What the hell? What weak binary thinking is this? Of course it isn't. To use one of my favorite examples, look at a game like Desperados. It gives you very convenient tools for killing people (e.g. Cooper's knife), but also tons of different tools to knock enemies out that
play differently in interesting ways. There was even a level that required total non-lethality in order to train you in those tools. But usually you had your choice, and usually it was significantly less convenient to be nonlethal. At the very least, when you knocked a guy out you had to have a certain character come tie them up (or they'd wake up later and bite you in the ass), making every operation take at least one extra action. But if you wanted to go to the extra effort, you could play nonlethally most of the time. Anybody remember that one level where you're trapped in the middle of a town with a thousand soldiers searching for you? Finished it without killing a single person. (Hey, they were just doing their jobs.) It was a pain in the ass, but super rewarding.
Unless you're claiming something stupid like "the path of least resistance = mandatory". That not being true is my whole point. If you slaughtered everyone in Dishonored just because it was easier, you're proving it. To be an actual good person, it has to cost you something. Loading blue bullets instead of red bullets, or punching instead of stabbing (DX:HR) only means you didn't make a deliberate choice to be evil. That's not the same as being good. It just makes you "whatever".
I haven't been watching dev too closely, but if
Jaedar is right, then sadly the devs are going the
other way -
materially rewarding you for being good instead of making it harder on you. Getting double xp for being nonlethal is a huge incentive. The only reason to be lethal at that point is that you are willing to
pay to be an asshole. This is head-shakingly backwards design in terms of moral choices.