mission 3 is by far my favourite of the “the previous level, revisited, with a bigger new area behind it” designs they’ve yet used and I can’t quite articulate why
ok I’m into mission 4 now and the smart asset reuse from the last game really drives home just how much better this one is
it’s really a bummer that this is being regarded as their swan song because sales are down so much on late-360-gen immersive sims, since it literally took a side story to a bigger-budget sequel for them to actually get their production in place to tell a good story with a good difficulty curve over interesting levels
they’ve gotten over almost every one of their design crutches, including the “interact with object to complete mission objective” button that cropped up nearly everywhere before and made the world feel way too much like a box with a series of human switches in it. refocusing it to “steal this thing and get out” is way more conscious of the verbs they already have
it’s also kind of weird that they just happened to get the two best actors in the cast by far for the side story of all things
what do I know though! it’s easily the best dishonored. play it if you liked the others!
I also love how one of the optional contracts in mission 3 is “don’t even choke anyone out, stay totally undetected” and then one of the optional contracts in mission 4 is “kill every single person you see”
no prior instalment has done anywhere near as much to encourage variety in your playstyle
it took me until halfway through the game to realize that you can put displace markers down while using foresight but I still think the limited power selection is brilliant
Sounds similar to Metal Gear Solid V, where the gameplay and toolset was larger enough than the old stealth game that they really needed to invert the narrative conceit for stealth play and play up being a bad guy. It’s interesting that a considered morality can be a bad constraint for players.
The “chaotic neutral Rosario Dawson on one last job” framing certainly helps here, yeah. It’s just very gratifying for them to have finally gotten it all right. Many of the reviews are mentioning how there’s nothing that really matches the spectacle of the clockwork mansion but I honestly never found that level particularly interesting to play even if it was impressive enough in its engine rigging.
still cannot get over how much previously OK-ish mechanics now feel perfectly utilized. the little rat-sized grates you could move through in prior games provided you’d invested in the proper talents, which acted like little more than zelda doors, are now traversable only by foresight – you can see what’s on the other side of them but can’t necessarily get through. way better!
finished it, around 7 hours, having done like 80-plus percent of all the optional stuff.
I won’t pretend the writing is on par with observer/nier/torment this year but it is absolutely the only time that dishonored has even gotten close to a real satisfying ending, and that they balanced that on the most annoying and underdeveloped character in the series is a real achievement!
it’s still a klepto-collectible messy stealth game but the extent to which it’s both a greatest hits reel and a patch on all previously significant flaws really can’t be overstated
I will say that despite the first game having boasted about having the art director from half life 2, most of the dramatic beats in this are still way too derivative of half life 2, a thirteen year old videogame.
it also still has the problem of being too easy if you savescum and there being no reason not to savescum. but y’know.
You don’t have to savescum if you kill everyone
u know billie <3’s butchering agents of the oppressive state > : |
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I also love – and it only just occurred to me after finishing – how there are almost no bloodflies at all in this one! it’s like arkane decided after prey “you know what, for once, let’s not have a core enemy type that’s relentlessly annoying in a game that’s not actually about shooting or endurance.”
the last mission is maybe a little bit underwhelming (it would’ve been a good fit for, and a welcome reuse of, the realtime link to the past dark world mirror from the one level in the last game, and it’s hard to reconcile its absence other than as a development constraint, given that it was already implemented), but I think it’s made up for by having actual forward motion in the plot for a change
one last point of praise: this was the first game in the series where I could toggle off objective markers (which I believe is just a single toggle in the menu for the first time) and have no difficulty getting to the various objectives based purely on the information the game gave me.
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I was so disappointed by the first yakuza
it took until zero for me to forgive nagoshi
Oh hey, it’s our Valley Village studio before I worked there. Looks like we had a G3 Mac out in the open down there in the control room… the fan must have been pretty noisy.
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asexual videogame characters:
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legendary assassin daud
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legendary assassin agent 47
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is it possible to love and hate a game genre at the same time
I Really Love stealth action games but Dishonored deals in a level of abstraction I just cant seem to ever get my head around. I know like all thigns in life I am probably o blame but my cut lil assassin gal keeps getting spotted in situations I am reasonably certain I should not get spotted in and also I guess why cant every game have visual indicators like the first mgs
why cant every game have soliton radar
why cant life have soliton radar
it does
so… it’s not abstract enough for you