Arkane Dishonored 2 - Emily and Corvo's Serkonan Vacation

[Morgoth]

http://www.dell.com/en-us/member/shop/dishonored-2-pc-gaming/apd/a8766277/gaming

Dishonored 2 for $19.99

 

[Morgoth]

https://bethesda.net/en/article/1xv1an5Nj6qiOigcme0Qso/dishonored-2-update-new-game-plus-mode

Dishonored 2 Update – New Game Plus Mode
If you’ve wondered what it would be like to combine Empress Emily Kaldwin’s all-new abilities with Royal Protector Corvo Attano’s signature powers, you’ll soon have the opportunity to do just that. Next week Dishonored 2 will get its first free Game Update, which – along with various improvements based on player feedback – includes New Game Plus. With this new mode, you’ll be able to combine Emily’s Mesmerize with Corvo’s Devouring Swarm – or create any other custom combo of multiple powers that you can you imagine.

Unlocked once you complete Dishonored 2 with either Emily or Corvo, New Game Plus lets you begin anew with either character, but this time you’ll have access to the full suite of abilities from both of the game’s heroes. You’ll also start your new playthrough with all the Runes and Bonecharm Traits you’ve collected from your previous game, but you’ll be able to re-assign those Runes so you can choose the powers you want.

“Dishonored players have asked for it, so now New Game Plus is here for Dishonored 2,” says Creative Director Harvey Smith. “If you've ever wanted to make higher-powered characters, now's your chance. If you've wanted to play Emily Kaldwin with Possession or Devouring Swarm, or Corvo Attano with Domino, now you can. We've been having fun with it here at Arkane Studios, and we hope you will too.”

The first of two free updates, Game Update 1 releases today as a beta on PC, then will release in full for PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 on Monday, December 19.

Game Update 2 will arrive in January, and will include two new features: Mission Select and additional Custom Difficulty Settings, the latter of which allows you to further tailor Dishonored 2 to your playstyle and adjust the challenge based on a wide array of settings. We’ll have more info on Game Update 2 soon.

GAME UPDATE 1 RELEASE NOTES
New Features

• New Game Plus mode!
• New Quick-Access Wheel option for hiding/unhiding items

Improved Features

• Fixed Oraculum false-kill count in Royal Conservatory
• AI detection tweaks to clarify when players are detected or not
• AI locomotion improvement for running
• Fixed various Bonecharm effects (Strong Arm, Spiritual Pool, etc)
• Fixed a problem in slow-motion where some inputs were ignored
• Blood Thirst: various enhancement and fixes
• Killing an NPC with their own bullet is now more reliable
• Tweak for mana potion refill speed, depending on difficulty
• General performance and optimization improvements
• Fixed various game logic issues
• Fixed various User Interface issues

 

[Siel]

New Game + is literally decline.

 

[Morgoth]

New Game + is literally decline.

It doesn't really matter.

 

[Siel]

New Game + is literally decline.

It doesn't really matter.

It's a waste of talent at Arkane.

 

[Morgoth]

I dunno, that's for Arkane to decide. What I meant is you still gotta allocate your runes wisely for (partial) specialization. Now you just got a bigger skills pool to choose from.

 

[pippin]

New Game Plus is a misunderstood gimmick in western media. Platinum mastered it, by making 5 to 7 hours-long games with tons of fun and content to explore. NG+ only makes sense when it's between those time limits, not double or triple of that, which is the usual for games of this nature. I didn't even wanted to do NG+ in DE:HR.

 

[TripJack]

http://www.pcgamer.com/game-of-the-year-2016-dishonored-2/

game must really be horrible if pc gamer likes it

 

[Siel]

http://www.pcgamer.com/game-of-the-year-2016-dishonored-2/

game must really be horrible if pc gamer likes it

Well despite its few flaws, it's still the best game released this year.

 

[udm]

http://www.dell.com/en-us/member/shop/dishonored-2-pc-gaming/apd/a8766277/gaming

Dishonored 2 for $19.99

Damn, wish I'd seen this earlier.

 

[Turjan]

Not quite as good a deal as the one above, but here it's -42% for the next few hours:

https://www.bundlestars.com/en/star-deal

 

[barker_s]

Anyone know if it's playable yet, or still a slideshow?

 

[Morgoth]

Anyone know if it's playable yet, or still a slideshow?

Oh c'mon read the patch notes. It was already super playable since Patch 1.2 and has only gotten better with subsequent patching.

 

[DeepOcean]

Still think this was a somewhat lazy sequel, this is to my bumb ass to learn no popamole AAA game is worthy buying at full price. I don't get why Arkane is so incapable at storytelling and providing challenge. I dunno, Dishonored 1 and 2 are some of the most mind numbing easy games I ever played even for AAA standards, they are enjoyable because of their level design but that is the only thing going on.

Common, you have a pistol that works like a one hit kill shotgun on a game where enemies run to melee you and don't understand what shooting from afar is, you can counter attack with an one hit kill move that is incredibly easy to do, the bird man robots, poor man replacements for the tall boys, one shot on the head, and they do the work for you and this on a game where you can stop time. I know, people repeat the "play your own way" buzzwords all the time but when all the ways made available by the game are boring? What you gonna do? Larp that they aren't boring?

All combat encounters can be solved with generous amounts of stop time/pin point accurate crossbow headshots/easy as fuck counterattacks coming straight from Assassins Creed, sure you can be "creative", but I'm a normal player not some stunt let's play guy posting "cool" shit on youtube, doing this convoluted shit to appear cool is more trouble than it is worthy it as you really don't need it. The combat is a boring I WIN! button affair and stealth is a barebones thing that doesn't go beyond the basic. Great choices you have to play "your" way... I standed that crap on Dishonored 1 for pure desperation and the novelty of the world but I'm having a serious case of diminishing returns with this game, this is for my dumb ass to learn to never buy a popamole AAA game at launch.

Zero interest at buying Prey or any next Arkane games until they fix their shit.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/12/23/why-dishonored-2-allows-you-to-skip-its-finest-content/

Why Dishonored 2 allows you to skip its finest content

This is The Mechanic. Taking a dive into Dishonored 2 [official site] with Harvey Smith, it marks the first anniversary of the column. Holy heck! I hope you’ve been enjoying it. I want to thank everyone who’s read The Mechanic, and all the amazing designers it has given me the opportunity to speak to. Here’s to many more next year.

In the city of Karnaca is a district that lies under mounds of encroaching dust. Home to the labourers of the silver mines, Batista has been worked into exhaustion. Its people are spent and the mines so overexploited that dust from them has been billowing out and falling over the streets and squares, the heavy wind whipping it up into storms and engulfing entire buildings.


Dust District is one of Dishonored 2’s largest levels, a dense network of byways, apartments and compounds peopled by downtrodden miners and two warring factions. But you don’t need to play any of it. In fact, the entire level is designed around an idea that speaks to Dishonored’s deepest design principles. Because the Dust District is all about:

THE MECHANIC: Skipping stuff

(Light-ish spoilers for both the Dust District and subsequent level naturally follow.)

Your mission in the Dust District is to enter the house of a mining magnate called Aramis Stilton, which lies, apparently abandoned, behind unassailably high windbreaks. The entry to it stands just after the level’s beginning, but it’s locked behind a puzzle which you’re told is impossible to solve without a code. The puzzle is called the Jindosh Riddle, and getting its code means going deep into the district to take it, by force or otherwise, from one of two hostile factions.

The Howlers is a gang of thieves led by a boss called Paolo who’s rumoured to be able to survive being killed and wishes to wrest control of the city for the people. The Overseers are a fascistic hyper-orthodox religious sect who have heard of the Howlers’ use of black magic and aim to crush it. But you’re told at the mission’s outset that you can use their mutual enmity to your advantage. If you can present the body of the leader of one side to the leader of the other, you’ll be rewarded with access to the code.

But the thing is, the puzzle is not unsolvable. With application of logic and maybe a lot of Post-It notes, you can divine the correct configuration of names and symbols from the riddle and open it. And if you do, there is no need at all to enter the Dust District. You needn’t negotiate its streets, apartments, rooftops and walkways; you can ignore their intricately laid out opportunities for concealment and murder and avoid penetrating the factions’ bases and kill and meet their respective leaders. You can disregard all the wads of dialogue, text and environmental detail placed for you to absorb. The next level is entirely open to you.


“Player, if you want to skip this, you can skip it,” creative director Harvey Smith tells me. “If you want to go fast, you can go fast. Slow if you want to go slow. We just believe a game is about play and playing with things.” His studio, Arkane, rose from the legacy of Looking Glass Technologies and its inception of the immersive sim, and Dishonored 2 is a worthy successor of the genre’s core values of giving players opportunity for self-expression.

“I feel like there’s a pretty big argument between developers who want you to see every single screen in the game and play through it one way because that’s the most high-drama, impactful way. And the only way you stop is if you die and then you reload and perfect what you’re doing and move on. On the other hand there are people who are like, no, there’s a big ecosystem and by definition you can’t see everything because you’re making decisions. Sometimes those are binary or mutually exclusive and by the end of the game you have your experience.”

But even if the studio is philosophically founded on the principle that players won’t get to experience everything in the game, allowing them to skip an entire level was still a pretty big step. Smith says that though he and level design director Christophe Carrier were excited by the concept of the Jindosh Riddle, “other people on the project were shocked, like, ‘Really, we’re going to let people skip the mission?’” They therefore wanted to make it “really fucking hard, a legitimate difficult to solve puzzle,” so it has weight and a sense of reward. “We want to give something cool to the player that they haven’t seen before. We want them to feel challenged, to feel smart, and make the world seem interesting and cool and we think this is an edgy decision.”


Carrier went away to research puzzles worthy of the lock and came back with Einstein’s enigma, a series of facts about five different people with five different attributes. The number of variations is incredibly wide, but by following a set of clues the right attribute can be aligned with the right character and the puzzle can be solved. It provided an ideal template for a combination lock, its complexity such that players feel accomplishment that lives up to the name of the achievement you’re awarded for solving it: “Eureka”.

There was one more consideration, though, which was whether the game would be long enough for those players who walked up to the puzzle, solved it and moved to the next level. “Are we cheating the players? No, because if you want to go explore the rest of the Dust District you can. And there’s more than enough value in the game. I feel sometimes that we packed three games into one box.”

The Jindosh Riddle is only one of the expressions of skipping in Dust District, which was designed by level designer Steve Lee and architect Christophe Lefaure. Each level in the game was created by these pairings of someone who considers the game and its flow, and someone who considers their spaces as coherent wholes and how it will feel to stand in them. Lefaure is the one who thought about the impact dust storms would make on a place: of how the dust would pile greater on one side of a building than the other and blast the colour from hoardings, and how the rich would be able to afford to build wooden windbreaks to save their homes from being inundated. Lee is the one who began to think about what it’d mean, as a player, to be compelled to take the side of the fascists or the criminals to get what you want.

By taking the body of one side to the other faction, you’re given a pass by that faction to walk into their territory. You therefore no longer have to work out how to traverse it stealthily or violently. All the little details that allow you safe passage and all the guard positions and patrols, carefully planned to provide challenge, are by-the-by for as long as you’re holding the leader over your shoulder. But the result in play is that you feel rewarded rather than cheated of experiencing content you’ve paid for. A big part of the reason why is that you have choice over doing so: the moment you drop the body you’ll be attacked, so it’s on you. But you also feel you’ve earned it. Entering the Overseers’ outpost or the Howlers’ headquarters feels like a full level in itself. And then there are two alternative ways of getting the code: by following a series of clues to a note, or by capturing both leaders alive.

Dishonored 2 as a whole is designed to have swathes that can – and sometimes must – be skipped. At the very outset you’ll choose between two characters, Emily and Corvo. Each has specific dialogue and reactions by NPCs, and each has a different set of powers. “You are skipping massive amounts of content,” says Smith. “You’re never going to see Domino and Mesmerise and Rat Storm. Tonnes of work went into those things. You could build entire games around those powers.”


And then there’s the fact that only 1.5% of players on Steam have so far completed the game without using powers. And yet the entire game has been painstakingly tuned and tested to ensure it’s possible. You have to wonder what it means to a development team to know that players won’t experience so much of what it worked so hard on. Smith describes a “great and depressing moment” during playtesting for the first Dishonored in which a group was discussing with each other their experiences playing the High Overseer Campbell level, while the team listened in. One playtester was disappointed in the game because marketing materials he’d been presented with had said it was all about choice but he’d seen no alternative pathways to what he’d played. And then the other playtesters said how they’d performed other actions and seen entirely other things.

“We had a moment; we knew all this was possible. It’s there for us because we’ve played the game a hundred times, but it’s not there for them because they’ve played one or twice. How do we tell them, ‘Hey, you’re going left, by the way, you could have gone right!’ How do you do that elegantly? It’s still a challenge, and some would argue you should spent all your development budget on things that every player will see, because you’re throwing away part of your work if 98.5% of players never play no powers mode. It’s an arguable point. You have to be comfortable with it, it has to be part of your philosophy, I guess.”

Dust District isn’t the only level with significant skippable material. In the next level, A Crack in the Slab, you can perform a logical but otherwise un-signposted action at a single critical moment that will transform the level and the game to come. If you miss it, you’ll have no idea these transformations exist. But for Smith it’s all justified when people tell him of their surprise when they experience them.


“It’s more like we’re rubbing our hands together in delight and we’re hoping that down the road people get that, you know? They have that magical moment where they play and maybe they have to play twice or talk to a friend, or maybe they just sense when they play that maybe it could be… It’s a little stress, like, ‘Ahh, should I do this or that?’ And then they see the results of what they’ve done and it’s wondrous. Games are one of those things that are still full of wonder.”

 

[DeepOcean]

You know, I would like to die or get caught sometimes, you know... Arkane needs to learn what threat escalation is, would be that hard to even introduce a single enemy type that doesn't die when you sniff at it? Imagine you are playing Doom but remove Pink Demons, Barons of Hell, Revenants, Lost Souls and etc. The only enemies you gonna fight with are zombie soldiers and imps on every single level.

I dunno, why aren't snipers around? Why aren't machinegun placements? What about guards armed with rifles? Fuck, I'm so desperate for challenge that even a regular guard with the double health points or that can't be counter attacked would be welcomed. How about robots that aren't hilariously expensive but easier to kill/neutralize than regular guards? Then people would say "Silly DeepOcean, Dishonored isn't an action game."

Okay, why when I crouch Corvo become absolutely silent? Isn't making Blink TELEPORT AND STOP TIME kinda make stealth pointless? How about the instant kill/neutralization crossbow, isn't that kinda a little OP on a stealth game? If you are a somewhat competent player and use the powers, you will ever be caught. People will say then "Silly DeepOcean, the only way to play is without powers, that is where stealth become interesting."

Okay, I play without powers, the map is full of runes, bone charms and money that are now completely useless, most weapons are for combat, the whole upgrading system becomes irrelevant, actually whole systems in the game become irrelevant and you start dreaming... "Boy, why I need to ignore most of the systems on a game for it to be enjoyable? Isn't that usually the other way around?". Why stealth isn't more complex and actually feel like a part of the game and not an aftertought?

Then people will say, "Silly DeepOcean, Dishonored isn't an stealth game."

Then what the fuck Dishonored is then?

Boy, I'm so butthurt, love the level design as I did on the first one but it is actually a Crtl C + Ctrl V of the first one with one of the most boring, non sense plot full of plot holes, contrivances and coincidences imaginable, that way Arkane is making things hard to keep me interested, the gameplay is the same old and the story, I could shit better plots on 10 mins.

 

[MapMan]

That's exactly why I couldn't stand the first game and probably wouldn't be able to stand the second. Good level design but everything else is just bad - not game breaking but dull and boring.

 

[Morgoth]

Bitching about the plot in an Arkane Game.

What's next? People claiming there are better AAA developers out there mastering the first-person sim genre? You people are impossible. Be happy with what you got.

 

[Ovplain]

Jesus Christ, how demanding is this game? Picked it up yesterday, started it up, saw most of the graphics settings were set to 'low' and even the goddamn main menu was acting all janky. Quit in disgust!

 

[Zep Zepo]

Finished yesterday with clean hands/shadow with Emily character.

I enjoyed the game. I like playing with stealth. Never crafted a bonecharm, just used what I picked up.

This might be the first game in a long long time I will replay. I want to replay the same way (stealthy/no kills).
The New Game + will let me use both characters powers on the one.

I missed a bunch of stuff in the early missions (1-6) trying to be too sneaky and just getting to the mission goal (bonecharms/runes/paintings/voidworld things).

I could have used about 9 more chapters. Hope they put out some interesting DLC in the future.

5 Zep--s out of 5.

Zep--

 

[Seethe]

Man, the game tricks you in the tutorial, making you think it actually runs pretty good. And then the real deal starts.....

Refunded.

 

[Sodafish]

Man, the game tricks you in the tutorial, making you think it actually runs pretty good. And then the real deal starts.....

Refunded.

Did you patch it?

 

[Zep Zepo]

The game ran great on my OG PS4.

Zep--

 

[rado907]

*long rant*

Agree with you, I think the game is best played AT LEAST in ghost mode, perhaps even without powers and/or without killing.
If you allow killing, detection or powers it becomes more of a sandbox.
The amount of effort put into the powers is amazing but perhaps futile. The powers are way OP. It's easy enough to just run around and backstab enemies with the sword.

I think the game might have worked better with weaker detection on the part of the goons, shorter but more numerous levels, and no saving - like the good Hitman games.

 

[Seethe]

Man, the game tricks you in the tutorial, making you think it actually runs pretty good. And then the real deal starts.....

Refunded.

Did you patch it?

I just downloaded it, played it for 1 hour, noticed that it has the same graphics as the first with worse camera work and performance. The biggest offender is the random stuttering, even when I get 40-50 FPS. Just another heap of trash suffering from the usual signs of consolitis. Thank god for Steam refunds.