| Title | Qt3 Games Podcast: Teamfight Tactics, Dishonored 2, Field of Glory: Empires |
| Author | Tom Chick |
| Posted in | Games podcasts |
| When | July 18, 2019 |
Jason McMaster can't escape Autochess, Nick Diamon hates himself, and Tom Chick reads a whole book.
Teamfight Tactics at 4:15, Dishonored 2: Doing It Wrong at 16:30, and Field of Glory: Empires at 33:30…
I’ll give this a listen to on the way home tonight, can’t wait to hear what went on with Dishonored 2.
Dishonored is one of the best videogame series that is not strategy or RPG. So I can understand Nick wanting to experience it again.
It does a weird thing with morality though. Playing the first game in a complete stealth/pacifist way is exhausting. And in this game you get the usual immersive sim arsenal plus magic, so you lose all the fun of throwing enemies into the pit with whirlwind spell, or sending an army of rats at them, or making them shoot their buddies. Morality system burdens you. It’s gentle: you have to kill no more than ~20% of people on the level, and in practice it means that if you even attempt stealth and only kill those who attack you, and you don’t try to clean up the level - you’ll be fine. However it’s still there forcing you to be good. Nick is also not right about its effects, it certainly changes how characters talk at the very least. Plus both games have a great variety of other choices and consequences. You can skip a whole huge level in Dishonored 2 if you solve a riddle.
It’s sad that the chaos system only counts murder as morality meter. I guess there’s in-world magical explanation, you affect the world with your attitude. Many of the things you can do without murdering people are very interesting, often evil. Relatively benign things are curing a mad maniac, gathering evidence to put a person on trial instead of killing them (this one is great cause it means you never even get close to your target). Some made me sit and think if it was kinder to kill my targets - like hire goons to cut their tongues and sell them into mines they owned, or electrify a proud genius guy till he’s an imbecile. Some are borderline ethical question - would you kill a vile woman or help a creepy stalker dude to take her away to his faraway island with a guarantee she’ll live a long life with no chance of coming back?
One bad thing I’d say is that the game rarely acknowledges those things, for most non-lethal solution you don’t even get any special dialogue from your friends, they always refer to your victory as “you got rid of that dude” or something. Dishonored 2 is a little better in that regard. It also had a more nuanced but weird morality system. You have an ability to learn people secrets and can see how evil they are. So killing bad people is still bad, but not that bad. Sorta.
Angry pee had me laughing at my desk. Hard to pretend you’re working when you can’t stop laughing.
Yes, but the riddle has nothing to do with being violent or not. I guess you’d kill less people if you can skip that section, but it doesn’t change my performance in the end.
As for dialogue changing, I know the folks on the boat will be gruffer or more open depending on how you behave, and the guests of course will be different (Hypatia for example) but I never felt like there was much actual difference in the trajectory of the game.
I was talking more about general choice and consequences than Chaos specifically. Chaos mostly affects the number of bloodfly-infested areas, it’s not that noticeable, yes.
Doing high chaos in Dishonored 2 does lead to more bloodfly infestations. Otherwise it’s mostly flavor. Allies will like you less, your flavor commentary tends to get pretty dark.
Also, there is a Clean hands achievement for not killing anyone. There’s also one for never being spotted in the entire game, and one for completing the game after rejecting the outsider’s powers. If Nick really hated himself, he’d go for all three at the same time.
No magic sounds interesting on itself but I imagine I would have to do it on high chaos to remain sane.
Hey @Jason_McMaster, don’t let @tomchick give you are hard time about playing dense, complex games with lots of strategy! Just because he can only understand turgid JRPGs with more dialogue than gameplay doesn’t mean he can make you feel bad about playing Thinking Man’s Games.
One question: in Team Firefight Tactics, can you combine two large items into a gold star item?
Ah, no, you can’t yet. I wonder if they’ve thought about that. In League of Legends you can combine certain larger items to make bigger ones, but they are mostly linking items (think mid-game items that can be combined so stay useful)
I wouldn’t be surprised if they do that, eventually, but I wonder what effect it would have on the game length/RNG portions. Might be too complex? Doesn’t seem like a consideration so far!
