Arkane Dishonored 2 - Emily and Corvo's Serkonan Vacation

[anus_pounder]

I'll wait for a 50% discount or something, though.

 

[Siel]

 

[Morgoth]

https://www.egx.net/egx/news/dishonored-2-makes-worldwide-playable-debut-at-egx-2016

Dishonored 2 makes worldwide playable debut at EGX 2016

Dishonored 2, the follow-up to Bethesda Softworks' mutli-award winning first-person action game, will be playable for the first time anywhere at EGX 2016.

In addition, Sebastien Mitton, Art Director at Arkane Studios, will be host a developer session on Thursday at 4pm. During his developer session, which will also be live streamed on the EGX Twitch channel and available to watch later on YouTube, Mitton will discuss his artistic approach for Dishonored 2.

This is the latest of many reveals for this year's EGX, we have loads of news to share with you in the coming weeks so stay tuned! Tickets are available to buy here.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Incloosive boatwoman confirmed. I was sort of anticipating this. Expect more out-of-place bullshit sprinkled through the narrative.

 

[Infinitron]

Dishonored already had strong black women: http://dishonored.wikia.com/wiki/Billie_Lurk

Heck maybe it's the same one!

 

[AwesomeButton]

Maybe it won't be completely "we have them for the sake of having them", but 1) when has it not been "we have them for the sake of having them" and 2) the minute I heard Smith mention that just as a talking point, a "feature", it immediately came across as something that was decided for PR reasons and did not occur naturally and for narrative reasons.

 

[Siel]

WOW a black woman is in MUH video gem, HOW WILL I RECOVER?

 

[AwesomeButton]

WOW a black woman is in MUH video gem, HOW WILL I RECOVER?

hey, let's not be so prejudicial.

 

[nil]

Dishonored 2 Has A Black, Female Ferryman, And It's About Time

Dishonored 2 Has A Black Ferryman, And Here Is Why That's Racist

Dishonored 2 Has A Female Ferryman (And That's Kinda Sexist)

 

[sexbad?]

I thought I saw a good deal of black people in one of the gameplay videos. I figured it was because the game is set further south.

 

[A horse of course]

Dishonored 2 Has A Black, Female Ferryman, And It's About Time

Dishonored 2 Has A Black Ferryman, And Here Is Why That's Racist

Dishonored 2 Has A Female Ferryman (And That's Kinda Sexist)

Wow, are you a professional journalist?

 

[racofer]

Denuvo = nothx, unfortunately.

 

[Latelistener]

Was there a confirmation regarding Denuvo? Won't buy it either in this case.

 

[Excidium II]

Not sure if confirmed but extremely likely.

 

[AngryEddy]

WOW a black woman is in MUH video gem, HOW WILL I RECOVER?

CAN WE MAKE ALL THE CHARACTERS BLACK WOMEN!?

eat shit faggot liberal, anyone can be snarky.

 

[racofer]

It's sort of impossible to see any black person in ads, workplaces, games, etc, and not wonder if they aren't there simply to satisfy the incloooosivenes quota.

For that we have to thank liberals, whom have successfully obliterated the notion of worthiness in black people anywhere in society.

 

[Morgoth]

Was there a confirmation regarding Denuvo? Won't buy it either in this case.

Bethesda slapped it on Doom, so expect the same for all subsequent games.

 

[Morgoth]

 

[LESS T_T]

Dishonored 1 recap with spoilers: https://bethesda.net/#en/events/game/dishonored–what-you-need-to-know/2016/09/08/196

 

[Morgoth]

http://www.gamerevolution.com/featu...-series-would-be-cool-and-better-than-a-movie

Interview: Dishonored 2's Harvey Smith Believes Dishonored TV Series Would Be "Cool" and Better Than a Movie

Much of the details behind Dishonored 2 is still lurking in the shadows. Luckily, I had the chance to interview the game's Lead Designer Harvey Smith at PAX West 2016 in a quiet room (thank The Outsider) and pry more information about the game's morality, Chaos level, The Outsider, and whether Dishonored would be better as a movie or a TV show.

One of the trademarks of the series is that creating more Chaos by slaughtering enemies and otherwise being a whirlwind of stealthy murder will impact the environment, making the dialogue, cutscenes, and security more dangerous and bloody. Dishonored 2 builds upon the concept by expanding the states from two to three: low Chaos, high Chaos, and "the whole world needs to burn" very high Chaos.

However, one concern is that killing anyone in the game—even, say, a mouth-breathing pedophile—destabilizes the world, and so I asked Smith about the game's non-lethal philosophy:
That's an awesome philosophical question. Our lead designer Dinga Bakaba and I... something that he and I both hold to is that at the end of the day, killing a human being is inherently a negative act.

And then you get to the philosophical question [the death penalty idea] about killing Hitler, because then millions of people would have been saved. At the end of the day, we feel like, well, locking Hitler up would have been a more positive action than even killing him because you could have studied him, we could have understood him, prevented future Hitlers, whereas a single bullet wouldn't have done that.

That's where we're coming down philosophically. This is not a game of false equivalency where we're saying, 'This is bad and this is equally bad.' No, no, no, we're saying that the alternate way, not killing human beings leads to a more stable society.
Just like the previous game, you can use The Heart to discover details of each NPC, with some players using what they learn to decide who to kill or not. In Dishonored 2, NPCs are dynamically set to being Sympathetic ("he works an extra shift to feed the homeless kids down the street whose parents have died"), Guilty ("she has another family on the other side of town that nobody knows about"), and Murderous ("she murders all the pensioners who stay in her tenement building and takes their retirement funds"). While the world becomes more Chaotic if you kill the Sympathetic character over the Murderous one, ultimately killing any person destabilizes the world.

Changing the world state by generating Chaos will impact the amount of security and make the game "nastier" as the game progresses. An alternate pathway that has you going through an apartment building might have been clear in a low-Chaos world, but in a high-Chaos or very high-Chaos world, that apartment could be flooded with bloodflies, which lay its eggs in dead bodies. That said, having more bloodflies means that you'll have a higher chance of claiming valuable Blood Ember from their nests.

Another hallmark of the series is The Outsider, an enigmatic figure who lives in the Void that gifts Corvo his abilities (as well as the aforementioned Heart of a living thing) in the first game as well as the empress Emily, whom you can choose to play instead of Corvo at the beginning of Dishonored 2. As Smith expected, The Outsider was a polarizing figure with some fans loving him and some hating him. Dishonored 2 will provide more details on this mysterious godlike character:
Some people mistakenly thought of him as a trickster god or as amoral or indifferent or something, and that's not actually how we present him.

This time, we go into his backstory. And we present him as someone who has suffered great abuse in his normal life, his real life, and therefore when he merged with the Void to become godlike in a sense—not omniscient or omnipotent, that would be kind of boring I think—he struggles to maintain some sort of human consciousness probably.

But he ends up picking people who are going to pivotal to large numbers of people, people in history, pivotal in that part of the world, and he kind of anoints them and gives the access to great power. And he fully, cynically expects them to abuse that power and lord it over other people, and when they don't, he's pleasantly surprised. It's such a break from the norm from what he's used to, and so he serves, I feel, like as a thematic touchpoint for the abuse of power.

An aristocrat, to exist, [requires] a thousand people to live in poverty basically for that level of [income disparity]. That means something it's a seesaw, so that's an abuse of power. The guards punching you in the mouth because you've backed up is an abuse of power.
That said, Dishonored 2 will give players the option to actually refuse The Outsider's gift entirely, forcing them to play the game without any magical gifts of any kind:
Our level design director, Christophe Carrier, was really the big proponent of that early on. And I was excited about it too because I really wanted this kind of thing in the first game we did, and in fact we got it so you could take Blink only but nothing else in Dishonored 1. So if you did that and didn't upgrade anything else, we gave you an achievement called Flesh and Steel.

But we really wanted to go even further and say you don't even need to have Blink. But it was a huge undertaking for the level designers because you have to make sure that someone can get to every rooftop, every locked office. Casting Emily's shadow walk and going through a rat passage or a rat hole and then coming out, or mashing the windows with Windblast, and possessing a fish and swiming in the fountain - those are the powers way, right? So there's got to be some non-power way to do all of that. It's a complication.

But it's totally possible and interesting, it contextualizes the whole game. The feels different with no powers. You lean, climb, hide over tables, eavesdrop...
In a short interruption, I asked whether the dialogue changes too if you go the non-powers route:
No. There's one or two spots where we change the dialogue. It wasn't our big focus. It already changes depending on whether you use Corvo or Emily, and low or high Chaos, but there's one spot where a dying overseer, since he's on death's door and can see into your heart, and he curses you for being a fiend marked by the Void or whatever. But if you're not marked, he recognizes that, and he basically gives you his blessing. And so that is one of a couple times where we pay off that you are not marked.

But the experience itself is so different. It suddenly becomes much more muscular version of Thief somehow, a more muscular version of a stealth game... Viscerally, you have to move through the world, you have to really focus on your hiding, you have to be in the rafters, you have to eavesdrop, you have to drop on people. You don't have the power to bend time or whatever, so it's a different game. It's harder.

Since I didn't have much time left in the interview, I decided to shift gears and ask I larger question. Smith mentioned that he was watching The Americans, The Walking Dead, and Game of Thrones, so I posed the thought of whether he believed Dishonored would be better as an adaptation as a movie, as Assassin's Creed is doing, or as a 10-episode-per-season TV series:
You're singing my song. FIrst of all, I have to say I work very closely with the writers and artists for the comic books and the novel. We have the novel, The Corroded Man, coming out, which is cool, Adam Christopher worked on, and it tells some of the story before the second game. And we also worked on The Wyrmwood Deceit, which is a four-part mini-series in comics. And I really like both of them. Fans are really going to like 'em; there's a lot of fanservice and cohesion with the world. So we are definitely saying, 'Hey, The Empire of the Isles is [a place] that you go deeper with.'

That said, I have said over and over to Raph [Lead Designer Raphael Colantonio] inside the company [that] I hope we never have a movie. I hope instead that we have a TV series, because if we ever got lucky and got anything like that—I'm not saying that we are or anything—the depth you can go to with the TV series these days, whether it's like watching The Americans, the time you have to develop the characters and little nuances. And you can do that one-off episode where instead of following the main character, you follow that one overseer who's conflicted because he's in love with his squadmate.

You can do so many deep-detailed things like that. And I would love to see a TV series. That would be cool.

Yeah sure, why not.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.gamereactor.eu/news/452593/You+may+only+see+20%+of+Dishonored+2+in+one+playthrough/

Dishonored 2 is set to be very substantial upon release and at Gamescom 2016 we talked with Arkane Studios' creative director Harvey Smith about exactly how much fans can expect from the game when it is released later this year, Smith revealing a startling fact that you may not see that much of the game in one playthrough.

"I don't think people really understand any of our games until they've finished it twice," Smith explained, "and it's a blessing and a curse. When you play a game you only really see like 20% of the content or something because if you only play Corvo you can't see all of the Emily stuff. Emily has her own assassination animations, her own combat animations, it feels different to inhabit her bodily than it does Corvo. He has his own powers, she has her own powers."

On top of all these variations of gameplay there are also different paths to take as well. "If you take the over the rooftop path you can't go down the back alley or you can't possess a fish and swim along a river. If you use possession or blink, you upgrade those, you probably even as Corvo don't have enough runes to upgrade some other powers of his. So your choices are facilitating a particular playthrough and you sense that there are many other decisions that you could have made both spatially and how you move through the world, and stylistically and how you approach each combat scenario [...] but also in choice of powers and choice of character. It's pretty dramatic."

http://www.gamereactor.eu/news/4526...detailed+trees+to+both+old+and+new+abilities/

At Gamescom 2016 we talked with Arkane's Harvey Smith about Dishonored 2 and more specifically about the abilities and the ability tree, not to mention the very intriguing time-skip mechanic that the game is offering.

"Dishonored is a game about an assassin where you don't have to kill anyone," Smith made clear, "and it's a bit of an oddball - there's stealth, there's combat. The supernatural powers are really key. Corvo's powers from the first game are back [...] the difference is this time we've added detailed trees under each of his powers". In doing this "there are many different ways, generally five, sometimes six, ways to upgrade the power. With Devouring Swarm you can be the guy to summon two swarms or you can have larger swarms or you can have swarms follow you [...] and then on top of that you can combine the powers."

Emily, however, "has her own supernatural powers. You might have seen in the demo material that we've released, the gameplay trailers and stuff, but her powers are maybe more befitting of an empress who maybe had a moment of darkness in her life. She's got Mesmerise which can crowd control" as well as other powers like Domino, Shadow Walk and Far Reach. "Both characters can now craft bone charms now as well so there's something like 400,000 combinations of bone charms. We haven't even looked at all the combinations, it's a procedural thing. So a lot of Emily's powers are new and they can be upgraded with trees under them the same way that Corvo's powers can, and the two characters share enhancements, the paths of powers we have, and we've added to the enhancements as well."

We also asked about the time skipping mechanic we saw demonstrated. "We tried to revisit all the things we loved in Dishonored and make them bigger and better. One of our core values is level design [...] this time we wanted to make our levels a little bit bigger, they're all about 20% larger, they have an urban area attached to them generally so there's side areas, streets to explore. But then on top of that each mission has a major theme attached to it, either through fiction or mechanics." Time skip occurs in "a Crack in the Slab where time itself is broken and when you get there the Outsider tells you your powers won't work here [...] and instead he gives you this thing called the Time Piece and it allows you to look through time, through two different periods, and also move back and forwards."

 

[AN4RCHID]

Looks solid

 

[Ivan]

fuck it must get exhausting repeating the same spiel over and over again

 

[AwesomeButton]

An aristocrat, to exist, [requires] a thousand people to live in poverty basically for that level of [income disparity].

Sorry mr. Ulyanov but that is just false.

But the experience itself is so different. It suddenly becomes much more muscular version of Thief somehow, a more muscular version of a stealth game... Viscerally, you have to move through the world, you have to really focus on your hiding, you have to be in the rafters, you have to eavesdrop, you have to drop on people. You don't have the power to bend time or whatever, so it's a different game. It's harder.

A few straight simple questions:
1. Does crouching still equal "100% silent mode"? Is it still impossible to cause enough noise to alert a guard even if you're moving right behind his back, on the loudest surface, as long as you are crouched?
2. Can the player use shadows to hide in, as opposed to being able to hide only behind obstacles?
3. Are the speeds of crouched and non-crouched movement unchanged from Dishonored? (judging from gameplay videos, yes)

Addressing these problems is part of what makes your game play more similar to Thief. I'm sick and tired of developers' namedropping one game knowing full well their game is based on a different philosophy and expects different things from the player, and by now seeing name dropping just makes me suspicious.

 

[Makabb]

Dishonored 2 or Space Hulk Deathwing ?