Last updated on February 3, 2013
We are here yet again at the beginning of yet another month. The blog’s survived for seven months of continuous posting. That’s pretty darn good!
Dishonored – Hey, I finally found myself playing a game that came out relatively recently! Hurray for me! Thanks to my friend Joe, I started the game and played about five hours or so. Here’s my initial judgment on it, for all you fine folks. M. Joshua Cauller previously discussed the game in a theological sense, but I may as well throw my hat into the ring.
Arkane Studios surprised me with this one. While I wouldn’t call it the greatest stealth game ever, nor the most exemplary experience just by virtue of a unique setting, the game has its own pace and vibe. I played the first mission as a crazed guard-and-people murdering machine, while I played the second as a peaceful man only interested in taking out his target (in, shall I say, unique ways). Dishonored respects the player enough to make these decisions matter and not be so blatant about it. I enjoyed the subtle ways a mission became harder, or easier due to my decisions. I like the selectable difficulty as well, although I only got a chance to play Normal just to familiarize myself with the controls.
But, I must nag, and nag I must do, because everyone else on earth, their mother, and their grandmother (not quite positive on that last one, but important enough to talk about; engagement equals praise in itself) already praised the thing to high heaven. Time to knock them off their high horse and shoot the horse, just for fun.
Perhaps my biggest problem comes from the constant progression of the story. The game forces you to relinquish control in the stupid dialogue sequences. Actually, I’d prefer that there not be any plot to this game at all, at least in the way they presented it; I really think the setting and the ability to listen in on conversation, should you choose, would immerse you more than the game constantly bludgeoning you with PLOTPLOTPLOT every time you complete a mission. It reeks of condescension: “Oh, hello player. Do you not understand what’s happening through our exquisitely rendered world? Here: ten minutes of boring exposition should suffice!” Ugh. Given all the freedom the developer provides, they suddenly take control away through these constant tutorials, cutscenes, and dialogue boxes. It’s a great looking “steam punk” type environment with little details and almost too much stuff for completionists. Why sully all that world-building with the incessant needs of the story? Am I alone in this?
And, simply put, these elements made me not care for what was even going on. I guess I’m a simple man with simple objectives at heart. Get me back into the game. It’s not like we HAD to go back to “the base” every time a mission ends. It’s an unnecessary narrative trope that adds nothing but padding to a game that could use a lot more exploring. It’s almost open world, but not quite there yet. So why not go all the way, give me missions in a place in the town instead of at a super-secret resistance base where we talk forever? It feels like plenty of developers already solved this problem years ago.
So what about the game itself? Well, the game itself remains pretty functional; the witchcraft tools seperate the game from its peers by providing you with a host of powers. However, it seems obvious that the console was NOT the primary development platform. Simply put, having to swap abilities used with one button got on my nerves more than necessary. Let’s say I Blink somewhere (the game’s trademark ability, allowing you/Corvo to teleport to a location), then switch to Dark Sight. Suddenly, a guard comes from behind and sees me. More often than not, you’re not going to press the magic D-Pad hotkey in the heat of detection and escape – instead, you’ll do something wrong and find yourself in melee combat that, for better or worse, is way too easy on the default difficulty. I felt like I had 2-3 seconds to parry an attack, and good thing enemies don’t all attack you at once (reminds me of Assassin’s Creed, almost). Dishonored seems designed for stealth first and foremost, with the violent combat being a simple afterthought. This is confirmed by what I’ve heard about good ending versus bad ending, I’m sure. They take a kind of moral stance, so that means they spent some measure of time on that way to play the game, and not the other.
That doesn’t mean I do not enjoy setting up a chain of events, or blinking toward someone and knocking them out, or finding creative ways to kill targets (such as putting them to sleep and throwing them off a cliff – I’m not sure whether one considers that sadistic or not). But, they’re all simply methods that move towards the same goal, a constant choice anxiety for me. Does the choice actually add anything to the experience? Choosing your path and whether or not you’ll kill DOES create an actual change in the environment; killing an enemy with killer insects versus a knife does not.
The RPG elements seem completely unnecessary in that regard – if I can finish any mission with any of these various tools, why pick them at all? Except for Blink (the one ability everyone uses and the one that should see upgrades), the rest come down to a perfunctory and seemingly rout selection of tools. Oh look, this one makes me better at killing people; this one gives me more health; this one lets me possess enemies. Interestingly, even the last one has been done before in various games (Geist comes to mind, off the top of my head) and probably slightly better. That does not occur due to any magic on the developer’s part. The toolset spreads too thin without any genuine necessity behind any of them.
It’s obvious that much of the design steals from Thief almost wholesale (same people from Looking Glass Studios, I gather; RIP), including the option to go stealthily versus combat, and had a similar morally ambiguous universe (note how most game reviewers don’t even seem to know the pedigree here, and the fact that this game is almost undeniably a remake of the same concept for a modern audience. GRR!). But Garrett was not a fighter; you needed to play INCREDIBLY well to engage in melee. On that note, you needed impeccable patience and timing not to get caught, but tools existed to dampen your footsteps and increase your stealth abilities. Dishonored places both roles at the player’s feet and dilutes the experience as a result.At least Thief had a sound meter that let you know how loud you were; here, it’s impossible to tell. Does crouching/stealth mode make me more stealthily? How far away does an enemy have to be before they see me? It’s not as if Dishonored removed all such abstractions; there’s still an “enemy saw you” squiggly line indicator, so why not these as well? Does sound make any difference? These questions Dishonored fails to answer in an easy, non-convoluted fashion.
If you introduce elements of choice, you must make your game like this; there’s no getting around it. If a player can make choices, than inevitably you must widen the net to accomadate different play styles. And by doing this, you water down the individual elements in service of the whole. Maybe this reveals why I do not like many narrative based games! At a basic level, I had fun. At an analytical level, I can’t help but feel the game needs a little more focus to truly become exemplary, in both the story and the mechanics. You can’t just rest on recreating Thief with fancy HD graphics and replacing steam with whale oil, if you get my meaning.
But yes, I need to play it more to figure out if that’s true.
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That’s it for this week’s Monday Update. Lots of weird articles coming your way!
