@Darren, re your last comment: I wish I could fire people from commenting on here.

(No joke, I’m actually looking forward to the D3 expansion because when all is said and done I did have a hell of a lot of fun with it.)

More seriously, it’s your blog, and I know in retrospect at least one of those questions was poorly phrased, so take your time. And, if I’m being honest, I prefer your rage-filled rants (a la SimCity) over well-reasoned criticism, so no rush to go play good (if flawed) games. Here’s a freebie to stoke your anger: having finally been able to play Diablo III (on console) I didn’t think the plot was as bad as you made it out to be!

Regarding your other stuff I think there’s a strange overlap between making a game reactive to what approach a player chooses to take and actively influencing their decision. You cannot have one without the other, even if it’s only on a subconscious level; a player will actively prefer outcome B over outcome A so they’ll go with the approach that gives them outcome B. Blacklist is very overt in the way it influences you; I like it because it’s not ever a binary “Gotta do it this way or this way with no middle ground” and you can use any mixture of abilities and approaches to get through a level, but reading this discussion I’d have to agree that this is more a reflection of the increasingly straitjacketed nature of modern games and it’s definitely not ideal.

I suspect there are various ways to take the tone. And to be fair unlike the Daud-based DLC, the core Dishonored plot isn’t too great despite some brilliant world-building etc. It’s certainly possible I took away different (or the wrong) emphases there. I did definitely think the low chaos ending was unnecessarily rosy in a lot of ways, considering that Corvo could have got there by doing very unpleasant things to get rid of the targets.

That seems a little different than the high chaos ending I saw (and I’ve seen both high and low chaos). In the high chaos ending I got, the boatman turns against Corvo for his monstrous acts (and later dies), Corvo has to dismantle the conspiracy one conspirator at a time, and Emily becomes some sort of cruel queen who rules with an iron fist.

In low chaos everything is peaches and rainbows and everyone recognizes that everything is wonderful, except for the conspirators, who mostly just did themselves in before Corvo even got to them.

Now I can’t quote the narration–you’ve clearly got a better memory of the game than I do–but that’s a stark difference in tone and outcome.

And an unskilled player isn’t limited to just killing. In fact, killing ain’t all that easy in Dishonored either (which is why I like it). You can’t easily take many people on, and need to rely on traps and running away.

I don’t think you can really be a bumbling incompetent. If you manage to complete the game, you do have some semblance of a skill level, and non-lethal takedowns aren’t that hard to diversify into (you can beeline for sleepy-darts working on aware opponents very early).