i really hope Arkane can get back on their feet after what must be an incredibly scary time, especially after Arkane Austin got dissolved. if you want a good Arkane-ish game that takes the player's actions into account without openly condemning you or the game world for them, the best example out there is Prey (2017) or the original Deus Ex (but do not play deus ex revision i am begging you it is awful). i do however want to articulate a criticism i've always had of dishonored:
dishonored still, in 2026, constitutes a breath of fresh air for the imsim/thief-y/looking glass-inspired genre of games. the world-as-designed is just overwhelmingly impressive, to the point where even things like electric viktor antonov trains dumping corpses into a hole feel so natural to this setting that it doesn't feel out-of-place.
as much fun as dishonored is to play (especially the Daud DLC's), there's one problem that still really hampers the experience in my opinion, which is the overbearing and quite nonsensical chaos system. like an honor/karma system from other games like mass effect or fallout (systems i also do not like), it tracks "good" and "bad" things you do, adding to a tally every time you kill an NPC, or occasional other things the game deems bad. gaining a high chaos rating has two effects:
1. the first effect changes your allies' perception of you - the allies that really matter, anyway. high chaos will make emily afraid of corvo, or billie start murdering more people based on what she sees daud do (but she also thinks he's weak? idk it was weird). this is the part that makes sense to me, because people are believably, you know, sensitive to whether their friend is a hyper-murderer or not. whether corvo kills daud at the end of his second set of missions makes a little less sense, because daud's behavior in the DLCs take place after corvo has been in prison, and corvo would have absolutely no way to sense whether daud has been working to try and overcome his guilt, as proven by what corvo knows of Daud in the base game, which is not very much. whether corvo kills daud is not due to something he learned about him, but because he was chasing the good ending.
2. the second effect, bizarrely, changes the entire state of the world. if you kill more than (i think) three-to-six people, a high chaos world will be full of more plague rats and weepers, more soldiers, and a far more miserable ending. this feels very strange and "game-y," the developers wanting the world to react to your actions but not really having a justification for why it would do this on so wide a scale. why would one quiet guy killing a few nasty boys cause the plague itself to be more effective? the plague has a specific cause, and person who caused it, and it's not the outsider. the outsider also is absolutely not the kind of being to punish corvo/daud by making plague rats more effective, he is quite explicitly only a watcher who only thumbs the scales in very rare circumstances he finds overtly interesting.
the chaos system is doubly bizarre because the non-lethal options for your assassination targets (the ones that make your allies think you're a cool merciful guy) are largely remarkably cruel, and one could see them as far worse a punishment than a quick death. cut out the twins' tongues and send them to work in a mine with no hope of escape, turn an unconscious woman over to a very off-putting incel creep guy who wants to be with her and hide her away "forever," or electrocute a man's brain until he's a drooling half-vegetable. these are horrible, horrible things to do to people, and strike me as something Emily would find even more cruel and scary than just killing overtly corrupt officials.
for my part, the loss of identity/self that often comes from diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's is probably the scariest thing i can think of, and it does not sit well to put multiple people through that loss and be told how cool and merciful i am. i hate irl billionaires, the capitalist class, "nobles," right wing influencers, etc. but i feel like the things you do to these people in dishonored often feel less like "ironic punishment" and more like the thing an absolutely sick person would do. two exceptions: exposing the lord highfart guy for his rat crimes, and using the heretic's brand, are pretty good.
the other problem with the chaos system is that, if you would like a story that doesn't end up somehow even more miserable and defeatist than it started (which is considerably miserable and defeatist all the way through), the vast majority of dishonored's gameplay options are simply unavailable to you. this is partly because the fully non-lethal option was not implemented until very late in the first game's development, but corvo and daud have maybe one or two options to knock enemies out without killing them. i get that non-lethal should be extra work, slower, and more risky - that part makes sense - but it's hard to have a fun time coming up with interesting uses for your powers (the stated gameplay focus of Dishonored) when all but two of them are super murder powers that will make all your friends hate you and then also die in a pile of filth.
i just don't think the non/lethal options in dishonored were very well considered, and every time i think of replaying this game i have to get past that again. if the world is to be worse or better by my choices, i don't think "worse" should be the entire world somehow falling apart irrespective of me for no stated or implied reason, and i don't think "better" should be truly psychopathic life-long torture.
frankly, both dishonored games would be improved if the chaos system wasn't so, for lack of a better word, "judgy." the fact that the game is so explicit about what it thinks is "good" and "bad" really sucks when even the "good" options are things only a monster would do. also: affect plot details based on your actions as much as you want, you can do that without condemning the entire world to die because of one person's actions for no real reason.
this is one of the two reasons why the two dishonored 1 dlc's and death of the outsider are my favorite parts of dishonored - they're more personal stories that don't somehow translate the killing of 6 murderers into a completely dead city, or condemning them to a cruel life-time punishment that, in multiple cases, literally erases or irreparably damages the brain/identity of the person.
the other reason i like them better, for the record, is that both the daud dlc's and death of the outsider are far more invested in the wider story of the game's world, specifically learning more about the strange things living/happening on the fringes of reality rather than, in both corvo/emily games, kind of a thing that just happens and is never really explored and neither character really seems to care about it all that much. the origins and fate of the outsider, the lives he's affected, are far more interesting to me than torturing a bunch of nobles. death of the outsider gets points for having no chaos system: the plot is affected by what you do, but in far less stupid a way.
if you got this far: there are mods for both dishonored games that force the game to stay at low chaos (the good ending) no matter what weapons/powers you use, so you can largely tell your own story and make your own choices rather than perform a specific dance that Arkane sets out for you. dishonored 1's version is a bit janky, it just makes weapons count as non-lethal, so you still do need to do the non-lethal options for the assassination targets.
good example of a karma system: red dead redemption 2. it's often just an "are you racist" meter, and even when you kill eugenicists and slave catchers and klan members it just sits back and lets you decide how you feel about that, rather than saying "oh no you killed, didnt you know murder is bad? welp time for the next shooting segment where you shoot 100s of men"
