So I'm doing a re-play of Dishonoured (British spelling, I know) lately to try and bag the Achievement for not killing anyone in the whole game.
While it's proving enjoyably challenging so far early through my progress, I think Dishonoured in general really highlights the inherent flaws (and they're some pretty damn big ones) in adding the moral choice of lethality to your game without really fleshing out the gameplay side of things to make playing as Gandhi fun.
Dishonoured itself is set in a really fascinating world. It's a well-crafted, extremely grim dystopia of plague, madness and betrayal. The aesthetic is fantastic.
Then we have the gameplay: extremely dynamic, varied, inventive, brutal and fun. Well...that's if you're okay with killing baddies, anyway.
If you're playing as a pacifist protagonist like me, you have a whole two ways of dealing with bad guys non lethally:
1. Grabbing them in a chokehold and squeezing them unconscious.
2. Sleep-darting them with your crossbow.
Additionally, you'll spend a good number of minutes carefully moving their bodies afterwards so nothing can kill them inadvertently (still counts as you committing murder if they fall in water, for example).
So...we have a game with roughly 30 hours of gameplay if you're going through it thoroughly. If you're playing as a "good guy", you'll spend those 30 hours simply choking people or sleep-darting them over and over...and over again.
Additionally, since fighting only gives you lethal attacks (beyond the sleep darts), you'll never get to have an exciting fight with baddies to break up all the stealth. Instead you just reload the game. This can get really bloody tedious.
By comparison, what do we have for a character simply playing to take down enemies, either non-lethally or fatally?
Well, we have both the non-lethal options above. Then we also have:
1. Spring razor mines, that send blades flying everywhere and cut enemies to bits spectacularly.
2. Swarms of supernatural rats that dramatically eat baddies alive.
3. Huge gusts of magical wind that crush enemies against walls and throw them out of windows.
4. A flintlock pistol.
5. Lethal crossbow bolts.
6. Special "adrenaline"-fuelled combat execution moves.
7. Grenades.
8. A freaking awesome spring-loaded sword that Corvo (the protagonist) adeptly spins around and flicks open every time you get it out. You can fight with it, or dramatically stealth kill baddies with a whole load of different animations.
10. The ability to leap off a building and skewer someone fatally with the sword (so convenient, it's worth it's own number).
Look at the two lists. The lethal one gives you the game's bad ending, has almost no Achievements associated with it, and is absolutely amazing good fun. A bad guy spots you? Just have a really badass swordfight. Or stop time, sprint-slide under a table and hurl a grenade that will blow up in their faces when time un-pauses.
Or counter-attack and send severed heads flying everywhere with your sword. Or summon a swarm of rats to help you escape...or...
Well, you get the picture. The other list, the non-lethal one, gives you the good ending. The game encourages you to follow it. A guard spots you? Well, son, I hope you have the quickload button hotkeyed, because you ain't gonna be going apeshit with any of those amazing lethal toys you've been collecting.
I don't understand why game developers do this. Why spend hours upon hours making all these incredible game mechanics, then chastise the player for daring to use them? Why make the lethal route so much more fun, if it's the "morally wrong" thing for Corvo to do?
You could argue the non-killy route is made less fun deliberately, to entice the player to be "bad", and make being "good" more rewarding. But that'd be bollocks game design. Because if you want to encourage the player to persevere with being good, the game should be harder to play non-lethally (it is, already), but equally fun as being a murdering bastard.
Why can't Corvo leap off a roof and kick a guard in the face? Or grab a guard in a headlock and punch him senseless? Or have knockout gas bombs? Why are there no amazing non-lethal combat takedowns? Imagine Corvo could block a sword strike, then break a guard's leg with a vicious kick, like you can in the original Assassin's Creed. It would be incredibly badass!
But no, you just have the crappy chokehold, which has one animation. One, as opposed to the sword, which can kill guards in about 30 different ways. You must ignore the awesome blade entirely for the whole game, it unsprings in Corvo's hand like the Forbidden Fruit.
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In conclusion, if you're going to make morals ALL GOOD or ALL EVIL in your game, for heaven's sake actually make playing both ways really good fun. Don't make players miserable by giving them a huge array of toys, but making 90% of them useless with a certain playing style. It's like putting a huge ham in front of a chained, starving dog.
Fingers crossed the inevitable Dishonoured 2 doesn't repeat this very irritating design choice.
