DISHONORED 2 gives you the illusion that you have many different paths to approach an objective from, but if you want to collect some lore and actually learn about the world of the game you're playing you'll have to snoop around and crawl through every possible path, nook and cranny to find reading material and loot.
You can breeze through, stealthily avoiding one guard, assassinating another, here, getting spotted by another, there. Fight him, go up the edges on the left, instead of down the path to the right, miss a painting and some books, letters, clues, a quarter of the loot in coins. Climb through a window, not the backdoor. See a piece of paper and some other object, bodies you could inspect, guarded by men, with no chance of getting near any of the bits of lore and loot without being detected, then you can choose to fight, knock maybe half of them out and kill the rest (although, the AI is too dumb to even hear you when you swing open the front door or when you start opening safes in the next room, so...), then opt for one path or another to get to your objective and then get shown at the end of the mission that you missed half the loot and who knows what other items, lore, characters, interaction, helping out NPCs...etc. So you have to slug around everywhere if you want to get the most out of every mission and the game, as a whole.
Start swiftly killing and act like a predator and you get a cynical/negative/chaotic/bad/dark ending. Why? Flies? Well, what if I eventually unlock and use my power to incinerate all corpses, then the flies would have nowhere to breed, so the plague wouldn't spread, right? Wrong. Why? Because reasons. Because it is the same bullshit they did with the rats in the first game. Came up with this whole explanation that leaving bodies around would cause panic and make the rats spread, just to force the player to hold back if they didn't want a bad ending. Even though Corvo could have the ability to make corpses "disappear", too. But, no. Apparently, that doesn't change anything. The ability doesn't mean you won't cause panic and plague. The developers haven't thought this childish morality system through in the first game and they haven't learned anything in the second, either. It is the same. Yet, they claim they've made it more nuanced by making the game consider your actions, who you let live (only in case of major targets, though), but if you leave a trail of bodies, even if no one can/will see them, you still make the world darker, even though Corvo himself was vindicated and people learned the truth.
Operating under the black and white presumption that violently resolving issues and (either some of or all of) the individuals only leads to darker world is thinly-veiled, badly-disguised, bleeding-heart, pacifistic drivel that put me off from properly enjoying the first game. And it's the same with the sequel.
And all of the faults (with the inconsistent AI, with the nonsensical, under-developed morality system and with the multiple paths and "freedom" to approach a situation) become glaringly apparent in the intro mission.
What incentive would I have to replay the game? Either on the same difficultly or harder.
Make the already inconsistent AI (that either sporadically develops 6th and 7th senses or loses all of them) be "more perceptive"? Sounds like it would only exaggerate the faults. In the institute the guards playing dice right next to the elevator don't even get suspicious that someone is abusing the hell out of it. Sometimes a guard looking out at a square, in broad daylight, fails to see me running along the balcony of the building 20-40m across from him, while at other times some ace decides he can spot me from across the street, roughly from the same distance, through bushes and a window, sneaking in a dimly lit corridor. And I want all of that to be essentially dialed up? Hell no.
Replay missions to try a good, fast set of paths I map out on my first play-through and miss half the stuff I can find, as a result, then have it all shoved in my face at the end by the score? Do a mission under 3-5 hours? Oh, do it the other way around? Leave all the exploring and detailed lore for a second playthrough (because I cannot get everything on the first one, anyway), but understand only half of what's going in the world in my first playthrough? What kind of an approach is that? Is that what replayability means? Have people go through the same thing, find every angle, every corner, every quarter, every paper for a story they already know, just to drag it out? It's like going to the cinema and understanding only half of the movie. Pacing is important. On the very first playthrough the most. For both the story and how fluidly one can progress through the world to advance it. Missing half the lore because one goes down a certain (easier or harder) path isn't compensated with tedious exploring that has one barely pushing events along. And it's either one or the other. One cannot have both, especially not on the first playthrough, which is the most important and leaves the deepest impression.
And with this game, like with its prequel, unless one wants a nice, clean, hopeful, bright ending and future for the world in the game and explore all the places and lore, then the developer's predictably over-hyped "freedom of choice" is an illusion.
