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JordanC's Dishonored (PC)
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| [October 26, 2012 10:23:04 AM]
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A selling point for a modern game is nonlinearity. For some games a linear story, like the Uncharted series, carries it along, but for one reason or another developer’s feel that games need to be more open. Often this lead to a thrown in good or bad choice system to make the experience ‘your own’, and it usually feels pretty cheap. If your game is going to leave many choices up to the payers, you have to design around that, not throw it in because the developer says nonlinear sells. The newly released Dishonored have ‘leave it up to the player’ in mind throughout the whole development cycle, and it shows. While the game has a take on the ‘good or bad’ system, where freedom shines is how to approach your target.
The development team at Arkane Studios spent a lot of time coming up with a variety of ways the player can infiltrate the domain of their next assassination target. This could be strolling through the front door, shooting a guard in the face, and then slowing time to knife everyone before they have a chance to sound the alarm; or by taking control of a fish and swimming through the sewer drain to reach the room of your target and quietly planting some infringing evidence on their person. Take for example a level where you must go to a bath house to assassinate two targets. The three level mansion has numerous widows to enter undetected, there is a storm drain you can swim through, or there’s always the front door. Those are the only three that I’ve found without doing too much snooping around, but experience from other levels tells me that there are at least three more. This game truly exercises the belief that the obvious answer is not always the best, and the developers implemented that with several paths the player can take.
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| [October 12, 2012 09:48:05 AM]
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The game Dishonored was recently released by Bethesda, and developed by Arkane Studios. This game is a first person RPG, which takes many cues from games like Bioshock and Deus Ex. The goal of this game is pretty straight forward; you have to save the recently assassinated empress’ daughter, while also overthrowing the illegally established military government, by assassinating key political figures. You can do this by which ever means you see fit. The game gives you the ability to sneak past your foes without them ever seeing you, knock them out so they can’t alert other guardsmen, or kill them to permanently end their threat. Will all three options are more than viable, the game heavily tailors to the sneaking paths. Killing guards increases your chaos rating, which in turn brings more guards, where sneaking will lower the amount of guards, and increases your rating at the end of every level. Like Deus Ex, the game allows your character to upgrade his abilities like blink, which allows you to teleport a short distance, and ability to see guards through walls. You get these upgrades by obtaining runes which are scattered throughout the maps. This game has the same problem that I am seeing with games that ‘allow you to play the way you want to’; they all tend to focus one way or the other. This game along, with Deus Ex: Human Revolution, focus on the side of sneaking. Both sneaking and attacking are viable, but one is clearly better than the other. I would love to see a FPSRPG that has both sneaking and attacking as equal ways to approach the level, but until then I don’t have much of a problem with sneaking around.
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JordanC's Dishonored (PC)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Friday 12 October, 2012
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