5. Freedom of Choice
As already mentioned, and considering this is a Bethesda-published title, freedom of choice is a given component of the game. To emphasis this freedom, the game dismisses a simple good and evil dynamic for your character, and instead your actions are based on the collateral damage they cause. Youre not lambasted for being evil and wont start glowing because youre good, but will see the consequences of your actions in the environment around you: chaos theory and so on. Basically you wont be punished for choosing one play-style over another, and the environments allegedly offer more than just a simple stealth or violent action route. If you liked the Dark Brotherhood storylines in Oblivion and Skyrim, then Dishonored is that concept bundled into its own videogame. You will also be able to go Rambo on the populace to get to your target and still complete mission objectives: the popular zeitgeist amongst videogame publishers is all about choice, and Dishonored naturally follows that design philosophy. You also possess supernatural abilities wherein your hand flutters and glows on the screen for a moment to show youre doing something awesome with your digits: like freezing time, possessing people, summoning those latterly mentioned disease-ridden rats and other warlock-craft (but Atanos not a warlock fyi). Youre given your magical powers by some mysterious fellow who rescues you from prison, and proffers you the opportunity for revenge. Youre ability to possess living creatures extends to pretty much anything in the game, such as controlling a rat and sneaking into areas you would otherwise be unable to reach. Then you could tactically spy on a potential assassination target, and then even proceed to possess them. Im very curious to see what would happen if you possessed a target and then proceeded to make them attack their own guards. Would those guards then kill the person that they were originally supposed to protect? And Im guessing you could repossess the rat and then hightail it out of there. I may be speculating, but its that kind of potentially reactive and dynamic gameplay system that makes Dishonored such an exciting prospect. It also means the game may be buggy in certain instances, but thats the price you pay for sheer ambition and the room for such extensive player interactivity. And as a brief addendum, I'd like to add that even Rafael Colontonio implied that any bugs to occur during Dishonored's play-time may actually benefit and open the scope of what is possible. I don't mean floating non-player characters or game-breaking glitches, but non-scripted events that could only be possible through such breath-taking freedom of choice.