"As you try to get characters like Elizabeth and people in the world who are more believably motivated, you start thinking about the fact that your main character is committing, not just acts of violence, not just physical acts of jumping and running, but the ability to take punches and bullets and all that," he said. "They're obviously quite fantastical. That stuff starts to get a little strange."

It's obvious, not just in Levine's comments, but in the game's design, that the notion of a player-driven character who is on some level cast as heroic but also commits a shocking number of murders, was something that the developers wrestled with.

When DeWitt dies at the hands of a careless player, for instance, the death has weight. There are consequences, beyond having to restart a section of a game, to a player's death. The experience of dying in-game deliberately takes you out of the moment of play, perhaps giving players a second to reflect.

Levine says that's one of many occasions in which the developers noticed dissonance "creeping in" to the game and designed a solution to thwart the issue. The bigger issue of how Elizabeth, a smart, powerful female character, reacts to and deals with DeWitt's own violence, committed again and again in her defense.

The answer, while a slight spoiler, is fascinating.

"There's a scene in the game and this is a little bit of a spoiler, where Elizabeth sees you being violent for the first time and she has a very strong reaction to it," he said. "We were in this weird spot because any human being that you're going to believe is going to have a reaction. Anyone who's been locked up her whole life, who's never seen violence, is going to have an obviously very strong reaction to that kind of violence. And she does. So Booker sort of explains the rules of the world to her, that somebody wanted her locked up like that. She was kidding herself when she thought they were just going to walk out. It is a weird moment because generally you don't beg the question in a game, right? Just people start shooting people and it's fine."

The same is true for movies, though Levine points to one specific movie that also seemed to deal with the inherent disconnect between a charming leading man who is also a mass murderer.

There is a scene in the 2006 remake of Casino Royale where James Bond gets into a particularly ugly fight with an enemy agent. The two brutally beat each other, all within eyesight of love-interest Vesper Lynd. Bond ultimately kills his assailant. But instead of moving on with the overt plot, Bond then has to tend to Lynd, a woman unused to death and violence, who saw him as charming but now knows what he is capable of. The moment ends with her in a shower, trying to cleanse herself of those violent memories and Bond sitting on the shower floor by her side.