A lot of the people you're targeting deserve to fucking die. The game gives you a TON of lethal options.
Offing these repulsive people results in everything turning to complete shit? What.
See guards abusing people? If you kill them you condemn society. What.
Their karma system is complete schlock.
Remember this is supposed to be a kingdom worth saving, if you win, those guards, they'd suddenly be YOUR guards or more importantly Emily's guards, so why go around killing them? And again, none of your targets get off without a hitch, at all, quite the opposite, death is too easy. The first target, you brand him in the face with a mark that means he's immediately ostracized from the city. Lady Boyle definitely doesn't get off without a hitch either.
Why do you think I called the level design "limited"? I didn't say the word "limited", I said under-designed. The point is you have all of these cool powers and the level design and the enemies don't challenge you on it at all (except, kind of, Daud), almost as if making the two things work together was an afterthought. They may have very well spent a lot of time on the placement of routes and such, but they give an unlimited warp that lets you literally skip over it. The combat is fairly uninteresting until you turn it into a combo video to post on youtube, because the enemies tend to be that hopeless, making them sandbags at best. So in a situation where the powers you give to the player greatly out paces the structure of the game, why wouldn't you just say you didn't anticipate this lack of balance and call it "emergent gameplay". Would Thief be a better game if it also had Blink tapped onto it? All the ways it would be broken would certainly seem more "emergent".
Also that masquerade level was cool, but it's also the only one of its kind so I don't see the point of lecturing me about what I know about the game based on it.
The game doesn't have a singular linear structure like other games, it's full of mini sandbox levels and yes, it's incredibly emergent in the way the world reacts to your actions as well as the sheer amount of ways you can complete every level, you're not breaking the level because all the systems work as intended, blink for instance gives an advantage to the player compared to guards who don't have normal powers, (compared to the assassins in the later game segments), it's not a lack of balance because Dishonored is not trying to depower the player, Dishonored was designed with the idea that the player is the most powerful entity in the level at any given moment.
Exactly- the game encourages you to play lethally by restricting the majority of the tools to that playstyle. It's good to hear that Arkane is adding more non lethal options but they need to trash the karma system altogether. It's unnecessary baggage and distracts from the core of the game.
The chaos system is part of the core of the game and encourages replayability. The way it's programmed makes perfect sense too, (if Corvo kills 50% of the population the game the game gets into an irreversible state where you get one of the high chaos endings), it's not solely dependant on kill count but also on
many other player actions as well like side objectives. It seems you want zero consequences for your actions which isn't the point of the game at all.
