Arkane Dishonored: Death of the Outsider - standalone adventure featuring Billie Lurk

[Infinitron]

lol, Arkane can't catch a break.

 

[skacky]

Great shit so far. Spent an hour and twenty mins on the first mission (killer atmosphere by the way) and am about 30 mins into the second, which appears to be a sprawling city mission with a lot of stuff to do. I have only encountered one bug, a guard stuck in place in an area, but that was fixed by reloading a previous autosave. Game runs flawlessly at a smooth 60 frames per second on Ultra settings on my GTX 1060.
The writing seems to be... not very good so far.

Spoiler

The sequence were you get your arm ripped off and replaced with something and get your eye gouged out is supposed to be horrific or at the very least a bit scary, but it completely and utterly fell flat on its ass. No idea if it's subpar writing or bad voice acting or both. Billie doesn't even give a shit. Eh...

 

[Latro]

so do you think Steve Harvey will fire her after this or let her ruin dishonored 3?

 

[DemonKing]

Will probably buy...after deep discounting and when I manage to finish W3: Blood & Wine, Tyranny, DD:OS2, Prey and Hitman!

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/09/15/dishonored-death-of-the-outsider-best-power/

Evasion of the bodysnatcher in Dishonored: Death Of The Outsider

Here you will find the curious case of the politician who broke his neck then went for a nice walk as if nothing had happened.

I’ll be along early next week with full thoughts in our Dishonored: Death Of The Outsider review [official site], but seeing as it’s out right now I want to bend your ear about the most interesting of its new sneak-o-magicky powers: the ability to temporarily assume of the appearance of almost any other character in the game. ‘Semblance’, as it’s called, puts a little Hitman into Dishonored’s whalepunk fantasy – only instead of borrowing someone’s clothes, you take their face. It’s a new tool in the series’ stealth armoury, but more importantly it’s another gonzo way of solving problems.

Semblance works like this: you sneak up on someone, and rather than killing or choking them, activate the power, which does something horrific involving converting their face into some kind of magical tar, and then your entire appearance into theirs. You can maintain the disguise indefinitely so long as you stand still and don’t do anything threatening or unusual, but start moving and your magical Energy drains as rapidly as Friday night’s first beer. Once your energy hits nada, you revert to your usual appearance – and woe betide you if that happens while anyone else is watching.

Basically, you’ve got about ten seconds of movement before the jig’s up, and on top of that you can only steal each face once, so no returning to your snoozing victim and pulling another catfish – you’ll need to find someone else. So, Semblance is a fundamentally different prospect to Hitman’s clothes theft despite the similarities – each time you pull an Arya Stark, think of it as a single shot at getting into or out of somewhere.

I suspect I’m going to uncover a ton of alternatives ways to use the power as I play on, but for now the below scenario has been the clear highlight.

What I’m trying to do is rummage through a politician’s office in order to find information on whether or not he’s part of a creepy death cult that’s been putting the frighteners on everyone in town, but inevitably the guy has the only key. And unfortunately for me, he’s spending his day practicing an upcoming (and creepy) speech on a stage in a town square, watched by a half dozen guards all the while. Getting him alone is impossible, and even if I identified a certain split second in which I could snag the key unobserved, getting back out again is a whole new headache.

Unless I take his face too. I call this one The Prestige. (If you’ve seen the film/read the book, you’ll know why; if you haven’t I’m not telling):

What I like about this:

1) SURPRISE TRAP DOOR ATTACK! (Also, as this isn’t obvious from the video, I had to run underneath him as he fell to make sure he landed on soft-ish sacks rather than a hard stone floor – that way he’s unconscious rather than dead. You can’t steal the face of a dead person in Death of the Outsider, because reasons).
2) he’s unconscious before I ever reach him, so no key theft risks here
3) As far as the onlookers are concerned, their boss took a comic-but-deadly tumble into a gloomy basement, then just strolled right on out of there like nothing had ever happened. They say politicians will never admit to a mistake, and this takes that to a chucklesome extreme.

What I don’t like about this:

1) tragically, the game’s dialogue is not reactive enough to the situation. I’d have loved an “er, you OK boss? Boss?” line or two in here. But so it goes.

I’m a few hours into Death Of The Outsider, and so far I’m digging it more than I did Dishonored 2 itself – as well as the use and abuse of body-snatching, it’s got a more interesting amoral and murky tone, a more nuanced protagonist and the missions to date feel a little bit more like playgrounds, where D2’s sometimes could feel like work. Also I really dislike The Outsider as a character, so I’m praying the game makes good on its title.

But we’ll see how it all shakes out later, which I’ll tell you all about that early next week.

Dishonored: Death of the Outsider is available now for Windows, and is available via Steam for £19.99.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamesn.com/dishonored-death-of-the-outsider/dishonored-death-of-the-outsider-pc-review

Dishonored: Death of the Outsider PC review

Dishonored began with a political assassination. All the main players were there: Corvo, Emily, Daud, and Billie Lurk. The whole gang. The Outsider watched on from the Void - a world between worlds, just beneath the water’s surface; an obsidian reflection where the dead whisper. This black-eyed deity granted the assassination party their supernatural powers, and he did the same for Corvo when he looked for revenge on the ones who killed his lover. But does the responsibility of the ensuing murders lie at The Outsider’s feet, or is that blood really on the hands of the people wielding these otherworldly gifts?

That question has been on Dishonored’s lips ever since the first game judged us for knifing too many people in its rat-infested back alleys. In Death of the Outsider, it’s finally answered - though it’s up to you to form its conclusion - as Arkane close the book on Daud, Billie, and The Outsider himself.

Characters’ powers always reflect their personalities in Dishonored. Corvo is an immigrant in a foreign land, so he can experience what it’s like to be a local via Possession. Emily is an empress, so she’s granted control over people’s fates, linking them together with Domino and conjuring up an expandable body double with Doppelganger. Death of the Outsider’s protagonist, Billie Lurk, grew up as a street urchin, so she can talk to Karnaca’s rats, scout ahead with a spectral form, teleport away from danger, and wear other people’s faces to gain access to restricted areas. She’s 38 years old, hardened by a lifetime of thievery and murder, and her abilities mirror that. She’s also not afraid to hide in a bin or eat discarded figs straight from the floor. Tasty, tasty floor figs.

You see, there’s a cohesiveness to Arkane’s worlds, from Prey to Dishonored, and that attention to detail carries through to Death of the Outsider. Take the first mission, which tasks you with freeing Daud from an underground boxing den. As you make your way in, you can hoist yourself up into a room containing plans for fixing fights. In there, on the desk, there’s a Bonecharm that you can equip, and it makes your opponents miss more often. These hoodlums had clearly been using it to rig matches, but now it’s yours. Every room is a story, and every prop in the world is placed with care, in the hope of reinforcing these stories.

For Dishonored veterans, this might sound like bloody (or not) business as usual, but Death of the Outsider does tweak a bunch of the series’ fundamentals. For starters, there’s no mana-management. You don’t need to stay stocked on mana vials to use your powers here - instead, you have three chunks of mana that quickly recharge after depletion. It means you can’t spam too many powers in succession, but you don’t have to ever worry about running low on juice. It’s a much better system.

Elsewhere, you only have the three powers: Displace, Semblance, and Foresight. In previous Dishonored games, you’d have to use the Heart to search for Runes - like a sinewy, talkative radar - then use those Runes to unlock and upgrade your powers. There are no Runes here. Billie doesn’t have the Mark of The Outsider, you see - she feeds on Daud’s power. It makes sense to the story, and improves exploration, making it feel more organic. You can make minor upgrades to Billie’s moveset by finding Bonecharms, though you have to actually find them this time - you’re not just chasing UI markers. These can be small tweaks like the aforementioned fight club trinket, or they can be major, such as one that adds a short period of invisibility to Displace, your teleporting ability, at the cost of reduced range. The fact you’re not searching for markers solves one of Dishonored’s longest-held bugbears and further pulls you into its immersive, stylised, and wonderfully-detailed vision of Karnaca.

On top of these clever tweaks, mission objectives are different. Dishonored has always been built around assassinations, but Death of the Outsider gives us only one target: the eponymous god. Over its five missions, you work towards this goal, gathering intel and stealing the supplies needed to do the deed. The majority of the game plays out like a superpowered Thief, and its best mission asks you to pull off a bank heist on a huge building kitted out with security devices invented by Dishonored 2’s Jindosh. From the lore-laden planning phase to the execution, the entire mission easily stands among Dishonored’s best, securing a place alongside Lady Boyle’s Last Party and the Clockwork Mansion.

It’s the best level because it gives you the most options, each stage of the heist coming with its own set of challenges. When I play it, I decide to go in through the roof. I’m told that I can lower the bank’s security if I drop some sleeping concoction down a vent before entering, so, first, I go about stealing the supplies. Unfortunately, the pharmacy has been shut down and its stock is being sold at auction. Once I find the auction, I steal a noble’s face with Semblance and stash his body in a dark corner, before making my way inside as my mana drains. I’m greeted by a guard on the way in, his dialogue matching the face I’m wearing. It’s at this point that I realise my mana drains faster the quicker I move, only ceasing to diminish when I stop, and I’m almost completely out before I take a seat.

The auction begins and I manage to outbid the other nobles on the items, but I’m stuck, stood in the middle of this gathering, and with only a slither of mana left before my mask slips. Luckily, I have just enough left to slink around the back of the stage just out of sight, so I go there and wait for my mana to recover. I still need to gather my supplies, though, so I generate a copy of myself on a nearby balcony using Displace, and quickly switch to its position before heading back out into the streets to take the face of a guard. Once I have it, I just need to get to the bank and use a painter’s lift to reach the roof. The painter’s lift is out of whale oil and has no power, however, so I have to steal another guard’s face and power it up, grabbing a tank from the other side of the bank’s grounds and slowly strolling over as my fellow guards tip their hats.

Once the concoction is down the chute, I head in via the rooftop entrance. Everyone is out like a light, but they can be woken up by noise. What follows is a tense 30 minutes of tiptoeing through the bank, taking care not to step on anyone or accidentally knock over any props, as well as avoiding the clockwork soldiers patrolling the most secure areas. When I finally activate the elevator vault, it wakes up everyone in the building with an alarm, and the intercom sends them my way. I’m still crouched, hiding, in the security room when the vault reaches the top floor - the voice on the intercom redirects the sentries, telling them to head to the vault, instead. I wait a few minutes as they scramble up after it, then push the button to send the vault back down to the bottom floor, Displacing my way down as quickly as possible, racing the guards. I get what I came for, then have to fight and sprint my way out. It’s frantic, exciting, and contains everything I love about Dishonored.

These same kinds of stories are generated in every level, particularly through Contracts - new optional side missions that can be accessed through each area’s black markets. Robbing those shops, like in Dishonored 2, unravels a story of its own, too. Contracts can completely change how you approach a mission, asking you to smuggle specific targets out of busy areas, tasking you with killing people and making it look like an accident, or even going as far as requesting you kill every person in a level except one. The game leans into Billie’s bloodlust and her disdain for a world that abandoned her to the streets. Displace into someone’s body and you can blow them into tiny chunks at the cost of some health, ripping them into pieces from the inside. Nobody will judge you for it, either - there won’t be any physical manifestations of your violence this time, just more corpses lining the streets.

Dishonored: Death of the Outsider captures everything that’s great about Arkane’s assassination series, while also showing that it can still surprise. Smart tweaks improve the core gameplay and, if you’re worried about having fewer powers to play with, you can always go back through it with Corvo’s moveset when you’re done. As far as mission quality goes, it peaks in the middle - the fourth mission has us revisit a location from Dishonored 2, albeit slightly reworked, and the final mission feels much more linear than what’s come before. Still, it all leads to a satisfying conclusion that neatly ties up every plot strand that’s been hanging since that political assassination, whoever you decide is responsible.

9/10

 

[Projas]

30 euro seems like a lot. Anyone knows how long is the expansion?

 

[Ivan]

one review stated half of the campaign

 

[Paul_cz]

30 euro seems like a lot. Anyone knows how long is the expansion?

I got it for 20 euros on gamebillet, which is authorized shop so you are not getting ripped off there. Can recommend.
Expansion should be about 20 hours completionist style, possibly more. It is pretty much its own game.
I started playing and immediately got sucked in by the atmosphere to the degree where it made me want to replay the whole god damn series.

 

[Morgoth]

I completed the first two missions, and so far the game is very cool. Definitely a worthy addition to the franchise.

You can also get the game for dirt cheap here:
https://gamesplanet.com/game/dishonored-death-of-the-outsider-steam-key--3057-3

22.50€ seems fair for a game roughly half the length of D2.

 

[skacky]

I'm 9 hours into the game and currently still in the third mission.
The game is *really* hard compared to the base game, which is welcome. I play on a custom difficulty with pretty much everything cranked to the max. I was playing non-lethal/ghost without powers but some bits are just borderline impossible without using at least the identity theft or Billie's version of Blink. Overall I'm really enjoying this. The level design is as usual fantastic overall, though it does feel a bit restrictive at times; for instance in mission 3 there are at least 4 different ways into the bank proper, but there is only one way to get into the bank grounds themselves.

Spoiler

I'm currently in the bank and I've sedated everyone. It looks like I had to wake up the clerk to be able to go to the vault controls, but that piece of shit sounds the alarm when I move the vault. I can't reach him and can't knock him out because it would fail me a very lucrative contract... Not too sure what to do for now.

The game had an update tonight so it was maybe fixed, but I ran into a very annoying bug: I've had bystanders become unconscious upon loading a quicksave. This happened twice during mission 2: once with a random bloke on the first plaza, and once with the cook in the opera singer's house. That second instance was irksome as a servant girl noticed him and busted my ghost run despite her not having seen me properly (I was in another room entirely, but the sting did play).

 

[LESS T_T]

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news...ew_Dishonored_adventure_with_Harvey_Smith.php

Gamasutra plays the new Dishonored adventure with Harvey Smith

Arkane Studios has had a heck of a year. First Dishonored 2 launched last fall, then Prey came out to massive critical acclaim. Now, the studio has launched Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, a slimmer standalone adventure meant to complement the story of Dishonored 2.

Today on the Gamasutra Twitch channel, we were lucky enough to get a chance to talk to Harvey Smith, creative director at Arkane Studios on the Dishonored series. Smith had joined us last year for a chat about the game’s release, but we were lucky to have him on today to dive into the development process behind the new Dishonored adventure.

You can watch our full conversation with Smith up above, but just in case you’re beginning your journey to kill a mysterious godlike being, here’s a few key takeaways from our chat with Smith.

A deep dive into the Semblance power that’s new to Death of the Outsider

Smith was kind enough to explain to us the development process behind the new Semblance power (which lets you take on the appearance of any NPC in the game…provided you can get close enough), some of the challenges to implementing it and why Arkane Studios thinks challenging abilities like this help define their games. It proved to be a springboard for talking about why certain features get cut at Arkane, and the realities of developing these fluid, more expressive kinds of immersive simulators.

The story behind why the Dishonored series lets you do nonlethal runs

Despite being thematically about killing, you can actually get through the Dishonored games without murdering a single character. But that process wasn’t a core pillar of the original Dishonored design, it was something that emerged in a conversation between Harvey Smith and Raphael Colantonio, former co-creative director at Arkane Studios. As Smith tells it, the pair were reviewing the game’s core verbs, and how you could non-lethally kill every NPC, when they realized there wasn’t a path for using those same gameplay mechanics on the assassination targets.

That led to a decision to extend the level design work (and game’s writing), and thus the dual-pathway of the Dishonored series was born.

During playtesting, developers would be livestreamed gameplay of people playing the game while they were still at their desks

This is kind of a small tidbit, but Smith says that during the process of making Dishonored games, playtest footage would be live-streamed to the desks of people inside Arkane so they could check in on how players were progressing while working on other projects. Smith says he himself doesn’t review every single playtest anymore, but some of his co-workers at Arcane use opportunities like this to take a very close look at how people play their levels.

 

[fantadomat]

I am surprised that there are 5000 people playing this sjw shit,meh back to replaying thief.

 

[Morgoth]

Finished this on Hard in ~11 hours. I liked it overall but I will highlight some pros and cons vis-a-vis D2.

The good news is that the level design as well as the art remains of the highest quality despite lacking those sublime gems like The Clockwork Mansion or the Aramis Stilton house in D2. The AI is also more aggressively tuned by default, prompting guards to search longer and farther away. In return, the game also urges a more confrontational gameplay style, thanks to the elimination of mana refills. Instead you now get a cooldown gauge for abilities, prompting you to use them more repeatedly. You can still do everything 100% stealthy but it's not as sublimely tuned as in D2. There are also contract missions which are overall fun and give you extra coin and bone charms. So all the guff you liked about D2 is still intact, but it has a different pacing and feeling to it. The performance is also great, not a single stutter.

A minor negative is the void strike ability. It's in essence a toned down version of Corvo's whirlwind ability integrated in a sword, but with higher frequency use. This makes the sword still ridiculously overpowered. It's easy mode from there on.

What I didn't like so much was the writing. Billie is a tough girl, I get it, but the Twitter-gals have overdone it with the shit-bombs. Some of the biggest letdown was

Spoiler

when Daud died. What an incredibly apathetic eulogy of Billie. Lazy and anti-climatic. I also didn't get the point in burning down the entire Dreadful Wale ship.

Rosario Dawson's VO also felt like a lame duck overall, while Michael Madson did his job playing a decrepit old man fairly natural.

So while I think the franchise is still in good hands at studio Lyon, I do think it's imperative that they find a visionary of the same format as Harvey Smith to keep the story and writing of the next big project coherent and fresh. Because I don't really entrust the Twitter-gals to conceptualize a Dishonored 3, going by their work in DOTO they simply lack the wealth of experience and acumen of the pre-internet-Twitter creative writers.

 

[skacky]

I don't know, story writing was never Arkane's forte. The story in Dishonored was simplistic at best and the one in Dishonored 2 was honestly pretty terrible. It doesn't bother me much since I'm not playing games for the story but it's a shame they're so meh when you have a universe that's so rich, engrossing and well written. So far Death of the Outsider feels the same, and yes some moments do fall completely flat because of either bad writing, subpar delivery from Rosario Dawson or both.

 

[Morgoth]

Speaking of the Outsider: I always liked him as a character (sans his new voice actor), listening to his little cryptic messages was always a joy, but in DOTO he was just mostly rambling weird shit for the sake of being weird - another victim of the Twitter-hires I presume. At least the finale was written fairly competently, even Robin Lord Taylor gave an effort to show a non-cringeworthy performance for once.

 

[sexbad?]

I played through it, and it was mediocre, like D2 but slightly worse. Enemies are hawk-eyed, despite the fact that most only attack you because of wanted posters. So they'll spot you across large courtyards, or see you peeking around a corner, and you'll have ten guys running after you if you don't play extremely methodically. Stealth is extremely hard as a result, like in D2 but worse. If they wanted to include social stealth properly, they would give some distance before cops would recognize Billie's face.

The level design is not as good. The second mission was pretty much walking through streets for three hours and stumbling over objectives if you didn't want to read everything, I guess. I had to enable quest markers eventually, because there was one guy's apartment that I had to get into but couldn't find. I knew the street he was on, but the map didn't have any fucking street names (!?!?), and I couldn't find any street signs either amid the visual clutter.

The second and third missions actually take place on the same map, and the second is pretty much just information gathering for the third, which is more exciting. They really could have just consolidated the two, deleted some of the (definitely) filler content from the second, and given you the goal of the third (robbing a bank for a powerful artifact) right from the start. Instead, you basically gotta fuck around a lot, run back to the hub level, watch a couple "heist planning" cutscenes, almost-bee-line back to the bank, and then do the actually cool mission.

Spoiler

Also, Daud dies off-screen in a manner as unceremonious as this sentence. You just complete a mission and then it plays one of those sketchy cutscenes with Billie saying he burned to death.

The writing, world building and narrative are as bad as Dishonored has always been, but because of the subject matter of this, it reaches peak retard. I don't think their Twitter lady they hired had much influence; it's just that as you converge on what the Outsider is supposed to be, nothing makes sense. I still have no idea why I had to kill him. All he ever did to anyone in these games was pop up in front of them and deliver dull ass monologues.

 

[fantadomat]

Without the outsider any future game will be boring at best.Not buying any future games,unless they pull something very original(which they will not).

 

[drgames]

Started and finished today, the game lasts 10h , 12h maybe if you are looking for all the secrets ect. I tell you clearly: this game is not worth 29 euros (the price i bought it ), my advise is to wait until it gets heavily discount , actually I don't think it is even worth buying it at all. The story,gameplay and even design are mediocre at best. The gameplay is utterly idiot : You have three skills that ruins the entire experience, because 1) they are overpowered 2) no matter what skill you use, the void energy regenerates. The story is idiot : they blame the outsider for being responsible for all the shit happened even tho he only offered them an outstanding power, without force them to do anything, so at the end they were the bad guys. The writing is cringe, bad and dumb, with huge plot-holes ....You know what, this game was so bad and disappointed that it is not even worth the time and the energy to write how bad and disappointed it is.

4/10, do not buy it. I was expecting more from arkane studio. I am really disapponted.

 

[drgames]

If there will be more dishonored in the future, they will just put a new outsider; since the character was so smart to focus to remove the fruit, instead of the root of the tree of problems.

 

[Siel]

arkane should make prey 3 instead of wasting money on fantasy garbage.

 

[skacky]

Finished it. Took me about 16 hours and I missed a few things. It's a bit of a shame that the game reuses locations not once but twice; the reuse of the city map from mission 2 is fine but they also reused the conservatory from Dishonored 2 mission 5, which is my favorite mission in that game by quite a margin, except this time they excised about half of it and changed the layout a bit. It's still good but kind of underwhelming. That said, I absolutely loved the final mission, and the bank job is frankly marvelous with all the available options. Can't wait to replay it. The final mission felt pretty spooky at times and it's also very challenging if you want to collect all the bone charms lying around while keeping ghost/non-lethal intact.

I do agree that the story is a bit ehhh, but that was also the case with the previous games so it's alright. Also for the few pissants who think the game is full-on SJW: there is zero reference made to Billie's skin color, and her being a woman has no incidence on the game at all. These two factors don't have any impact at all. There is no overt SJW preaching of any kind either. I like Billie as a character but I know what didn't work: the voice acting for her just has no emotion at all. It's like she doesn't give a damn about anything, which is a shame. The character deserved better imo.

Death of the Outsider is definitely a worthy addition to the franchise. It's also much more challenging than the base game.

 

[Leechmonger]

I really should get around to playing it.

Spoiler

The original, I mean.

Spoiler

Dishonored 1.

 

[waterdeep]

They had something good going on with the Outsider in the first Dishonored, but ruined all the subtlety with the 2 new games

 

[Goldwell]

I finished the game on Hard and it took me about 17 hours to finish, however I did all of the contracts bar one and really took my time with the levels.

I did feel that the repetition of levels was a bit lame, but the new mechanics they introduced were limited but still fun. As for the story

Spoiler

I felt a bit underwhelmed by the ending, it turns out that whether you play in low or high chaos doesn't matter so they're able to get a low-chaos ending if you choose to save The Outsider even if you played high-chaos the whole way through, I assume they did that so that you feel free to do the contracts which are some of the best parts of the game. I decided to but it didn't really feel like saving him, rather just setting free a man who has been tortured with all of the knowledge in the world from the past 4000 years. That to me seems more dangerous than just killing him, but I guess he will go live out his days doing whatever now.

I was hoping a bit for a reaction to how Corvo or Emily might react learning that the outsider is now a freeman and wondering around the world but seeing as Arkane have closed the Kaldwin story arc with this game I guess we will never know.

All in all I did enjoy it, but it really felt like something that should have been added to the end of Dishonored 2 rather than a standalone game. I hope that Arkane will revisit the Dishonored universe but this time with new characters and hopefully a story that is more engaging. I would not pay more $15-$20 for it though, it certainly isn't worth the $30, especially given how much content they reuse... Even if exploring Karnaca again was enjoyable.