Bit of an explanation as to what prompted me to make this post: I recently played through Sniper Ghost Warrior: Contracts 1 and 2 and I just felt off. I've slaughtered hundreds of innocents for my amusement in games like Fallout and TES, I play through No Russian with a grin, but for some reason, I refrain from killing bad guys in SGW? The first one has you hunt down Russian oligarchs and war criminals, while the second one is about Middle Eastern terrorists and this is the game where I feel bad about killing? There's just something about the soldiers talking about their daily problems like making no money, uncomfortable boots and sweating too much, or showing eachother pictures of their dogs, not to mention the absolute horror when you've got a knife against their throat or when they find a body. I hope this isn't weird, but I've never experienced remorse for killing a video game enemy, and I've played a lot of different games. I'd like to hear about your experiences, and which games do a good job humanising common enemies, the concept intrigues me.
I've always felt like the Dishonored games gave me loads of tools to inventively kill people, but then punish me for doing so with the bad endings. It firmly kills my desire to play every time I think about getting back into them. I don't feel bad about the individuals, it seems most enemies in Dishonored are caricature-level evil to justify unaliving them, but I know the game is going to punish it in the end.
It's not good and evil, its high and low chaos.
I always play full chaos. The city gets what it deserves, and I get to have my fun.
Non lethal is honestly way worse in some cases, like you lobotomize a genius in the second game and knock out and give a woman to her stalker in the first. The implications of the latter were problematic so they had to retcon the woman into overpowering her stalker and living off his wealth.
Or for the grunts non lethal takedowns are some Batman level shit, where you slam people’s heads into concrete or choke them until they pass out. I guess they are still technically alive though.
I'm with you. I love all three (including DotO), but this always bothered me.
The game says "play your way", but it feels like there's a right way and a wrong way to play.
I wouldn't mind if the games punished you for indiscriminate mass slaughter, that doesn't seem very Corvo anyways, and lots of open world games have consequences for being a dick to innocents.
But Corvo is soldier-cum-bodyguard-cum-assassin, all three occupations involve or can involve causing death and harm to others.
And some of these targets are truly horrible people that the world would be much better off without. Seems to me that there would be more evil in the world if they were left alive, not less.
You can kill people in Dishonored and still have low chaos and the good ending, you can just kill the targets and even a few guards here and there but not like half the guards in each level. It makes sense that the more people you kill it leads to high chaos as less guards means more rats, more rats means the plague spreads more and makes more weepers and just more social unrest.