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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   19722 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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The bad high chaos ending is the best one. Corvo in his lust for revenge abuses his new powers and slaughters his way through the city killing everyone in his path, in the end even letting Emily die, never knowing she was his daughter. The city burns and his revenge is sated. Mostly because this is the kind of story you will never see in a AAA game because of how dark it is, but if it's a side route it's fine.

I will never understand people who complain about the chaos mechanic in Dishonored when it was one of the best parts of the game, and the fact that they tone it down in the sequel and then just removed it in DotO is a travesty and a sign that Arkane was going downhill.

Since most people don't seem to even consider the idea that killing could have consequences. Like yeah, the guard in Dunwall is shit, but if you kill the one real force keeping what's left of the peace, it's not surprising that things will get even worse.

how did you feel about Spec Ops: The Line

I didn't like Spec Ops' ending anywhere as much, because in Dishonored, the player chooses to kill, while in Spec Ops Walker chooses it for you. The story is still good taken on its own terms, but overall it's not as good of a "game story" in the sense that it takes responsibility away from the player. Dishonored 1 is good precisely because you will have a tougher time if you choose to do the right thing.

The chaos mechanic is one of the biggest examples of ludonarrative dissonance in a video game for me. Dishonored gives you, a literal assassin, a massive array of cool abilities and toys to play with, makes most of them lethal and then goes, "ackshyually, using them was baaad, you should have played the game like it was Thief!"

I haven't played Dishonoured but from reading the description and other people's comments here I get the impression that this is not "Ludonarrative Dissonance" as much as it is simply the narrative.

Like i said in the op, Jason Brody didn't kill those people, YOU killed those people and if you're complaining that the game is punishing you for playing like a murder-hobo maybe that says more about you than it does the game.

(FC3 spoilers again, really don't know what's going on with the spoiler tags, they're showing up for me in the preview and everything.) || The game doesn't punish you for being a murder-hobo. That being said, I'd be delighted if Far Cry 3 gave an honest Far Cry 4 secret ending in the beginning, and treated you to a "Congratulations! You did the reasonable thing and didn't engage in violence. Here's a fully-animated spread of Vaas raping and murdering you and all of your friends to death! Sure is a good thing you didn't try to fight back, right?"

If you as the game developer need to cheat and take away my agency when the mechanics you have given me up until that point say I can do X, because you need me to do not-X for your story to land, you are a bad game developer and/or a bad writer. The logical consequence of fully-engaging with murder-hobo gameplay is not "I decide to kill my friends for no reason and then the retarded Bad End happens", it's a cut to Citra's perspective as she is waiting for you to approach, is concerned that you are taking so long, turns to look a the captives, and when she turns back all of the Rakyat are dead and Jason is standing in front of her, machete out, with vacant stare and happy smile, because the fun isn't over and now he gets to do all the outpost liberations again. I buy that a drugged-out witch would delude herself into thinking "Aha, I am manipulating the American super-soldier into doing my bidding!" and not noticing that he's killing people he has reason to kill, and that this started before she met him, or even that the last three times her brother literally killed him and the hundreds of times he got maimed by bullets, fire, or crocodiles he just casually came back from the dead.

If the game disapproves of my choice to engage with it, then the game is dumb, and if the game is instead offering implicit approval of Vaas and Citra by saying that they weren't punished for their own murder-hoboism, then the game is just the authors engaging in contempt and sneering at their audience instead of trying to make a point, and said sneering says much more about them then it does about me. ||

Can't do spoiler tags multi-paragraph, I think. You need separate tags per paragraph. The preview operates on slightly different rules. Click 'view source' on my post.

(FC3 spoilers again, really don't know what's going on with the spoiler tags, they're showing up for me in the preview and everything.) The game doesn't punish you for being a murder-hobo. That being said, I'd be delighted if Far Cry 3 gave an honest Far Cry 4 secret ending in the beginning, and treated you to a "Congratulations! You did the reasonable thing and didn't engage in violence. Here's a fully-animated spread of Vaas raping and murdering you and all of your friends to death! Sure is a good thing you didn't try to fight back, right?"

If you as the game developer need to cheat and take away my agency when the mechanics you have given me up until that point say I can do X, because you need me to do not-X for your story to land, you are a bad game developer and/or a bad writer. The logical consequence of fully-engaging with murder-hobo gameplay is not "I decide to kill my friends for no reason and then the retarded Bad End happens", it's a cut to Citra's perspective as she is waiting for you to approach, is concerned that you are taking so long, turns to look a the captives, and when she turns back all of the Rakyat are dead and Jason is standing in front of her, machete out, with vacant stare and happy smile, because the fun isn't over and now he gets to do all the outpost liberations again. I buy that a drugged-out witch would delude herself into thinking "Aha, I am manipulating the American super-soldier into doing my bidding!" and not noticing that he's killing people he has reason to kill, and that this started before she met him, or even that the last three times her brother literally killed him and the hundreds of times he got maimed by bullets, fire, or crocodiles he just casually came back from the dead.

If the game disapproves of my choice to engage with it, then the game is dumb, and if the game is instead offering implicit approval of Vaas and Citra by saying that they weren't punished for their own murder-hoboism, then the game is just the authors engaging in contempt and sneering at their audience instead of trying to make a point, and said sneering says much more about them then it does about me.

Have to spoiler-tag each paragraph individually. Dunno why it's better-behaved in the preview than in post. Use escaped control characters or periods to keep the paragraphs separate after.

There was some dark humor in Dishonored in that the nonlethal ways to eliminate your targets were stuff like them being sold as slaves with their tongues cut out or getting locked in a rape dungeon for life, that quite possibly left them wishing you'd just killed them instead.

You don't have to play the game like Thief, you can kill up to 30% of all the enemies in each level. You can easily kill all the targets and their guards, but if you're killing every guard on the way, then yes, you do kind of deserve the bad ending.

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