I think what you were thinking was:
“There is no dialog on the character’s part about whether or not these people should die.”

I thought Dishonored showed actions speak lauder, that we don’t need dialog options to have choice. I don’t think any number of dialog options would cover my unique moral approaches to the NPCs in this game.

PS. I killed all thugs(except Slackjaw), Granny, all assassins, occasional guards, all targets except Lady Boyle, Lord Regent and Royal Torturer and still got the low chaos ending.

I ignore moral systems in games and I hate forced moral consequences based on a game developer’s moral views. Games should acknowledge that people have different moral values. Best way to implement this: moral judgments should be made by individual in-game characters who hold different moral values, not by the game globally. Dishonored’s non-judgmental chaos mechanic is still a better solution.

That argument nailed it, even more since the guys at Arkane where involved in Bioshock 2. And Bioshock also was pretty close to System Shock (surprised?) which dampened the whole experience for me on those titles. The heavy use and the widespread appreciation of ecleticisms in especially Bioshock and Dishonored makes me wonder which era or art style is going to be ripped off next.

Don’t get me wrong, Dishonored is fun and entertaining to play and especially the first does an incredible job at the visuals and the smoothness of game controls – but they are in no way to be hailed as the new representatives of free choice in games.

Ahh and yes – Blink is hopelessly overpowered.

I’ve begun wondering if that isn’t an inevitable consequence now that games are primarily produced with the console market in mind.

I liked Dishonored’s level design and gameplay, and the semi-grotesque character design was neat, but the writing left a little to be desired and the whole experience seemed awfully short.

What I wouldn’t give for a full-on Elder Scrolls-type game experience set in a similar world to Dishonored….

If you didn’t use it to explore the level then you’re really, really missing out. It’s pretty much the key element that keeps me playing.

I will say that I enjoyed Slow Time a great deal. Casting it, firing off 4-5 sleep darts and then coming back into real time to watch everyone suddenly collapse into a drugged stupor never got old, not to mention what happens when you try to use it in the assassin level.

And yeah, it definitely distinguishes itself from Bioshock in that all the component parts are very fun to play – the powers, the combat, the sneaking, it’s all at a very high level.

And it by no means plays it safe. Maybe not as adventurous as they’ve tried before in Arx Fatalis or Dark Messiah, but they’ve certainly melded the goodies learned from their previous efforts into this.

So basically if you limit yourself to just killing Weepers and the odd assassin then you’re going to have low chaos anyway. Especially since killing dogs/plants etc don’t count towards Chaos.