Was the Dishonored series good? Did System Shock 2 have good level design?

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Barely remember any respawning enemies in the game, unless you ignored cameras and ended up triggering the alarm on every corner.

Weird, because LGS actually added options to edit enemy respawning and weapon degradation in their own official patch. Sadly by the time the patch was out I had already played the game. See here: https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=12.0

Interesting, I never bothered to look it up.

Technically this is a cheat though, and it would be safe to assume it was added at the publisher's request when hundreds of players started mailing them letters with 'reee too hard where do i go half life is better quack 2 is better fix respawn now or else' written in blood.

 

[Infinitron]

I played the game with that no_spawn option. It actually doesn't completely remove respawning, so you still need to be on your toes. A viable playstyle choice IMO.

 

[Mikeal]

Lol at the people complaining about respawning enemies. Go play in something easier like Candycrush Saga or "Button Awessome" games.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

I believe I can explain this.

You could say there's a school of thought that developed on the RPG Codex during the 2000s that posited that the main, overriding flaw of modern (non-open world) console popamole games was poor, constraining level design. This is the generation of gamers that was utterly traumatized by the tiny maps of Deus Ex: Invisible War and the claustrophobic tunnels of BioShock. They've come to value good level design to such a degree that they're willing to overlook a lot of flaws if they get it. It's something that probably doesn't make as much sense to the post-Skyrim generation, who take expansive game spaces for granted.

Skryim has horrific level design, with nearly all dungeons being linear. They contain a large volume of space, with wide corridors and sizeable rooms, but that extra space isn't actually used for anything. All the player does is run forward along a trail until the end of the dungeon, at which point there is either a back exit or it loops around to drop the player back at the front entrance. Skyrim, of course, is an Open World game with a large overworld that allows the player to roam freely, but any perceived expansiveness of its dungeons is an illusion.

 

[Yosharian]

That looping back on the entrance thing that Skyrim does isn't inherently bad. It can be quite fun in some parts, for example that dungeon where you end up at a high ledge where you can jump down into the water below to get quicker access to the beginning of the level. Or the one where you exit the dungeon at a new area, not far from the tower near Riverwood.

The problem is that the designers over-use this feature, sometimes clumsily so, so you begin to feel the 'hand' of the designer when you are navigating the levels, and you come to expect it, rather than it being a pleasant, and interesting, surprise.

As for your criticisms of the dungeons themselves, yes, anyone who's played older games knows just how badly dumbed down the actual dungeon level designs are.

That's without even touching on the puzzles, which are so fucking mindless that a 3-year old could solve them.

Or the traps that deal such little damage that you can walk through them, and are incredibly easy to spot in the first place. Mods help significantly with this, though. You can get mods that remove the 'TRAP HERE, IDIOT' tiles, and mods such as Requiem change trap damage to be extremely high. You can get quite far in Bleak Falls Barrow at lower levels by using the swinging door traps to one-shot the weaker draugr. It's quite fun and satisfying to see those bastards go flying through the air courtesy of their own traps, haha.

 

[ColonelTeacup]

Another thread cut

Is that why the thread start was so nonsensical and disjointed? What was it cut from?

 

[what am i doing]

I liked Dishonored. I don't think it was great, but I do think it was fairly good and I've sunk a fair amount of hours into both games. Dishonored 2 got better in some areas, mostly gameplay/polish/visuals (the ability to stun and choke out an enemy you'd already alerted was a welcome addition) and worse in other areas (the setting, while still pretty good, wasn't as good, and scrawny female guards broke my immersion; a lot of the dialogue and characterization also took a hit). I think the series has a lot of flaws but gets a lot of undue hate possibly due to the devs hinting during development that the first game would be more like Thief than it ended up actually being; if you treat it as its own thing rather than as "well we aren't getting Thief anytime soon so here's the next best thing" then it's fairly good.

If I were to pick nits, this would be the most nitpicky thing I could say but also one of my biggest beefs with Dishonored 2: I don't like that they moved away from whale oil and introduced wind power. It's not an unreasonable change to make, but it takes away from the tone of the setting as set out in the first game. Whale oil had clearly made possible a burgeoning industrial revolution, but it was also, while doubtless renewable if used in modest quantities, not likely to last forever if they kept hunting whales at greater and greater rates (or even just held steady where they were). When would the oil start to run dry? What would happen to the world then? A gradual decline back to pre-industrial civilization with some lingering high technology, or outright collapse? This was something that was always at the back of my mind in the first game and it greatly enhanced the atmosphere of the setting. The idea that it was all temporary, and doomed in the long run - that even if the Rat Plague was cured, Dunwall's days were still numbered. This went away with Dishonored 2 since now they apparently have a limitless supply of electrical power generation and the setting is firmly directed towards increasing technological progress. This is a subjective complaint, and relatively minor, but I don't like how they moved away from the slightly apocalyptic feel of the first game and the transition from an unsustainable organic power supply to sustainable wind power was a significant part of that.

EDIT: Wait no I forgot, change "fairly good" down to just "kinda ok" because I completely forgot (it's been a while) that the stealth was dogshit, with the amount of shadow or light having no effect on how hidden you are. All that matters is line of sight (and in the first game you can lean you entire body out of cover without detection as long as your feet are planted behind cover) and to a lesser degree, footstep volume. The game is better played with combat, which is why the addition of non-lethal non-stealth combat options in 2 was so important.

 

[JarlFrank]

The most epicly stupid design decision for Dishonored was adding free blink. Like fucking stupid.

They meticulously create levels for traversal on foot jumping and mantling, which is evident by all those routes, chains etc., then some genius decides "lets compromise our level design with free teleportation!"

And yes, Dishonored is pretty shitty and below Arkane's standards

Were they copying nuThief with that blink shit? I forget which came first. Dishonored was fun, haven't played 2, but Chaos Theory is a better game so I just return to that. I prefer first person, but goddamit CT had better levels.

nuThi4f came after Dishonored and actually copied a LOT from Dishonored, in ways that didn't work half as well as they did in Dishonored. Blink is actually a great example of the different design approaches of both games:

Dishonored's blink allows you to move freely through the level and reach almost any place you can see as long as it's in range of the power. Meanwhile, Thi4f removed the ability to jump and rope arrows couldn't be used anywhere except on pre-determined spots.
Which is why Dishonored was a pretty decent game with good level design, and Thi4f was just shit.

 

[glass blackbird]

That looping back on the entrance thing that Skyrim does isn't inherently bad. It can be quite fun in some parts, for example that dungeon where you end up at a high ledge where you can jump down into the water below to get quicker access to the beginning of the level. Or the one where you exit the dungeon at a new area, not far from the tower near Riverwood.

The problem is that the designers over-use this feature, sometimes clumsily so, so you begin to feel the 'hand' of the designer when you are navigating the levels, and you come to expect it, rather than it being a pleasant, and interesting, surprise.

As for your criticisms of the dungeons themselves, yes, anyone who's played older games knows just how badly dumbed down the actual dungeon level designs are.

That's without even touching on the puzzles, which are so fucking mindless that a 3-year old could solve them.

Or the traps that deal such little damage that you can walk through them, and are incredibly easy to spot in the first place. Mods help significantly with this, though. You can get mods that remove the 'TRAP HERE, IDIOT' tiles, and mods such as Requiem change trap damage to be extremely high. You can get quite far in Bleak Falls Barrow at lower levels by using the swinging door traps to one-shot the weaker draugr. It's quite fun and satisfying to see those bastards go flying through the air courtesy of their own traps, haha.

Yeah, in Fallout 4 all the dungeons just end with a chained door which is extremely lazy and also wastes your time, since you're free to go down the exit path and just hit a door that's impossible to bypass. At least a big cliff you jump off doesn't have the potential for pissing you off

 

[Yosharian]

That looping back on the entrance thing that Skyrim does isn't inherently bad. It can be quite fun in some parts, for example that dungeon where you end up at a high ledge where you can jump down into the water below to get quicker access to the beginning of the level. Or the one where you exit the dungeon at a new area, not far from the tower near Riverwood.

The problem is that the designers over-use this feature, sometimes clumsily so, so you begin to feel the 'hand' of the designer when you are navigating the levels, and you come to expect it, rather than it being a pleasant, and interesting, surprise.

As for your criticisms of the dungeons themselves, yes, anyone who's played older games knows just how badly dumbed down the actual dungeon level designs are.

That's without even touching on the puzzles, which are so fucking mindless that a 3-year old could solve them.

Or the traps that deal such little damage that you can walk through them, and are incredibly easy to spot in the first place. Mods help significantly with this, though. You can get mods that remove the 'TRAP HERE, IDIOT' tiles, and mods such as Requiem change trap damage to be extremely high. You can get quite far in Bleak Falls Barrow at lower levels by using the swinging door traps to one-shot the weaker draugr. It's quite fun and satisfying to see those bastards go flying through the air courtesy of their own traps, haha.

Yeah, in Fallout 4 all the dungeons just end with a chained door which is extremely lazy and also wastes your time, since you're free to go down the exit path and just hit a door that's impossible to bypass. At least a big cliff you jump off doesn't have the potential for pissing you off

Yeah, right. The chained door thing is really lazy and overused.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

Dishonored was a good game. Not great but not mediocre either. Just good.
It's main problem was the fact that it tried to be a stealth game were the player is as powerful as Skeletor and the enemies were way too vulnerable against a minimally skilled player (with a good use of Blink alone you could genocide a whole level with no hassle).
Also the enemies perception and AI is weak to say the least.

 

[DalekFlay]

I'd say Dishonored is great. There's very few games in that style and genre with any kind of competence, so when you get a good one it's automatically great I think. There's literally what... less than 10 good "immersive sims" out there? The only real problem is the game's too easy, but if you're not focused on difficulty then pretty much every other aspect shines. Dishonored 2 was much harder on the hardest mode, because the main problem was enemy awareness and they upped that considerably.