided to roll.

the narrative framing sets you up to be a highly-trained stealthy assassin

I quietly took out guards rather than avoiding them. No alarms were raised, etc… Seems pretty stealthy to me.

Ultimately I just didn’t appreciate the mixed messaging of “here are tools for extreme violence” and “why did you commit extreme violence?”. If non-lethal means were such a priority why was I given tools that heavily favour lethality?

I’m reminded of a show I was watching and lampshading. One of the characters is exhausting to watch and the other characters comment on how much the character sucks. That’s great an’ all but I’m still stuck watching this character suck. Commenting on it doesn’t make it go away.

Similarly I could not use the tools the game gives me but they’re there for me to use. If I’m not supposed to use them then I might as well instead play something that wants me to play it!

I grew up playing Fallout 1/2, Deus Ex, stuff like that. Dishonored framed its morality system as “chaos” rather than good vs. bad but ultimately I had characters complaining about my methods. You brought in someone to specifically be an assassin and then you’re outraged that he kills people? I shot the damn traiterous boatman in the head at the end of the game.

I think I’m the only person who played through the entire game and didn’t like it. Yes, yes, I should probably have quit but I’m a bit of an optimist and hoped it would get better.

It felt to me like the game really didn’t want me to kill anyone. However it had any number of fun ways to kill people and then scolded me when I was naughty enough to (gasp) use them!

Also the rats were bizarrely low poly compared to everything else. Odd gripe, perhaps, but given how crucial they are to the setting it felt strangely shit.

Mobile-first seems to be the future 🤢

I’d say he’s the opposite of teflon - he’s so fundamentally dirty that it’s impossible to make him worse than he already is. If who he is doesn’t move the needle then nothing else will make the difference.

Ooh, that’s a useful thing to know about! Thanks!

I felt like the modern sections were starting to fulfil what had been promised throughout the series. Then they just slam the door on that. Blech.

Also agreed on length. I’m not planning to play Valhalla because I don’t want a second job.

Rust still exists? My calendar must be wrong.

You’re getting ragged on but I would very much prefer an approach with these things that used some sort of modular system.

I’m imagining the service would have the option for “address for communication bridge” and it’d pass messages to it using JSON or something. The communication bridge would then decide which medium that would go through (email, SMS, smoke signals, whatever the owner configures).

As far as the service is concerned messages come and go (or just go) and how that side of things works isn’t its problem. It’d also mean that one could configure fallback messaging mediums and use dummy ones for if one doesn’t want anything like that (much like the “emails print to the console” debug tool Django has).