I don't understand. Are you complaining that the game doesn't allow you to slaughter people indiscriminately and still consider yourself a good person for doing it? Because that's not the game's problem, that's yours. If you want the best ending, you have to forgo some of the cooler things. Besides, to get a high chaos situation you really have to go to quite a bit of effort—you need 50% of the population in the level dead. You can still sate your desire for stylistic murder, as long as you limit yourself.
Agreed, the morality system was crap. But so was the ending, just a bunch of epilogue clip art Power Point presentation. Killing a bunch of people doesn't even change much of the story at all. You let the moral system color this review too much. Play again whilst ignoring the moral system and use the heart to scan everybody. It tells you who's been naughty and which random guard murdered a child last night. Playing as a Vigilante Man can make you feel like a good person despite high chaos (there are a lot of people who deserve to die in Kirkwall)
Even with the limited tools and fun asides, playing the pacifist run can be deeply unsatisfying because many of your non-lethal take downs doom your victims to horrific fates. In one case, you basically submit a woman to spend the rest of her life in the sex dungeon of a crazy stalker; and she didn't exactly warrant being harmed in the first place - her big crime was being the arch duke's girlfriend, and for "providing funding for his armies" - neither of these things actually making a damned difference to the conspirators mission. If I want to play a pacifist run through, its because I want to do the least evil, least harmful actions possible. It doesn't mean I want to maximise the agony of others for no god damn reason.
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In terms of the karma system - I like the idea of the game responding to your playstyle, I just don't think it should rubbish you for playing a certain way. For instance, having more guards in response to a more violent player makes sense. Having more zombies because you pollute the water makes more sense. Bitching at you because you had the audacity of using the cool powers the game offers you? Not so much.
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So close, and yet so far.
I was looking forward to Dishonored since I first saw it announced in Game Informer. I was HYPED by the steampunk setting, by concept of a supernatural assassin, by the sheer number of combinations one can make of Corvo's powers to tear your foes to shreds.
The last point being why I have such a love-hate relationship with Dishonored.
The graphics were great, the controls crisp and fluid. The game played wonderfully. But the morality system KILLED my enjoyment and fed it to the plague rats. Out of all your weapons, gadgets, and powers, only three, THREE of them saw regular use in a pacifist run: Blink, Dark Vision and Tranq Darts. Use of the other, more lethal tools at your disposal, like the trip mines, plague rats or even Corvo's SWORD, raises the Chaos meter. Too-high Chaos gives you the grim, downer, 'screw-you-for-being-a-murderous-bastard' Bad End that honestly makes less sense the more you think about it.
There's a couple of problems with this. MAJOR problems.
A pacifist route's not a bad idea on the surface: it's been done in Metal Gear, it certainly raises the challenge of the game, and some of the non-lethal fates of your targets are truly cringeworthy and worth checking out. But for god's sake, DON'T MAKE IT MANDATORY, especially not after billing your main character as an ASSASSIN. Don't release trailer after trailer of all the lethal combinations the players can use to dispatch their foes, getting them all excited for the prospect of the Time-Bend/Possession combo that has an enemy shoot himself, and then scold them for doing it. Bethesda created a world of choice, of thinking on your feet and creating combinations of weapons and powers, and then hamstrung players by penalizing them for taking advantage of these things.
Dishonored never should have had a Karma system, or if it absolutely had to, it should have been tied to side quests or the like, not how many faceless guards you kill. Or at the very least, give us non-lethal equivalents to lethal gadgets and powers: gas mines to use in place of the shrapnel mines for instance. Should Bethesda ever release Dishonored 2, I can only hope they can let us fully enjoy the world of choice they clearly meant Dunwall to be before fumbling at the very end.