Dishonored | Capturing the Arkane | 2020 Review

[Music] oh arcane studios inspired by the likes of deus ex system shock and thief spent the 2000's creating a gameplay formula that would become dishonored first in ark's fatalis and then a sequel that later became dark messiah of might and magic then things took a turn getting led on by valve into creating the unreleased half-life raven home imagine half-life ravenholm never being released with something like hunt down the freeman and half-life alex getting the green light that's okay though because then arcane would proceed to fail to find a publisher for their next game the crossing and then getting their next project lmno cancelled by ea i mean lmno was ea's idea which they brought to arcane and asked them to develop despite arcane having been founded by former ea employee rafael collie antonio who was disturbed by ea's business practices during his time there in the 90s so arcane subsisted living off jobs like assistant development on games such as cod world at war and bioshock 2. general regulars will recognize that last sentence as being descriptive of several other studios as well this was when harvey smith joined the company being the qa lead on system shock a producer on ultima 8 a lead designer on deus ex and in fairness deus ex sequel invisible war and that was when they were approached by none other than bethesda softworks because what is one of my videos without bethesda but how did they get top billing on dishonored ahead of the guys who actually made the game well bethesda and arcane entered a partnership and by partnership i mean bethesda withheld milestone payments on an already financially weakened arcane in order to acquire their company and intellectual properties i mean that's just an unfounded rumor of course similar to how they almost did the same thing to obsidian with fallout new vegas and they acquired studios like machine games of star breeze fame and tango gameworks and id man it sure is fortunate the bethesda and cinemax just happened to be in the area at the same time all these companies had financial difficulties in order to acquire them and gradually build an empire riverboats pass day and night and the looters are going to start gathering once they're sure i conclude if our enemies are not dead by the month of wind we will be once we take dunwall tower i'll see that her life is better i've always thought that i'd command the navy in her name sometimes i wonder if i shouldn't just take the title lord regent and do it properly don't worry arcane was too naive to survive in this world they got [ __ ] over by literally every big player in the industry ubisoft got them to make might and magic instead of a sequel to arc's fatalis valve refused to publish ravenholm ea proposed the project and then backed out two years in activision got them to work on a con game 2k got them to work on the scuffed bioshock and then bethesda everybody's favorite company at the time remember that this was before bethesda tried to sue mojang over usage of the name scrolls bethesda showed them some small relief before slipping that final knife in but hey these are just unconfirmed allegations arcane had been juggling budgets since its inception and maybe it caught up with them with dishonored i guess there are worse fates than being a zenimax subsidiary like being forced to create a reboot for a game you didn't create the original for or getting bought out by microsoft dishonored is a stealth action game set in a post-apocalyptic empire riddled with corrupt oh um yeah sure okay we can't make that joke here unless the video get labeled what'd you call it perpetuating false information about a deadly pant okay okay it was just a joke so we'll call it corpus and i think with context clues or your preferred search engine you can deduce what i'm talking about the prologue is early in the course of the disaster but the bulk of the game takes place after the point where half the city has died despite attempts at containment we play as the lord protector to the empress originally i thought this prologue ran long but on playback i realized that it only takes about 9 minutes less if you decide you don't want to play hide and seek with emily okay i'm going to count to 10. find a place to hide here okay you win we should go now so mother can see you're going to have to do better than that if you want to make protagonist by game 2. we meet the empress to deliver our report we journeyed the aisles searching for aid with corpus and came up empty-handed we were apparently chosen for the task because there was no one else that she could trust which is silly but it worked out because no one tried killing her until after we came back the poor timing means we get sent to the slammer you could have just set this up as a frame job from the start and avoided that weird question of why the bodyguard of all people was handling the mail while corvo's busy serving his present sentence let's discuss genre the genre question was invariably going to come up what is dishonored it's half stealth and half action that combination invites platitudes about how dabbling in both means the game can't master either and that's actually true i'm someone who's completed this game main and dlc campaign without any alerts and even without killing a single person i've even done it without buying a single upgrade and i will freely admit that largely relied on religious worship of the f9 key i've spent less time because it takes less time playing the game as a typical action game i can say with a degree of certainty that the game is weakest when you try to play in either of these pure categories and it's at its strongest when you play a synthesis of these play styles instead the game is not good at stealth guards are very nearsighted not spotting the strange men climbing across the rooftop over yonder during the day or the guy leaning three feet around a corner but the guards are also bad about spontaneously turning around or randomly tilting their heads or spying a pixel of you from the crack of two door frames likewise the game is not good at combat corvo endowed are fairly fragile as action protagonists go a trait which is more so characteristic of stealth protagonists the game features a basic parry and repost system which makes both men the most dangerous fighters in the world at least until someone with a gun runs up behind you and blasts all your health away but even that's fine because the game is generous about giving you time to pop a health elixir resource management is not a threat playing outwardly aggressively and killing absolutely everyone made barely a dent in the amount of ammo i was finding in the environment just on casual inspection let alone with exploration despite my criticisms it's when you put these elements together that the game truly works wonders you can stealth far enough until you get caught and fight the rest of the way it's not like the typical stealth game where getting caught is an immediate reload job and it's not like the typical action game where stealth is an obvious afterthought it leads into an enjoyable hybrid playstyle but can be endlessly frustrating for anyone trying to do pure stealth or pure action pure stealth is going to involve a lot of reloads and pure action we'll get to what happens if you go pure action later as nice as this is invariably someone is going to come in and start screaming the words immersive sim and ruin our good time oh hang on it's the game's first safe there's the code i could have guessed it'd be 4-5-1 i wonder what truth is inside it dishonored story is the story of the city of dunwall rather than being about any one character which is fitting because there's little we really know about corvo itano there are scant few times in the game where we ever even see what corvo looks like in part because the game lacks reflective surfaces and also it's unreal engine 3 so corvo doesn't have a body even his name signifies his out-of-place nature as a foreigner corvo is a blank slate for the player to inhabit his methods and his decisions are a reflection of the person playing his character there's only one time in the game from another character's perspective that we even see corvo killing and that character is dowd dowd is the real assassin of the empress which makes it fitting in a game about assassins that he serves as the protagonist of the dlc campaign the knife of dunwall and the brigmore witches doubt is not the game's antagonist nor is he even the deuteragonist of the story both campaigns run parallel until dowd's conclusion where he meets his fate with corvo in the third act this is because dowd was little more than a weapon a tool used by the royal spymaster and this theme reflects in corvo corvo getting freed from prison by a disloyal guard escapes into the sewers and comes out to meet samuel a boat man who will be ferrying us around the city throughout the game samuel takes us to the men responsible for freeing us at the hound pits pub a loyalist conspiracy led by men in three different power structures of dunwall at present only two are here admiral farley havelock and lord trevor pendleton the last significant member of this conspiracy we meet is piero joplin a disgraced natural philosopher who is applying his trade crafting the exotic tools we have access to a handheld crossbow a folding sword and corvo's iconic mask this isn't ubisoft iconic either there is no better icon of the game than this mask that night as corvo rests before he begins his mission he's visited an asleep by the outsider a mysterious entity that has been designating protagonists in this universe he is the source of magic and he's taken an interest in corvo and his story to come he mostly exists as a shrug from the writers to explain the existence of magic in the setting and as a storytelling device he gives us the empress's heart which is pretty hardcore she has some insight in the world and can also point us towards important upgrades in the levels so begins corvo's mission his first target is the high overseer the head of the militant arm of the abbey of the everyman a religious faction dedicated to the worship of wait okay i'll let you guess gotta guess okay they worship cosmology it's effectively the imperial truth a religion founded around opposition to heretical worship of the outsider which they might actually have a point given what we encounter speaking of here we meet granny rags she's being harassed for protection money and if we choose to help her she'll ask that we assist her again in exchange for a rune which is useful for upgrading our magic she asks that we steal the vivisection of a plague rat from a local doctor researching the plague and put it into the elixir still of the bottle street gang which has the consequences you would logically expect somebody trap three of them in the distillery rest are wandering in the street after bypassing the quarantine we reach holger square where we encounter teague martin a former overseer currently shackled out in the rain he's the third conspirator and has vital information on our target we spare a guard captain jeff curnow from getting poisoned for asking too many questions which we were asked to do by one of the servants back at the hound pits before we left and we take down campbell in his hidden room down in the basement right before he shanks kern out we make our escape out back and head back to the hound pits our next mission is to secure our position in parliament by taking out the brothers of lord pendleton giving their votes to him instead they're currently in a brothel called the golden cat and it's believed by the loyalists that the golden cat is where emily has been hidden as well this is also where we are formally introduced to weepers two of whom have made their way into the sewers beneath the hound pit's pub this mission sees us returning to claverine boulevard the same locale as the previous job we get contacted by a few of the local thugs telling us that their boss wants to meet us surprisingly it's not about the poisoned elixir still rather slackjaw has a job opportunity wanting us to visit the doctor's office again to find one of slackjaw's men who went missing in exchange for a key that will give us easier access to the golden cat this leads into another job opportunity this time to get a safe combination out of a local art dealer at the golden cat in exchange slackjaw will take care of the pendleton brothers for us so we make our way over while campbell will always start off in his office the pendleton brothers each have two whole rooms they could be in so theoretically the mission could play out differently each time you play it in reality for me custis always seems to be in the gold room and morgan always seems to be in the steam room yeah this was an um an accident what the art dealer bunting can be found in the silver room tied to an electric chair we can torture him to get access to a safe inside which will be valuables as well as an invitation to the party finally emily can be found on the top floor we reunite and escort her to the vip entrance where she says that she'll go to the rest of the way and we don't have a choice on the matter so i hope she doesn't run into the giant swarm of rats the weepers the assassins the thugs or any of the guards on the way back to the boat or any of the witches that want to kidnap and mind swap with her we head back and inform trevor of his brother's fate but this isn't our only mission today our next objective will be to uncover the identity of the lord regent's mistress who was allegedly painted by anton sokolov we go and retrieve sokolov bringing him back to the hound pits for interrogation after a night's sleep we performed the interrogation and sokolov reveals that the lord regent's waifu is lady boyle but he doesn't know which one as he painted her from behind he did well for himself in his way he had many admirers among the aristocracy especially those who lack a solid background in matters of natural philosophy this sets up our next job as we infiltrate the boil estate during a lavish party we already have an invitation from the previous mission bypassing the infiltration of the estate although it should be stated that getting an invitation is embarrassingly easy we can blend into the party unwittingly handling a duel for pendleton signing the guest list and playing the party game all three boyle sisters have done similar outfits and where to deduce which one is which so not only must we figure out which lady boyle is our target but what outfit she's wearing as well and it is randomized the information we need is upstairs as well as a load of valuables and a skeleton key to dunwall tower after which we eliminate the correct boil and return to the hound pits we're finally in a position to eliminate the lord regent and we set out to finish the job we infiltrate dunwall tower and eliminate the lord regent before returning to the hound pits having avenged the late empress and expelling a tyrant sadly it doesn't last long as corvo drinks a little too much and ends up passing out in his bedroom while he's relapsing let's discuss dowd's story the knife of dunwall it's much simpler and more straightforward doubt is bothered by the death of the empress and gets approached by the outsider he remarks that the hit on the empress was different and pushes down by giving him a name delilah one of our lieutenants billy lurk discovers that delilah is the name of a ship owned by a local factory manager he'd acquired the ship from the local barrister arnold timch making him our next target temche named the ship after a painter named delilah copperspoon who knew the late empress as a kid delilah is a witch marked by the outsider like us and she has apparently known of dowd for some time this is when assassin hq gets attacked by a force of overseers who were sent by campbell we free some of our underlings and take out the head overseer and it turns out this was a betrayal by billy lurk who was working with delilah delilah even pops up which makes it kind of awkward because billy and dowd have a conversation while delilah just stands perched on a rooftop and none of our subordinates kill her nor does she try to kill doubt whom she's been stressing out about for some time now this leads into the second half of dowd's story the brigmore witches we know that delilah's holed up at brigmore manor but we need a ship to get out of the city so we bust local gang leader lizzy stride out of prison and reinstate her as the head of the dead eels we fix up her ship and sail up river to pay the witches in kind for the slaughter of our men before confronting delilah we're technically supposed to be here to stop delilah from mind-swapping with princess emily and taking over the empire but i feel like dowd is more so interested in the self-preservation aspect of eliminating delilah hell delilah's plan only works if emily comes back into the fold which she really shouldn't know considering emily's been missing ever since dowd kidnapped her unless we're being led to believe the brigmore witches are dunwall's most clandestine spy organization this is where corvo and dowd's story meet betrayal corvo's intoxicated with a half dose of lethal poison knocking him out and samuel sends us floating to the flooded district where we meet the whalers endowed dowd makes what is probably an intentionally pathetic attempt at containing corvo and this leads to a confrontation between the two men ending in doud's request that corvo spare him now before i continue i need to address the player choice in the room you may have noticed i've been scanned on details about the elimination of various targets we've encountered through the game this was intentional as i needed to separate the discussion of lethality and non-lethality to its own section each target bar sokolov whom we needed alive presents a choice between a lethal takedown and a non-lethal resolution however this was actually a choice that the player makes throughout the entire game from the very beginning with each person we encounter now i generally tend to play a character when i record for these videos one that tries to avoid confrontation where possible but not to the point of absurdity you could certainly say that dunwall is a city that is full of people who honestly aren't deserving of mercy but i tend to grade kindness on a curve during the apocalypse i tried to avoid a lot of the guards or put them to sleep where necessary there was the odd occasion where i would kill someone that the city was probably better off without seem nice enough shame she has to die i mean and so horrible like too now you listen to me it's none of our concern the how or why of things and if you want your elixir rations then i suggest you stop your wondering these are pigs pigs for soka loves experiments and pigs mean nothing to me understand [Music] or i had to kill a couple people because my quick save was seconds from discovery bring the alarm your choices are reflected in the chaos system if you avoid killing people then you're low chaos and if you kill more than 20 percent of the people you encounter you enter high chaos levels can change as a result with more guards and more named character deaths in a high chaos play through the system's not really that great though increasing the number of guards in a high chaos situation seems like potentially putting the player in a trap where they have a harder time of getting back to low chaos high chaos is also invariably going to be the result of a pure action playthrough should the player abandon stealth so anybody who just likes to swordfight is going to get locked into the bad ending i mean the high chaos ending what was funny however was when i reloaded the game and tried to get high chaos the world had effectively flipped a switch and everyone was suddenly a lot less optimistic as though i had been high chaos all along with news of the senseless slaughter of innocents at dunwall tower shouldn't have even reached the hound pit's pub yet this was most transparent with emily everyone says he did something good tonight did you kill anybody tonight how many you were drawing smiley faces when i left what's bad about the system is that our choices are meant to reflect in it poisoning the elixir still was a high chaos action but it got offset that very level by saving that guard captain jeff from getting poisoned and an overseer's sister in the backyard before i left even though arguably turning half of the bottle street gang into weepers is a tad more chaotic than three additional people surviving the night and it's not like it's really additive to the choices you make in terms of guards stabbing a guard is faster than choking them sure but it's not significantly so as to stop me from just knocking the troublesome ones out and avoidance is so easy that i wouldn't be surprised if i didn't encounter half the guards in the game but what about the targets well let's run through them you could kill high overseer campbell or you could mark him with the heretic's brand and turn him into a pariah you could kill the pendleton brothers or you could arrange to have them kidnapped shaved have their tongues cut out and thrown into a mine that has an exceptionally high lethality rate you could kill lady boyle or you could ship her away to live in her stalker's basement forever she's dead you monster oh my dead love you could kill the lord regent or you could broadcast a confession of his crimes across the city if i explain then you will see i am not at fault my poverty eradication plan was meant to bring prosperity to ridders of those scoundrels who waste their days in filth and drink without homes or occupations other than to beg for the coin for which the rest of us it was a simple plan bring the disease-bearing rats from the pandycian continent and let them take care of why is the most ethical non-lethal choice for the guy that makes the most sense to kill i marked campbell with the brand but he ended up turning into a weeper that you encounter later in the game so that wasn't really non-lethal and i killed the rest i did broadcast the lord regent's crimes after killing him but that was for style points whenever the game would try to present the non-lethal choice it just seemed worse than stabbing them the game tries to pretend this isn't the case there are more rewards for going non-lethal even though the non-lethal choices will cause some level of suffering and even chaos in the world am i supposed to believe there wasn't a chaotic argument after campbell awoke to find himself branded you could decide to just kill all three boyle sisters and bypass the game of figure in and out who is who but if you don't the surviving sister will send you money pendleton will also pay extra for choosing the non-lethal solution even though the pendleton mine is famous for how dangerous it is the one standout mission where non-lethal is the only choice is sokolov and that actually made me think of something interesting sokoloves is the only mission where samuel the boatman will meet you in the same stage as the target every other target requires you to go through a loading screen to get to him wouldn't kidnapping all the targets be a fairly valid choice for the player to make well i double checked and you can't take unconscious bodies with you through loading screens i would guess being able to collect all the conspirators pending trial would just create some added complications to the story dow's choices are markedly more mellow than corvo's you can kill the barrister timch who's been fraudulently condemning homes with plague in order to steal them from the healthy or you could condemn his home by plaguing it with the smell of a weeper and you can kill delilah or just trap her in the void dowd despite being an assassin by trade actually has less targets than corvo his missions tend to revolve around solving problems for people i guess arcane took the criticism to heart that they're non-lethal options were a little [ __ ] up however the best part of this is yet to come the flooded district sees the resolution to doubt story in the beginning of corvo's third act how this plays out for dow depends on the choices he makes which is code for whether he is high or low chaos if you play low chaos then corvo will spare you while if you play naughty he'll kill you like you guys realize that by the very same metric you're great in chaos and missions dowd's hit on the empress would technically be considered low chaos as only one guard died and funnily enough despite hunting down and purging all the brigmore witches as revenge for delilah getting a bunch of the whalers killed i still ended dowd's campaign on low chaos which i honored when it came my turn to choose i think corvo would generally understand dowd's plight dowd was a reflection of the people who employed him a weapon used by the royal spymaster and a grab for power in order to cover up the mistake he had made by introducing corpus into the slums of dunwall dowd would then be discarded and attacked by the men that used him and much the same corvo had been used as a weapon by the loyalists in order for them to take power something that became apparent when they discarded corvo once his usefulness had expired it's funny that dowd wouldn't mention the part he played in saving emily from delilah which is more likely a sign that plot point had been written after the fact and not a sign that dowd was a humble man corvo then escapes heading back to the hound pit's pub but not before a literal detour to resolve the granny rags in slackjaw storyline that hadn't been relevant since the third mission here we encounter granny rags about to cook and eat slackjaw and have to make a decision whether to assist her or to free slackjaw but this is a really bad choice for one players trying to get the ghoster non-lethal achievements are actually advised to avoid granny rags during the second mission as this section will heavily complicate your playthrough and for two it's a choice between getting a rune and getting gold neither of which are useful at this late stage in the game if you've been getting a decent amount of gold per level you'll probably own most of the upgrades at this point if not all of them and the game gives out so many runes that one more isn't as compelling a motivator as it was when we first helped granny out so we arrive at the hound pits to find it's been black mesad most of the lower class of the loyalist conspiracy have been wiped out except kalista due to havlock apparently owing captain cornell a favor we rescue piero and sokolov who've managed to thus far survive in the workshop and set out to complete an arc pylon that can eliminate all the guards in an area then we can flare samuel to come pick us up so that we can go after the loyalists the choice between stunning and killing the guards is a weird choice like i can only imagine people going out of their way to be psychopathic choosing the lethal option here when the non-lethal option is equal in terms of effort i would fix this choice by making the objective to grab the plans from havelock's room optional but necessary to get the non-lethal option i think the general idea the game was going for was that lethality was the easy but morally worse path and non-lethality takes more effort but is morally better this simply isn't a choice this leads into the final level of dishonored which changes based on how much chaos you've caused up to this point and honestly the level you get for high chaos is way better than the low chaos version the island in high chaos is a stormy battlefield martin's taking control of the lower level guards and overseers blockading havelock and pendleton on the upper levels who only retain the loyalty of the higher ranking officers you confront martin who commits suicide upon seeing us then you find pendleton who is bloodied from a stray round and bleeds out on the spot before finally climbing to the top of the tower and finding havlock who grabs emily and is prepared to leap off the tower he'll do it too stay where you are [Music] emily dying is one of the endings the best part that i didn't get to record but surprised me when it happened in a prior playthrough is that if you're really bad and kill enough people samuel will fire a gun off upon arrival alerting the guards as soon as you arrive this level sounds awesome right well in low chaos none of that happens havelock pendleton and martin are all in the upper level of the tower sipping tea and the lower level is nice and peaceful climbing the tower you find that havelock's poisoned martin and pendleton and he says he won't fight you go ahead kill me or take me to colebridge prison make your choice she'll be watching while this is generally a more positive ending i can't help but feel disappointed hell the third act betrayal is disappointing even if there is a point that corvo has just been getting used up to this point and that he finally frees himself of other people's control yeah sure whatever but wouldn't it have been nice to get a second round of assassinations after all this time the betrayal is more personal we don't really know burroughs or campbell when they betray us and we meet the pendletons and lady boyle for the first and last time in their respective missions the player actually builds a relationship with havelock pendleton and martin so those decisions on whether to spare or kill them would be more significant because this time it is personal of course i imagine arcane probably wanted to do that in fact martin was even going to have his own version of the office of the high overseer mission maybe they would have had the time to complete the game if somebody hadn't withheld their milestone payments mid development in order to acquire them dishonored has some phenomenal level design which makes sense given that the arcane seem to have plenty of talent in the design department even on repeat playthrough there isn't a point where i felt like rushing a section because the incentive is there to explore dunwall is a great setting an environment full of vertically stacked housing packed to the brim with vents and pipes and new pieces of technology that clash with the old aesthetic of a pre-whale oil society it really feels like a world amid an industrial revolution slash apocalypse but i repeat myself there's also a nice contrast between the clean and well-maintained homes of nobles in the thoroughly trashed world just outside their bubble and once the player makes it to the flooded district you really see the full extent of what corpus has wrought upon the city and much of the character of the city comes from the conversations you overhear and overseer asks his brother to give him the emperor's peace when he realizes that he's come down with the sickness you know what you have to do stop it i'll give you my share of elixir nonsense i don't want to bleed from the eyes and lose my mind i don't want to spread the plague to anyone else don't fall prey to restless hands i'm asking you to do this because you've known me for so long can you do it will you yes my friend i will before you weep before you bring down the rest of us thank you turn your back my friend recite the seven strictures i will make it fast restrict the wandering eyes that look hither and yonder for some flashing thing that easily catches but brings calamity in the next an officer remarks with fascination about how technology has changed the world around him a noble tricks another into confessing a distrust of the lord regent to get him arrested for thought crime there are so many ways to navigate the levels you can possess creatures to navigate small spaces take out whale oil tanks to disable security devices or find ways to climb around areas actually that last one is most of the game it can be fun the first couple times you realize the tricky section could have been bypassed with a little clever climbing but then you realize that almost every level is trivialized by climbing and it starts to sour the level design the office of the high overseer has a ledge which provides easy access to the entire second floor the golden cat has many shutters to climb through sokolov's elaborate manner can be entirely skipped thanks to a handy chain dangling off the roof and dunwall tower is full of ledges and chandeliers to climb you can very quickly and cheaply get the upgrades needed to trivialize stealth throughout the entire game by the second mission blink is a great idea and you can tell the entire game was built around it but there is a valid criticism when people say that it ruins the game a big part of the problem is that blink is a cheap cost neutral ability it only costs mana if you immediately cast another spell if you wait a few seconds the mana spent will recharge i say that the game was built around blink due to how prevalent it is in the story it's the main ability that's shared among every person in dishonored who uses magic and it's the outsider signature move and there's a consistency to it one of the whalers explains it as such now attempt a transversal do not focus on your destination with your eyes you know the layout of the room instead focus on where you wish to be standing and it will be solved which is consistent with how the game portrays it in this cutscene you can see the boat begin to move as though he's there before he even begins to appear as the reality has already shifted to accommodate his will that is a very deliberate choice on the part of the animators dowd as someone who's been using magic for a long time is even diegetically shown to have a greater mastery over blank as time stops while he chooses where to go but blink is a problem not just in my passing levels but in what i've termed the level wide siesta the fundamental choice of any stealth game is the choice of whether to avoid or eliminate a guard eliminating a guard can make it safer to operate in an area but creates new risks should the body be found some stealth games give you the option to move bodies putting you in a vulnerable state while doing so but allowing the player a measure of control in order to not make the simple act of eliminating guards feel like a punishment dishonored goes wild with this moving bodies is criminally easy and dishonored to the point that it too can trivialize the game based on the nature of levels and dowd's campaign it became a signature move of doubt and knock out and hide bodies for the entire level this is because bodies travel with the player through a blink so it goes as such choke out a guard immediately pick up the body teleport up to a ledge and put the body back down the guards have no defense against this strategy they can't find bodies that have been placed on balconies atop bookcases or even on top of chandeliers and the guards will never wake up again even worse however is that by default the game only allows a maximum of 5 bodies per level what happens if you violate that rule it starts despawning the bodies now this might make sense to you from a performance standpoint until you consider the following a body is a static entity while a living guard has patrol routes and line of sight and dialogue and other stuff so the game can handle 20 guards but not 20 corpses and i know it's a simple ini edit to fix this but ain't that the point it's just ridiculous that the cap was kept so low up to the final update for the game considering how easy it is to fix that's probably a bethesda influence if the players have posted on steam how to solve a problem then why bother fixing it dowd's missions are more open-ended than corvo's revolving around working as a problem solver more so than as an assassin as such i had to put a lot of people to sleep in the event i needed to come back to an area the first level at the slaughterhouse saw me backtracking and re-tracking across the entire level several times two of dowd's missions are retreads of corvos the surge is part of the flooded district a stay of execution for lizzie which is a terrible level name by the way is just the level dishonored at coleridge prison with an extra wing the brigmore witches would actually be a pretty terrible pack of levels if it didn't include brigmore manor the dead eel sees a part of dunwall where two gangs are fighting a turf war and as you progress the gangs become neutral to you that's cool and all but that doesn't excuse the character of lizzie stride your friend edgar wakefield set me up to be taken by the city watch and you followed him took his orders but you know what i forgive you all of you i'm filled with love but the following people each owe me a finger logan douglas bang bang ferrous pig face the bakers and annabelle [ __ ] two from you annabelle have a good night actually a lot of the character writing in the dlc is like this you guys remember that eccentricity was literally the mark of the outsider and not a part of the tone right for every one piero there were three callistas lydias and wallace's brigmore manor is interesting it's exterior is unique as it's the only mission to take place outside the city proper the game does make things a little too bright to cover up the fact there isn't a skybox past that fog the witches are similar to the whalers in terms of their ai their ability to teleport makes their patrol patterns and combat abilities unpredictable they are at least present through most of the brigmore witches unlike the whalers who only pop up in dishonored's third mission i wasn't particularly merciful as these guys got a bunch of my boys killed also i'm here to kill their leader and since they basically worship her i figure it'd probably be better to purge this whole place to prevent any future revenge schemes it was kind of awkward when i bought a favor to meet with one of the witches and she told me she'd hunt me down if i killed any of her sisters nine of which died on my way to the meeting the manor is a fun level unlike the average dunwall manor with a livable floor plan entropy has allowed the level designers to get creative with the layout delilah here's painted a portal to the void and we go in to find her in the midst of a ritual to mind swap with emily her non-lethal solution is probably the weakest in the entire game because it's introduced at this very moment dishonor generally goes out of its way to make sure the player knows their options long before they reach their target another point of interest while i'm giving you the grand tour corvo broadcast control station here where all them announcements come from might be worth looking into spare my life and i can help you beat him he makes recordings on audiograph secrets some that would destroy him if others heard anyways you can either shank delilah or you can lock her in the void i'm gonna go with the one that minimizes the chances of us ever meeting again [Music] there is a level of polish that's missing from the dlc missions the entire base game has been meticulously crafted as do not require objective markers objective markers and much of the ui for that matter are actually turned off in my game health and mana bars objective pop-ups tutorial notifications focus highlight pickup log contextual icons player stance objective markers grenade markers and awareness markers all off most of this stuff is unnecessary now usually i complain about lacking a health bar but dishonored isn't an action game so you don't always need one i kept mine off and use the one in the radial menu instead objective markers are the real problem though i feel that if you play dishonored with the markers on you're doing yourself a massive disservice it's not a big issue because again the level designers seem to do a pretty good job of not necessitating the player to ever use them and this is where i complain one of the first favors you can get as doubt is to have one of the whalers going ahead of you find out the combination of one of the safes and write it down on a wall and i quote favor loot the watch officer safe find the combination written on the wall oh yeah just on the wall outside the slaughterhouse just somewhere on a wall here well i knocked everyone out searched the entire exterior twice didn't find it looked it up there weren't any pictures of it because of course everybody who plays the game is a [ __ ] pleb who leaves their objective markers on so they didn't even realize the game hadn't actually told them where the code is they just follow the waypoint the dishonored fandom page leaves no description of location and the dishonored game pedia is so pathetic it doesn't even have a page for the mission so i have to turn on the objective markers for a second just to get pointed in the right direction yeah it's it's literally on the wall outside of the slaughterhouse hidden behind some boards that need to get broken outside to be damned arcane's level designers were generally pretty good about making sure stuff like this didn't happen in the base game the temps mission is pretty solid so it shouldn't be a surprise that it was originally going to be part of corvo's campaign one of the search objectives is to freehold the whalers but the game doesn't clue you in on where they all are and the game makes a big to-do about how much work turning the water wheel back on in the dead eels is even though the hard part was figuring out what the game even wants us to do then there are the dunwall city trials there are extra gameplay challenges that show at least a little bit of mechanical creativity back alley brawl is a horde mode that's pretty fun if not prone to randomly killing the player assassin's run has you going through a level trying to hit only the enemies oil drop is target shooting bend time massacre is a fun set of puzzles centered around the time stop power kill chain is a less fun set of puzzles bonfires has you using blink to get around as fast as possible train runner has you racing a train and kill cascade has you performing a series of drop assassinations to reach the end of a course and then there are the stealth challenges these represent the best and worst of the dunwall city trials burglar is a mode that has a stealing from a building while avoiding detection with three chances to get caught before failure i stripped that entire building drying into two gold pieces short of completion without any clue as to where the final two pieces could be yeah i think i'm done with this game mystery foe is topical as baby's first space station 13 is currently popular mystery foe selects a random enemy in the level and has the player navigate and find randomly placed clues as to the target's identity if you're detected the target books it stealthing it's a fun challenge since quick savings disabled and don't let the fact that i beat both the regular and expert version of this trial by guessing the targets after i get caught give you the idea that guessing's a surefire strategy incorporating randomness into the targets works well here and i kind of wish arcane had made more variations of this idea then again partitioning out a section of dlc seems like a bethesda's decision more so than an arcane decision and so we look to the future actually we wouldn't be if microsoft hadn't reaffirmed what i said in the syndicate review with the acquisition comes the question as to the future of arcane they got to make a dishonored 2 and it wasn't the worst thing but it sold less than the first game in large part because of its super invasive version of de novo that made the game perform worse for legitimate owners than pirates we can't say it's the drm though that would be admitting that consumer boycotts actually work so instead let's just pretend it's a complete mystery i know they removed it but that still left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths so while dishonored is on hiatus under bethesda i'm willing to bet microsoft will want to dust the ip off for the 9th generation xbox something something that's fitting that arcane was the one that was dishonored all along that's stupid that's not the content you subscribed for be sure to unsubscribe if this video gets enough dislikes i'll do the second dishonored eventually although it's getting close to cyberpunk season i really need to finish morrowind you must be exhausted i advise that you get some sleep your life will get even more difficult soon you should rest while you can sleep well

Channel: PatricianTV

Views: 141,138

Keywords: Patrician, Dishonored review, Dishonored 2020 review, dishonored trailer, dishonored arkane studios, dishonored arkane, dishonored analysis, dishonored 1 analysis, capturing the arkane, dishonored 2020 analysis, arkane bethesda, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Arx Fatalis, Deus Ex, System Shock, Thief

Id: OMFwYbQrlQk

Length: 44min 30sec (2670 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 19 2020