Totally forgot there was a “Narrative” difficulty mode in Prey.
I uninstalled it for now, but if I ever go back I should try it out.
This talk of dishonored 2 not having much advancement and being filled with discreet levels that aren’t physically connected with rewards that are sparse has been doing a bang up job of selling me on the game, I must say.
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yeah dishonored 2 is not good at a macro level
and funnily enough the only level in 2 that does anything that death of the outsider doesn’t, has basically the same hook as a level in titanfall 2, so just play those instead
I liked Dishonored and I liked the demo I played of the sequel, it threw some real weirdo shit at me in some tucked-away side room that I really appreciated. I’ll get around to playing it sometime.
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This is a beautiful sentence. I love it.
In another life I would have loaded up the ROM and credit fed until I got a good screenshot of this sign but I’m very lazy nowadays so this is good enough, for me.
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I am collecting SO MANY DOGS in deadfire
this game understands action so well, holy shit.
I got a RetroTink2x. now to hook up the Dreamcast…
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Ugh, no thanks, we don’t need more open world crap in Dishonoured. I’m much more interested in the series of hub areas it has, and focused, detailed levels once you get to the main mission. It’s stuff I really miss that bland “everywhere is the same” open world design has killed.
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Thief 3 was trying to do that, mainly severely hampered by the engine in execution though. I did like the idea on paper of having The City and then the focused detailed levels exist inside it. Actually I think Thi4f did that too but hell if I can remember much about that one.
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Yeah, Thi4f did it too, and didn’t do it any better than Thi3f. Of course, Thi4f didn’t do anything better than Thi3f.
I don’t believe that a Bloodborne-like structure leads to ‘everywhere is the same’ open world design, but I’m not sure it’d make the game better.
Both of those suggestions are tasteless but Professional – what you’d get if you hired a consultant or just gossiped at GDC. So I’m not really confident in them but that’s the easy answer. And, of course, even the best ideas become trite and boring when they’re the dominant form of the media. I am confident in saying a strong reason why it’s not ‘sticky’ the way Thief 1 & 2 are is the context of our time and the availability of games that allow freedom of action and choice in behavior. And that’s a shame because I thought Thief was nearly perfect.
I’m beginning to believe it’s a length thing – the extreme length of Thief-style levels, within a sparse structure of levels and progression is out of character for the reasons sparse levels and progression are good. Normally we use that with clear action games where we don’t want to dilute the player’s ability to understand their skill increases, but within Thief’s genre it’s mostly RPG-like growth, so Thief is an outlier.
Of course, there’s also the issue that the basic stealth paradigm in games hasn’t really changed since Thief 1, except the development of ‘soft stealth’ used in modern action games. But the model of AI behavior, patrols, investigation, cooldown has led to extremely similar problems. Dishonored was able to come up with the fast teleport (meaningful), and the dense action (not meaningful under its encouraged play pattern). Dishonored 2 brought…not much. And it pushed hard on the moral framework that constrains play (don’t kill anyone!), encouraging most players (I’m certainly susceptible) to avoid the reactive tools they’d built. One of the best pieces of Metal Gear Solid V is a context where engaging in both violence and stealth fits the moral world of the game, justifying Metal Gear’s longtime huge arsenal for the first time.
The morality thing is the one thing I agree with here 100%, I remember now that’s the main reason I bounced off. I would accidentally kill someone then roll my eyes and reload. When I went back to it I stopped caring and just went with whatever happens and enjoyed the game a lot more, but the game doesn’t encourage that. It should.
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How do you feel about Dishonored?
I’m always left slightly unsatisfied despite having all the components of something I am extremely into, and I’m hesitant to start pulling apart smaller bits like world and AI design and tone because I think they’re very good in their own right. Or, it’s not as good as it should be when examining the pieces, and I need to (as in I’m Professionally Obligated) to have a good answer why.
consider me co-signing everything Sykel has said about Arkane games
Prey is a revelation because it is such an earnest return to the first person dungeon crawler form. Meaningful non-linearity, some lock and key mechanics but the gates are built into ‘fences’ rather than ‘walls’ (meaning that with sufficient clever use of tools and agility, you can hop a fence whereas a wall is impassable)
Arkane games use expansive detailed hubs by making traversal meaningful at every level. The horror elements of Prey did nothing for me and I found it to be such a relief when I finally got past enemies being anything more than a road bump because the game had so much to offer in terms of exploration.
Dishonored, as well, I found the ‘morality’ system to be a hackneyed flaw and the game was immediately better when I leaned into the reactivity by just trying to deal with all of my mistakes rather than savescumming.
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It’s been far too long since I played it so it’s hard to say, but I played through the whole thing start to finish and enjoyed it the whole time. I did get the remaster with the sequel, so maybe I should give it another go, but on the other hand I have so many other games I haven’t played at all yet that I need to give a try.
The standout mission was the one where you infiltrate the party, because I enjoy Hidden-In-Plain-Sight design (hence why I’m a Hitman fan).
This does feel important applied to System Shock/Deus Ex (softer, here)/BioShock but maybe it didn’t stand out because it feels like it’s always been part of Thief DNA. Reconciling that back into System Shock probably is an important step.
Prey’s nonlinearity feels only half-successful and half-important to me. System Shock never left it, so it didn’t surprise me, though it is richer and the first half of Prey is much better for it. I think the back half of Prey (post-arboretum) suffers for it, as they use the quest log model to encourage backtracking in a way that begins to trivialize the space, turning it into a transit system and NPC nodes. When the player is constrained in the first half, moving and poking to find the softest opening is meaningful.
I am the person that finds the Souls games most interesting before I’ve crested the power curve, and am touching every path. Once I build the tools to handle the situations the games slowly deflate in the back third as the power fantasy gets fulfilled.
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The best way of dealing with the morality system in the mainline Dishonoreds is to recognize that you’re playing either the lapdog assassin/lover of a murdered empress or the bored daughter of said murdered empress who just could not care less about her throne and its responsibilities until Aunt Crows-For-Buds showed up to take it from you. Lean into the characters. Kill everyone. Unleash rat chaos. Bad end.
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I mean I did the other stuff to fuck around too but you know
first:
unleash rat chaos
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i finished dragon quest iii for the super famicon. as to be expected, it’s fantastic. i remember reading about it many years ago, but when the main twist happened it really did catch me by surprise!
many things that are placed in the game’s world as generic utilities become historicized just enough to entice you to think about them as actual things in an actual world by the end, even if loosely. the opening (with a fancy cutscene and all!) is incredible. this game was able to create through a sparce environment a very charming, elegant lore closing the trilogy.
another thing that makes a favour to dq3 is that there is no equivalent to that awful mountain-cave dungeon from dragon quest ii that served as a wall to the endgame. the progression is much smoother. it only gets hectic with the bosses, but by the time the final castle is available, if you game the class-change system and collect a good number of stuff trough small medals / sidequests / pachisi matches, you can have some really tough party members
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