Arkane Dishonored 2 - Emily and Corvo's Serkonan Vacation

[Mynon]

I do not see or give ratings.

I rate this post "Citation needed"...

 

[AwesomeButton]

By impatient, I guess you mean "someone who doesn't really want to play a stealth game".

I rate this post "Citation needed"...

I rate you an overall retard.

 

[DeepOcean]

IMO Disnonored's stealth is a step up on Thief, and is more demanding. Dishonored removed the importance of Thief's safe spaces, ie darkness, which means that you must always pay attention to enemies in your range whereas in Thief you are basically invisible to them from certain point. Dishonored's stealth is faster, tenser and more dynamic.

This is funny, you are talking of a game where you can grab a guard from the other side of the room and knock him silently, how many times you want and with a single click, with your powers and claiming it is a better stealth game than a game where you actually are required to do stealth.

 

[Vibalist]

It's funny. I think this game and its predecessor are the first games I've played that do peripheral and environmental storytelling really, really well, but regular storytelling really, really poorly. All the lore that's revealed to you through books and small details is exquisitely done. The world is fleshed out, is visually consistent and atmospheric and has tons of hidden stuff that isn't shoved in your face, but left for you to find. However, the voice acting is dull, the characters even more so, the ending slides are short and insufficient and the plot never rises above b-movie revenge tale stuff. There's all this potential hidden within characters like Delilah, The Outsider and Jindosh (and Granny Rags in the first game), but it only ever flourishes in the background information you can gather on them and in their visual design. They're only cool conceptually, but never when you actually interact with them.

A Crack In The Slab is an excellent example of what I'm talking about. Aramis Stilton is another non-entity in terms of character development, someone who shows up for one level and then promptly disappears (he didn't even have an ending slide on my playthrough), but the way in which you can manipulate time to restore his sanity is so well done. It shows us everything we need to know about him as a character, namely that he single handedly kept the dust district from going to hell and that, if you prevent him from going insane, things never really turn bad. Everything about the present changes if you keep him away from the seance. The Dust District (which looks completely different and is now referred to as the Batista District, because the storms aren't there), his own home (which goes from dilapidated ruin to restored mansion with guests, workers and servants walking around) and even Meagan Foster, who no longer is missing her arm and her eye (because she presumably lost them looking for Stilton). It's show, don't tell done perfectly. The game just lets you observe the consequences of what you've done without ever telling you explicitly, which never fucking happens in any AAA game today.

Now if only they'd hire someone who can write engaging dialogue and a better plot and maybe, I don't know, a voice director who can actually inspire his actors instead of telling them to deliver every line in the same flat monotone, and we might have something special here. At least in terms of story. The gameplay is another thing entirely.

 

[HoboForEternity]

Dishonored provides stealth gameplay for the impatient (aka the modern gamer).

Thief provides stealth gameplay for the connoisseur (aka an extinct species).

styx: master of shadows and shard of darkness are the closest thing we will ever get to thief of the olden days

(there's of course countless mod and dark mod etc, but stilll)

 

[Darth Slaughter]

Dishonored provides stealth gameplay for the impatient (aka the modern gamer).

Thief provides stealth gameplay for the connoisseur (aka an extinct species).

styx: master of shadows and shard of darkness are the closest thing we will ever get to thief of the olden days

(there's of course countless mod and dark mod etc, but stilll)

To be honest, playing dishonored 2 powerless is quite a thief-y experience. but to be honest, it's more like playing thief fan missions.

 

[HoboForEternity]

It's funny. I think this game and its predecessor are the first games I've played that do peripheral and environmental storytelling really, really well, but regular storytelling really, really poorly. All the lore that's revealed to you through books and small details is exquisitely done. The world is fleshed out, is visually consistent and atmospheric and has tons of hidden stuff that isn't shoved in your face, but left for you to find. However, the voice acting is dull, the characters even more so, the ending slides are short and insufficient and the plot never rises above b-movie revenge tale stuff. There's all this potential hidden within characters like Delilah, The Outsider and Jindosh (and Granny Rags in the first game), but it only ever flourishes in the background information you can gather on them and in their visual design. They're only cool conceptually, but never when you actually interact with them.

A Crack In The Slab is an excellent example of what I'm talking about. Aramis Stilton is another non-entity in terms of character development, someone who shows up for one level and then promptly disappears (he didn't even have an ending slide on my playthrough), but the way in which you can manipulate time to restore his sanity is so well done. It shows us everything we need to know about him as a character, namely that he single handedly kept the dust district from going to hell and that, if you prevent him from going insane, things never really turn bad. Everything about the present changes if you keep him away from the seance. The Dust District (which looks completely different and is now referred to as the Batista District, because the storms aren't there), his own home (which goes from dilapidated ruin to restored mansion with guests, workers and servants walking around) and even Meagan Foster, who no longer is missing her arm and her eye (because she presumably lost them looking for Stilton). It's show, don't tell done perfectly. The game just lets you observe the consequences of what you've done without ever telling you explicitly, which never fucking happens in any AAA game today.

Now if only they'd hire someone who can write engaging dialogue and a better plot and maybe, I don't know, a voice director who can actually inspire his actors instead of telling them to deliver every line in the same flat monotone, and we might have something special here. At least in terms of story. The gameplay is another thing entirely.

i didnt know you can even save stilton thanks!

 

[Vibalist]

Hah, no problem. This game has hundreds of hidden details like that. It's quite astonishing, really.

 

[Morgoth]

In every playthrough, I didn't even consider anything but giving Stilton the sleepy-sleepy sting.

 

[Vibalist]

I didn't do it on my first. I saw no reason to even interfere with him, as you don't really know it's the seance that drives him insane until after you witness it.

I also assumed the player could talk to him after seeing it and reason him out of his mental state somehow.

 

[LESS T_T]

In this GDC 2017 talk, Arkane Studios' Steve Lee advocates for a holistic approach to level design where level designers not only think about many aspects of the player's experience (primarily gameplay, presentation and story), but focus specifically on how all of these things work together.

 

[fantadomat]

IMO Disnonored's stealth is a step up on Thief, and is more demanding. Dishonored removed the importance of Thief's safe spaces, ie darkness, which means that you must always pay attention to enemies in your range whereas in Thief you are basically invisible to them from certain point. Dishonored's stealth is faster, tenser and more dynamic.

- Nonsense. Crouching in Dishonored is effectively stealth mode. You make zero db of noise, as far as the enemies are concerned, whereas in Thief the second thing they teach you in the tutorial is that different surfaces make different amount of noise when walked upon, and moving quickly makes more noise than moving slowly. It's not that Arkane couldn't implement such systems. They could. But they don't want to make stealth a challenging mode of playing. They are satisfied with dumb pseudo-stealth, because that's good enough for the people who play their game.

- "Safe spaces" in Thief I as you describe them serve a gameplay purpose and gradually disappear as you progress to more complex missions. The same safe spaces exist in the beginning of Dishonored, and its level of difficulty is pretty much constant throughout the whole game, though that's a bit subjective. (Thief II is pretty easy for much farther down the missions' list. Thief I throws you in the deep as soon as mission 3)

- Dishonored is so well-lit that most of the time you don't have the option to use shadows for hiding, but you are just behind cover, which I consider to be a drawback. Thief's hiding in shadows gave me the feeling I'm using a "special ability" in a way which 1) felt natural to the environment, 2) had a story explanation - Garrett's training, and 3) was still not 100% guaranteed safe - you might make noise by accident, or someone might bump into you . In Dishonored, I click a button and I do awesome magic, and that's all. Again - deliberately stripped down complexity.

- Thief's genius design is in the way it makes you listen to the sounds you make, and to the sounds other actors make, and from this information draw your decision on what your next move is. Again, it's down to the player using his senses, not to pressing a button that lets you see through walls, or show you the AI's state in a tooltip above their head. And all this is mixed with the incredible ambient background sounds which make your hairs stand. So much atmosphere in a game which was ugly-looking even when at release. What do you get in Dishonored - all the orientation by sound is optional because when push comes to shove, you can just doge and slice your way through people because your movement speed is insane, even without use of the bullet time ability.

- The main problem however, and I've said this before - in Dishonored the player uses stealth from a position of near-invincibility, whenever he wants to play with the guards like a cat with a mouse. In Thief, the use of stealth is a requirement, and you are an inch away from shitting your pants even though you made a savegame at the last doorway.

I rate this post "Creative"...

I rate this post as endless pile of shit!

 

[AwesomeButton]

IMO Disnonored's stealth is a step up on Thief, and is more demanding. Dishonored removed the importance of Thief's safe spaces, ie darkness, which means that you must always pay attention to enemies in your range whereas in Thief you are basically invisible to them from certain point. Dishonored's stealth is faster, tenser and more dynamic.

- Nonsense. Crouching in Dishonored is effectively stealth mode. You make zero db of noise, as far as the enemies are concerned, whereas in Thief the second thing they teach you in the tutorial is that different surfaces make different amount of noise when walked upon, and moving quickly makes more noise than moving slowly. It's not that Arkane couldn't implement such systems. They could. But they don't want to make stealth a challenging mode of playing. They are satisfied with dumb pseudo-stealth, because that's good enough for the people who play their game.

- "Safe spaces" in Thief I as you describe them serve a gameplay purpose and gradually disappear as you progress to more complex missions. The same safe spaces exist in the beginning of Dishonored, and its level of difficulty is pretty much constant throughout the whole game, though that's a bit subjective. (Thief II is pretty easy for much farther down the missions' list. Thief I throws you in the deep as soon as mission 3)

- Dishonored is so well-lit that most of the time you don't have the option to use shadows for hiding, but you are just behind cover, which I consider to be a drawback. Thief's hiding in shadows gave me the feeling I'm using a "special ability" in a way which 1) felt natural to the environment, 2) had a story explanation - Garrett's training, and 3) was still not 100% guaranteed safe - you might make noise by accident, or someone might bump into you . In Dishonored, I click a button and I do awesome magic, and that's all. Again - deliberately stripped down complexity.

- Thief's genius design is in the way it makes you listen to the sounds you make, and to the sounds other actors make, and from this information draw your decision on what your next move is. Again, it's down to the player using his senses, not to pressing a button that lets you see through walls, or show you the AI's state in a tooltip above their head. And all this is mixed with the incredible ambient background sounds which make your hairs stand. So much atmosphere in a game which was ugly-looking even when at release. What do you get in Dishonored - all the orientation by sound is optional because when push comes to shove, you can just doge and slice your way through people because your movement speed is insane, even without use of the bullet time ability.

- The main problem however, and I've said this before - in Dishonored the player uses stealth from a position of near-invincibility, whenever he wants to play with the guards like a cat with a mouse. In Thief, the use of stealth is a requirement, and you are an inch away from shitting your pants even though you made a savegame at the last doorway.

I rate this post "Creative"...

I rate this post as endless pile of shit!

You are an endless pile of shit.

 

[fantadomat]

IMO Disnonored's stealth is a step up on Thief, and is more demanding. Dishonored removed the importance of Thief's safe spaces, ie darkness, which means that you must always pay attention to enemies in your range whereas in Thief you are basically invisible to them from certain point. Dishonored's stealth is faster, tenser and more dynamic.

- Nonsense. Crouching in Dishonored is effectively stealth mode. You make zero db of noise, as far as the enemies are concerned, whereas in Thief the second thing they teach you in the tutorial is that different surfaces make different amount of noise when walked upon, and moving quickly makes more noise than moving slowly. It's not that Arkane couldn't implement such systems. They could. But they don't want to make stealth a challenging mode of playing. They are satisfied with dumb pseudo-stealth, because that's good enough for the people who play their game.

- "Safe spaces" in Thief I as you describe them serve a gameplay purpose and gradually disappear as you progress to more complex missions. The same safe spaces exist in the beginning of Dishonored, and its level of difficulty is pretty much constant throughout the whole game, though that's a bit subjective. (Thief II is pretty easy for much farther down the missions' list. Thief I throws you in the deep as soon as mission 3)

- Dishonored is so well-lit that most of the time you don't have the option to use shadows for hiding, but you are just behind cover, which I consider to be a drawback. Thief's hiding in shadows gave me the feeling I'm using a "special ability" in a way which 1) felt natural to the environment, 2) had a story explanation - Garrett's training, and 3) was still not 100% guaranteed safe - you might make noise by accident, or someone might bump into you . In Dishonored, I click a button and I do awesome magic, and that's all. Again - deliberately stripped down complexity.

- Thief's genius design is in the way it makes you listen to the sounds you make, and to the sounds other actors make, and from this information draw your decision on what your next move is. Again, it's down to the player using his senses, not to pressing a button that lets you see through walls, or show you the AI's state in a tooltip above their head. And all this is mixed with the incredible ambient background sounds which make your hairs stand. So much atmosphere in a game which was ugly-looking even when at release. What do you get in Dishonored - all the orientation by sound is optional because when push comes to shove, you can just doge and slice your way through people because your movement speed is insane, even without use of the bullet time ability.

- The main problem however, and I've said this before - in Dishonored the player uses stealth from a position of near-invincibility, whenever he wants to play with the guards like a cat with a mouse. In Thief, the use of stealth is a requirement, and you are an inch away from shitting your pants even though you made a savegame at the last doorway.

I rate this post "Creative"...

I rate this post as endless pile of shit!

You are an endless pile of shit.

I am not rating you mate,i am rating Mynon's post as pile of shyte

 

[AwesomeButton]

Oh. Well...

 

[HoboForEternity]

Well, these long quote posts are a fuckin blight from phone. It feels like endless scrolling ino the abyss. Someone shoukd fix it

 

[fantadomat]

Well, these long quote posts are a fuckin blight from phone. It feels like endless scrolling ino the abyss. Someone shoukd fix it

Hi!

 

[Mynon]

IMO Disnonored's stealth is a step up on Thief, and is more demanding. Dishonored removed the importance of Thief's safe spaces, ie darkness, which means that you must always pay attention to enemies in your range whereas in Thief you are basically invisible to them from certain point. Dishonored's stealth is faster, tenser and more dynamic.

- Nonsense. Crouching in Dishonored is effectively stealth mode. You make zero db of noise, as far as the enemies are concerned, whereas in Thief the second thing they teach you in the tutorial is that different surfaces make different amount of noise when walked upon, and moving quickly makes more noise than moving slowly. It's not that Arkane couldn't implement such systems. They could. But they don't want to make stealth a challenging mode of playing. They are satisfied with dumb pseudo-stealth, because that's good enough for the people who play their game.

- "Safe spaces" in Thief I as you describe them serve a gameplay purpose and gradually disappear as you progress to more complex missions. The same safe spaces exist in the beginning of Dishonored, and its level of difficulty is pretty much constant throughout the whole game, though that's a bit subjective. (Thief II is pretty easy for much farther down the missions' list. Thief I throws you in the deep as soon as mission 3)

- Dishonored is so well-lit that most of the time you don't have the option to use shadows for hiding, but you are just behind cover, which I consider to be a drawback. Thief's hiding in shadows gave me the feeling I'm using a "special ability" in a way which 1) felt natural to the environment, 2) had a story explanation - Garrett's training, and 3) was still not 100% guaranteed safe - you might make noise by accident, or someone might bump into you . In Dishonored, I click a button and I do awesome magic, and that's all. Again - deliberately stripped down complexity.

- Thief's genius design is in the way it makes you listen to the sounds you make, and to the sounds other actors make, and from this information draw your decision on what your next move is. Again, it's down to the player using his senses, not to pressing a button that lets you see through walls, or show you the AI's state in a tooltip above their head. And all this is mixed with the incredible ambient background sounds which make your hairs stand. So much atmosphere in a game which was ugly-looking even when at release. What do you get in Dishonored - all the orientation by sound is optional because when push comes to shove, you can just doge and slice your way through people because your movement speed is insane, even without use of the bullet time ability.

- The main problem however, and I've said this before - in Dishonored the player uses stealth from a position of near-invincibility, whenever he wants to play with the guards like a cat with a mouse. In Thief, the use of stealth is a requirement, and you are an inch away from shitting your pants even though you made a savegame at the last doorway.

I rate this post "Creative"...

I rate this post as endless pile of shit!

You are an endless pile of shit.

I am not rating you mate,i am rating Mynon's post as pile of shyte

I rate this post "informative"...

 

[LESS T_T]

Harvey Smith on world building (and also comparison between Blink and Rope Arrow from Thief): http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articl...dwarves-harvey-smiths-guide-to-world-building

Arkane Studios: "Lots of people have done elves and dwarves. F*** that"
Dishonored creative director Harvey Smith offers advice on how to create a distinct and memorable fictional universe


It's the dream of almost every creator to forge a world that people instantly recognise.

While few gaming realms are as instantly recognisable as Star Wars' galaxy far, far away or J.K. Rowling's wizarding world, there are still franchises set in universes that can be identified by millions of people from a single screenshot, item or phrase.

One of the most prominent examples from the past five years is Bethesda's Dishonored. The series' blend of steampunk and the supernatural sets it apart from any other franchise, thanks in no small part to the vision and leadership of Harvey Smith, creative director at Dishonored developer Arkane Studios.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz earlier this year, Smith offered the following advice for creating a distinct world.

"Raymond Loewy, a designer in the '50s, once said what people want is something very familiar but different enough," he explains. "Something new but not too new, not too familiar. That's a tricky combination.

"When you're making something you want to be recognisable, if you find yourself doing exactly what has been done before you need to put a twist on it. We constantly talk about that - bone charms, on some level, are just a system of perks but they work differently. They don't just modify an existing power, they do something different. What's their place in the main world, since most people aren't magic-using assassins?

"We say that sailors will carve a piece of whale bone or something from an exotic animal into a cool shape during a full moon and keep it in their pocket as a way to ward off venereal disease, or women will use it to avoid getting pregnant. That's the function of those. You can imagine an old woman hanging one over the door to her kitchen so that the food never spoils. That's the larger fictional cloth behind them, but then the player has them to improve their powers.

"Lots of people have done elves and dwarves. Fuck that. Imagining 1850s whaling cities is a much more interesting backdrop, even if you're going to do a fantasy game about a supernatural assassin. So taking something familiar and twisting it is always a good idea."

Since our interview with Smith, Bethesda has revealed it will be inviting players back to the world of Dishonored later this year with standalone expansion Death of the Outsider. To anyone who has played either game, the title is already evocative, referring to the enigmatic deity that bestows magical powers upon each game's protagonist, but the promise of exploring new areas will also appeal.

So far, fans have only seen two regions of Dishonored's world: Dunwall, the capital city of the first game, and Karnaca, the sun-kissed setting central to last year's sequel. But in-game maps show a much wider world beyond these two locales - is this just decorative, or does Smith have entire continents planned out for use in future instalments?

"A lot of it is in my head," he admits. "A lot is also in our documentation. There is stuff alluded to in the comic books, like the place in Dunwall called Wormwood Way where bone charms and heretics collect and illegal shops thrive - those have never appeared in the game.

"We believe in, as a creative technique, making the world larger than what the player can possibly experience. First of all, you can't see everything in one playthrough. Second of all, you have the sense of a larger world because we allude to it, but it's not all there. That just creates a sense of mystery and a sense of a bigger world.

"One of my co-workers, my lead designer, one of his parents is from Paris and one is from the Ivory Coast. He alludes to things that happened to him when we're going back and forth that don't really exist for me; they only exist as his stories. That makes the world feel bigger than I am; interesting, mysterious and exotic. We try to do that in our fiction as well."

Smith continues with an anecdote he recalls from one of his favourite science fiction writers, Roger Zelazny. The writer once said that for one novel, he wrote an interstitial chapter in which the main character buys a gift for the child of a friend and then attends their birthday party, before heading out and continuing the story. The chapter was thrown away and the author never let anyone read it, explaining that the sole purpose of this exercise was to help him better understand the character.

"Even if he alluded back to that later, he wanted the world of the novel to feel larger than it actually was on the pages, and the readers could sense that," Smith adds. "I was influenced by that anecdote."

As with writing fiction, it's as important for game developers to create worlds as much for their own interest as for the players - but Smith stresses the player's opinion is still vital. For Dishonored 2, Arkane invited fans to come and test the game while it was still in development, and their reaction to seemingly minor set-dressing elements helped shape the title's overall tone.

"We put up those posters with Delilah, the villain, and it says 'long live the new Empress'," says Smith. "I can't tell you the number of women that went up to those posters and went 'I don't think so', or something to that effect. I never anticipated that - they had a powerful antagonistic response to [those posters] and that wasn't our intention. It was cool that they immediately took on the role of Emily who lost her throne to this woman and they're going to fight that woman. We wanted to play that up, so we put some of that into our future messaging and people really responded to it, it was great.

"We love interacting with the fans, and the psychology about how they're feeling about the characters, the story and the setting."

Developers face a unique challenge when it comes to building a distinct world, one that creators of other entertainment forms never encounter. While forming a rich lore and culture can be instrumental in getting players to engage with your fictional universe, their gameplay experience can be just as important - they have to enjoy playing in your world as well as learning about it.

Arkane's answer to this has been creating a world where players have as much freedom as the studio can allow. The ability to sneak through Dunwall or Karnaca undetected, storm through on a supernatural killing spree or a mix of the two is key to Dishonored's appeal, and that comes down as much to the world's design as it does the mechanics.

"First and foremost, we want to make an environment that transports you and lets you explore it and lets you do what feels intuitive," says Smith. "That might be throwing a bottle at a guy's head, dropping off the roof of a building into an alley, or breaking a window and going in then unlocking the front door to let yourself back out, or fighting people, or sneaking past them and hiding under the desk until they pass. It's not an everything simulator, but it puts you in an environment in an intense situation and lets your do what feels natural."

Famously, player behaviour helped shape one of the series' signature powers. Arkane has previously revealed that in early tests for the first Dishonored, they found users trying to teleport up to the rooftops at the very edge of one level with Blink. Rather than preventing players from circumventing their level design with this exploit, the team instead widened the rooftops to cater for it.

It's an attitude that carries over from Looking Glass Studios, the defunct studio from which many of the Arkane team hail and developer of the original Thief games. Thief was also praised for the freedom it afforded, and while it had no supernatural powers for players to experiment with, certain items meant level designers had to enable gamers' freedom and inventiveness in much the same way.

"When we made Blink, we didn't want to limit players to only certain spots where you could Blink," Smith recalls. "We wanted an algorithm that very dynamically figured out the angles of the world on the fly and let you Blink to them.

"The original Thief had a really good balance there, because the rope arrows only attached to wood, which meant as a level designer you had some control over whether people can use rope arrows to ascend. But if you do that too much, if you say the rope arrows only attach to the orange wood and there's only orange wood here and there on the ceiling where I want it to be, your players suddenly feel like, rather than making their own decisions and playing improvisationally, instead they feel like they're following a trail of breadcrumbs left by the game designer. There are very often decisions we make at Arkane where we keep all that in mind. We want to give you the agency."

Following the rooftop revelation with Blink, the studio has regularly called on fans to assist with the construction of its fantasy world, observing each player and what they attempt to do. This naturally has its limits - no developer can account for every player-induced possibility - but Smith assures that it does not hold back the Dishonored team's creativity.

"In each case, we either double down and support [what players are doing] if it's fun, like building an animation for whatever it is, a sound effect, edge case protection, debugging," he says. "We need some time to put into that if we want to support it. But sometimes it could be months.

"A good example [of us supporting an idea] is the springrazor, a grenade that throws out shrapnel and cuts people to shreds. You can plant them on the wall or the floor, and guards that walk past will be dismembered. But someone wanted to put it on a bottle, and then throw the bottle so that as it lands near the guard, it goes off. We were like 'that's cool, that's fun'.

"On the other hand, once in a while people figure out something they want to do and we have to bulletproof against it or work against it because it would cause too many problems, take months to fix and it's not the core idea. It's dealt with on a case-by-case basis."

 

[LESS T_T]

Geoffrey Rosin, environment artist who worked on Stilton Manor, on his history of level art and design and the art process of the level: https://80.lv/articles/environment-storytelling-in-dishonored-2/

His first commercial project was E.Y.E., heh.

When Half-life 2 got released, I learned to use Hammer on Source with a Level design french community called “Mapping area”. Later, I got invited to do modding projects such as “I-robot” , “Get a Life”, “Bisounours Party”.

I also worked on E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy, which was designed to be a free mod at first but later evolved into a full size game with AAA ambitions and was the foundation of Streum on Studio. It was my very first serious project during High school; I was mainly doing level building and level design for E.Y.E. but my main concern was about visuals and I started to feel frustrated to not be able to get the models and textures I wanted as I was imaginating them.

I then decided to enter at H.E.A.J. (Haute Ecole Albert Jacquard ) , a Belgian CG school, to learn modeling and texturing. During my last study year, I was working both for School and as Freelance to maximize my chances of quickly finding a job at the end ; Thanks to a friend, I contributed to GameTextures.com and their awesome material library.

During the same year, I met Shawn “FMPONE” Snelling, a Counter-strike map maker with whom we did Gwalior, a CS:GO level which got officially added in Operation Bravo. It allowed me to get in touch with New World Interactive and work on Insurgency as an Environment Artist. However, I also just heard back from my application at Arkane studios and decided to go for it. Now, I’ve been Environment artist at Arkane since August 2012 and I had the pleasure to work on “Dishonored 2”, its DLC and helped on “Prey”. I’m also regularly teaching GameArt in various schools and still doing personal project on Source engine.

 

[prodigydancer]

Well, I finally found some time to play this. I'd say it's OK but not that great. Many things are copy-pasted from the original game, including much of the plot. OTOH, some aspects are noticeably downgraded. E.g. the Overseers don't have music boxes anymore. The boxes weren't a huge obstacle in Dishonored but at least they acted as a hard counter to Time Stop. Not to mention they were something unusual and therefore memorable. Now the Overseers are just a bunch of elite guards. Similarly, the Clockwork Soldiers are much less intimidating than Tallboys. Tallboys presented a unique challenge. They somewhat countered the abuse of verticality, they couldn't be disabled non-lethally and they were relatively hard to kill in open combat. Jindosh's robots can be effectively disabled with one upgraded crossbow bolt to the head and you conveniently get the upgrade before you're sent to the mansion.

The level design is good and rewards exploration. Not all alternative paths are immediately visible. Dealing with large groups of enemies in low chaos can be a little tedious at first (unless you're really good at stealth) but is definitely possible with or without powers. However, there's not enough darkness, especially on the first two maps, and enemy sight range is quite limited, even on the hardest difficulty. As usual, two wrongs don't make a right.

Spoiler

The villains are definitely less interesting than in the first game. Recycling a dead antagonist is just nu-Bioware level of laziness. Delilah is a clichéd cartoony villain without any reasonable agenda or believable motivations. She's been defeated before but has learned nothing and still considers herself invincible. She proclaims herself empress but she is an incompetent ruler by any standard. She draws way too much attention to herself with her misguided coup but gains little from it alienating almost everybody in the process.

Others aren't much better. Hypatia is a classic Jekyll&Hyde case. Plot-wise it's boring and unoriginal. Gameplay-wise it means she has supernatural powers without being marked by the Outsider which breaks the lore. You cannot subdue her with, say, a sleep dart. It's not cool, especially in a Dishonored game where you're supposed to be able to take down nonmagical "bosses" like regular people. Jindosh is for some reason obsessed with building an army of robots. Why? He's an inventor, not a general. Just because the Duke wants that army doesn't mean their goals align. It should be obvious to a genius like Jindosh that once the Duke gets his mechanical soldiers he'll have no further need for a particular Grand Inventor who knows too much. Breanna and the Duke are OK, I guess.

The game has very few notable NPCs. In the first game there were about ten people in the hideout, now it's three at most.

I'm tempted to call it Dishonored 1.5 but in many ways that would be an undeserved compliment.

 

[Mynon]

Well, I finally found some time to play this. I'd say it's OK but not that great. Many things are copy-pasted from the original game, including much of the plot. OTOH, some aspects are noticeably downgraded. E.g. the Overseers don't have music boxes anymore. The boxes weren't a huge obstacle in Dishonored but at least they acted as a hard counter to Time Stop. Not to mention they were something unusual and therefore memorable. Now the Overseers are just a bunch of elite guards. Similarly, the Clockwork Soldiers are much less intimidating than Tallboys. Tallboys presented a unique challenge. They somewhat countered the abuse of verticality, they couldn't be disabled non-lethally and they were relatively hard to kill in open combat. Jindosh's robots can be effectively disabled with one upgraded crossbow bolt to the head and you conveniently get the upgrade before you're sent to the mansion.

The level design is good and rewards exploration. Not all alternative paths are immediately visible. Dealing with large groups of enemies in low chaos can be a little tedious at first (unless you're really good at stealth) but is definitely possible with or without powers. However, there's not enough darkness, especially on the first two maps, and enemy sight range is quite limited, even on the hardest difficulty. As usual, two wrongs don't make a right.

Spoiler

The villains are definitely less interesting than in the first game. Recycling a dead antagonist is just nu-Bioware level of laziness. Delilah is a clichéd cartoony villain without any reasonable agenda or believable motivations. She's been defeated before but has learned nothing and still considers herself invincible. She proclaims herself empress but she is an incompetent ruler by any standard. She draws way too much attention to herself with her misguided coup but gains little from it alienating almost everybody in the process.

Others aren't much better. Hypatia is a classic Jekyll&Hyde case. Plot-wise it's boring and unoriginal. Gameplay-wise it means she has supernatural powers without being marked by the Outsider which breaks the lore. You cannot subdue her with, say, a sleep dart. It's not cool, especially in a Dishonored game where you're supposed to be able to take down nonmagical "bosses" like regular people. Jindosh is for some reason obsessed with building an army of robots. Why? He's an inventor, not a general. Just because the Duke wants that army doesn't mean their goals align. It should be obvious to a genius like Jindosh that once the Duke gets his mechanical soldiers he'll have no further need for a particular Grand Inventor who knows too much. Breanna and the Duke are OK, I guess.

The game has very few notable NPCs. In the first game there were about ten people in the hideout, now it's three at most.

I'm tempted to call it Dishonored 1.5 but in many ways that would be an undeserved compliment.

I rate this post "Edgy"...

 

[LESS T_T]

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/...red_composer_Daniel_Licht_has_passed_away.php

Obituary: Dishonored composer Daniel Licht has passed away

Veteran video game, movie, and television composer Daniel Licht has passed away at the age of 60 after battling with cancer. Variety broke the news earlier today.

Licht was perhaps best known in the games industry for scoring Dishonored and its sequel. He was also the composer behind notable horror titles Silent Hill: book of Memories and Silent Hill: Downpour.

Outside the world of games, Licht lent his talents to a number of popular movies and television shows, and had been plying his trade since the early '90s.

The maestro scored all eight series of the acclaimed Showtime drama Dexter, which ran from 2006 to 2013, and also composed the soundtracks to a number of horror flicks including Thinner, Children of the Corn II, and Hellraiser: Bloodline.

"Dan was an incredibly talented musician and composer, but most of all, he was a dear friend," said Dexter executive producer, Clyde Phillips. "His passing leaves all of us a bit quieter, a bit sadder, and without the gift of his music and his love."

 

[HoboForEternity]

Fuck cancer

 

[udm]