Scoring system? And Dialogue?

[Valentine]

How does the scoring system work exactly? Whats the benifits of being non-leathal over leathal? Does Dialogue count for anything or is it all just flair? Every time i need to select something I'm wondering if i'm somehow effecting the plot.

[TH3G4M3GRL]

Dialogue only has three times it truly matters involving the story. Otherwise it's all just the same stuff. Being nonlethal gives you a better score. As I remember though, from the scoring system... Your speed, if anyone sees you, if you injure anyone.

[James]

It depends on the level, if you press escape it shows you your side mission, for instance, Gessler usually wants you to kill all witnesses.This affects your score, as does collecting laptops. I always check before starting the level.

[Erratic_Engineer]

At the end of the level you get rated in four different categories, but they (usually) do not affect your grade. Your grade is usually determined by what your client wants. Sometimes they want you to avoid violence, sometimes they want you to leave no living witnesses of you.

Other than that, the only benefit of non-lethally taking out a guard vs. punching a guard to death is that it takes more time to click the mouse more times to kill the guard. That's it. There's no morality system or anything like that.

[Aegix Drakan]

The only morality system is your own conscience.

That poor guy you just tackled out a window and punched to death? He had a family, a bowling team, a pet plant that's going to dry up and die!

That enforcer you just electrified to death? He was just about to retire and live his dream job as a volunteer at a soup kitchen!

That guy in a black suit? ...Alright, that guy was a jerk. He deserved it.

[Mandrake]

The scoring system ranks you on four things: Violence (how many people you punched/killed), Witnesses (how many people saw you and lived), Noise (how many alarms you triggered and windows you smashed), and Speed (how quickly you finished the level). The rankings you get at the end only matter if you were given a secondary objective (such as no violence or no witnesses). A good self-challenge is to see if you can speed through every level without any violence, noise and/or witnesses.

If you take a non-lethal approach throughout the entire game and reach the final level without killing a single person, the dialogue of the final scene and epilogue will change slightly. It's also more of a challenge to finish each level, but very rewarding if you do so.

While there are a few points in the dialogue that affect the plot, they all lead to the same climax so it doesn't really matter which path you follow. In fact, you'll need to go back and go through some of the dialogue trees more than once to get all the achievements.