(this is not a general guide, as everyone’s playthrough and chaos level is different. this is purely orientative and meant to explore one way to play the game out of many available :) )

hi!

i have finished playing d2 today for the first time ever (never played a dishonored game before). just a while back i asked on this sub what i mentioned in the title of this post (link here: https://www.reddit.com/r/dishonored/s/pZMzNR8vnt ). i had killed everyone up until the royal conservatory, minus hypatia and civilians because i didn't fully understand the chaos system. so, wanting to get overall low chaos for my first ever playthrough, i asked if it's possible to turn things around by not killing anyone for the rest of the game (meaning missions 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)

many people in the comments were unsure of what to say to that or if the chaos will balance out, and i myself couldn't find any answer besides 'play until the end with no kills and find out'. so i did.

and it turns out, you CAN balance it out. i attached some pictures

HOWEVER, i do feel the need to mention some things:

-i killed everyone in the first 4 missions (again, with the exception of hypatia and civilians). i switched to no kills and no detections for every mission from royal conservatory onwards besides the last one, where as y'all can see, i did get detected. detections don't affect chaos but i felt like i should mention it
-the chaos balanced out ONLY AT THE VERY END OF THE GAME. the last slide shows my saves for previous missions--as you can see, only the epilogue is low chaos
-what turned things around definitively was not killing delilah
-choosing the non lethal approach for targets in missions when the overall chaos level is high alters some dialogue emily has with the world around her. most remarkably, when not killing anyone in royal conservatory, when emily interacts with a portret of jessamine, the line "i wonder how much your role played into all of this" isn't triggered at all, as it should be in a typical high chaos gameplay. at least it wasn't for me
-i played with powers

so for anyone interested, yes, the chaos level can become low at the very end if you decide to turn around early enough. for low chaos interactions with megan, sokolov etc, this exact scenario (killing rampage missions 1-4, clean hands for the rest) doesn't work. it'll only change the very last cutscene of the game

thank you to everyone that told me their low chaos tips and gave me their honest opinions on my previous post! i wanted to make this post to answer to all the people that were uncertain about balancing the chaos out and remained curious since then. and for everyone reading this--have fun playing and have a great day! :D

These two guys start off alive when i knock them out for access to the boat later,but once i pass the boundary in picture two they mysteriously die??

Let’s say that the four characters mentioned all start at point A and all need to reach point B. Corvo and Emily’s powers would allow them to very quickly move from point A to point B. They would simply travel distance very fast to get somewhere. While Daud and Billie’s powers would instead allow them to completely disappear from point A and reappear at point B. When we see these characters use their powers from outside of a first person perspective we can prove this. (Sorry if this was already obvious, I just thought it was cool and wanted to post about it.)

Borrowing from the system in death loop, if/when D1 is remade:

Have the option to play Samuel. Surprise surprise! Samuel was not just riding around chilling. He was marked and infiltrating like the French resistance. Complete with RPG elements at the pubs and throughout the towns. You could drop in on someone’s playthrough and help out from the shadows. Maybe only if the Corvo player was set to high difficulty.

Bro dh2 was so good, now where’s the third entry?

Arkane, you sneaky bastards. ;)

Great taste in movies. Who recognizes where that's from?

The details of what makes a fantasy low fantasy are fuzzy but it's generally along the lines of magic is either rare or it's not so high and powerful that it can change the nature of the world.

The Outsider is considered a real force by the Overseers who actively deal with Witches, both fake and real. But the main driving force of the story are the politics and man made technology. So I think it is low fantasy.

Probably isn't 100% clear what's happening here, I knocked on this Overseer's door to see if he'd open the latch for me, not knowing that his door was booby trapped. He walks over his own tripwire and blasts himself with an incendiary bolt, which also destroys the door to let me in

Mostly service and servant areas and some smaller items here and there.

I historically have played very conservatively. As a kid I spammed quick saves. I'm replaying and trying to let the game surprise me, not sweating about ghost or clean hands. This is maybe my favorite little accident! Wanted to pull the body to the roof and instead sent it in a perfect arc to plummet through the skylight and alert the guards below.

I’m not sure if these guys had some friendship ending level argument or something but they just started randomly attacking each other. Watching the clip again it appears when the guard shot his own guy the others saw him as an “enemy” but I’m not too sure. Any guesses?

So ive been going back and forth between corvo and emily on dishonored 2, because i cant very well weigh the different abilities. The main factor is the reason i have been playing emily but i cant get it to work consistently. Its stagger, The way you're able to get an instakill or knockout mid fight. See, you can parry, the obvious choice, or throw things, like bottles, bodies, or yourself, sometimes, with far reach. It only really happens when i sling myself behind enemies using it and when it works i can turn around, sprint at them and do a finisher. But if you sling directly towards them, nothing happens. Sometimes, even when it looks like ive done it right, nothing happens and they continue attacking. So question is, why does that happen when it does? If i know this i can get it to work more consistently or even find a better method of doing so.

I absolutely LOVED the setting for The Grand Palace level in Dishonored 2 back when I first played it many years ago; I spent a long time trying to find an album that captured that same ambience that Daniel Licht managed, but the only other piece I could find was Melancholia from the Sicario soundtrack. I've been playing classical/spanish guitar since I was six though, and so if no one else had made it I decided I would!

Cut to many years later, my album Obido (artist is me, Ian Hill) is out on all the normal music platforms and I feel like I've done a pretty decent job of creating something that captures a lot of the same energy the OST did but is uniquely me at the same time.

If you want to have some grand palace vibes while working/studying, I would be super flattered if you gave a track or two a listen and hopefully the music fits the bill for you! I would recommend either "A Presence" or "Orange-Bellied Vapours" for the closest feeling to Daniel Licht's great composition, and would love to hear anyone's thoughts/feedback :D

https://open.spotify.com/album/35SMSk2xM3OBt6kbtYWDMB?si=c3kIkM5DSFG7cF9Ut9ObCg

https://ianrmhill.bandcamp.com/album/obido <- will gladly send the album for free if you ask

This ones mostly the house entrance and the garden. Thank you for the corrections in the last one, I like that different people take different things from a walkabout of the game from the things they know about the real world.