Dishonored

[None]

I didn't find any thread in a search, so here is a new thread. Anyone else excited for this? It looks pretty fucking crazy. Bethesda is publishing this, but Arkane Studios (they helped out with Bioshock 2's level design, which I haven't played, but I've heard not great things about it). It comes out next week.

[HomeSkillet]

I have no idea how I haven't bought an xbox again. The fucking games coming out / that are already out look sick.

Please post any/all info on this game. Even if its just 3 hours of slomo assassinations to that little girl singing. I found that eerily entertaining

[Combo7]

http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/09/14/ ... -this-year

Why Dishonored is my Most Anticipated Game This Year

by Keza MacDonald

If you’ve been following Dishonored on IGN, you probably read Charles’ “Death at a Dinner Party” adventures earlier this year, in which he crashed a masked ball and caused total chaos, attracting the whole city’s attention by murdering guests and throwing canisters of explosive whale oil at guards. I sat down with the exact same mission recently, and was a bit concerned that I’d have nothing new to write about. How wrong I was.

Everything was different. For me and Charles, literally not one single thing, apart from the mission itself, was the same. This has instantly made Dishonored my most-anticipated game of this year. This is the first game I’ve played since Dark Souls last year that hasn’t patronised or restricted me for one second, instead just pushing a set of tools and powers into my hands with an avuncular wink and leaving me to do what I want with them. It gives you freedom, it gives you options, and it lets you work things out for yourself.

Here’s the first difference: I made it through the whole scenario without killing anyone. Not even my assassination target. (Well, I did kill a few rats by possessing them for so long that their tiny brains exploded, but that doesn’t count.) Here’s the second: I didn’t find the equipment menu, so I played for more than an hour without the incredibly useful instant-teleport Blink power or any weapons. Here’s the third: because I took a wrong turn on my way to the mansion garden party I was supposed to be infiltrating (my sense of direction is legendarily awful, in games as in real life), I discovered a whole neighbouring area of slum-houses that I wouldn’t otherwise have known existed.

I like to play Dishonored like a spy, rather than a superhero. That’s in line with how I approach most open-world games - I like digging around in people’s diaries for information in Skyrim (and digging around their houses for possessions to liberate. I hacked into and read several thousand mundane emails on the computers of corporation employees in Deus Ex. I like to explore a place and hunt for the tiny details hidden in basements and dusty old books and peeling propaganda posters on the walls. Dishonored’s Dunwall is rich with this detail. If you take your time, avoid attention and keep your eyes open, you can really drink it in.

The premise of this mission – the same one shown at Quakecon and Gamescom – is an assassination during am exclusive masked ball hosted at the Boyle family mansion. Lady Boyle is your target, but the problem is, there are three Lady Boyle’s and all of them are in similar creepy porcelain-doll costumes of different colours (the game randomises the mission each time, too, so you can never be 100% sure which Lady Boyle should be the object of your stabby assassin affections.) There are three options (that I could work out, anyway): find out which is guilty, kill all of them, or kill one at random and hope for the best.

Infiltrating the mansion’s grounds is a mission in itself; the night streets are patrolled by police and Tall Boys, those heavily-armoured striders with the power to vaporise you on sight. You begin the mission on a boat in the nearby canal, and you have to work out how to get in by yourself. It’s gratifying that the game doesn’t give you hints; it doesn’t tell you which way to go, and no button brings up a magic light-trail showing you the best way in. You can swim through the sewers and try to find an inlet to the mansion. Getting up to the rooftops and climbing the fence is a more obvious solution.

I got chased into an alleyway after being spotted in the water by guards and accidentally discovered a slum-house with stairs leading promisingly upwards. Upon entering, I noticed a few prone bodies in the neighbouring room; I did not expect them to suddenly spring to life, run at me and cough black plague-goop into my face whilst blood streamed from their eyes. These people are the Weepers, the diseased poor of Dunwall whom the government has been systematically exterminating. You won’t find them in the opulent mansions where the rich are hiding away – they hide in the slums, evading the Tall Boys.

You’re supposed to feel sorry for these guys, but man, they behave a LOT like zombies, with all the moaning and the stumbling and the blood and the spontaneous attacking – not that you can’t empathise with zombies, but they’re terrifying. I ran away upstairs and climbed out of a window, taking in as much of the decaying building as I could. Soiled mattresses were lying about everywhere, with plague information pamphlets and posters trodden into the floorboards. When I got into the roof, I realised that – fortuitously – I was right opposite the Boyle mansion, and one of the windows was open. Leaping between the windowsills, I climbed into the guardhouse and scouted it out. I’d managed to make my way in without having to scale any walls, swim through any sewers, steal an invitation or kill anyone. And now, after stealing them from a hook on the wall, I had the keys to the whole place.

You’re undercover at the party, where your masked-assassin outfit blends into the other guests’ fancy-dress ensembles. You can walk around more-or-less freely, listening to conversations (apparently one of the absent society ladies likes to get carnal with her male siblings and nephews) and scoping out your potential targets. The first Lady Boyle I meet is rather… over-friendly, leading me willingly away to a secluded assassination-friendly bedroom after a glass of punch on the promise of some drunk party-sex. Feeling massively uncomfortable about either murdering her without proof or jumping into her bed (the game wouldn’t let me, anyway), she eventually got bored with the masked guy hanging awkwardly around in her room and wandered off, at which point I read through her diary and stole some jewellery. The diary contains no allusions to illicit murder-worthy activity, making me think she probably wasn’t my target after all.

The other rooms upstairs are locked, so I head back downstairs to look for a way in. There’s a rat scuttling about in the grand ballroom; after possessing it, I head into the first vent I can find and emerge in a room that controls the giant security forcefield barring the way up the grand stairway. If I could find a hacking module, I could modify it to fry anyone who walks through it, which sounds massively entertaining but not enormously helpful to my goal of causing as little chaos as possible.

It’s after I’ve met all of the Lady Boyles stalking the party in red, black and white costume that a guest in a scarecrow-esque mask approaches me and whispers that he knows who I’m looking for – and that he’s in love with her, and understandably would rather I didn’t stab her to death. He promises to take her away and keep her safe if I deliver her unharmed to the basement. It doesn’t sound… entirely above-board, but at least I wouldn’t have to kill anyone.

Getting into the other Lady Boyles’ bedrooms is easy once I’ve found some more rats in the cellar to possess and scuttled through the mansion’s network of vents. Another diary reveals my true target: it’s the Boyle in black. Now I just have to get her to the basement and send her away with her lover without alerting anyone by striding through the party with an unconscious body draped across my shoulders.

This turns out to be pretty easy. I just walk straight up to the Boyle in question and tell her I’m out to murder her unless she comes to the basement, right now, a request to which she acquiesces with surprisingly little consternation. I knock her out in a quiet spot and sprint the rest of the way down to the basement before the guards stroll past. Once we’re there, the masked guy from earlier is waiting on a barge to take her back out into the canal. “She’ll have a long time to learn to love me back, now,” he says, calmly sailing away to wherever on earth he’s going with the unconscious Lady Boyle prone on his boat. Oh. Well. It looks like I’ve accidentally delivered someone into a life of imprisonment and possible sex-slavery. But at least I didn’t kill anyone.

It’s only when I’m comparing experiences with others later on that it becomes clear how unusual this experience of Dishonored was. Some players were relying on magic to teleport them across rooftops, facilitate an escape from the Tall Boys or possess guards to open doors for them. Others got eaten by fish in the canal. Most were causing violent chaos, turning the party into a colourful disaster, summoning hordes of voracious rats to nibble at the attendees. Not one other person found the slums, or the force-shield hack, or managed to make it through without killing. You could play that same mission five or six times and never do anything the same.

And that is exactly why this is the most interesting game of this year.

[None]

http://www.youtube.com/user/BethesdaSof ... eos?view=0

The channel has plenty of videos to check out from Developer Diaries to an animated miniseries. I haven't checked out much outside of trailers and an article/preview here and there. However, the aesthetic and look won me over and what I've heard about gameplay sold me completely. From the trailer this game seems completely fucking unsettling, so buy this instead of RE6. Rent RE6 or wait for it to be 20 bucks during Christmas.

[Hayzoos]

Been following this game for a while now, but I'm getting a little sick of first person games. I'll wait for the Game Informer review to come out to make my decision.

[LilLeftBrain]

just saw the commercial for this and wanted to see if there was a thread. there is indeed. this is it. still don't know anything about the game asides from the commercial being badass & it being a bethesda game. havent gotten into a game since probably skyrim, will cop on tuesday

[Balzac]

reviews are filtering in.

looking like a hit

[drobizhek]

I just saw this yesterday on IGN and got a hard on. I love the old schoolish look as opposed to these copy paste shooters that are being released nowadays.

[Random Sample]

I think I might actually have to buy this.

[LilLeftBrain]

been playing around on this for about an hour, can already tell game is going to be all consuming
visit from the outsider was trilllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll

[None]

been playing around on this for about an hour, can already tell game is going to be all consuming
visit from the outsider was trilllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll

Nice, I'll be excited to give this thing a try in a week.

[b0mbs_of_death]

Looks interesting, will wait till I catch up with my other games. But then Assassins Creed and Halo hit. Hello 29.99 special!

[Kalistoga]

dope game so far. Reminds me of a mix between Fable, Bioshock & Assassin's Creed.

[ric]

I think I might actually have to buy this.

wasnt counting on it but ive read that its almost perfect.
the idea that they finally made a game purely about assassination is awesome

[LilLeftBrain]

finished this and i dunno. almost perfect is far too far of a stretch for anyone to say. went through a few phases with it of loving it from the get go, loving when you get all the outsider abilities then got bored after mission six or seven and put it away for a few weeks. when i got it going again i was having a blast through the end. a large flaw would be no new game + type of setup where you can play earlier missions with the abilities you get/advance later on. story was a snooze, tho the characters/voice acting was top notch. finished the game on high (and i'm guessing highHIGHHIGH) chaos, though it wouldn't have been as bad had i just twerked one or two decisions twds the end. will probably start again attempting to be as stealth and non-lethal as possible, but have doubts that i have the desire to see it through again