Dishonored, the new IP from Arkane Studios

Depends entirely on your own skill - are you pretty good at FPS games with a controller? Are you good at stealth games?

I’m ok at fps games. I’m not great at stealth games and don’t really enjoy them. I enjoy dark souls games. I usually play single player fps games at one notch harder than normal. I like a challenge, but not frustration. I’m guessing that somewhere in this thread is a discussion on the proper difficulty to play this game, but it will take too long to read through the entire thread to find it. :)

I played on Hard, with a mostly stealthy approach but became a killing machine when things went south. I’m decent at games like this, but definitely not exceptional.

These were really great games. Are they making anything new?

They are

Can’t wait to find time to watch this.

Just started watching this. It’s so funny at the start that he says “let’s set the game in London, no one ever sets games in London”. Ha! Not true anymore, but it certainly was kind of true back then. Dishonored came out in 2012, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate in 2015 and then Watch Dogs London in 2020.

Well, there was this huge classic!

Also, Getaway

That was a great documentary. I stopped at the part where they started describing the two best levels of Dishonored 2. I don’t want to spoil that for myself. The rest of the doc was mostly spoiler free, kind of. It definitely renewed my interest in continuing my game of Dishonored, which I bought at launch but never got very far in.

I think the most illuminating segment was Harvey saying that as players we are lazy and want to just do the same thing over and over, maybe blink behind someone and cut their throat; and as designers it’s their job to try to break the player out of that laziness so that you try all these other tools they have, and don’t keep doing the same thing over and over.

I think that’s exactly what I had been trying to do in my initial playthrough, and was getting frustrated that it wasn’t working. So perhaps that was on purpose, and instead of getting pushed out of my comfort zone and trying different things, I just dropped the game and started playing something else for 9 years. But now I should go back with that knowledge and get comfortable with trying different approaches.

You can mostly blink behind fools and ghost 'em, but there are a couple spots where you need to break out of your comfort zone. Dishonored 1 and 2 are some of the best games of the past decade, IMO.

There was a weekly quest on Xbox to alert 3 enemies in this game. So I fired it up briefly on the cloud to do the quest.

I was immediately struck by how the game doesn’t look dated at all. I think the game came out 10 years ago, and yet, because of the stylized look, it hasn’t aged a day. I thought it looked a little strange back then, but I really appreciate the artistic choices now.

Dishonored 2 was fine but I never understood why the witch / antagonist from the Dishonored 1 DLCs was the antagonist…again. (and immediately wins at the start of the game!)

And I didn’t like how they changed the Outsiders voice actor. The original guy had way better delivery.

I loved the first game but it took me a few tries to really get into part 2. And once I was in, I just thought it was OK. I tried to proceed into the third game after finishing part 2 but I shelved it. Maybe some other time. I was Dishonored’d out, I guess. Also, I kept wondering why Billie Lurk had an eye and arm in the game when she clearly didn’t in part 2. Turns out, there’s a canon choice to make that I didn’t make. That took me out of the moment, for sure.

Watched the documentary.

A Half-life 2 art designer being involved makes sense. The barriers / walls and mechanical things in dark blue steel are evocative of Combine tech. Plus the game takes place in an European-esque city.

Holy shit, killing the “street speaker” who gives city wide announcements on the intercom in Dishonored 1 is replaced by none other than the late Carrie Fisher. WOW.

Yeah, the guy that did Clockwork mansion worked on five levels in Dishonored 1, but only that single level in Dishonored 2.

That level must have been a hell of a lot of work! One of the most impressive examples of level design, well, ever.

I enjoyed guardians of the galaxy and thought deathloop was okay, but I’m bummed we aren’t getting Deus Ex 5 and Dishonored 3. They deserved better.

I don’t doubt it was a lot of work for just one level. The first room alone when it completely transforms is kind of insane. And this is in an immersive sim. The only thing that comes to mind is Control’s Ashtray maze but that is a fully linear experience.

I kinda wished they could have pulled off the void house idea and didn’t cut the other content with the intro.

What was the idea? Because the game has a level where you jump between two timelines at will in real time, which is also pretty insane on its own.

The idea was you can place a doorway to a private pocket dimension on any (valid) game geography. It didn’t have anything to do with the two timelines level.