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[Egan_BW]

That's not how it fucking work though.
There are only three endings in the game, one low chaos, two high chaos. Which high chaos you get is literally determined at the very end of the game.

So either you get low chaos or high chaos. It's easy to figure out what route you're on, the game even tells you at the end of each mission.
So do you need to avoid anyone to get the "good" ending? No! I killed every target and a good number of guards, as well as every single assassin, and what ending did I get? Low chaos! You don't even have to avoid killing, you just have to avoid unnecessarily and gratuitously killing everyone in your sights, which is a damn good justification for giving you the "bad ending", IMHO.

Anyway my pet peeve is people complaining about Dishonored's endings.

[Rolan7]

Iji did that sort of thing *so well*.  It never berates the player for being violent, in fact the NPCs are basically shouting "Fire your weapon already!!  They want to kill you!" with various degrees of fear.  It's easy to only kill a handful of enemies, and your reward is basically "Wow you're stupidly idealistic.  That's kinda impressive I guess, but still crazy and naive!"

It's just cool how it supports nonviolent playthroughs (particularly after updates) without pretending they're a better idea than self-defense.
Though if you go out of your way, the dialogue does change to reflect that too...  Still arguably justified, but a bit creepy.

Basically Iji did a great job with non-preachy dialogue and even in-combat exclamations.  "sorry..."

Here is one nitpick though:

Spoiler: Iji "innocent" run spoiler (click to show/hide)

Using the mine on the teleporter should count as a kill, and she shouldn't automatically use the shotgun in the alternative.  It shouldn't be possible to save everyone while being perfectly idealistic, imho.  Or maybe that's too dark.

[Egan_BW]

"sorry..."

Which quickly gives way to "just DIE" if you play like me.

[Krevsin]

Nonviolence in stealth games, murder optional

I'm cheating a bit on this one as it's not something that really bothers me (at all), but I do find it interesting that in pretty much any stealth game where you can choose to either kill or not kill, I usually do two runs. One where I spare everyone (because I am a good boy please pet me on the head and tell me I did a good please game please) since I feel like games with the binary choice of "EVIL VS GOOD" always tend to have a more satisfying and overall better for the "Good" ending than the "Evil" one.

The other run is "Kill everyone that is killable on the map" run and by gods is it satisfying. Especially in Dishonored where the murder is just so much fun. Also stealthkilling entire hubs in Deus Ex and sequels is incredibly fun.

[Rolan7]

Especially those fricken MJ12 troops.  The tiny area on their lower back where they're vulnerable to the baton was soooo frustrating, I always kept the dragon tooth sword on my nonlethal playthroughs just to save/slaughter/reload occasionally.  Probably should have spent the inventory space on the stun prod, but I hated using a melee weapon with ammo.  Particularly since you literally have a power meter, but no, got to find special prod batteries.  Also you can miss and electrocute the air, and it still costs a charge.

Tranq rounds were precious mana from heaven, of course.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

Generic Fantasy Worlds

Sure the small details may be tweaked, but you can basically sum up everything else as being the same.  You will find yourself somewhere in the European countryside and there'll be elves dwarves, and goblins/orcs.  The names may be different, but you know it's them.  Oh, and there'll be some prophecy set to go off sometime soon.  It's fantasy, why not go insane.  Off the top of my head: a world where the only land is on the top of massive pillars reaching out of the sea and everyone flies around on the backs of Pteryodactyls and fight each other with the magic equivalent of muskets, pistols, and rockets.  Main character raids ruins to get stuff to sell off to get money for their family and later joins the military when a war breaks out after they mistakenly sell an artifact to create human-sized storm elementals to an enemy force.

[Egan_BW]

But doing what Tolkien did is so much easier!

[Krevsin]

Especially those fricken MJ12 troops.  The tiny area on their lower back where they're vulnerable to the baton was soooo frustrating, I always kept the dragon tooth sword on my nonlethal playthroughs just to save/slaughter/reload occasionally.  Probably should have spent the inventory space on the stun prod, but I hated using a melee weapon with ammo.  Particularly since you literally have a power meter, but no, got to find special prod batteries.  Also you can miss and electrocute the air, and it still costs a charge.

Tranq rounds were precious mana from heaven, of course.

I mostly found tranq rounds to be kinda useless since the afflicted individual then proceeded to run around a lot and trigger any alarms in their proximity because of course they did.

[Rolan7]

A headshot makes it take effect instantly, though that can be hard at range with those darts.  Adding more darts also helps a bit I think, but that ammo is pretty rare...

[Shadowlord]

In the original Deus Ex, at least, alarms turn off after a while and everyone gives up looking for you and goes back to what they were doing. It was also possible (in places) to hit them far enough from an alarm that they'd collapse before reaching and activating it.

I didn't find knocking out the armored MJ12 troopers with the baton difficult, especially on an almost-non-lethal playthrough*, but that's because I dumped a ton of points into melee and such.

* It was non-lethal except that I allowed killing with the crossbow, killed Anna on the airplane by booby-trapping the cabin door with a LAM, said "laputan machine" to Gunther, and killed Walton Simons with a dragon's tooth sword** to the face (he has one of his own, and is fairly resilient, so there was a fair bit of dodging involved).

** which I was hauling around for busting doors down and stuff

I actually had a problem with Dishonored because I didn't want to kill any of the soldiers but found it practically impossible to sneak up and knock them out, and completely impossible when there was more than one in an area. So I said "fuck this" and quit forever instead.

[Krevsin]

In dishonored I mostly didn't bother knocking out the guards and mostly just moved/blinked around their patrol patterns, which led to a hillarious scene in a place where I just rapidly blinked through half the map to get away from the guards that were alerted.

I found that Dishonored was best structured for a constantly moving approach to non-lethal playthroughs since the guards often cover each other and their patrol routes can be a bit hard to predict. So it's best to play it by moving from cover to cover and not bothering to knock out the guards except some isolated cases where you find a single one patrolling around. There's lots of tiny spaces to crawl into and hide.

[Parsely]

Yeah, choking people takes too long. Use your possession powers and upgrade blinking a lot.

[Egan_BW]

Unless you get lucky and find the bone charm to choke people super fast.

[Silverthrone]

Roight, sci-fi armour smiths, when and why did the foldable suit-helmet thing become all the rage? It always looks quite silly when those things click and clack themselves together, and it can't be particularly sturdy. Wouldn't an ordinary helmet do? Maybe with a hitch on the back, so you can hook it to your belt. That said, I notice that the foldo-helmets seems to be going out of fashion again. Along with the glowing chest gem accessory. Maybe Tony Stark gave up on the fashion business. Carry on.

Oh, Spess Mehreens, while I've got you... Wear your sodding helmets, squad commanders! You're officers, they'll be gunning for your jacket potato noggins first thing they can. Hey, hey you! Yeah, particularly you, with the helpful flag on your backpack!
And speaking of, what's that parchment nappy good for, and why are you wearing it on the outside of your trousers?

[Shadowlord]

The Jaffa helmet in Stargate SG-1, in the first episode in 1997, perhaps?

I don't recall if the movie had retracting helmets as well. (Apparently it did)

And then there was this episode later where it did fancy stuff: https://youtu.be/EoXsXeGgHm0?t=53s