Vampyr - Kill Anyone or No-one

Choices and consequences are built into Vampyr according to PcGamesN meaning you can kill anyone you wish or no-one but it will have meaningful consequences.

"This is the golden rule - you can take the lives of everybody in the game," explains narrative director Stéphane Beauverger. "There is no exception, even if it's your own family. You have a mesmerise ability that allows you to lead someone into the shadows to do so. [To do that] the mesmerise level of your character has to be equal or more the mind resistance level of your target. So you can't kill everyone at the beginning of the game."

But as you progress and level up, your lethality increases along with your other stats. "At the end of the game, you have the possibility to kill everyone" explains Beauverger, also saying that your character is not a very nice guy. "You are a predator that has to take lives. You are not the real hero, the real heroes are the vampire hunters that try to take you down. You have to deal with the fact they consider you a beast, a monster, you have to face that, you have to prove to them by your actions that you can be trusted, that you are not someone who is completely heartless."

Art director Grégory Szucs adds that "You are very much in charge, you are not watching a TV show and being disgusted at the heroes actions - if you do something disgusting it's because you chose to do it." That's where the options come in. If you want, you can complete the whole game without killing anyone - but it won't be easy.

"You have the right to feed on the rats if you want," says Beauverger. "You will get no experience points, you will just get blood, so you will stay very weak, but you can try to do that."

Which do you think you'll go for?

Zam has a more comprehensive preview here.

I'm not going to lie: this looks like a game where the protagonist will spend a lot of time agonizing over his vampire guilt and misery. And frankly, since it's a game about vampires, that's what I hoped for: some super dark and overwrought emotions. The demo opened with our hero gazing down at the funeral of a young girl-- a relative of his whom he'd actually killed. Afterwards, a woman vampire in a snazzy Victorian suit asked him how he felt; when he refused to be honest with her, she told him he'd need to open up emotionally or he'd turn into a ravenous fiend. Nice!!

The game features a dialogue wheel pretty similar to the ones in Bioware games-- but this one doesn't seem to have any kind of icon-system telling you what category your choices belong in. To this I also say: nice!! I am a huge fan of unlabelled choices in RPGs-- and for a game where you spend all your time deciding who to unwillingly murder for their XP, morally-ambiguous choice systems seem like a good idea.

But although the choices are all pretty much ambiguous-- and although the game seems pretty much all about making you do objectionable things you don't want to do-- there are "bad outcomes" for the various districts of London which you prowl. Killing too many citizens in a given district, or allowing its infection by the flu to rise, will decrease its overall health score; let it get too low and the district will turn into a charred and disease-ridden feral wasteland full of prowling vampire mutants. I assume this will make more trouble for you, since your character is gonna have to fight them.