Do not look here said:
Not really sure what to make out of it, personally I think it obviously won't be graphic enough to satiate those wanting tortures and whatnot, while also being underused - if used at all - feature in usual gameplay, rather a gimmick for a one-off Vlad the Impaler kind of affair. We'll see.
Personally, I don't see why the 'animation' couldn't be replaced by an actual scene that you take part in.
It's not as though you don't kill plenty of people in battle anyway, often more gruesomely, I expect. Just have the condemned man or woman in a scene with some soldiers, and allow the player to walk up to them and hit them with a weapon. And they fall over and die. I don't see the difference between doing that in a set-piece execution scene and doing it in a battle, in terms of Public Moral Outrage.If anything, it'd make the decision feel more powerful, rather than being trivialized into a series of menu-clicks.
You could have the option of giving the task to one of your minions, so you wouldn't have to do it yourself or watch every time if you didn't feel like it.