One of the other games that’s not Borderlands that has my head spinning is Arkane Studios open-ended stealthy dystopian steampunk adventure, Dishonored. In my own time with the game at Gamescom, I was tremendously impressed at the many, many, many options available to complete just a single mission. In the Lady Boyle mission, I found that that at least one solution was practically handed to you – something that surprised me. Turns out it was for a reason.

In playtesting, Arkane found that people just weren’t all that able to go about finishing the mission using their own heads. without at least some sort of clue, people would just wander about aimlessly, hoping for the mission to complete itself.

“People would just walk around. They didn’t know what to do. They didn’t even go upstairs because a guard told them they couldn’t. They’d say ‘Okay, I can’t go upstairs.’ They wouldn’t do anything,” explained Arkane’s Julien Roby to Games.On.net.

As a result, you might find a few solutions pretty much handed to you on a silver platter – but fear not, those needn’t be the best solution. Often, the least obvious route is the most rewarding, and there will still be numerous angles from which to tackle any given scenario.

“We try not to lead the player by the nose, but at some point we found that if we don’t give a little information, people just get lost and don’t know what to do. It’s just overwhelming,” he said. “So we tried to add this element that gave just a hint, to help a little. But we try to do it as little as possible.”

As a case in point, while I loved every second I had with Dishonored at Gamescom, a friend from another publication hated it – because he just couldn’t figure out what to do.​