#indirectly inspired by all the videoessays that talked about low and high chaos 'outcomes' of missions in a 'but this is not Good :(('

[no-light-left-on]

Let's talk about the Chaos System in Dishonored

“Your actions affect the city. A high number of deaths results in more rats, more weepers, different reactions from your allies and darker final outcome.”

The most important thing to note is that we need to distinguish between chaos and morality. A lot of people interpret Low Chaos as Good and High Chaos as Bad which is… not inherently correct. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that while non-lethal takedowns of key targets result in lower chaos, they are not the only thing that contributes to the chaos rating of a mission. I highly recommend reading these two posts [1] [2] by the lovely @kirtlandswarbler who looked into the science behind the chaos system.

It is perhaps easiest to imagine as the DnD alignment of Lawful to Chaotic. Low Chaos aligns with Lawful, the player character going after their targets and not dragging bystanders into their mess. All the takedowns are tactical, some might even say deserved – the Lord Regent hanged for his crimes, Campbell branded as a heretic that he was, Hypatia cured of her madness caused by the serum, Delilah locked in a painted world she desired so. The achievement for completing the game with non-lethal ways is even called Poetic Justice in DH and In Good Conscience in DH2. If the game is completed in a self-serving, bloodthirsty, anger satiating way, the chaos ends up being high – or plain chaotic on the alignment chart. But that is what the chaos means for the playstyle.

Chaos within the world is, in short, the way the world reacts to the player’s actions. The good and the bad, but every move the player makes in the world is a choice, and the world responds accordingly.

Let us set the scene, first, in general terms. In both games, the Empire is at a point of heightened anxiety. In DH it’s the plague, in DH2 the Crown Killer. Both games deal with brutality citizens face from the City Watch/Grand Guard, religious anxieties and terror from the Overseers, gang activity and a tyrannical regime from the Regent or the Duke respectively.

This is the world we walk into as Corvo, Daud or Emily. Everyone is uneasy and somewhat distrustful, and the player character then descends into the streets with a blade in hand, carving their way through a crumbling city to reach their goal. Loved ones go missing. Fathers don’t come back from work, cousins stop responding to letters. Even the elite in their palaces aren’t spared, slaughtered in cold blood with their loyal guard lying close by, staining the expensive hardwood floors. This is the world the player creates in high chaos – a world where no one is safe, and the few survivors live in terror, afraid that every breath they take might be the last. They see no reason to trust their neighbours, become more selfish, angrier- even your allies become more cynical, watching you slaughter your way back to the top, and why are they helping you again? To replace one tyrant with another?

In low chaos, however, the people remain safe. The civilians are allowed to continue going through their day to day life, however harsh it might be. The guards and overseers are spared, for the most part, and the nobles and rich that might go missing? That is their problem. They never cared for the smaller people. Both games open with a large shift in the political landscape – the assassination of an empress, a coup that seats a witch on the throne. And yet people still die of the plague or to the bloodflies. If a couple more members of the parliament die, that is, at the end of it all, just politics. It is among those who meddle with political issues, and not the business of the rest of the world.

The chaos is calculated by the absolute body count, along with a few special actions that the player can take. Most of them make sense. The chaos is higher if Daud blows up a slaughterhouse, killing many in the process, harming an industry, terrifying people who only hear of the event. Saving a young woman and her brother as they are harassed by the overseers over witch crimes they never committed lowers your chaos, because Corvo helped people in need. It’s a balance of the good and the bad you do, in total, rather than the simple distinction between killing and not killing the key targets. The overall chaos remains low even when all the key targets are taken down lethally. However, even if they are all spared, if the player killed every guard in sight just to reach these targets, the chaos will be high.

Something that I see (wrongly) be brought up is that killing key targets grants you a High Chaos ending, while the non-lethal takedowns result in Low Chaos ending. As mentioned above, that’s not true – they do count towards your total body count, but their deaths do not have a greater weight towards High Chaos. The non-lethal neutralization thus helps maintain lower chaos, but it does not necessarily mean that these choices are the right ones to make. The best example of this is probably Lady Boyle, which is oftentimes brought up as “oh but the morality of this game!!” critique. Death vs. poetic justice has little to do with morality in these games. After all, the protagonist (not counting DLCs) is out for revenge, to an extent, on people who have wronged them and caused them to fall on hard times. Just because a character lives does not mean there are not fates worse than death – like handing a woman to her stalker under the threat of death.

Morality and lethality in Dishonored are two things that don’t necessarily overlap. Lobotomizing Jindosh is, most definitely, a horrible thing and Jindosh ends up begging the MC to rather take his life than let him live without his intellect. There is no doubt that he is a horrible person, and many people tell you so during the game, but is this really the right way to go about things? Is an existence without the one thing you truly value about yourself worth it? On a similar yet completely opposite side of things, when you overhear one of the guards talk about how they have fun killing people who break curfew, is it truly a bad thing to kill them? One or two more deaths won’t affect your chaos all that much. It gets even more worth considering with the special actions that decrease your chaos which involve saving people from getting murdered by overseers or the guard. These actions are often difficult or impossible to perform without killing the attackers (like the guard harassing the girl that worked for Bunting).

These actions then reflect on your surroundings – the more corpses litter the streets, the more weepers and rats there will be, the nastier the bloodfly infestation. With a killer on the loose, there have to be more guards around. Mind you, the special actions that cause your chaos to grow are not enough to tip you over into high chaos alone. And as you, and Corvo/Daud/Emily by extension, grow more cruel, your allies grow more cynical. The Loyalists see Corvo butcher the city, and, well, it’s working. So why shouldn’t they get more cruel to achieve their goals, too? Emily is the most impacted, in Low Chaos growing to be Emily the Wise, the beloved empress of the Isles, asking Corvo innocent questions, while in the high chaos she talks about executions, asks how many people he's killed. Some grow to despise you, like Samuel, seeing the growing corruption and wishing for the quest to be done because they now see that the person they were helping was as much of a monster as the ones they are opposing. If you are cruel, the world will be cruel back, and the world involves those you might hold closest, like your daughter or your second in command.

The world, then, behaves in the way you mold it. Chaos reflects it, the destruction or kindness that you leave in your wake. Of course the murder of a noblewoman on a party she hosted, guarded by tallboys, will cause people to worry. Of course panic will spread when civilians are murdered in the streets. The general population of Dunwall will worry when the medicine that was meant to cure the plague suddenly turns everyone into weepers. But just the same, if people are shown kindness by a stranger without having to ask, they will be soothed. A cruel political leader being executed for the crimes he committed will make people excited, hopeful even. When Emily switches the Duke for his body double, the common people won’t notice. There is no need for fear, with the non-lethal takedowns. Not for those who are not directly involved.

Chaos, at the end of it all, dictates how the world evolves from the brink of collapse. The Outsider says it best, in one of his many speeches. “I have to wonder whether you're going to give if that final nudge, or pull it back from the edge.“ You have the power to tip the scales with your actions. Your choices matter, the big and the small, each life you save and each life you take, because at the end of the game, you are the one that has shaped the world that you will rule.

#dishonored #dh #li.txt #essays tag #YOU HEARD THAT RIGHT THERES MORE COMING YOUR WAY #yes there is an essay about the lack of chaos in doto coming #indirectly inspired by all the videoessays that talked about low and high chaos 'outcomes' of missions in a 'but this is not Good :((' #basically what Im trying to say: yeah chaos is about how fucked up you are. but from the perception of OTHERS #Im really tempted to write a full length analysis of all the games on their own and how chaos impacts the world #especially after dakota's hard work #which again massive thank you for answering all of my questions and actually tearing the game to shreds for this info