The immersive sim has seen a revival in recent years. Not only from larger studios like Arkane, keeping the faith alive with their time loops and space stations, but also from a bunch of smaller developers bravely exploring a typically ambitious genre. RPS has always had an affinity for these systemically luxuriant simulations, historically lauding the likes of the original Deus Ex as the best game ever made. But given everything that has come since, is that still the case? Only one way to find out: make a big list.
]]>Overnight, in what Edwin called an "unredacted document oopsie" related to Microsoft trying to buy ActiBlizz, two things have been revealed that interest me. Well, three. Firstly, Phil Spencer capitalises "Gaming", which I hate. Secondly, as noted in that linked story, Phil Spencer wants to buy Nintendo and, in pitying also-ran brackets, Valve, which has some of the same energy as me walking into an estate agent and demanding a six bedroom house with a new fitted kitchen and a hidden library. And thirdly, according to a release schedule from a presentation dated 2020, Bethesda and Zenimax have planned out their next few years of games in depressing MCU presentation-style. Boy, are the next couple of years going to be whelming.
As is predictable now, it is largely a list of sequels and remasters, many of them dated quite optimistically, it must be said. This document pegs Starfield for 2021, for example, and obviously that didn't happen. There are also two unnamed games on there for this year (Projects Kestrel and Platinum; 2021's Project Hibiki we know refers to the surprise-released Hi-Fi Rush) and it seems unlikely they're going to appear before the end of the year. We know The Elder Scrolls 6 isn't coming for at least another five years. They're going to remaster Oblivion (but not Morrowind, the weird cousin everyone else likes most, but whose parents aren't sure what job to give them in 2023). And they're going to make Dishonored 3. I'm excited about that! But also fearful.
]]>What does the future hold for ZeniMax and Bethesda? A sizeable helping of the same, if a 2020-dated release schedule leaked as part of today's accidental FTC Microsoft court document blowout is to be believed. The document is from a July 2020 Microsoft presentation about the acquisition of ZeniMax, during the early months of the Covid pandemic - as such, it doesn't reflect Microsoft and ZeniMax's plans today, following global lockdowns and the buyout, and several of the dates are obviously bogus. Still, it's probably a good steer as to current and future Bethesda and ZeniMax projects, which may include Dishonored 3 and remasters of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3.
]]>I can almost remember the moment in the original Dishonored when I realised, "Crap. Chaos is coming, and there's nothing I can do to stop it." It was around the halfway point of the game that the world of Dunwall was visibly starting to sour before me, and it was all because I hadn't quite taken the time to truly understand how its chaos system worked. I'd let too many of my mistakes get away from me, killed one too many people in the process, and now its Low Chaos ending seemed permanently out of reach. I thought in vain that if I behaved really nicely for the rest of the game, it might balance out my former transgressions. But alas, it was not to be. I ended the game in High Chaos, and I was furious. For whatever reason, getting a game's 'good' ending really mattered to me back then.
It was this personal failing that drove me to some extreme lengths when Dishonored 2 came out a couple of years later. Not only did I resolve to do a Clean Hands run this time, guaranteeing a Low Chaos ending by refusing to kill anyone, but as I cast my eye down its list of Steam achievements, I also got it into my head that, 'You know what? If we're going no-kill, let's Shadow run it as well and do it completely unseen at the same time.' A great idea at the time, I thought, if a little unusual for me. Cut to my fifth hour trying to clean out Kirin Jindosh's Clockwork Mansion on a review deadline, however, and you might think that decision would have worn a little thin. But you'd also be totally and utterly wrong.
]]>Dishonored 2 is an immersive sim stealth 'em up by Arkane and it's been in my brain a lot more than usual. Partly due to this year's RPS 100, but also because of the mess that was Redfall. Arkane swung at the live service hero shooter and missed, with some comments writing off my sadness in the review as an inevitability. Sure, there's definitely truth to Arkane having changed over the years, of course it has. But I don't think there's anything wrong with being hopeful.
I think of Dishonored 2's A Crack In The Slab mission as both a beacon of Arkane's past pedigree and a symbol of their situation in the present. While I can't look into the future, I still think there's worth in turning to an all-time classic of a stealth level.
]]>I’m a sucker for well-hidden video game easter eggs, from Psychonauts 2’s strange mpreg cutscene to the ability to play as a baby in Mount & Blade 2, they're all great they’re great. But it’s all too easy to walk past easter eggs without knowing they were even there. I’ve probably waved off multiple fun secrets, mistaking them for lore I didn’t understand or a questline I haven’t gotten to. So, my pea-sized brain enjoyed this video of game designer Steve Lee interviewing the devs behind The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout as they reveal some dev secrets behind those games - including a cool egg.
]]>The Epic Games Store's festive season of freebies has drawn to a close. The Epic Games Store's weekly freebies have therefore resumed. Right now and until January 5th you can grab Dishonored: Definitive Edition for free, which includes Arkane's first-person stealth playground and all its expansions.
]]>Time-bending sci-fi shooter Deathloop is one of the possible futures of the Dishonored universe, Arkane’s Dinga Bakaba revealed during a recent episode of the Xbox podcast. Bakaba was the creative director on Deathloop, and lead designer for Dishonored 2 and Dishonored: Death Of The Outsider. He’s finally spilled the tea, confirming players’ suspicions that the two Arkane series beginning with a D and featuring magical abilities are linked.
]]>On this week's episode of the Ultimate Audio Bang, we select a few of our favourite non-traditional guns that aren't really guns. You know, the sorts of weapons that don't just spew bullets but generate portals or even clean filth off car bonnets. What really happens is we go off on a massive tangent about Deathloop, because we can't help ourselves.
]]>Dishonored: Death Of The Outsider is a revenge and redemption tale, only here the target of your revenge is god. 'We're going to kill a god’ might seem like a well-trodden path in JRPG country, but Death Of The Outsider brings something new to the table. Here, the god is a trickster, a victim, and the source of the player's power. He's a figure that has come to define the Dishonored series as a whole, and is both revered and pitied by its players. So how, exactly, do you go about killing a god like this? I spoke to the developers at Arkane to find out.
]]>Every now and again, I think about Dishonored 2 and how good it is. I don't play it, I just observe it in my head like a photo album. I flick through my memories and shake my head in disbelief at how ingenious its levels are. I also take a moment to remember Karnaca, this beautiful port city nestled in the mountains and surrounded by forest.
I just wish I could explore more of Karnaca. I want to break free of the game's constraints and just wander into the hills, or potter around the mountains. This isn't a criticism, it's more of a compliment I think. That Arkane crafted a world I hunger for, but I probably won't ever get to explore fully. All I can do is bash my character against invisible walls and wail in agony.
]]>Occasionally I have these moments where I can't stop thinking about Dishonored 2. They come in fits and spurts, when I'm playing a game or I'm ordering a takeaway or I'm reading a book. I think to myself, "this just isn't A Crack In The Slab though, is it?"
]]>Seven-day speedrunning marathon Awesome Games Done Quick 2021 has ended, raising a brilliant $2,758,847 million (around £2 million) for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. It's the second-highest amount ever raised at the event, right behind last year's winter marathon, which is pretty good going considering this year was the first fully digital AGDQ.
Despite not having a roaring crowd sat behind them, the speedrunners still put on an excellent show from the comfort of their own homes. Here are a few of my fave runs from the week.
]]>Get your speedrunning shoes on and prepare your glitches: Awesome Games Done Quick has arrived for its yearly speedrunning extravaganza. As with previous years, the charity event is raising money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. It's been live since yesterday evening and runs until this Sunday, and there are already some fab runs in the likes of Mirror's Edge and Dragon Age: Origins to catch up on.
]]>Ultrawide gaming monitors can seem excessive compared to regular 16:9 gaming screens, especially when their demanding resolutions often require powerful and expensive graphics cards to make the most of them. Once you try one, though, there's no going back. I've been a big fan of ultrawide gaming monitors for years now, as their extra screen space not only makes them great for juggling multiple desktop windows, but supported PC games also look uttery fantastic on them - and to prove it, I've put together this list of the best ultrawide games on PC.
]]>Break out the party poppers - Prey and Dishonored developers Arkane Studios turns 20 years old this year. Well, sort of. The studio may have been founded in '99, but who am I to ruin a party? To celebrate two decades of sneaking, stabbing, and all-round immersive sim'ing, Arkane are dusting off the oldest book on their shelf by giving away free copies of the studio's 2002 fantasy debut Arx Fatalis.
]]>If it's not baroque, don't fix it. Little architecture joke for you there, just to kick off a dry topic with a giggle. You see, appreciating architecture is for people in beige cardigans. Folks who subscribe to magazines printed on paper so thick you can still calculate the tree’s age. You know the type I mean. Spectacled couples with non-Ikea coffee tables. Thirty-year-olds. People like you! Here are 11 examples of very satisfying architecture in PC games.
]]>I'm Alice0 and I'm here to say, some great Bethesda games are out in a DRM-free way. GOG this week added the Dishonored games and two of the new Wolfensteins. That's some lovely gaming right there, so I'm just briefly highlighting it for people who prefer their games without DRM. They've got hefty discounts for one week to celebrate the launches too.
]]>Rat-dodging monarch restoration sim Dishonored is getting a tabletop roleplaying adaptation this very year.
Announcing the news last week, publishers Modiphius say they're working "in close collaboration" with the games' creative director Harvey Smith, also famed for his work on System Shock and the first two Deus Ex games. That's some pedigree, alright.
]]>It's been an eventful decade for PC games, and it would be hard for you to summarise everything that's happened in the medium across the past ten years. Hard for you, but a day's work for us. Below you'll find our picks for the 50 greatest games released on PC across the past decade.
]]>Another month, another big video game publisher puts a great big dollop of video game music online for zero pennies. This time, it's Bandai Namco, who have just uploaded every single Tekken soundtrack onto Spotify because, well, apparently everyone loves Tekken. I've never partaken in a Tekken, but with track names like "Massive Stunner" and "Lonesome City Jazz Party 1st", I'm already 100% convinced the music must be great.
However, given my rather lacking expertise in all things Tekken-related, I thought that instead of doing a big Tekken musical breakdown like I did for Capcom and all the Final Fantasy games, I'd take this opportunity to celebrate some of the other great gaming soundtracks you can currently listen to for free right now, because boy howdy are there loads of 'em. So bang on those headphones and turn up the volume, folks. It's head-banging time.
]]>Rural life is disgusting. All those shrubs and trees, how awful. You should pack your checkered pouch and head into the big smoke. The shining cities of videogameland are calling to you, and the team of the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, will be there to help you get settled in to your disgusting, overpriced flat no matter which giant urban maze you choose. Trust us, life is so much better in the city.
Ignore the rats. You'll get used to them.
]]>A ten-sided device appears in your hands. Each side features a carving of a wild animal, but three of the sides depict the face of an RPS writer instead. Look, there’s Matt. And yes, this one is John. The side with Brendan is a bit grubby, but it’s unmistakeably him. Smells a bit weird. What could this mean? Of course! It’s the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. Perhaps if you press down on these three journo mugs at the same time… aha! A telling click, and the sound of a delicate MP3. You’ve discovered the latest episode. They seem to be talking about puzzle games.
]]>Excellent stealthy-stabby sequel Dishonored 2 and its also-excellent standalone expansion Death Of The Outsider have followed in the steps of other games late in their lives and removed Denuvo DRM. Arkane and Bethesda likely figure that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar - those who buy the game and provide a Bethesda store or launcher login will get a pair of new (if minor) perks. You get a Disho-noired black, white & red graphics mode and the option to replay any mission with your choice of powers, plus the pre-order bonus items for Dishonored 2.
]]>Here ye, hear ye! The most honourable nobles of this treehouse do hereby declare that the RPS Podcast, known in various lands as the Electronic Wireless Show, is now royal majesty of recorded games chat, lord over all, King of the Podcasts, ruler of headphones, holder of hot takes, overseer of opinion. Welcome to this coronation, feeble folk of the videogame fields. Come listen to us chat about the best kings and queens in PC gaming.
]]>Over the past several weeks I have sent a lot of interesting people who work in the games industry an email containing the following scenario:
"You enter a room. The door locks behind you. From a door opposite another you enters. This other you is a perfectly identical clone, created in the exact instant you entered the room, but as every second ticks by they are creating their own distinct personhood. The doors will unlock in 90 minutes. Nobody will ever know what happens in the room. What do you do? (assume the materials you need for whatever you want to do are in the room). Please show your working, if able."
]]>Leave no rodent behind – that’s the motto of the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. With the release of Warhammer: Vermintide 2, we decided to celebrate the lovable dirtbag of videogames. The lowly, filthy, wonderful rat. Whether you are murdering five of them in cold blood for an RPG hotel owner, or pledging your sword to a disgusting subterranean monarch, there’s room in your heart for the humble rat.
And your intestine. And lung. Basically, shove over, organs. Make room for the rats.
]]>When you think of Dishonored, what's the first image that comes to mind? Rats, blades, haunted hearts and clockwork mansions? Perhaps it's cramped streets, a bleeding whale, or an arterial river. For many of us, it's a city. We asked Rob Dwiar, a garden designer, landscape architect, horticulturist and writer, to look at a specific aspect of those cities. The gardens. There's a whole lot of meaning locked in the green.
Across two (and a half) games, Dishonored has created an immersive world, rich with intriguing lore, place-specific atmospheres and a believable society. All of that is wrapped in brilliant, believably-designed environments, where a distinct sense of place is always present. Whether you're exploring palaces or cramped city blocks, navigating mansions or slums, each area has a sense of authenticity as a lived-in space, and the effect is not entirely aesthetic. By looking at the gardens scattered throughout the Isles, we can see how their layered and meaningful design elevates their importance from pleasant environments to important displayers of in-game themes, reflectors of in-game characters and exaggerators of underlying narratives.
]]>What Works And Why is a new monthly column where Gunpoint and Heat Signature designer Tom Francis digs into the design of a game and analyses what makes it good.
I love Deus Ex, System Shock 2, and Dishonored 2, and the name for these games is dumb: they're 'immersive sims'. If you asked me what I liked about them, my answer would be a phrase almost as dumb: 'emergent gameplay!'
I always used to think of these as virtually the same thing, but of course they're not. Immersive sims usually have a whole list of traits, things like:
]]>We've already seen which games sold best on Steam last year, but a perhaps more meaningful insight into movin' and a-shakin' in PC-land is the games that people feel warmest and snuggliest about. To that end, Valve have announced the winners of the 2017 Steam Awards, a fully community-voted affair which names the most-loved games across categories including best post-launch support, most player agency, exceeding pre-release expectations and most head-messing-with. Vintage cartoon-themed reflex-tester Cuphead leads the charge with two gongs, but ol' Plunkbat and The Witcher series also do rather well - as do a host of other games from 2017's great and good.
Full winners and runners-up below, with links to our previous coverage of each game if you're so-minded. Plus: I reveal which game I'd have gone for in each category.
]]>Another year over, a new one just begun, which means, impossibly, even more games. But what about last year? Which were the games that most people were buying and, more importantly, playing? As is now something of a tradition, Valve have let slip a big ol' breakdown of the most successful titles released on Steam over the past twelve months.
Below is the full, hundred-strong roster, complete with links to our coverage if you want to find out more about any of the games, or simply to marvel at how much seemed to happen in the space of 52 short weeks.
]]>Oh no, you've tripped the alarm. Now the terrifying RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, knows you're here. It's going to hunt you down and force you to listen to it. Quick! Think of a way out of this, before you hear all about Adam becoming an accidental mass murderer in Dishonored, or John obsessively re-loading his way out of a bad situation. If you don't escape, I'll have to tell you about the time I threw a gun at someone's head in Heat Signature, to absolutely no effect. This week, you see, we're talking about Things Going Wrong.
]]>Me: someone who believes that gothbro apparent trickster god The Outsider is the worst thing that ever happened to the Dishonored games, and thus positively relishes the chance to kill the blighter.
Also me: someone who is absolutely determined to play Dishonored games without causing even a single fatality.
Hmm. Standalone expansion Dishonored: Death Of The Outsider [official site] makes life pretty tricky for me, then.
]]>When we meet the creators of fictional worlds, we often want to kill them. Whether its Bioshock's Andrew Ryan and his deadly Rapture, GlaDOS and the sadistic test chambers of Portal, or Kirin Jindosh and the Clockwork Mansion. The urge to destroy these builders is partly down to the nature of their constructions - deathtraps and mazes that make the architect a cruel overseer - but there is perhaps more to it than that. With spoilers for the above, Hazel Monforton investigates the role (and the death) of the author in a medium that invites the audience into the action.
]]>Here you will find the curious case of the politician who broke his neck then went for a nice walk as if nothing had happened.
I'll be along early next week with full thoughts in our Dishonored: Death Of The Outsider review [official site], but seeing as it's out right now I want to bend your ear about the most interesting of its new sneak-o-magicky powers: the ability to temporarily assume of the appearance of almost any other character in the game. 'Semblance', as it's called, puts a little Hitman into Dishonored's whalepunk fantasy - only instead of borrowing someone's clothes, you take their face. It's a new tool in the series' stealth armoury, but more importantly it's another gonzo way of solving problems.
]]>I hate The Outsider. Perhaps that’s too strong a word, but I’ve never liked Dishonored’s meddling god. I’ll explain my stance in some detail below, but before I do that I offer an apology to the large chunk of the Dishonored fanbase who will find my opinions here blasphemous and heretical. But I’ve held my silence for long enough and it’s time to admit it: I really really really really want to kill that equivocating little bastard.
Dishonored 2's Death of the Outsider [official site] standalone expansion should fit my tastes perfectly, and the hour I played of it was fantastic.
]]>As you might know Dishonored 2 is welcoming a new standalone adventure expansiony thing called Dishonored: Death of the Outsider [official site]. Well, I say "welcoming". I don't remember anything in Dishonored ever being welcoming, more horrific and with the capacity to go chaotically and mass-murderingly wrong. What I'm trying to say is there's a new thing involving Billie Lurk and Daud and the Outsider and now there's a trailer...
]]>As the Steam Summer Sale closes, here's the last of the charts influenced by the discounts, before they return to being exactly the same as they were before the sale, and indeed during it.
So this week we're going to dig into the history of these familiar names, revealing some secrets of their pasts that many may not already know.
]]>As we learnt last week, the Steam Summer Sale feels like the sort of thing that should enliven the charts. Nothing can enliven the charts...
Apart from me!
]]>The Steam summer sale is in full blaze. For a while it even blazed so hot that the servers went on fire and all the price stickers peeled off the games. Either that or the store just got swamped with cheapskates looking for the best bargains. Cheapskates like you! Well, don’t worry. We’ve rounded up some recommendations - both general tips and some newly added staff choices.
Here are the things you should consider owning in your endless consumeristic lust for a happiness which always seems beyond reach. You're welcome.
]]>I haven't yet got round to playing Dishonored 2 despite loving the first, so it seems awfully rude of Bethesda and Arkane to announce Dishonored: Death of the Outsider [official site]. It's a standalone expansion about trying to assassinate The Outsider, the magical goth who gifts powers to the protagonists in Dishonored games and prattles in an irritating way. Watch a cinematic trailer and find details below.
]]>We are living in a golden age of big-budget PC games that offer us choice and freedom. Be they descendants of the System Shock model - finding a route around a meticulously-crafted, locked-down and hostile place, most recently seen in Prey [official site] - or the roleplaying games based around choice and consequence rather than action alone, they are legion. There are so many, even, that I'm not sure we can fully appreciate how good we've got it.
]]>He was a boy. She was a girl. Can I make it anymore obvious? He wrote the weekly Steam charts. She read them.
What more can I say?
Other than that these are the ten Steam games with the most accumulated sales over the past week, obv. See ya later, boy.
]]>A demo for Dishonored 2 [official site] would've been more useful five months ago, back when people had no way to know without buying the game whether its initial performance problems would strike them. Still, a demo coming this Thursday will give a welcome look at the first three missions of Arkane's first-person supernatural stealth game. That's a good chunk of sneaking from a good game.
]]>One of the talks I went to at GDC was about AI in Dishonored 2 [official site]. I'm not sure what I was expecting because my encounters with the AI are mostly terrifying. As someone who doesn't play much stealth gaming and isn't great at combat from a first person perspective the AI is primed to deal with strategies I'm nowhere near perfecting and thus it tends to rule the roost. I think I was hoping that attending a talk might open up the AI in a way that meant I understood how to bludgeon it into submission, or at least do something other than kill a guard, drag them back to my safe spot and repeat until I'd cleared a path to an objective. That didn't happen, but I did learn that the AI has a crew system that sounded like a kind of maths-based Lonely Hearts column.
]]>If my interpretation of the update notes is correct, Dishonored 2 [official site] now has a Martial Arts Movie slider. The introduction of customisable difficulty sliders - more than twenty of them - allows you to decide "how many active enemies are likely to attack you at once". I'm hoping that means I can either choose to have mobs of guards surround me but attack on at a time, as often happens with martial arts minions, or set them to rush me en masse, ignorant to the etiquette of combat.
The sliders let you fiddle with the speed with which sleep darts take effect among other things and I'm glad that they've arrived alongside the mission select option because I don't fancy playing the whole game again, but will gladly jump back into my favourite parts with the scales tipped firmly against me. It'll all be live some time later today.
]]>This is The Mechanic. Taking a dive into Dishonored 2 [official site] with Harvey Smith, it marks the first anniversary of the column. Holy heck! I hope you’ve been enjoying it. I want to thank everyone who’s read The Mechanic, and all the amazing designers it has given me the opportunity to speak to. Here’s to many more next year.
In the city of Karnaca is a district that lies under mounds of encroaching dust. Home to the labourers of the silver mines, Batista has been worked into exhaustion. Its people are spent and the mines so overexploited that dust from them has been billowing out and falling over the streets and squares, the heavy wind whipping it up into storms and engulfing entire buildings.
Dust District is one of Dishonored 2’s largest levels, a dense network of byways, apartments and compounds peopled by downtrodden miners and two warring factions. But you don’t need to play any of it. In fact, the entire level is designed around an idea that speaks to Dishonored’s deepest design principles. Because the Dust District is all about:
THE MECHANIC: Skipping stuff
(Light-ish spoilers for both the Dust District and subsequent level naturally follow.)
]]>Exciting Dishonored 2 [official site] news arrives in the form of an update that adds new stuff to the game rather than fixing what is already there. First of all, there's a new game plus mode, allowing you to start fresh with all the abilities and bonecharms you've discovered at the end of a playthrough carried across into the next one. In a wonderful turn of events, you can play as either character in your new game plus, but will have access to both Emily and Corvo's powers, allowing you to mix and match. The update will be available in beta later today and launches proper on Monday.
In January, a second free update will add a mission select screen, for replaying your favourite areas, and customisable difficulty modes.
]]>You could open the next door on our calendar, but it might be more fun to find another way inside. Surely there's a window round the back that someone left open, or maybe you could get in through the cellar. Day twelve of The RPS Advent Calendar, which highlights our favourite games of the year, brings...
It's sneaky-stabby marvel Dishonored 2 [official site]!
]]>As a sister of Omega Theta Nu, I could never use Beta software. No, the recent beta patch aimed at improving performance in Dishonored 2 [official site] was not for me. Loyalty wouldn't allow it. Thankfully, the update yesterday left beta and properly launched on the main line, bringing its fixes and improvements to all players - not just those who have no respect for the sanctity of being sisters forever. While our Adam dodged the performance problems all along and adored the game, that there Alec at last seems to be happier after all his woes. That or it's broken him. Who could tell?
]]>Had a week off. (No, not a holiday, no such thing when there's a three-year-old in the house). Bit of a break from writing about games. Though I'd rebuild and resupply a little, come back fighting fit, ready for anything GAMESWORLD might throw at me next.
Anything but this.
]]>There's a - oh no! I just dropped a big toast crumb into my keyboard and the number four is now unavailable to me! Let's start again and I'll deal with that in a moment. There's a Dishonored 2 [official site] PC patch currently being tested on the beta branch of the game in Steam which is aiming to help with the performance issues some PC players have been reporting. This is just a housekeeping patch so no sign of a mission select option for now.
]]>I've a 'mare of a time with Dishonored 2 [official site]. You can tell because I've devoted an order of magnitude more words to the subject than I've written to my parents in the past two years. As I wrote yesterday, the latest patch has ameliorated but not solved the performance problem - however, I might now have found the sweet spot. Not without compromise.
]]>I took last week off to play Dishonored 2 [official site]. That might seem strange, but this was a game I didn't want to play for work. I wanted to approach it completely differently, play it like I would play games when I was a teenager, no pressures to produce copy by a deadline, no weighing up pros and cons as I went, and most of all, the liberty to luxuriate in playing slowly, meticulously, without worrying that I'd not reach the ending before the internet had moved on. So of course I've got so much to write about it now, because apparently I can't switch off the work bit of my brain. I've got a few features half developed, but I thought I'd get the most important and pressing article done straight away. Here's a gallery of the piles of unconscious bodies I left on my way.
]]>I've had a torrid old time with Dishonored 2 [official site] to date, though I'll warrant not quite as torrid as the Arkane staff who've likely been working all hours to try and redeem a very messy, reputation-trashing PC launch. A second emergency patch has just landed, and, unlike last time, the fixes are meaningful.
The game's performance is still a long way short of where I want it to be, but, thank Grud, it is now playable at reasonable settings.
]]>Well, this really isn't the chart I'd expected to see at this point of the year. We're in peak Silly Season, and yet last week's 10 best-selling games on Steam form a broadly unexpected bunch.
Which is exactly what I like to see.
]]>Arkane Studios are still working on improving the technical side of Dishonored 2 [official site] but that's not all. December will bring a free content update including a New Game+ and custom difficulty settings, for folks who fancy more power or more challenge. Don't forget another performance patch will probably arrive this week.
]]>Arkane have been very open since almost the start that they fully intend to fix Dishonored 2 [official site]'s performance problems, so kudos there. G'dang it's a shame they didn't nail this stuff down prior to release though, because in any just world the Dishonored 2 story would have been "Yeah, it's ace" rather than "Oh God no." The game runs pretty atrociously on my PC - yes, I can get it to playable with rock-bottom settings and non-native resolutions, but it looks like someone wiped a used nappy down my screen and still feels jerky and sluggish.
Goodish news: a patch has now landed (as an opt-in public beta), which begins to tackle the problems. Its fixes sound very promising on paper, but haven't helped me in practice.
]]>Dishonored 2 [official site] is a wonderful game, but in terrible shape on PC - not for all of us, but for many of us. The most widely-reported issue is its lurching framerate on a suitably-specced PC, and that's been severely hampering my attempts to play it on my desktop (AMD R9 Nano, FWIW). As well as making the general sense of motion disrupted and even uncomfortable, I have bungled strangles because the game suddenly spasms underneath me. I HAVE BUNGLED STRANGLES. In desperation, I sought to instead run the thing on a three-year-old laptop with a very weeny AMD GPU, just in case Dishonored 2 was playable at lowest settings.
And so began my nightmare.
]]>We're nearly at the end of silly season: most of the big releases are out now, with only Watch No Underscore Dogs Two really still to go. It's been a messy one for a lot of the big companies, by all accounts. Let's see how it shook out during Dishonored 2 launch week.
]]>Dishonored 2 [official site] creates a greater sense of place than just about any other game I've played. That's true whether you're standing on a balcony, looking out toward a distant objective across the chaos of the city streets between you and it, or picking through an apartment building, floor by floor, and seeing all the signs of life you'd expect to find. It's a remarkable game, and in many ways a true heir to the legacy of Looking Glass' immersive sims, and it features some of the most spectacular world-building you'll ever see.
]]>If you've had your sneaking trousers cleaned and pressed in preparation for a weekend of Dishonored 2 [official site], you'll want to follow Adam's performance-enhancing tips first. It sounds like we need need to wait a few days before we see an official patch addressing some of those performance problems, you see. Publishers Bethesda Softworks have popped up a small notice to acknowledge the problems some players are reporting -- our own Alec included -- and say they're working on a patch.
Bethesda say we can expect this "in the coming days", which sounds a bit ominous considering how pre-apocalyptic everything's looking lately.
]]>I hate to be the Dunwall Downer, to be honest. Any other week I perhaps wouldn't do this, but bloody hell, what a week. (Not you too, Leonard. Not you too). I desperately needed something to feel good about, and I'd hoped Dishonored 2 [official site] would be it. It still might be, but I'm one of those who is enduring a particularly bad dose of its increasingly notorious technical woes. A knock-on effect of that is that, because my immersion is generally and near-constantly disrupted by the shonky performance, design and presentation faults which might otherwise have been minor seem that much more glaring.
]]>I'm still working my way through Dishonored 2 [official site] so that I can bring you a full, detailed review, but with the game officially released today (it was available yesterday for people who preordered), I've tried to gather as much information as possible about the performance issues that have seen the game's Steam rating take a bit of a hammering. As is often the case, given the number of reports and conflicting data, it's difficult to figure out precisely what to do if the game doesn't runs smoothly, but I've done my own digging and Bethesda have released some tips, while director Harvey Smith is acknowledging the issues on Twitter and says Arkane are working on a new patch.
]]>Ah, Dishonored 2 [official site]. A chance to right the wrongs with my approach to stealth in the original Dishonored. A clean slate where no-one has yet been massacred and no guards have been panic-killed and the guy in the chair in that room didn't get accidentally stabbed because of a previous stabbing session which left me with a bit of a hair-trigger stab-finger. It was thus reassured that I have embarked on my non-lethal playthrough of Dishonored 2.
Six people have died so far.
I can definitely explain...
I've tried to keep the following spoiler-free but you might still want to leave reading it until you've played that first mission if you're worried about accidental environmental spoilers?
]]>I've been playing Dishonored 2 [official site] for nine hours but I'm not here to spoil any surprises for you, so don't worry about precisely how much I've seen or what beans I might spill. What I want to do is to reassure you that developers Arkane haven't fluffed their lines with this sequel. Quite the opposite in fact – they're firing on all cylinders.
Even if the remaining levels are so badly designed that I find them intolerable, and there's absolutely no reason to believe that would be the case, I've already explored enough beautifully realised and densely packed areas to see this as a sequel that understands what its predecessor did well, and knows precisely how to do it better. Here, with no spoilers, are my thoughts on what I've seen so far.
]]>I know how much you like slitting throats, so I got this Dishonored 2 [official site] launch trailer for you. It’s got a lot of your stabby bloodshed in it, but also some other powers available to the discerning murderer, including ‘annoying flies’, the ‘mini warp’ and ‘becoming a living avatar of chaos’. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before but there’s some bits of plot thrown in for good measure. Which is good because plot is your second favourite thing after slitting throats.
]]>With Dishonored 2's [official site] release hovering on the gaming horizon, I wanted to take a closer look at Arkane's sequel and its distinctive aesthetic with art director, Sébastien Mitton. Our conversation touched on fashion influences, how you approach the art of a sequel, the role of tech advangements and why it's important that Dishonored 2 went with Victorian city-building instead of a modern grid. As ever with these art-focused features, you can click on the images to see a larger version.
]]>We're barrelling towards the end of the year, which means - oh gosh! - we're ten days from Dishonored 2 [official site]. Publishers Bethesda today announced that Arkane's supernatural stealth-o-action game has "gone gold", which is a technical industry term for the dev team being allowed a 5-minute toilet break for a wee (to 'go gold') before they return to their desks and start on the first patch. This also means enough is locked in to announce system requirements and gab about graphics options. Onwards!
]]>Bethesda, developers of Elder Scrolls and Fallout and publishers of Dishonored, Doom, Wolfenstein and more, say that their policy now is to send out "media review copies" one day before their games come out. That's what they did with DOOM earlier this year and that's what they intend to do with the approaching releases of both Skyrim Special Edition and Dishonored 2.
We think this is a bad thing for you and for everyone other than Bethesda.
]]>Dishonored 2's fourth mission is supposedly about infiltrating the home of Kirin Jindosh, a sadistic inventor who must be bumped off or “neutralised” before he unleashes an army of automatons upon the world. But what you're really doing in the Clockwork Mansion is invading a brain. Having already seen excerpts from a developer playthrough, I had a sense that the building's rearrangeable mechanical layouts might reflect the character of its architect, much as Bioshock and Portal's labyrinths do GlaDOS and Andrew Ryan. I was unprepared, however, for how extravagantly Jindosh's neuroses infest the place, or for how cruel it feels to slip through the cracks in his amazing creation – past the velvet drapes, beneath the lacquered facades and into the whirring schematics of his subconsciousness.
]]>Good news: a new Dishonored 2 [official site] gameplay trailer is out, with a pleasing eight-minute chunk of Emily murdering her way through a place we've seen a bit of before. What I saw was quite nice, but I started peeking through my fingers then stopped watching because I'd still like to be surprised by Arkane's sneak-o-FPS.
Plbbbbbrfffff news: those silly sausages at Bethesda have announced that they'll release the game a day early - to people who pre-order it. You cheeky bunch!
]]>Have a whale of a time with...no. These creative kills are whale-y good. Oh no no no.
I understand the appeal of playing a game like Dishonored 2 [official site] without killing a single person, I really do, but Arkane are sorely tempting my no harm, nn foul-festering-bloodfly-feeding-frenzy policy. A new video shows both Emily and Corvo using their supernatural skills to create deftly calculated carnage. There are doppelgangers, body-swaps, blink-kicks that send people flying through the air like footballs, and combinations of time manipulation, razor traps and vertical violence that make a stab to the back seem so simple as to be uncouth.
]]>Let it be known that Adam Smith is my arch-enemy, and if his body is found floating in Manchester Ship Canal with a dagger in its back any time soon, you know who to blame. Unless you're a police officer, in which case it was definitely his dog that did it.
The reason for my Smithsonian belligerence? There I was, doing my best not find out much about Dishonored 2 [official site] in order that I can go in blind, but he lobs a new trailer focusing on returning Dishonored 1 protagonist Corvo into the RPS work Slack and says he's too busy to post it. Which means I have to. Which means I have to watch it. Which means I now known things about Dishonored 2. Which means I need to buy a dagger.
]]>There will be many ways to play Dishonored 2 [official site], rewarding players for stealth and more brazen maneuvers both. We got a glimpse of some of Corvo's more aggressive skills at QuakeCon. Now, with Gamescom festivities well underway, Arkane gives us a glimpse at what empress Emily Kaldwin has up her sleeve, and she is easily just as vicious. Take a look!
]]>Looks like Dishonored 2 [official site] got some new gameplay footage at QuakeCon. Not being at QuakeCon and with the footage not having leaked (that I can see, anyway) I'm making do with GIFS! and a DESCRIPTIVE BLOG ENTRY! in order to get a feel for a high-chaos Corvo playthrough:
]]>During one decade in the late eighteenth century, one gang was reportedly responsible for around 80% of bank robberies in America. That gang was led by George Leonidas Leslie, an architect and a criminal genius. He utilised his knowledge of buildings and their secret ways to break them down piece by piece, building scale models of targets, and replicas of their safes and vaults, planning for years. Like many master burglars, he could look at an exterior and understand the interior it hid.
Designing a game like Dishonored 2 [official site] requires some of those same skills.
]]>You might have seen actual proper gameplay from Dishonored 2 [official site] on Bethesda's E3 press conference stream, or maybe you read Adam's retelling of Emily's wee adventure. Or maybe you didn't. Or maybe you want to see it again. Maybe you don't even know what it is (if so: it is a jolly exciting supernatural first-person stealth-ish game set in a strange version of Victorian-y Europe). The point is, look below: it's Harvey Smith's twenty-minute presentation of sneaking, gabbing, and stabbing in handy moving picture format.
]]>Bethesda's E3 showcase wrapped up this evening (LA time) and I was there, in an enormous hangar, as new things were announced (Prey! Quake!) and more details of the games we've already played or heard about were released. The pick of the crop was Dishonored 2 [official site], which had that rarest of things: an E3 showing that involved an actual dev walkthrough of a mission and the new character abilities. Beats even the shiniest of trailers. You can see a trailer below, captured in-game, along with thoughts on the wonderful time-twisting mechanic.
]]>Dishonored 2 [official site] won't be with us until November, however that doesn't mean we can't catch up with supernatural assassins Corvo Attano and Emily Kaldwin before then. Bethesda have announced comic and novel tie-ins to launch this summer, see, set in the Dishonored universe and taking place between the events of the original and the incoming sequel. The first issue of the proposed four-part comic series kicks off in August.
]]>Dishonored 2 [official site] is one of those games that I don't need to read about, because I've already decided that I'm going to play it based on how much I enjoyed the first's blend of magic and stealthy murder. Still, for you, I have mined Game Informer's recent preview for news of how its new and old powers will function.
]]>Dishonored [official site] will bring us more first-person stealth delights on November 11th, publishers Bethesda announced today. Dishonored 2 is set 15 years after the first game, with Emily Kaldwin now a grown-up Empress and supernatural murderer herself as a second playable character option. We still don't know much more about the game than when it was announced last year, nor have we seen it, but Bethesda say they'll finally give us a peek during E3 in June.
]]>Arkane Studios co-creative director Harvey Smith has been talking about the new setting for Dishonored 2 [official site]. Given that Dunwall is my favourite fictional environment of the last few years, I'm sad to be leaving it behind in the sequel but given that the hints to a wider world were such a tantalising aspect of Dishonored, I'm happy to see another region within the Empire of the Isles. Dishonored 2 takes place in Karnaca, "the jewel of the south" and you can learn more about it by watching the video below.
]]>First-person supernatural sneaky murder simulator Dishonored is indeed getting a sequel, which was never in doubt but is still splendid news. Publishers Bethesda last night announced Dishonored 2 [official site], which will let folks travel to a new land to stab faces as either the first game's face-stabber, Corvo, or the first game's small girl, Emily Kaldwin.
It's set 15 years later after she's received a visit from the Outsider to get her own magic powers, mind. Come see in the announcement trailer.
]]>
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