TychoCelchuuu

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Posts posted by TychoCelchuuu

  1. Posted

    4 hours ago, aoanla said:

    Secondly: the arguments we've (the people who think that the authorial intent is to suggest that "non-lethal is better") been making all hang together.

    Your arguments basically require a lot of "ah, but this is specials" - we should ignore the changed reactions of NPCs because they're morally compromised (except for Samuel and Emily - the closest things the game has to "neutral observers", or "everyman figures", which are often used to suggest the moral baseline of the world in fiction - but you just discount them because you don't like that their reactions also suggest "non-lethal is bad") - we should assume that "the order of the world decaying" with more violence is a morally neutral signal - we can "accept" that the ending indicate a moral stance on "non-lethality", but assume that this has nothing to do with the authorial intent in the rest of the work at all, it's just a non-sequitur. 

    Your argument requires just as many "ah, but this is specials" as mine does. How do you explain the fact that the non-lethal solutions are almost universally so terrible as to make death almost preferable? How do you explain the fact that you have a magic talking psychic heart that seems to exist to generate an infinite number of reasons to murder nameless NPCs? How do you explain the fact that even if you go entirely non-lethal, the Outsider treats you as an agent of chaos? How do you explain the fact that most of your powers and gear are oriented around killing lots of people? And, by the way,

     

    I think it's perfectly sensible to discount the reactions of the NPCs (aside from Emily and Samuel) because as I've pointed out, they're lying to you, and they end up betraying you and each other no matter whether you're lethal or non-lethal, so its not like the game is trying to make you feel bad when those guys start wigging out at your killing acumen. That's just a hint that they're worried they're next. If you don't go around killing everyone, they're a bit more relaxed, but ultimately they still betray you and kill each other. We're clearly not supposed to take their reactions as indicating anything like a sound moral compass. It's entirely just a matter of whether they're worried that you're going to slice them up.

     

    I'm not saying the game is totally fine with murder, but your point about the game being caught between showing murder is wrong and wanting to let you be maximally violent is a bit off-course. The game's stance on murder isn't so much that it's wrong and you should feel bad for doing it and why are you even playing Dishonored (it's not Spec Ops: The Line) but that it has a bunch of pretty gruesome effects, like more bodies for the rats to eat. I think that's a pretty reasonable stance to take on murder. Frankly the game has more or less the same take on non-murderous revenge, given the generally dour tone of everything, the severity of most of the non-lethal solutions, etc. As you point out, it's sort of a gothic revenge fantasy game.

  2. Posted

    I'll grant that the game endings (unlike most of the rest of the game) support the "non-lethal is better" thing but I honestly don't see why that's a huge deal for someone playing through the game, unless everyone except me watched the ends of games on YouTube before playing. You have no way of knowing what the ending of the game looks like, so how can you say the game's trying to keep you from using all your lethal weapons, or your Lethal Weapons 2 staring Mel Gibson?

  4. Posted

    13 minutes ago, Gormongous said:

     

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    if all the chaos and death that you cause in the game drive the villains mad, isn't that the very definition of a negative signal?

     

    They get driven mad either way! In the nonviolent path, at the end of the game they've all killed each other. In the violent path, they're trying to kill each other.

     

    13 minutes ago, Gormongous said:

     

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    Not to mention, Samuel is also disgusted by your violent actions and, although not to the extremes of the rest of the conspirators, also takes direct action to interfere with you.

     

    Again, Samuel's the only exception. He doesn't fit in to your earlier point about how it's stupid that all these admirals are getting angry at you. Samuel is not an admiral, he's never killed anyone, and he's never been a huge fan of any of this since day one. If you want to have a big conversation about Samuel, that's fine, but my point was just that if your argument hinges on getting angry that these admirals dislike all your killing, Samuel doesn't fit in, because he has a good reason to be angry about killing.

     

    13 minutes ago, Gormongous said:

     

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    Also, the developers didn't just find this story in a book somewhere. They wrote it themselves, and they chose to write it in such a way that many of the game's most plentiful, interesting, and fun mechanics are inextricably tied to a narrative that incriminates you for using them. 

     

    What do you mean by "incriminate?" I mean obviously if you kill a lot of people the game says that you killed a lot of people. It doesn't lie to you or anything like that. So yes, the game incriminates you in the sense that it doesn't say "Corvo was mostly a pacifist" when in fact Corvo killed lots of people. If by "incriminate" you mean the game judges you and says you're a bad person and you really ought not to have killed all those people, I'm not really seeing that. Samuel says it, sure, but the game isn't Samuel. I think the game is obviously fine with you killing lots of people - as everyone in this thread has pointed out, it certainly goes through great lengths to equip you with all sorts of killing tools, dumps you into levels full of people to kill, and gives you a psychic heart that tells you terrible truths about every single NPC that basically justify killing them right then and there. Everyone seems to describe High Chaos Dishonored like the game is sitting you down in the Clockwork Orange chair and lecturing you about the consequences of violence and so on but from my playthrough I recall none of that. I recall a bunch of nonlethal options that almost seemed crueler than the lethal options in a lot of cases, for instance. Is that a game trying to tell you that killing is bad?

  5. Posted

    1 hour ago, aoanla said:

    If you don't see why "the world becoming more dark and violent" is a negative signal for behaviour, then...

    That's like saying Call of Duty doesn't want you to kill people because when you shoot them, blood flies out, they cry out in pain, and then they die, and all of those are negative signals for behavior. I mean yes if you do dark and violent stuff then you get dark and violent results in Dishonored, but that doesn't mean the game is saying "don't do it."

     

    As for the people berating you that @Gormongous is mentioning, this gets into spoiler territory:

     

     

    Those people are berating you because they're slowly going insane from all the lying and conspiring and murdering they're doing. They're getting increasingly nervous about your destructive capabilities because they know they're going to betray and kill you, and they're worried about whether that is going to be successful. They are also starting to feel increasingly unsure about this series of events that they've touched off. As the body count piles up, they're starting to worry that the wheels are coming off the wagon and that they don't have control any more. Things are growing more chaotic (this is why the game says it's tracking "chaos," rather than something like morality, which is what everyone accuses the game of tracking). The developers are obviously not speaking "through" the generals/admirals because those guys turn out to be the bad guys all along and in the end you either kill them or they've killed each other. Those guys are the villains, not the developer mouthpieces! The only guy who's not obviously a villain who berates you is Samuel, and he's clearly just fed up with all this bullshit, which I think is pretty understandable.

     

    I haven't really thought a lot about this because I never really saw the point behind the criticisms people made, but the more I think about it the more I think this game is really unjustly denigrated for the chaos stuff. 

  7. Posted

    The narrative barely even says killing people messily is wrong. The world gets darker and more violent if you kill people messily, but that's kind of a silly thing to get bent out of shape about. Killing people messily is already dark and violent, I don't see what the big deal is with having the world also get dark and violent. I played through Dishonored twice, once without killing anyone and once killing basically everyone, and I don't recall the game telling me I was doing it right one time and doing it wrong the other time. I agree that the tools they give you are mostly geared towards a lethal playstyle (although I had no problem playing nonlethally) so that's a criticism I understand, but I've never really seen what people are drawing on when they say the game wants you to play nonlethally. The nonlethal stuff honestly feels more like an afterthought.

  9. Posted

    Did we actually see those nipples in the movie, rather than in that behind the scenes shot? That statue on the right of the lady on the guy's shoulders, for instance, basically wasn't in the movie, as far as I can recall. The statue that I can remember we see the chest of is the one at the city outskirts, which is a lady standing upright, and I think she may be lacking nipples. This is, of course, all very crucial information.

  10. Posted

    What do you mean "all the instances of human nipples?" I can only think of three, two of which (shower + getting out of bed) lasted for about a second at most. I was forgetting the statue nipples, though. I can't remember if the statues even have nipples. They definitely have breasts, but nipples?

  11. Posted

    On 10/21/2017 at 9:18 AM, Kyir said:

    Did anyone notice an abundance of nipples in the movie? I pointed it out to someone I went with and they hadn't noticed many at all, so I'm a bit confused about that.

    Just saw this for the third time. Still a very good movie. One of my favorites this year. I did not go in watching for nipples specifically, but thinking back, I'm not really seeing an abundance of nipples. What exactly do you mean? I remember nipples in two scenes, I think, plus very briefly when K showers and when Mariette gets out of bed.

  14. Posted

    The whole "what game would you show to someone to introduce them to games" is kind of a pointless question because I'd show different games to different people. It's like asking what book you'd recommend to someone. It depends on the person! I think Crystal Warrior Ke$ha, for instance, is a great first game for people who would like the tone and the subject, but definitely not for other people who wouldn't be feeling it at all. Proteus is great for people who can get the hang of M+KB first person controls and who have fun wandering around, but for someone who is not able to pick that up quickly or who wants something focused to do, it's a crummy choice. Tetris is a big crowd pleaser but not for people who don't like time pressure. 

  17. Posted

     

    America, 1961. Your assassination of Nazi General Deathshead was a short-lived victory. Despite the setback, the Nazis maintain their stranglehold on the world. You are BJ Blazkowicz, aka “Blowjob,” member of the Resistance, scourge of the Nazi empire, and humanity’s last hope for liberty. Only you have the guts, guns, and gumption to return stateside, kill every Nazi in sight, and spark the second American Revolution.

     

    I've been playing through this and enjoying it a ton. I am a huge fan of the first game and this is basically more of the same. The tone is a little broader - there's a bit more humor, and the pacing is very slightly slowed down from the insane kineticism of the first game, which gives things more time to spread out, metaphorically speaking. The shooting is still excellent and it's almost scary how cathartic it is to be killing Nazis in America in today's political climate. My favorite character is still Set, who throws even more Yiddish into his lines this time and who gets to shoulder a lot of the humor.

     

    For a while I was sort of making the game less fun for myself because I was playing in ways to specifically unlock those perks, but now I've basically unlocked them all so I just play how I want, which is what I should've done all along. I usually go around stealthily until getting revealed at which point it's dual wielded weapons and lots of booms until nobody is moving anymore.

     

    If your game is crashing, turn off Async Computing. Mine was crash-central until I did that and now it's rock solid.