Dishonored and XCOM came out on the same day in the United States, doing few favors to the free time of serious gamers. As for me personally? I haven’t had any free time in the past six months. It’s been one very long, very exhausting sprint of professional responsibilities, leaving me scarcely time to check my email, let alone immerse myself in games. I haven’t seen anyone socially in months. And then Dishonored and XCOM arrive, both on the same day, and of course I bought them both because I’m me, and here I am trying to insert slivers of play time no wider than acupuncture needles here and there into the unyielding mass of my schedule. Luckily I think that’s a light further on down the tunnel, so hopefully things will go back to normal soon. And I have been finding a little time to play.
You’re On Her, Your Honor
Dishonored comes from Arkane, which in and of itself surprises me. The studio has been around for quite a few years now, but it’s never actually made a good game – nor, in fairness, has it made a bad one. Arkane’s work has heretofore been extremely, profoundly okay: Dark Messiah of Might and Magic was okay. An earlier attempt, the unusual subterranean RPG Arx Fatalis, was okay. You could tell that Arkane had talent, and creativity, and was pretty good technically, but I never really saw the company being able to break out of a sort of mediocre mold.
Imagine my surprise, then, with Dishonored, a game hit so far out of the park that the park is but a speck in the rearview and still falling away. Dishonored makes me think differently about Arkane, to think that maybe with their earlier work they were just kind of feeling a way toward the accomplishments of which they felt truly capable if they could only find the path. The company did make some important staffing additions crucial to this game (Deus Ex: Invisible War lead Harvey Smith, for one; and former Valve art director Viktor Antonov, who was largely responsible for the bleak stone-and-angled-metal dystopia of Half Life 2’s City-17), but what’s truly amazing about Dishonored is how good it feels. I mean, that in itself is not terribly amazing, it’s just that I wouldn’t have expected it from Arkane.
I suppose the above paragraphs would probably read as pretty offensive to anyone who works for Arkane. That’s really not my intent. Dishonored doesn’t strike me as accidental. Instead, it strikes me as proof that Arkane has always had a lot of capability and is now really beginning to realize it.
Arkane – and they have made no secret of their influences – basically took the best of Thief, Half Life 2, Bioshock, Deus Ex, and Assassin’s Creed and rolled it all into a game. It hybridizes a mission-based first person sneaker with large, sprawling environments that create the perceived affordance of an open world without actually being one. Overlapping, often conflicting optional objectives and a myriad of potential solutions to your problems result in a sense that you can go as you please and do as you please, provided, of course, you stay within the general parameters of your mission.
A Dish Best Served Cold with A Side of Jellied Eels
That mission is revenge, revenge for the dis on your honor. You’re Corvo Attano, Lord Protector (read: bodyguard) to the Empress Jessamine of Gristol and her daughter, crown princess Emily. Corvo is a trusted advisor, even a friend to the Empress, and Emily adores him. So there you are with a nice government job, the opportunity to do some traveling, the ear of a hot Empress and a delightful little girl to play hide and seek with.
But Jessamine is murdered, brutally, and Emily gets snatched by the assassins and to a casual observer it would totally look like you did it and before you have a chance to say “that was a really good frame-up,” you’re in prison getting poked with red-hot pokers, less than a day away from your big showy public execution. The city’s ruling elite planned it and even stop by the prison to make fun of you for falling into their trap.
I know it looks bad, but I honestly had nothing to do with it.
Gristol, and its capital city of Dunwall, is a panoplytic merger of various architectures, technologies, and cultures. Swords and flintlock pistols coexist alongside electric lights, combustion engines, and even robots. Fascism is the watchword; religious orders control speech and belief with inquisitorial authority. The punishment for practically every infraction is death, street gangs clash with the City Guard, religious police kidnap children in the night and initiate them into their order. Poverty shares streets with opulent wealth, homeless scrabble for dumpster food in the shadow of eight-story manses. Dunwall is a cold, hard-edged mixture of Orwell and Machiavelli.
Oh, and there’s a terrible plague that’s already wiped out about a quarter of the population. The sick are in agony for days before bleeding out through the eyes; plastic-wrapped corpses pile in the streets and many doors are heavily barricaded and marked as plague homes. It’s spread by rats, this plague, and the rats of Dunwall have recently gotten out of control. Even the rich have rats. The streets teem with them. Alone they’re nothing to worry about, but rats get smarter in groups, and rat swarms can strip a man to the bone in ten seconds. No wonder people on the street curse and stomp every rat they see: one or two often indicate a coming swarm.
Rats. I mean… darn it.
The influence of City-17 and the City of Thief are in evidence here, obviously. Dunwall is a little of both. But it’s also its own place; Dishonored isn’t a straight copy of anything. This world has a vast mythology and a lot of unique character, almost all of it kind of… horrid. The food, for god’s sake… brined hagfish, potted whale meat, jellied eels… “bread” is the most normal thing I’ve eaten in this hellhole of a city where concentrated whale oil is used as fuel and people protect themselves from evil spirits by carving out totems of bones and walrus tusks, only to be hauled away and executed for blasphemy by the religious Overseers.
Discharge
Corvo’s escape is inevitable, and he soon hooks up with a sort of resistance that’s fighting against the High Regent (the guy actually behind the murder of Empress Jessamine and the kidnapping of her daughter). The resistance sees the former Lord Protector as the final piece of their revolutionary puzzle – trained in stealth and combat, he can systematically eliminate their political enemies and get his revenge at the same time.
Depending on my mood, at least one of these guys is going to have a very bad night.
Of course, everyone thinks Corvo murdered the Empress, so they stick a big mask on your face to wear when you’re out on assignment. It’s… not particularly subtle, but in this gloomy, diseased metropolis of rebreather-clad assassins and Overseer enforcers hidden behind terrifying golden masks that resemble smiling children, you stand out less than you might imagine.
I have a feeling that Dishonored is going to get to this, but it kind of goes without saying that the country wasn’t a nice place for most people to live even when Empress Jessamine held power. Oh yeah, everyone makes it clear that things have gotten worse since her death. And she seemed like a nice lady. But even so, the autocratic stranglehold of life in Dunwall doesn’t seem terribly new. The poverty is endemic, the strict lines between the aristocracy and the people weren’t drawn in days or weeks. Dunwall is a city of Haves and Have-Nots, though the plague is remorseless about taking them both. I am curious if part of Corvo’s journey won’t be about the realization that it wasn’t until his life was shattered that he truly understood the world in which he lives.
Yeah… that’s a whale swimming through the ether back there. Corvo has bad dreams.
I’m playing through Dishonored very slowly – about halfway through the second assassination mission, actually, which amounts to maybe six or seven hours of play. Each major mission is huge, practically a world unto itself, and what a world it is.
A Man Chooses, A Slave Obeys, A Steerpike is a Dumbass
They’ve been really pushing the concept of choice in this game, choice in how to approach your objectives, how to infiltrate secure keeps, how to play Corvo. Stealth versus violence is the least of it. Right now I need to get into a brothel, for example, and I know of at least six ways in, of varying degrees of effectiveness, and those six are all either doors or windows. I haven’t yet checked to see how the brothel is hooked up to Dunwall’s sewer system; I haven’t investigated chimneys or hiding in delivery vehicles or using one of Corvo’s unexpectedly-gained magical powers to possess a rat’s body and skitter through a crack in the wall. Any or all of them could be valid. Occasionally the game itself will pause and remind you to look around and be creative.
Complex, forward-thinking decisionmaking is a hallmark of Dishonored. Who you kill and how you kill affect the attitudes of your allies, affect the behavior of the guards, even impact the course of the plague. My very first assassination target presented me with a number of options, none of which were ideal. At least one was easy, and would guarantee that I’d never be considered a suspect, but it would result in someone else being accused of the murder. Another was straightforward but would have meant a bloody running knife-and-gun battle to the exit. A third had potential but would require amazing stealth and, frankly, for me to trust someone I’d never met before. A fourth came across as the most cold-blooded, but also the most likely to get my primary objective completed without raising an alarm.
I believe in peace, bitch.
You see a lot of this in Dishonored. Choosing whether to use the rooftops or the alleys as your main path from place to place. Casing a building and finding a way in that suits your purposes. Messing with the City Guard’s automated security systems. Luring rat swarms toward foes by gobbing severed human limbs and viscera into a Hansel/Gretel trail of gore for the vermin to follow. In fact, the most difficult thing about the range of player choice in Dishonored is that I at least don’t always think as nonlinearly as the game allows, and I feel like I’m doing it, or myself, a disservice.
So though I laud the inclusion of choice in games, it also sometimes makes me feel bad when I’m actually playing such choice-laden titles. If I elect to go across the rooftops instead of going through the sewer to get to my objective, I somehow feel guilty for “skipping” the sewer. This isn’t a rational thing, and it’s not the game’s fault, but it’s an interesting aspect of granting choice in entertainment.
One of the nicest things about children, and one of the things that adults lose when they grow up, is the ability to not care about “playing it wrong.” Kids play in a pure sense. I have lost that ability.
With games like Dishonored, I often can’t help but feel that I’m playing it wrong. The developers would shake their heads at this and say there’s no wrong way to play Dishonored, and they’d be right. But that wouldn’t stop me feeling it sometimes.
Even the hub area is a small open world, with its own mysteries to explore.
Not Among Thieves, Though
The PC system requirements are surprisingly high, so check under the hood if you want to go this route. It is a little surprising, though, since Dishonored shows no signs at all of being a hardware hog. It makes spectacular use of Unreal 3 technology and shows off fabulous visuals, practically nonexistent load times, and bedrock-like stability. A generous person would call my PC high end – I have a Core i7 2600K with 16GB and a GeForce 560 on Windows 7 x64. That’s well within the recommended specs but hardly top of the line; Dishonored is capped at 60 frames per second and I have never seen it drop below 59. I guess it might not be the most graphically punishing game in the world, but it looks amazing, and the performance (especially the ridiculous non-load times, less than a second) tells me that this game is super well-optimized. Honestly, if you’re above the minimum specs you’re probably going to be okay.
The biggest complaint I have about Dishonored right now is a really weird one. Corvo carries his knife in his right hand and keeps his left free for some other tool – gun, crossbow, readied spell, whatever. Knife is your primary weapon, and a left click swings it, which is very standard for first person games. But for some reason the visuals of it here, the knife so evidently on the right of the screen, and often having a gun or something so prominently on the left, is very disorienting. It’s the visual disconnect between which button I’m using and which hand is executing the action. That’s bizarre because left click is almost always used for the primary action, and primary weapons are almost always in the character’s right hand in a first person game, but in Dishonored I often accidentally click wrong. I can’t explain why, but I’d love a way to switch the visuals (not the controls), so Corvo’s got his knife in his left and his secondary in his right.
Look, I know “left” and “right” are not hard concepts, but it confuses me, okay?
In general I can’t say enough about this game, at least based on the handful of hours under my belt. I mean, it’s basically Thief in all the right ways, with a bunch of roleplaying elements and a deep new world mythology to explore. This is a game I’d have expected from Looking Glass, not Arkane; that Arkane managed it tells me I’ve been unfair to the studio all along.
The two top contenders for game of the year came out on the same day. XCOM is everything it ought to be, an absolutely monumental reboot of one of the best games ever made. Dishonored is a slurry of many influences, so I guess you could claim that it’s not “original,” if you don’t know the meaning of that word, because it is so very original in so very many ways. On my personal scale, right now at this moment, it’s edging out XCOM for the top spot. The year’s not over, but these two titles are a million miles better than the next best of 2012. I find it hard to believe something could possibly supplant them.
Now if only I had no job and no demands on my time.
Make squeaky little rat sounds at Steepike by emailing him.
These games came out at the worst possible time for me, when my computer is trying to cough up a lung (which is impressive, given that it doesn’t have lungs to begin with). But I am glad that both Dishonored and XCOM are turning out to be worth the hype. With Assassin’s Creed 3 I’ll have a busy season…eventually.
I know what you mean, Steerpike, about the odd side effects of choice. I don’t too often feel them when it comes to plot decisions – I’ve been playing through The Witcher 2 lately and not once thought, “Gee, I should load an old save and try helping the Scoia’tel this time!” – but with gameplay options I always feel this odd pressure to do whatever it is the game does that the fewest other games do. This is part of the reason I invariably played such a social/hack heavy Human Revolution character: it always felt wrong to shoot my way through problems because I could do that in a million other games, even when I really just wanted to kill some dudes.
And I can sympathize with the controls/visuals thing. I had this problem with The Darkness 2, which had the same issue once you were dual-wielding, and I repeatedly had to learn not to accidentally fire my SMG when I just wanted to fire my pistol. I eventually changed the control scheme and had to learn to right click to fire the weapon in “my” right hand whether or not I was carrying two, but it made my brain feel loads better when the chips were down.
How odd that the mouse buttons are the reverse of what you see on-screen. I’m playing on the 360 and the right trigger swings my knife while the left fires the crossbow or spell.
@Toger: Having seen this in other games on the PC, I think it’s because the left mouse button is used as “primary” (which is pretty much always the right hand) because the left mouse button is used for everything else on the computer, and I guess somebody or other thinks it would be peculiar to change what the most important button in your control scheme is. And to be sure, when I swapped them in The Darkness 2, it was awkward for a while.
Consoles tend to be a bit more freeform about controls since they don’t have the “everything else” part so much (or when they do it’s a corollary to the games rather than the other way around). Nothing out there is making gamers really used to using the left trigger all the time and using the right sparingly.
Ye gods, man, we do think alike. Every line of that was something I’d already thought while playing, or during my sessions of introspective digestion between plays. I really have nothing more to say. That was eery.
Good first impressions of Dishonored.
I was on the fence considering the ridiculous pc requirements (especially when neither the scope of the levels nor the gfx’s looked like they might require 5850 as the ‘base’).
This game has such a strong ‘Thief’ vibe that I went ahead and got it and it’s got me hooked and surprisingly it runs smooth on my ageing 4850 with around 6 sec’s of load time.
The world looks like it needs to be savored…not rushed.The gfx look like oil painting coming to like.
Just as I was getting ready to call it a day as far as pc gaming is concerned out pop Black Mesa and Dishonored(imo a re-imagined Thief)…perfect.
Steerpike,
I am thinking carefully about those four ways to complete the first proper mission, which I finally completed last night after 12 hours of play. I went non-lethal, of course.
I was also concerned that the magical “blink” would spoil the stealthy feel but, astonishingly, it heightens it. In one fell swoop, they’ve got their own solution for Thief’s rope arrows that feels tighter than the climbing gloves of Deadly Shadows.
I could not believe how that first mission sprawled and sprawled and sprawled. It’s large, although the console-friendly nature means it has to broken into several loading zones. Sidequests kept pouring out of the game like rats from the sewers.
I hadn’t noticed the problem with the left/right although it does explain some of my wrong-clicky moments when I swish about with my knife instead of blinking.
I’m still not convinced it’s really paying much attention to my playstyle. Yes, there is the rats/weepers thing but sounds more like adaptive difficulty than moral complications. I chose non-lethal in that first mission but no one, not a one person so far, has said “good for you, well done on that”.
And, strangely contradicting everyone who has said it’s too short, I’m wondering whether I can still have this much fun right to the end. I’ve seen so many mechanics already and upgraded pretty much everything I wanted to, so seems little point in further skill upgrades for a non-lethal player. Why seek more runes and bone charms etc. etc.? Even coins to some extent?
So I’m actually a little anxious right now! I’ve got a solid ten hours under my belt and wondering what more the game can show me. I wonder – did I ever worry about this with Thief? Probably not.
Good call on the Empress presiding over the authoritarian regime thing, which I noticed too. I would imagine that’s why she was really bumped off, being too nice and incompatible with the status quo.
P.S. I absolutely aching loved Arx Fatalis.
Thanks everybody, I’m mostly glad to be back with enough time to write for my own site. : )
The left/right thing is totally me. I’d have trashed Arkane relentlessly if they’d made right click primary and left click secondary; the controls are exactly what you’d expect of a PC FPS. Given Toger’s reaction my suspicions are confirmed – with a controller, your shoulder buttons typically correspond to your hands – which actually makes more sense when you think about it. That’s why the controls of some games (like Dark Souls) are so hard to convert to the mouse. The mouse system is more precise, but less intuitive.
HM, I too have wondered if I’ll be able to have so much fun all the way through. This is such a good game, so well made, so clever, will it eventually seem redundant to me? Will I be ready for it to end? I don’t know. I can say that I hope they try a few different things here and there – like they broke up Thief’s burglaries with a few genuinely terrifying haunted levels.
You’re right on about the blink power. I wasn’t sure about it myself at first, but of course now I use it constantly. It’s by far my most commonly equipped secondary. And they were so generous with what Corvo can climb up or perch on that what could have been infuriating is liberating instead.
Amit, glad to hear it’s running okay on your older system. I think they might have scared some people off with those system requirements. They’re higher than they need to be. Your description of it as an oil painting is very apt… this game has a very painterly style. I was somewhat put off by close-up encounters with people until I realized this, that it was an intentional mechanism. Once it clicks it works very very well.
In a couple of weeks I might have no work schedule, funds to buy the game and open afternoons. The magic blink sounds like zippy do dah fun time.
Oh hang it! Fine, buying Dishonored now. Happy?
Your comments about “playing it right” really hit close to home with me. I suffer from the mad desire to see everything, and knowing that multiple paths means I likely won’t drives me nuts. But ironically, when I put aside that urge and play these types of games like a normal human (relatively speaking of course) and not like a dumpster-diving klepto, it tends to feel more natural and enjoyable. I’m finding that now with DXHR. It helps that I’m at a point where I don’t need to scrape for every bullet, energy bar, or praxis though. I’m striking a good balance now between poking into nooks and crannies for interesting rewards and playing the plot with purpose so to speak.
It also doesn’t help my dysfunction that these types of games tend to reward exploration. The dissonance comes (to a degree) from what you find in odd places (ammo in a trashcan, I mean come on! Looking at you Bioshock).
Anyway enough about that. Comparison to Looking Glass is high praise indeed, and pretty much seals if for me.
HAHA! Synonamess Botch is broken! Who will be next??
You make an interesting point about dissonance of ammo in garbage cans. There’s a bit of that here in Dishonored – not as much, but some. For a place where poverty is such a problem, people sure do leave a lot of coins lying around. There’s also a whole lot of food in strange places, though most of the food in this game is so revolting I can’t bring myself to eat it, health bump or no.
Looking forward to your thoughts, Botch.
Oh come on, Steerpike! Eat a can of potted whale meat. It’s far more appetizing than the jellied eel… and it’ll do you a world of goo… d!
And personally, I want the ability to Blink from place to place in real life. With the exception of Dark Vision, that’s the spell I use/enjoy the most.
Only downside to Dishonored is that it’s relatively short. Of course so were Thief 1/2/3. And those were the downsides to them, too!
I was probably going to succumb in any event, but now this game will have to be on my Christmas list (doing a favour to my wife and others who struggle to find appropriate gifts…!). Thanks.
Meho and I were just talking. Dishonored is basically Thief for the 21st Century. I like so much about this game. We see them so rarely, games with such a rich mythology and world. It makes me think of the Pagan poems from Thief, and the mystery of the City. Dishonored is darker and crueler and more… hideous, I guess… but the fundamentals are there.
I can’t understand the claims that it’s short. Now, I haven’t finished – not even close, I think – but each mission is a good three hours if you try to complete everything. Besides, I’d have thought that Portal proved brevity need not be a shortcoming (see what I did there? shortcoming? eh? eh?), but people still complain about it. Oh well, their loss. Dishonored is pretty awesome.
I say!!!!!! I mean, I am 17 hours in and approaching the home stretch. I assume that at least 18 hours of play on the first walkthrough is nothing to be sneered at. And obviously, this being a non-lethal walkthrough, I will inevitably play through it again, to experience the bloodthirsty style. So, certainly not a short game for a person who enjys playing with its myriad of systems at player’s disposal. Joyless gamers who just run around and stab everyone in the neck will have a shorter experience, sure, but to me that’s like practicing ONE move in a fighting game and then fighting every single opponent using that move. I have seen people on PSN play like this – in Arcana Heart 3 for instance – and find it hard to imagine how this could be fun for them.
But, also, what I thought is great about Dishonored is exactly that it doesn’t feature padding. Missions feature optional searching for runes and bonecharms, but these actually help you refine your playstyle so are very much welcome and are part of the game’s lore. And there are NO side quests. What you have when you’re in the field are “optional” missions that are actually alternative ways of completing the main quest, the story mission. There are NO random fetch quests (the few that there arein the game actually contribute to your main quest) and mission design is smart and varied and every single mission in its entirity revolves about your ultimate goal – eliminating the target, but in such a way that experimenting, improvisation and analysing of the environment are highly rewarding. To me this is very much what separates Dishonored from the current crop of AAA stealth/ assassination gaming – compared to Splinter Cells and Assassin’s Creeds, this is a game where every single piece of action is part of the great tapestry of the current mission and is not thrown in just because this or that mechanic looked cool in some power point presentation.
Also, the richness of the world and mythology that Steerpike mentions: it’s not that other games lack in those, it’s that Dishonored has a smart and measured way of communicating them to the player. I dislike, nay, abhor the way games often do it – Mass Effects and Dragon Ages with their codex nonsense that puts me to sleep, Elder Scrolls with its awkward infodumps… Dishonored almost totally does away with cutscenes (what little limited interraction parts there are in the game are still in the first person, with some freedom granted) and lets you soak in the world as you play, through choosing to read the books and diaries, through observing grafitti on the walls and eavesdropping on conversations, through examining the arhitecture and city design. In that sense it is VERY much like Thief.
Thanks for your great impressions Steerpike. I haven’t been doing any gaming in months and your post peaked my interest enough for me to pick this one up (for the 360) and have been really enjoying it.
One thing I have really enjoyed is the attention to detail the game offers for those that play it slow and look for it. It can be small things, like characters leaving notes and items in your room depending on you complete mission objectives (which if you rush in and out of there you may miss being tacked to your wall, or your dresser). Plenty of small details thrown about to make the world feel real and lived in.
Also, something that I am sure a lot of players overlook which I find very cool, is that the Heart doesn’t just show your the location of runes and bone charms, but you can target any character in the game and activate the heart and it will speak to you about that character. It is pretty impressive the amount of things it will say and will identify main characters by name and give you details about them you would othewise not know. Vey cool stuff.
I just finished the Sokolov mission and have been using the Heart much more. I wonder if there’s something to be taken from the fact that it only tells you bad things about people. A few of its remarks have really stuck with me… “if he does not die tonight, he will take two more lives before taking his own.”
*shiver*
The first guard I used the heart on it told me the same thing, and at first I naively thought amazing, have they given henchmen in this game individual personalities/stories?, only to have it start saying the same thing about pretty much everyone. The trick is to use it excessively on one or two people, then never use it again, and you’ll be impressed.
RE Max’s point, if you keep using it on nameless characters, you’ll also get contradictory and/or inappropriate information, such as hearing about the long, dark future of someone who is also about to commit suicide, or hearing someone complaining about what she has to do to keep her job as a maid when she’s actually a plague survivor living a destitute life in the sewers.
Yeah, given how many times I’ve heard “Do you think you’ll get your own squad after what happened last night?” and “Should we meet up for whiskey and cigars?” I figured the Heart’s novelty must wear off eventually. Haven’t heard many repeats yet but I do really love the idea of the thing.
They do say brevity is the soul of wit. I for one prefer a tight, focused narrative to something with a bunch of meaningless padding thrown in (can you say JRPG? Oh the fishing and cooking and worthless item crafting we’ll do!). I even thought some recent games in the same vein as Dishonored overstayed their welcome a bit (looking at you again Bioshock).
So I’m pretty much with the rest of you: the complaints about a short game don’t concern me in the slightest.
I’ve read this website on a regular basis since the day i found it (even reading backdated stories from when it was called FFC), but PLEASE, for the sake of the industry and the ever present diminishing standards, review games using a surround sound speaker system instead of headphones, even if only for an hour.
No matter how great this game may or may not be it doesn’t properly support 5.1 (and probably 7.1) and that is seriously detrimental to the gameplay experience (for me at least). Sure you can set the menu in game to 5.1 or auto, but the only sounds that come out of the center channel speaker are ambient reverb effects… sounds like words spoken to you by NPC characters in game 2 feet in front are missing… your own footsteps are missing… the list goes on and on and on….
IF reputable websites like this place and other game industry journalists don’t hold developers/publishers accountable to for the diminishing standards in audio engineering who will?
(and please, don’t reply ‘the consumer’ because we all know that will never happen)
Hello, drivetheory!
I… I did play with a 5.1 speaker set.
Wait, didn’t I? Now you’re making me doubt myself!