Dishonored by Arkane

[Angthoron]

Yeah, setting's decent. Characters and motivations are utter shit though.

 

[DraQ]

1. Wrong engine. Seriously, the game looks much, much worse than HL2, which sported rather similar style and environments. Why the fuck not license Source?

Do you have a clue about what are you talking about?

I don't even either.

Visually the game looks pretty archaic, and stuff like water or foliage look p. shit.
(Ok, water is awesome while submerged - annoying as fuck and not quite realistic, but I dig it. It's pretty meh from above.).

HL2 engine might be technically inferior, but it plays its cards better.

Play on hard, that's the mostly correct setting.

Playing on Very Hard or whatever is the max.
It's a next-gen game, what else would I choose?

4. Game could've used longer, more in-depth introduction.

Definitely not.

Definitely yes. So you come back from super important mission and your empress gets assassinated. Would be a big deal, except you aren't fully in Corvo's shoes at this point yet, so it all kind of glances off you.

I dig the setting though - dieselpunk is even rarer than decent steampunk.

 

[Black]

It's a Count of Monte Cristo story that forgets to introduce the villains even though it's obsessed with forcing you to sit through the narrative. That's bad.

It forgets to add any sort of characters, really. The ones with most depth are actually the characters that have fuck-all to do with anything - the maids, the boatman and the butler. The rest aren't even reaching the level of being two-dimensional.

The Outsider not enough multi-dimensional for you?

 

[Captain Shrek]

Yeah, setting's decent. Characters and motivations are utter shit though.

The heart was as amazing device for exposition. Tragic that there was too little to expose. Still it was done quite well. The entire ability to occupy bodies of other AND get dialogue as their characters was nice too. Should have been an expanded experience. Unfortunately the game does not dwell on these aspects so much.

 

[Raghar]

And yes, I am doing this pure Thief-y sneaky sneaky exploration, trying not to miss out on any content and still it makes me yawn just as much as the sloppy, banal 1 click action.

It's not a Thief, and if you are not trying to get a ghost achievement, you doesn't need to snake on purpose. Killing few people left and right, or letting them be eaten by rats, is fine too.

1. Wrong engine. Seriously, the game looks much, much worse than HL2, which sported rather similar style and environments. Why the fuck not license Source?

Do you have a clue about what are you talking about?

Visually the game looks pretty archaic, and stuff like water or foliage look p. shit.
(Ok, water is awesome while submerged - annoying as fuck and not quite realistic, but I dig it. It's pretty meh from above.).

That water lock looked very nice, otherwise you don't do much with water, if you are evading guards you are on roofs, if you are killing some guards and dogs, you are walking on blood stains and watching shadows eating bodies, or rats killing guards when you are behind scenes, or in direct combat.

Playing on Very Hard or whatever is the max.
It's a next-gen game, what else would I choose?

Hard?

Have you increased number of corpses in ini? And most importantly are you finishing missions without reloading?

So you come back from super important mission and your empress gets assassinated. Would be a big deal, except you aren't fully in Corvo's shoes at this point yet, so it all kind of glances off you.

I dig the setting though - dieselpunk is even rarer than decent steampunk.

Well, trying to get around the world and find stuff from clues when everyone acts as if you knew basics is definitely better than a typical amnesia.


Also less explicit explanation gives more room for imagination.

 

[JarlFrank]

Don't bother playing this shit. It's a watered-down Thief game. Rather just play Thief 2 again.

But I already replayed it so often.

Then again, there's still some fan missions I haven't tried out yet.

 

[DemonKing]

I don't understand the hate for the graphics - I appreciate that they went for a stylistic rather than realistic look and the art design is pretty good IMO.

I'll admit the gameplay isn't as good as in the Thief series but I think the problem is that in Thief you had visual and aural indicators of when you were and weren't detectable whereas in Dishonored its a bit more hit and miss meaning you are more likely to stuff up and alert enemies.

 

[Angthoron]

Well, trying to get around the world and find stuff from clues when everyone acts as if you knew basics is definitely better than a typical amnesia.


Also less explicit explanation gives more room for imagination.

There's imagination, and there's motivation. The game does fine with the first part, you're given enough room to generally try to imagine what's going on, fill in the blank spots et cetera - basically it seems that the devs took the HL2 ideas and ran with them. Unfortunately, what passed under the radar for HL2 is very easily spottable in Dishonored.

Basically, the game tries to pretend there's a story, and that the story is important. When a story is supposed to be important, it's generally a rule that the spectator/participant is supposed to, well, care. Why does the player care about the Empress? For no reason. Why does he care about the heiress? For no reason. Why does he care about Corvo? For no reason. Why does he care about Corvo's revenge, and the obvious plot twists? See the previous. There's really no reason for the player to care, aside from just completing set pieces. Nothing wrong with that, mind, but in that case, the game shouldn't be trying to front the story and the characters so much. Why do I need to listen to the drivel of one-dimensional rebels that will obviously betray me when I don't give a damn about any of this? The story is just in the way.

Why create an interesting setting, and then set up a trite story with tired twists? Egh.

 

[racofer]

I don't understand the hate for the graphics - I appreciate that they went for a stylistic rather than realistic look and the art design is pretty good IMO.

The problem is not the stylistic style they used, but how bland and washed out everything looks in the game due to poor resolution textures and overall blurriness of the scenery, obviously due to the consolization process.

Skyrim suffered from the same issue when it was released, and only when the high resolution textures started to emerge (along with the fxaa injector, which allows sharpening out everything) things started to look acceptable.

 

[DalekFlay]

I think it has a watercolor look. I like it.

Game is also pretty ace, I wasn't posting when it came out. Not as good as Deus Ex or Thief 2 I guess but it's as good as we get in the current generation.

 

[Excidium]

Not as good as Deus Ex or Thief 2 I guess but it's as good as we get in the current generation.

It's p. shit, yeah.

 

[Zewp]

I don't understand the hate for the graphics - I appreciate that they went for a stylistic rather than realistic look and the art design is pretty good IMO.

I'll admit the gameplay isn't as good as in the Thief series but I think the problem is that in Thief you had visual and aural indicators of when you were and weren't detectable whereas in Dishonored its a bit more hit and miss meaning you are more likely to stuff up and alert enemies.

The problem with Dishonored is it sets you up for being a game which grants you a lot of freedom, but playing the game actually involves a lot of linear progression and you can't really get lost because as long as you keep going forward you're going to reach your objective. Once you've moved through a certain area you can stop worrying about the guards there because you're not going to need to pass through the area again and the guards won't bother you.

Thief placed you on wide open maps with multiple objectives where you often had to go searching for your objectives, and this often involved moving through the same areas multiple times.

 

[DalekFlay]

The problem with Dishonored is it sets you up for being a game which grants you a lot of freedom, but playing the game actually involves a lot of linear progression and you can't really get lost because as long as you keep going forward you're going to reach your objective. Once you've moved through a certain area you can stop worrying about the guards there because you're not going to need to pass through the area again and the guards won't bother you.

I think that's a bit exaggerated. Quite a few levels offered fairly large playgrounds and multiple objectives you could do in any order, plus tons of shit to find if you wanted to look and rewards for playing stealthy and thoroughly. In the first real level you can go to Granny first, the doctor's office, or straight to the target, for example. There was a lot of that in later levels as well, and tons of nooks and crannies through the whole game.

I do agree it's not as wide open as Thief but that doesn't mean toss it in the bin.

 

[Zewp]

Yes, you got a handful of sidequests which miraculously dried up after about the third mission as if the developers simply forgot they were going to add sidequests to each level, but in general your movement through levels were pretty linear.

 

[Tagaziel]

The biggest problem with Dishonored is the obscene amount of power the player gets at their fingertips. It isn't really a challenge when five runes in (High Overseer Campbell) you get the ability to see through walls, highlighting goodies, enemies, and their vision cones. It only gets more ridiculous with teleportation and bullet time.

The story is neat, though predictable plot twists are predictable. Wish they played with that a bit and set up Daud as the end game villain, rather than Havelock. I had no problem empathizing with the characters and got pretty engrossed in their struggle, though the decision to refrain from voicing Corvo and having him react to the world around him hurt the game.

As a side note, the morality/Chaos system is completely fucked up. It appears that mutilating people and dooming them to years of suffering (Campbell and the Pendelton Twins) or to an unavoidable execution (Burrows) is somehow more righteous than killing them cleanly on the spot. Seriously?

 

[DraQ]

I don't understand the hate for the graphics - I appreciate that they went for a stylistic rather than realistic look and the art design is pretty good IMO.

Ok, I've examined Dishonored's graphics a bit closer:

• I don't think painterly style works for 3D games. You know how some paintings look good only from certain distance away? In 3D you don't have this luxury and sometimes see textures from very close up. Blurry low res textures and bumpmaps don't help either.
• Painterly or not, this is still not an excuse for coat every fucking thing with specular wax*. It's even worse than in oblivious, luckily Dishonored has at least good art direction going for it.
• Additionally, Dishonored just plain fails a lot at bumpmapping**.
• I'm not sure developers know how light shafts work. If they know, they certainly can't replicate that in their game.
• Finally, lighting is often way off, for example rat swarms seem to be lit as single point object despite being fairly expansive, which results in stuff like rats in the shadows being fully lit because the center ofthe swarm is.
• Like I said, I do like art direction, the game feels a lot like Mieville's New Crobuzon, some scenes are pretty gorgeous, despite graphics' many failings. Void looks a bit like what I imagined for some TES daedric realms.

*) Waxed rocks

**) Epic bumpmap fail

Barf.

I'll admit the gameplay isn't as good as in the Thief series but I think the problem is that in Thief you had visual and aural indicators of when you were and weren't detectable whereas in Dishonored its a bit more hit and miss meaning you are more likely to stuff up and alert enemies.

Dishonored has DX1 style visual indicator - the way your hands are lit. Seems sufficient to me. Sound is indicated visually when you use dark vision, if you find just listening to it not informative enough.

Some additional stuff:

• I do reload quite a lot, because for some reason sneaking on Num0 doesn't work entirely correctly, and that's how I've been binding my sneak key since around 1998, meaning I fumble a lot with the damn controls.
• Yup. The AI is as dumb as bag of bricks.
• I really enjoy movement, you're no longer a box with weapon sticking out, but can context-sensitively squeeze yourself into tight opening, pull yourself up on ledges and so on.
• I dig dual wielding system, although weapons should have lengthier reload times. It's also close to that thing DraQ was talking about in regards to guns in arcanum. It also produces interesting gameplay changes when you wield different weapons or powers in your offhand.
• Magic is neat, oriented towards interesting utility spells rather than fireballs.
• I've been hit with amusing bug that not amusingly necessitated reload of much earlier save in overseer Campbel mission:
  Spoiler

  when arriving to the meeting room overseer, that watch dude and entourage ran into room declaring "I'll find you!" ran past me standing in plain sight (and going "wut?") blissfully unaware of my presence and exited the room.

 

[Raghar]

Do you have some problems with installation? Also have you updated corpse counts to at least:

m_CorpseAbsoluteMaximumCount=40
m_CorpseIdealMaximumCount=25

Actually if you killed Overseer already, they could just switch into that run away mode and they simply played wrong text.

 

[DalekFlay]

Yes, you got a handful of sidequests which miraculously dried up after about the third mission as if the developers simply forgot they were going to add sidequests to each level, but in general your movement through levels were pretty linear.

They dried up in the middle a bit maybe for the whorehouse and party but they came back in the later levels. The flooded city section is one of the most open in the whole game.

Also even though Thief is pretty open I would still say your path is mostly linear, moving from one objective to the next. They're both wide corridor games it's just Thief's are a little wider.

 

[Excidium]

Life is p. linear, you are born and inevitably die.

 

[DraQ]

Do you have some problems with installation?

Nope.

Also have you updated corpse counts to at least:

m_CorpseAbsoluteMaximumCount=40
m_CorpseIdealMaximumCount=25

Only recently, there is around twenty different inis spread across game's install directory and documents and settings.

Actually if you killed Overseer already, they could just switch into that run away mode and they simply played wrong text.

The problem wasn't related to killing anyone in game, or, as far as I can say anything in game. Just reloading save close enough to that location (and I reload a lot, because I'm mixing up keys a lot because I can't use my intuitive binds, which makes me durp up stealth attempts or get killed in embarrassing ways).

 

[Raghar]

Well, I didn't reload and it played fine. If you can't use your binds directly, install a program that would convert them on background. That INI modifications are absolutely critical. Otherwise you don't need to hide corpse, you simply create few others in different location and that problematic one disappears itself.

 

[Tagaziel]

Also even though Thief is pretty open I would still say your path is mostly linear, moving from one objective to the next. They're both wide corridor games it's just Thief's are a little wider.

Life of the Party called, wants its socks back.

 

[DeepOcean]

The problem is that the maps on dishonored are way smaller than thief, life of the party could easily be of the same size of three Dishonored maps, but it isn't only a problem of size of the maps, on thief you has to steal alot of stuff to meet the loot requirements, this forced you to explore and every single silver coin was important, on Dishonored, you are rich , powerful and have everything you need without much effort, so loot, runes, bone charms becomes irrelevant and there isn't any reason to explore anymore. Most of the missions aren't all that interesting, I really had high expectations on the Lady Boyle mission only to be disappointed in how easy is to discover who is the true Lady Boyle.If you want any challenge you need to ignore all the powers but this have the result of making runes, bone charms and money even more useless. I liked the game but halfway through I started feeling that it was better to play Dark mod and alot of FMs that I didn't tried. There are two words that sum up Dishonored problems: too easy.

 

[toro]

The biggest problem with Dishonored is the obscene amount of power the player gets at their fingertips. It isn't really a challenge when five runes in (High Overseer Campbell) you get the ability to see through walls, highlighting goodies, enemies, and their vision cones. It only gets more ridiculous with teleportation and bullet time.

The story is neat, though predictable plot twists are predictable. Wish they played with that a bit and set up Daud as the end game villain, rather than Havelock. I had no problem empathizing with the characters and got pretty engrossed in their struggle, though the decision to refrain from voicing Corvo and having him react to the world around him hurt the game.

As a side note, the morality/Chaos system is completely fucked up. It appears that mutilating people and dooming them to years of suffering (Campbell and the Pendelton Twins) or to an unavoidable execution (Burrows) is somehow more righteous than killing them cleanly on the spot. Seriously?

This. I've complained about this this for so long.

 

[toro]

Life is p. linear, you are born and inevitably die.

And what are you waiting?