Īnd the same goes for our general sense of progress. This is the perfect excuse for us to miss and fumble even though we are supposed to play this rugged killer hunk of a man. Here, Colt has another characteristic: he’s drunk. El classico technique to get a character closer to us, ignorant fool that we are at the beginning of the game, is to make our protagonist amnesiac: we don’t know anything about the game, and so do they. The trick, you see, is not only to get us closer to Colt, our player character, but to make Colt narratively closer to us. Or make the matter a time-sensitive affair. īut it would be incredibly easy to take Deathloop’s framework and use its currency, Residuum, as the limiting factor to “lock-in” assassinations allowing you to chain them together. Like a mean internet troll, you’re having your grenade-lobbing fun at the expense of everyone else’s eternity of drunken drug-infused bacchanale. Īnd, while you are indeed the party pooper who intends to end it all, the very pleasurable process of ruining the party for everyone is itself your party. To some extent, one could argue, this is the least violent shooter in video game History because nobody dies in the course of an entire playthrough. This is the antidote to self awareness and a palate cleanser of Akrane’s history : “go be a dick dear child o’ mine, there be no consequence on these black reefs”. In fact, it is made abundantly clear in the way secondary characters behave, that this repeating time loop is a perfect excuse for everyone on the island of Blackreef to engage in self or mutually destructive behaviors. Since they will always wake up the next day and be resurrected, and since (mild spoiler alert) the game ends when you indeed break the loop, there is no part of the play experience in which you will be able to perform any consequential violence.
In Deathloop, the infinite smartness of the time loop narrative is that the repeated murdering of bystanders is of no consequence. The self-awareness lingers, even when you’re not being watched anymore. Yes, there might be consequences, but it’s up to you to ponder what they might be. This, I feel (but have no insight into the matter) led to the decision in Death of the Outsider to forgo the judgemental system entirely and, to some extent, let the remnants of the lived experiences of the previous two games cue you in as to what’s expected of you. It also encourages you to replay the game to try a more murderous route, although we’ve known for years now that a vast majority of players take a moral to mildly-moral route in their first playthrough of most games with narrative agency. īeing watched (and judged) on your actions, leads you to examine them or be, at least, somewhat cognisant of their repercussions. If one kills an NPC during a non-lethal playthrough in a Dishonored game, they would, more often than not, restart their current level, much like an achievement seeker or speedrunner would. And the consequence of being aware of these narrative consequences, is that it tends to make players take their role playing very seriously, and consider their actions more carefully. While your playstyle being “observed” by the system, only to deliver a sucker punch at the end of Dishonored 1, was supposed to be an unexpected twist, its all-seeing eye is now expected. The system sees you, counts your kills, the number of times you were detected, and renders a verdict at the end of the game. Those were later mapped, in the second installment of the Dishonored series, on a two dimensional possibility space : visible or unseen and killer or sparer. People who play and avoid disturbing the world, and people who play to break it. With Dishonored (probably stemming from their experience making Arx Fatalis) Arkane recognized two broad categories : destructive and non destructive. There are many unique playstyle archetypes in “immersive sims” (why I hate this term is a topic for another article).
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