Dishonored, and the Morality of Uncheckable Power

foreign [Music] is a game that's about a lot of things it's a game about movement about Stealth and being an assassin it's a game about power and magic and a people in desperate need it's a game about death and betrayal and what our actions might look like when right and wrong are not so simple recently I played it for a bit to get some footage from my last video on night City but that wasn't anything near the first time I'd played the game it just happened to be the first time that I really spent time thinking about the game thinking about the things I was tasked to do and all of the different ways I could do them you see Dishonored as a game with a morality system called chaos to some it's a frustratingly black and white system with two main outcomes those being high chaos and low chaos bad ending good end of course like all good design it does go much deeper than that the whole game and by naturally extend the world of the game ends up being shaped by your actions and it scales from small to large from the way one daughter sees her father to the way the world ends or if it even ends at all this means that playing Dishonored invites the player to see not just the ending through the morality of high chaos and low chaos but rather to view the entire game by what you feel is right or wrong there's this idea that who we really are behind all of our masks and layers is defined by who we are when no one is looking but Dishonored asks a much much more interesting question you see Dishonored sees us given an array of magical powers by an entity known as The Outsider The Outsider is difficult to quantify but what's relevant in the median is that he offers us a deal he'll grant us slivers of his power if all we do is be interesting in return now Dishonored is a game so it does have some natural progression for these Powers but even playing casually you'll probably find that you soon far exceed the region capabilities of the Common Man nonetheless it is largely the common man that would stand in the way of our goals now these Powers have a curious range and because the outsider is neither good nor bad they don't care how we use the powers we're given only that we use them which means we don't just have power over the common man we have power that is unchecked and uncheckable we might run faster we might jump higher we might freeze time and open the veins of men who could never defend themselves we might summon a swarm of rats under the feet of our foes and we might not even stay to watch the Vermin feast but did these people deserve these things or were they just in our way were they even in our way or did we do these things because it was slightly easier than any alternative that would let a man go home after his shift ended did we do it just because we could because we recognized in a single moment that we had power over someone we're supposed to be saving this world but are we thinking about what the world is going to look like after we're done with it because designer doesn't care at all about who you are when no one is looking the only thing Dishonored really cares about is who are you when no one can stop you let's officially establish what's going on in this game Dishonored sees us playing as corvo otano the Lord protector of Dunwall returning home after a long journey away to seek aid from dunwall's National laborers to help combat the growing rat plague the plague has been a problem for months now bringing further and further instability to the city and it doesn't look like it's going to get better anytime soon on the contrary it's actually going to get much worse right now corvo can barely complete a game of hide and seek with Emily the daughter of the empress and his daughter also before some shadowy tryhards forcibly take hide and seek to the next level by killing Empress Jasmine and stealing away with Emily murder is already considered to be in pretty bad sport by the hide and seek community at large but these guys take it even further by Framing corvo for the murder and getting him locked away and tortured for six months which seriously hinders his ability to seek after those six months it's finally time while ugly over here has been turning your fingers to beef jerky the spymaster having assumed the role of Lord Regent has been seizing control of the government now with full control he confides in corvo that everything has gone according to plan for he was the one who orchestrated the assassination of the empress and improvised your subsequent framing like all good villains he's fully content to admit guilt One Step before his victory because tomorrow corvo will be executed and what's the point of winning if you don't get to gloat about it well it turns out things aren't so simple for the new Lord Regent corvo has some friends on the outside and they've smuggled a key to corvo's cell to the inside because they know that he's innocent of course they're the precious few that understand that because six months of lies in propaganda have turned corvo into a monster to the common man to the rest of Dunwall corvo is guilty of regicide and the sole instigator of all the wrongs that have befallen the city since the empress's death knowing this we've opened the door the game begins and we make our first choice do we kill this man doesn't really matter does it sure it'd be nice if he got to live but maybe he's been mean to corvo while we've been locked up or maybe he's been helping the man who brought you the key you'll never really know and besides the most important thing right now is getting out of cauldridge isn't it follow your heart the thing about Dishonored is that it doesn't really make it clear that your actions might have consequences the first place that you'll maybe really notice it is when you escape from coldridge and the sewers and are met with your very first chaos rating high or low and if you went through the prison like you might go through any other game it'll probably be high after all you might be used to seeing the number of enemies alive in an encounter as the same as your metaphorical to-do list for that encounter but Dishonored is watching you and keeping track of more than a few things both small and large and while we'll talk about some of those things as they come up once you know this it's hard not to evaluate the world of Dunwall from its most consequential acts all the way to its smallest decisions through your own understanding of what's right and what's wrong even if the game disagrees or doesn't value that moment like right here the game doesn't track this individual guard in any special way but he's scripted to always talk about how much he respected the empress right as you walk into the range to hear him and sure that respect translates in this moment to being eager to see you die but what else is he supposed to think in the understanding of him and most of Dunwall this is all your fault so decide for yourself if ignorance is a death sentence maybe you just don't like being disrespected only you can say but one way or another will use the bomb we collected from the safe will blow the door and will away through the sewers now I know this is a video about ethics and morality and all that jazz but I would be remiss for not exploring briefly at least how well Dishonored teaches one of the most important game Mechanics for its world see the city is infested with a rat plague this means you guessed it there's rats and also oh there's rats silent lesson number one rats will eat people even if they're alive and they'll do it in about this much time climb over the rot and keep going until you get to the Sewer passage and again there's rats but also there's corpse silent lesson number two the rats don't have a priority Target between living or dead they just want to eat so position a corpse between yourself and the Swarm and the Rats will choose the corpse once the rats are busy eating take the jump to the other side and keep going until you get to this chamber here guards are a top too high to see you sneaking about and they're tossing bodies down they talk about where the bodies are actually supposed to be going but these days does it really matter the rats are just going to eat them anyway wherever they end up so just toss them where it's easiest and sure enough there's rats now if you try to just open this door the rats will eat you before you can finish turning it and if you get them to munch on a body first they'll still finish the snack before you can open the door so you have to use what you subconsciously learned would work create a trail of corpses leading away from the door with each body being placed at the right distance away that the Swarm will prioritize the next corpse over you it's totally brutal and if I'm honest I can't really think of another time where the game gets this puzzle based but it does lay the groundwork of you being expected to pay attention to the world around you to figure out what's going on in it once we're past the rats for the final time it's onward to meet Samuel and a short boat ride to the Hound pits Pub later we meet Our Saviors and the people who will help us write the spymaster's wrongs introductions all around and after meeting with the Loyalists and hearing their plan to recover young Emily and put her on the throne it's time for the first night of sleep in an actual bed in six months it's also time for the game to actually begin because with the tutorial Over The Outsider comes to us in our dreams hello Corva now like I said earlier this fella is a bit difficult to quantify and just because I have more time to do so now that we're out of the intro doesn't really help The Outsider tells us that he finds US interesting tells us that One Way Or Another We're going to shape the world in the days to come and thusly grants us access to his power as he does to anyone he finds interesting not good not bad just interesting and who could be more interesting than corvo right now we awake and the Mark is there of course so is the empress trapped within a mechanical bolstering of her own heart which is quite frankly the most metal thing I've ever seen in my whole life the heart is capable of two significant things it'll show us the locations of runes and Bone charms crafted in times long ago that will help us claim new and stronger powers but it will also tell us little secrets about the world and as you make your way through Dunwall I think it's important to listen to what it says foreign the first real mission of the game sees us heading to the office of the high overseer with a handful of objectives dispatch the high overseer claim his journal which holds the location of Lady Emily and save Martin if possible save Kernow who you might remember is having been with us on our return to Dunwall and already the game is showing its hand we're stronger than anything we encounter between corvo's trained abilities Piero's inventions and The Mark with a handful of notable exceptions there's little in this world that can actually stop us there is a void between you and the Common Man and that void will only grow even if you only casually collect the runes needed to upgrade and unlock new abilities even if you don't really try to become as strong as possible that void will grow and it's up to you to decide what that means as you explore the streets you'll encounter an adult old woman called Granny Rags she's a bit bumbling clearly displaying some form of neurological degradation she talks to her birdies which are not there and when people begin pounding on the door she asks you to attend to the men that come to harass her at this point in the game handling these Three Goons in a non-lethal matter is so hard such a chore much easier to just kill them besides they're harassing an old woman who knows what they'll do if they're not stopped for good either way you deal with them you can head back up to Granny Rags to let her know that she's safe and she'll teleport up to meet you on the balcony because Granny Rags is not just some old woman she's been marked by The Outsider same as you she'll give you a rune as thanks and if you claim the one from the altar behind her house The Outsider will tell you even more about her with that completed she'll ask you for one more favor The Men Who were bothering her either are or were members of the bottle street gang a group who among other activities brew and distill their own Elixir a home brew blend of the special concoction that helps keep the rat plague at Bay if you poison their still infecting their Brew with the rat plague granny will give you another rune of course sick people come to them for their off-brand brew and despite being a street version notes found throughout the game imply that it's nearly as effective at holding back the plague as the name brand so infecting the still hurts not just the bottle gang's bottom line but also the people in the most need but hey you'll get another Rune if you're willing to forsake them regardless of our choice once granny is safe she'll go to feed her birdies and tell you to close the door behind her and don't peek of course if you do peek you'll see that her birdies are not Birds but playgrats they seem to like her do with that what you will eventually we come to Martin locked in a sort of stockade and being tormented by a man a man with his back to us it would be so easy and doesn't he deserve it for the way he treats Martin deal with him however you like it's not like he can stop you with Martin free you're off to complete the main objective of the mission High overseer Campbell must be removed from power and his journal must be claimed to find the location of Emily just beyond Martin as you make your way deeper into the level you can overhear a conversation too overseas or having discussing the Heretics brand if you're crafty you'll recognize what the game is doing here you see the main interaction you have with the chaos system is how many bodies your actions leave behind too many bodies too high chaos incoming bad ending if you're curious the basic function is that around 80 percent of people you encounter need to be left alive for a level to be considered low chaos according to the game the best way to interact with the world is also the way that leaves as many people whole as possible so every main target has a non-lethal way to dispatch them of course that does leave that twenty percent for some wiggle room so maybe you bleed Campbell dry maybe when Campbell takes kernel to the nice table to slip him some poisoned wine someone has switched the glasses maybe you catch Campbell unaware and Scar him in a way he can never hide on your way out to Samuel The Boatman you'll have to Journey Through the overseer Barracks where you might stumble across two different encounters firstly you'll meet Bertha and Elsa an overseer and his sister who are being accosted by two other overseers the two claim that Elsa is a witch and threaten both of the siblings if you don't interfere eventually they'll kill both berthid and Elsa if you save the two of them however your Chaos level will decrease in the background of course if you Snoop around enough you'll eventually find a letter from a friend of berthid that essentially confirms that Elsa is in fact a witch do with that what you will second however you can find a group of three overseers and you can see for yourself the influence of your actions one of them is sick with a plague and while this is no direct fault of yours depending on high or low chaos his two companions will treat him differently in low chaos the sick man will beg his companions to end his life swiftly before he might infect them too his friends plead with him stating that surely he'll be okay if he only Waits another week but that's what they said last week the sick man retorts finally his friends concede the sick man closes his eyes and it's over a quick peaceful melancholic passing of course on high chaos you can watch a man beg for his life as he's slaughtered by people he once thought cared for him it's for the greater good they say surely he understands that but I can't help but think that all he really understands is that he's not ready to go sick or not but that doesn't stop the people he thought friends from butchering him and this was the moment at least for me when I understood that playing Dishonored involves making a silent hidden handshake with the game a deal that the game promises to Value the lives of people exactly as much as I do no more no less the game is not some passive Watcher like The Outsider it will mold the world around us and it will use our image of the world to do so of course no one will stop you from doing whatever you want no one could stop you from doing whatever you want after all that's what the game wants to find out who are you when no one can stop you understanding this is critical to playing Dishonored but it also encourages the player to think further than the game is programmed to what's actually best what are the right decisions to be made here for this world going all the way back to the beginning of this level there's this woman she's not a bad guy she's not infected she's not going to hurt you in any way or interfere with your work you could kill her I suppose no one could stop you but she also has a purse on her and if you sneak around behind you can steal it five coins for you towards whatever upgrade is worth stealing from survivors of the plague she'll probably miss it when she goes to buy the bottle street gangs bootleg Elixir but hey at least you got something out of it what's more the game does present branding Campbell as the ethical morally upstanding thing to do of course if you brand him you'll meet him again wandering the streets alone and terminally infested with the rat plague there's a special actions note at the end of the level the flooded district for killing Campbell here titled is you putting him out of his misery personally if he was always going to die I don't see any ethics or morals in dragging it out this long in fact pretty much any time you have the option of taking a merciful approach to dispatching your main targets that merciful option ends up sounding so much worse than death for example the next level sees you recovering the young lady Emily from the golden cat a place that we'll call a bath house to be polite and dispatching the two Pendleton twins older brothers to our own loyalist Pendleton and notable for controlling the tie-breaking Pendleton vote in Parliament with them gone our own Pendleton takes full control of his family's voting power and the spymaster now Lord Regent loses his majority dealing with them comes in two forms as all main targets do kill them in the bath house or make a deal with slack jaw the man who leads bottle Street get slack jaw what he needs and when the pendletons make their way home bottle Street will abduct them shave their heads cut out their tongues and put them to work in their own Silver Mines and maybe they deserve a life of tortured slavery after all the guards outside the steam room will talk about how the slaves and the mines owned by the pendletons are dying by the dozens either way they won't be talking and either way no one can stop you when we later find ourselves breaking into the boil estate it seems not even a rat play can stop the wealthy from enjoying their extravagance even if the sick are literally being gunned down in the street outside the estate the trick to this level is that one of the three Boyle sisters is in bed with the Lord Regent literally and metaphorically and she's using her personal finances to bankroll the Region's military and guard with her out of the way we'll be able to strike at the region directly sneak into the state enjoy the masked ball and you blend right in wearing your own mask after all and snoop through the off-limits areas of the estate to find out which sister is which from there you have two options kill the sister or ship her off with this man a romantic obsessed pursuer who knows both who we are and what we intend to do if you need further help making a decision we can always phone A Friend by interacting with the shrine to The Outsider in the derelict apartment outside the estate The Outsider will appear stating that he sees all possible futures for the guilty Boyle she dies tonight or she's never seen again and her fineries Fade Into Rags either way it's her last party so kill her or send her off to a lifetime of solitary confinement under the control of an obsessive controlling stalker no one can stop you either way with these non-lethal options sounding more inhumane than death and with all of these people's direct influence over the murder of the empress it might feel like the game expects you to take personal Vengeance for their wrongdoing like the game doesn't actually expect you to spare any main targets and that might be because it doesn't regardless of your methods wanted posters around the world will always State a victim was murdered guards and civilians will always comment on the death of a Target or targets even if those deaths never happened maybe that's why they give us that 20 wiggle room why even the most difficult achievement in the game the one for never being detected and never killing anyone still lets you kill main targets because while I never want to minimize the difficulty of game design especially in regards to a game that I love would it really be that difficult to have two different posters two different dialogue pools that just change regarding to your actions after all they already made two different versions of the final level let's set the stage for that after dealing with ladyboyle and turning the Lord Region's military power into a skeleton crew perhaps literally depending on how you play it it's time to head back to where everything started clamp the water lift make your way into your old home and do what needs to be done like all main characters there's two ways to do it make your pick cause after that it's all over return to the Loyalists return to your daughter share around with your friends black out after one drink realize you've been poisoned Samuel will drag what's supposed to be your corpse to a boat to set adrift in the river but before that he'll have some words for you depending on how you've treated the world around you you might not like his words and that's just too damn bad because there's not a thing you can do when you're near comatose state either in your room or after he dumps you in a boat or when the people who killed the empress find you but soon you'll sleep off the poison and you'll have your chance the flooded district pairs us against the worst that this world has to offer and depending on your actions it can lean anywhere from very bad to holy [ __ ] [ __ ] these clams what the [ __ ] either way reclaim your gear stock the stalkers and make your choice with doubt he's one of the only characters in this game that could actually stand against you having the same mark from The Outsider but whether you kill him or slip by him you once again prove that no one in this world could stop you take his key enter the sewer path back to Hound pits and encounter the natural conclusion the ideas encountered by those three overseers from the first mission because in these sewers Against All Odds is a small community of people who have managed to eke out of life safe from the plague while surrounded by it on all sides maybe they're somehow immune maybe they're just lucky or maybe you're just doing a low chaos run because in high chaos there is no Community here just a bunch of walking corpses a small cluster foreshadowing what Dunwall is to become under your influence when we finally return to Hound pits we find that it's currently swarmed with guards and it turns out Samuel was right the small fish always gets the worst of it and we can find several corpses of our Associates who have locked Pendleton and Martin deemed as knowing too much but being worth too little pierrot and sokolov have barricaded themselves inside the shop and they offer you the last Choice the game really cares about they've thrown together some scraps some handfuls of wires and about 98 of a functioning Arc pylon to build a functioning Arc pylon and I'll ask you what you want to do with it you can tell them to set phasers to stun incapacitating the guards outside long enough for you to plan your next step or you can crank it high enough to Ash every single one of them neither of them will try and stop you or influence your decision offer argument either way both of them know better at this point I think with the guards dealt with we head to Emily's room in the tower use the flare system to call for Samuel and take one last boat ride and if you thought Samuel had some words for you the last time you spoke to us you'd better get ready for more he'll drop us off at the final level and if you've been a particularly Naughty Boy he'll fire a shot off as he leaves putting the whole island on alert to your location of course in this scenario the people on the island are already a bit busy with the other people on the island so it won't do much when it comes to slowing you down much less stopping you so here we are at the end of all things depending on how much you've shown the game you care about the value of people the game is ready to show you just how much it's down to match you a storm rages over the island and that storm is mirrored by the Island's denizens Havelock Martin and Pendleton have split each fearing the others each wanting full control whoever leaves this island with Emily wins everything and they know that play it quick and you'll be able to personally inform each of them that don't worry all three of them are about to lose to be totally honest for a moment this is probably my favorite level in any linear game like this it is perfect it pits us at the height of our power not just through runes and charms but through our own fluency in the game's mechanics against people that have wronged Us in the worst ways we're freezing time we're summoning swarms we're butchering those lesser than us and we're clearing entire squads of guards before they even know that we've come for them all three of our betrayers die at our hands spiteful angry and in vain we save Emily in dramatic fashion and the game ends so here we are at the end of all things depending on how much you've shown the game you care about the value of people the game is ready to show you just how much it's down to match you the wins are calm and the sea is agreeable the Sun is bright and that makes the Shadows dark it's as though nature itself sides with you here Samuel Praises us for Never Letting anger or rage or the pleasure of bloodletting Cloud our actions that we never lost sight of what really matters in all this that what matters is not this but what comes after this the World We Leave Behind the world our daughter inherits from us and the things we teach her before we leave her and so we take to the island and we use all of our tools and knowledge and the wind lifts us and the Shadows hide us the ascent is easy as though the world itself knows the importance of our journey and wants us to succeed we Dodge a handful of guards and then we're done we entered the manner Atop The Lighthouse in Havelock monologues laments Over The Poisoned corpses of Martin and Pendleton same poison used on us actually but they didn't have Samuel to watch out for them you can listen to Havelock if you care for his words and you can silence him however you like take his key take your daughter everything is going to be okay and the game ends if you'll allow me a small tangent here at the end I promise it's relevant my favorite author is a man named guy Gabrielle K his books are largely historical fiction with some low-level fantasy mixed in for fun they follow a handful of characters no one of particular Renown or interest no Mighty chosen ones or prophesized Heroes just people living with what time they have who occasionally gets swept up into things far beyond them they are in general some of the nicest stories written with what I consider to be the best prose and style I've ever encountered but what I love most about them is this one specific technique K uses on occasion K will introduce a character not a main character or a side character and even calling them a minor character is sometimes too much and after this character briefly interacts with our main character they'll go away go to do their own thing and K will in the course of a few paragraphs detail the entirety of this character's life their growths and failures and successes and death everything this character ever will be all the highlights all the most important things and how their interactions with the main character influenced that a quick Glimpse at how the actions of a single person shaped the world around them it's my favorite thing I've ever seen done in storytelling so hopefully that puts the idea in your head of how much I love the endings to Dishonored because what plays right after grabbing Emily is a small cutscene influenced by the choices you've made and the outsider either good nor bad just present narrates with the next year the next decade The Next Century looks like as Dunwall is shaped by your actions you might have saved the day sure but your daughter who now sits on the throne was watching your actions from the sidelines the whole time so what did you teach her by your actions is it okay to slaughter anyone who stands against you is it a death sentence to not know the whole truth of a tightly kept secret or do the people of the world deserve better things than they'd have without you that your presence should be a boon and uplifting to the sick and the weak and all who might need it unless you value life even less because you can let Emily fall the world never really recovers from that one but then again there's not much left to recover at that point all three of these options are open to you to freely shape the world and the future and the people that inhabit them with no checks Only You deciding what's right and what's wrong showing who you are in a world where no one can stop you if you've been around my channel for a little bit you might have noticed that there's a bit of a Chasm between my cyberpunk 2077 videos and anything else that I make I love cyberpunk 2077 and between the two of us they are my favorite videos to make but I want to use this channel to write love letters to all the content I enjoy not just cyberpunk 2077 and my patrons over at patreon are the people who really make that possible they help me feel secure in the notion that whatever I make I'll be able to make it regardless of what the content is about rather than me having to resort to cranking out content about night city as fast as possible which I do still love to do that's why I have two different cyberpunk scripts in the work right now so if you liked this video and you want to help ensure that I get to keep writing these Love Letters to the media and experiences that move me it would mean everything to me if you'd consider funding my work over on patreon it's totally optional but if you'd like to help ensure the diversity and quality of my channel and get access to behind the scenes extras early access to my content and hang out in the Discord head on over there and see if there's a tier that works for you thank you Club

Channel: Thane Bishop

Views: 372,330

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Id: FZ5s4vg-NfQ

Length: 31min 50sec (1910 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 16 2023