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Dishonored was the first game I ever pre-ordered, going against my usually standard rule about such things. It promised wide-open areas with multiple paths to victory. It promised fantastic magical powers to make even more options available. I was hyped, then I was let down. But despite my disappointment with the first, the sequel seems to have promise.
When Dishonored finally came out, it was….okay. Certainly not bad, just generic. Having been a fan of the Thief series, I was hoping for 14 years of improvement on that formula with a bit of assassination thrown in (but, you know, actual assassination. Not running around with a sword and stabbing people in broad daylight). And while all the elements they promised were there, it all felt just a bit too small. The environments ended up feeling cramped, even though they were detailed. The story wasn’t particularly engaging – to the point that I had forgotten that I had completed the game. It just felt like it was missing something.
I’m not totally sure why I ended up owning the sequel, given my disappointment with the first. And for the first few minutes, it certainly felt as if I’d made another mistake. The story was contrived and the limitations of the game engine seemed painfully obvious during a birthday party for the empress where a grand total of 10 people were in attendance. Compare to the Queen’s last birthday:
…[A] 41-gun salute in Hyde Park, a 21-gun salute in Windsor Great Park and a 62-gun salute at the Tower of London. […] Over 1400 soldiers, 200 horses and 400 musicians take part in the event…
https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/36489213
But I digress. Dishonored 2 only improves from there. The levels are expansive, there are a multitude of ways to get around, and the guards react fairly reasonably. There are still problems, though: when a guard is seated or leaning against a wall, it’s almost impossible to find the magical spot you need to stand to knock them out. The game engine occasionally has trouble interpreting what you want to do (much like accidentally running up a wall instead of through a door in Assassin’s Creed), but it’s at least much less frequent in Dishonored.
The thing that bothered me the most was that for a game that lets you play through without ever killing anyone, you can only carry 5 sleep darts at a time. Oh, sure, you can carry 5 incendiary darts, 10 crossbow bolts, 10 bullets, 3 grenades, 3 sticky grenades, several mines, and various other lethal options – but only 5 sleep darts. You can upgrade your crossbow capacity, but not your sleep dart capacity. Much of the time, this led to me clearing out a room or two and running back to the black market shop to buy more. It’s actually quite frustrating.
That being said, I have already played 20 hours of Dishonored. I’m almost through – and would have been done already, but I’m a bit of a completionist. What really kept my interest was that I was given the choice to reject the powers offered to you at the start of the game – and it doesn’t really stop you from succeeding (though it slows you down). I’m actually looking forward to a NG+ run with powers, to see how it compares.
Perhaps the biggest thing running through without powers has shown me is that you don’t need to have Ezio Auditore levels of climbing skill to make a game vertically interesting. Well, I knew that already, but the amount of work that must have gone in to Dishonored’s level design to make it feel so effortlessly climbable is staggering. Sure, there’s the occasional pipe that doesn’t make a lot of sense except as a place to climb, but there are just as many that lead nowhere or are truly just set dressing.
That, however, leads me to my final complaint. The game does a terrible, terrible job at distinguishing intractable items from background. This is okay when you are climbing, since it makes it more immersive. When you’re trying to pick up a gold coin in a closable container or a piece of paper that you know is on a desk…somewhere….it’s less enjoyable.
Overall, my complaints are mostly problems with polish. Dishonored 2 is a better assassin game than Assassin’s Creed and a better successor to Thief than Thief.