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Dishonored - or - GIFs By Breckon

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Considering how good at video games most game reviewers are and considering an early story making the rounds about how they had to dumb down Dishonored because people couldn't do things without being directly told to, I wouldn't be surprised if 4 hours is missing a large amount of stuff.

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The bargo was busted by CVG. They gave it a 9.5, then pulled the video review down after noticing their error.

Additionally, Skyrim could have also been beaten in like 3 hours or something dumb.

I'm still really skeptical about Dishonored in general. I haven't seen much that has interested me.

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Anything that's in the tradition of Thief/Deus Ex/Arx/Underworld/System Shock/Whatever is enough to get me at least interested. Whether or not it's a successful expression of that sandboxy multi-tool methodology is yet to be seen, but I certainly support the experiment at the very least.

It having Raphaël Colantonio and Harvey Smith at the helm is encouraging.

Regarding the length: http://imgmr.com/ind...red-game-length

On his twitter, Smith says it should be around 12-20, depending on how you play. The four hour thing seems to be a weird, unfounded internet rumor. We'll see.

edit: Did some poking around, and it stems from a stream wherein a player set the game to easy, skipped all the side-content, didn't explore and ran through killing everyone in his path. I could see a game of this style being very short indeed if played in that manner; that is not the experience I expect to have.

If you took all the waiting in darkness out of Thief, it would probably be pretty short, too.

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In fact, I'd say it's a GOOD sign if the game can be completed in a fairly short length by being solely focused on smashing your way to the objective without any subtlety or time for exploration. It means that the game isn't going to spoon feed you every bit of content, strapping you down to a chair and forcing itself down your throat. The interesting stuff will be off to the side, hidden around a corner, waiting for you to discover it. It won't drop you into a cutscene every time it needs to deliver exposition or funnel you down a carefully tuned tunnel of experiences that the developer has crafted to ensure that everyone gets the same result out of their playthrough. Instead, the vast majority of the game is meant to be encountered organically.

So, yeah, I'm pretty pumped for this game. The manual is out on Steam now if you want to read that.

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4 hours! Cool, I can blaze through it before xcom.

But seriously, playing the game on normal in an aggressive fashion killing everyone with those super power I would imagine you could get through it pretty quickly

Just ramp up the difficulty and take you time with it

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It seems crazy to me. If Bethesda is confident in the game, wouldn't they want a little word of mouth starting already? Do they know the game is a steaming pile of shit, and don't want word to get out? Based on the little bits we've been able to see so far, it looks terrific, so why keep such a tight grip?

Well... Doesn't this mean PR is doing a good job? If what we've seen makes the game look terrific, how would they benefit from letting us see everything?

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Looking at it from the other side: it would suck to be the site following protocol and then get pooped on by someone else breaking the embargo and posting their shit early. Once that happens, the sites following protocol are going to get a lot less traffic from whatever review or story they post.

Whatever the reasons for which these rules exist now, I'd bet that, in the beginning, they existed for the benefit of both PR and the enthusiast press.

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Further reports have revealed that the campaign takes 4 hours playing on easy and going through the game at a moderate pace without looking at/for much (if any) side content. Additionally it seems as though the game should remain interesting for multiple play-throughs in a similar fashion to Deus Ex (Lethal/Non-Lethal/Pacifist and Stealth/Non-Stealth runs). I also spoiled the ending for myself but that is the price of busting bargoes.

#BargoBusters

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I totally pre-ordered XCOM 2 minutes before I realized this was coming out as well. I really shouldn't...

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I totally pre-ordered XCOM 2 minutes before I realized this was coming out as well. I really shouldn't...

They release on Steam at the same time too. :devil:

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It's stupid. It's not like I can play them at the same time.

Or can I...?

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Gonna play this for now. I enjoy stealth/action games more than strategy, though admittedly X-COM looks just amazing. I've also been insano-exited for this ever since seeing the stealth playthroughs.

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Been playing it up,

So far it definitely follows the pattern of both Deus Ex and Dark Messiah. You're going through defined missions with multiple paths, with the option of decent seeming first person combat. Speaking of which, the first person stuff is definitely enjoyable. Leaning around corners feels like a good substitute for a third person view, and I've found the climbing and jumping up on things incredibly easy. Much easier in fact than Mirror's Edge.

That being said there is a reason I'm here writing this and not actively playing the game right now (though I intend to resume shortly). This game reminds me of how much I dislike enforced morality systems. The second it says I get "dark" ending for killing guys is the second I realized that I'm not killing anyone at all in this game. It's a personal thing, admittedly. And has a tiny bit of rationale behind it, the more bodies you provide the rats the more the plague spreads. But there's so many people dying I doubt even Nathan Drake could add significantly to the body count. I'd have much rather been given a choice based on what I felt about the npc's in the game and what I wanted to do, rather than some obviously video game style system presented to me.

There are also some other foibles. I remember now how hard it is to make a great stealth game. Combat is much easier to make interesting, because it's been done a hundred thousand times. You've got the changing geometries and speeds of you and your enemies, timing involved and even the sheer act of aiming is a large analog area of control.

This is not to imply that in comparison the stealth is terrible. I'm still having some fun with it. But how and when enemies can see you, in terms of distance and lighting and etc. feels odd and a bit frustrating. There are obvious "stealth" paths carved out everywhere, which also annoys me. It reminds me how good an open world hardcore stealth game could potentially be, or at least makes me want to play something made by more dedicated and experienced teams and games like Assassin's Creed 3 (please be good!) or Hitman Absolution (pre-ordered).

And then there's the story. While the setting could have been interesting the story itself is a flop. You are mute character with no explicit background other than you might have been doing it with the Empress. A character, along with her daughter, that you're supposed to care about after all of two minutes of interaction and about five lines. You're also supposed to want the bad guys dead, except I'm not really feeling them as bad guys. Oh, and there's the art direction. And while some of it's interesting and good you'll also hit in the face with the fact that Half Life 2's art director worked on this. And by hit in the face I mean like an anvil.

I'm sure I'll enjoy the rest of it, it seems to have promise in areas so far. But I'm not totally into it like I was with Borderlands 2 initially or Icewind Dale 2 when I'm playing it co-op (currently).

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Leaning around corners feels like a good substitute for a third person view

Third person view is a bad substitute for leaning around corners. *grumble* *PC elitist* *old man*

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This is not to imply that in comparison the stealth is terrible. I'm still having some fun with it. But how and when enemies can see you, in terms of distance and lighting and etc. feels odd and a bit frustrating. There are obvious "stealth" paths carved out everywhere, which also annoys me. It reminds me how good an open world hardcore stealth game could potentially be, or at least makes me want to play something made by more dedicated and experienced teams and games like Assassin's Creed 3 (please be good!) or Hitman Absolution (pre-ordered).

I will note on this that the reasons for an enemy seeing you are wholly explainable, mechanically. I'm not sure what you're having problems with.

Loving it so far, though I agree with the "HERE BE STEALTH, YOU HAVE THAT BLINK ABILITY YOU KNOW" aspect of things. Still opportunities to foul up badly though.

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So everyone knew this already, but I just discovered I get three days of everyone raving and tweeting about both Dishonored and XOM before it's unlocked here (meanwhile it's of couse already available for free and easy torrenting ...) I don't have anything new or interesting to say about this, and just want to rant and complain, and also to ask the question on the mind of everyone who's not playing XCOM and Dishonored: why are they doing this again?

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It's too early to tell but I've been enjoying what I've experienced. I can't judge the morality system until I see how the endings turn out. It seems more nuanced than violent/non-violent. Also, having the plague spread as a result of your violent actions is probably helpful as rats attack enemies and adding chaos to the system would make it easier to sneak around. I'm still going to play mostly non-lethal as that's usually a more interesting challenge.

I'm also kind of confused by guard vigilence. I mean, it's not bad as far as stealth games go, but it's still weird that a guard can't see you if you're in his line of site 20 feet away. He's not a mouse for god's sake, there shouldn't be a fog of war past 10 feet. (I'm playing on hard and I don't think the game handicaps guard abilities at that level)

Oh and one more thing on morality:

One of the side missions I did during the first assassination was to poison the antidote supply a gang was producing. There was actually a surprising amount of grey area in the setup of that mission. Ostensibly you're helping granny rags out, and getting a gamey bonus (upgrayyds) as a result. Good thing! But then the Outsider is like: this lady kind of fucked up somewhere down the line, so think about that. And then when you head into the distillery you see a note listing all the families that are not part of the gang that buy their antidote. So you'll also be poisoning a ton of innocent people. But you're also cleaning up the gang. So I ended up pretty unsure of what to do. I ended up poisoning it anyway as I was already 90% in, and I was interested to see how that would effect things later. I really hope it does and in a nuanced way. Of course, it may not. But at least playing it felt super grey morality wise. Along the lines of what the Witcher does. And that was cool.

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Aside from everyone loving the game (to which I can add my voice to join the chorus), two of the most common complains I've seen are "it doesn't make sense that a guard can see me when I'm in darkness" and "it doesn't make sense that a guard can't see me when I'm in darkness," the difference of course being that the first set of people are close to the guard and the second set are far away. I suspect using shadows for stealth in a video game is always going to be tough; if you make them magic shadows like in Thief, it's an easy binary for people to know if they're hidden or not, but it's kind of silly, and if you make them normal shadows like in Dishonored, if someone bumps up the gamma or decides that in real life the shadow wouldn't be effective at that range, then they'll get annoyed that they're hidden.

I'm not far enough in to make any determinative judgments one way or the other except to say that everything I've played thus far has been stupendous.

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I wonder what the venn diagram is of "people complaining about hiding in shadow in Dishonored being frustratingly unclear," versus "people complaining that Mark of the Ninja isn't immersive because it clearly demarcates hidden and visible through non-diegetic UI."

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Playing this right after Mark of the Ninja certainly makes the distinction painfully apparent. I did have at least one moment when a guard spotted me from what I thought was too far off and confused me thoroughly as to the capabilities of the AI.

Then again I did have another moment right after where a maid came into a room I was in and I blinked to the top of a bookcase and laughed maniacally to myself (not in game).

I might be in the part of that venn diagram that thinks both types of gameplay are equally awesome for wildly different reasons.

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I might be in the part of that venn diagram that thinks both types of gameplay are equally awesome for wildly different reasons.

Venn diagram z-axis unlocked.

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