This isn’t just a violent game. It’s an immersive sim. The fun comes from the many different ways you can handle a level. Even in ways unintended to the developer. Not every game is Gears of War.
I mean, it really isn’t though. You can totally play it that way, yeah, but that’s only one option. The story reacts to how you play and the decisions you make. I find the low chaos (less or non-lethal) ending to be my favorite. Also canonically Corvo isn’t a raving lunatic murderer, so if you’re looking for the “True” story experience that’s the way to go. He still kills some people, notably the Lord Regent, but spares others.
That game is insane. Like, I played the game with a non-lethal route because of the good ending and stuff. But after I finished the game, I wondered how other people played this game, and holy shit, we are playing different games lol. This game is very gorey I don’t even know it’s part of the core gameplay lol
Dude it’s a blast. When they came out I played through each Dishonored once slowly, methodically, and non-lethal. Then immediately started over and hauled ass just slaughtering anything that got in my way. Both ways are valid and so much fun!
Played dishonored 1 and 2 earlier this year on my steam deck and they played great. Also FYI - month ago I grabbed expedition 33 and started it - as someone who loved ff turn based games and baldur’s gate and turn based pathfinder, I found it extremely boring. Quit playing after forcing myself to continue for 15 hours thinking it would get better.
Probably just me, but maybe look into it more before making the buy.
Yeah I honestly have so many games that I haven’t played that I’m going to wait for a big sale on it. I’m always so behind the times that I never get anything at release.
Dishonored is one of the few games that I’ve turned right around and played through again after I beat it. The gameplay is just so free. It’s not really the biggest map ever, but it is so dense and easy to navigate. I also haven’t experienced a lot of titles that just ooze atmosphere the way that Dishonored does. The art direction is off the charts, and I think it’s aged pretty impeccably. It’s always a good idea to do stylized over realistic, at least if you want your game to stand the test of time.
I played the first game way, way back. At the very least, I remember completing it, and liking it. So fast forward several years, the game goes on sale plenty, and I’ve forgotten nearly all of it, but remembered I liked it. So why not play it again, right? Picked it up for cheap, and just could not get into it. I tried a couple times even, but I just can’t for some reason.
Did you enable all the DLC? Maybe you didn’t the first time. I made the mistake of playing it for the first time with everything, and some of the DLC gives you all your powers/etc right away I believe. It has been years but I remember this really bummed me out rather than unlocking things as I went.
I could be remembering wrong, but I think it just hands you a lot of unlockables almost right away. I recall feeling like it killed some of the excitement that would have been there.
Someone with more recent memory can help me out. I just remember being powerful super quick.
Dishonored (1) is my favorite game of all time. I’ve put in so many hours across every console I’ve owned since it came out in 2012. Some of the best DLC story expansions of all time, too. Glad to see it still getting some love and mourning the fact that we’ll never get another game.
Wow that looks like a blast. I just finished my ~fifth playthrough of Bioshock: Infinite last week and that game looks like it would slot in right beside that. Thanks for sharing!
Dishonored is my favorite video game series of all time! I play that thing every year, lol. Love the stealth challenges and all the ways you can approach things. I really enjoy the sequels too, and this year I’ve finally gotten into the books. Fantastic game. Also they leaned heavy into the style, so 13 years later it still looks decent. Not nearly as aged-looking as “realistic” graphics from that time. Those still look decent too, all things considered. But stylized graphics tend to fit their current limitations better than pushing for realism.
Dishonored: The Corroded Man
This takes place about a year before Dishonored 2, and POV characters include Emily and Corvo. I really liked this one. Especially how it expanded on the relationship between Corvo and Emily. Some neat character insights too. Emily is canonically a beefcake.
Dishonored: The Return of Daud
This one follows Daud during the events of Dishonored 2 as he looks for the Twin-bladed Knife. Really cool concept that is once again brought down by Daud and his Daud-ness. “Woe is me, I killed the empress! Who can I push this blame upon to heal the hole in my black heart?!”. I’m making my way through though. It does show a bit more of Gristol that is outside of Dunwall.
Dishonored: The Veiled Terror
I haven’t gotten here yet. It follows Billy Lurk after Death of the Outsider, and how she deals with the consequences of the ending of that game.
Comics
I have not read these at all yet, and they may be hard to find.
It absolutely was, but thats in spite of choosing to launch it on an immature architecture with no developer tooling, not because of it. Imagine what it could have been if it wasn’t so hard to use!
We don’t even need to imagine, necessarily! The quality of games released towards the tail-end of its life cycle speaks volumes: Uncharted 2&3, The Last of Us, God of War 3, Metal Gear Solid 4 etc.
I don’t think there was anything actually wrong with the architecture per se, but rather just the lack of proper documentation and tools set potential developers back significantly.
It was definitely hubris on Sony’s part, thinking that they could do whatever they wanted given the prior success of both the PlayStation and PS2 consoles prior.
Those PS3 launch stumbles definitely were a wake-up call, however I do believe that because it was largely the US/Western arm of SCEI that lead the ‘rescue’ - they ended up wrestling control away from the JP arm, ultimately causing the PS4/5 to end up so risk adverse and largely unremarkable as a result.
Ugh games of this era are gonna age like milk with this forced upscaling and blurry TAA smear shite.
More compression and upscaling… How about just better graphics? How about you make a console that can do path tracing that you can get going with a fairly cheap PC setup.
All these years and these consoles still run 720p30fps like the PS3, but it’s ok with some people because it’s using AI to be dishonest and not just lying like back in the good old days with fish AI.
Forced upscaling and blurry TAA is compensating for the fact that they can’t push graphics much further on the hardware we have. The current hardware progression has stagnated, combined with the fact that we are seeing more diminishing returns in graphics as they improve, requiring more power to deliver less of a noticeable difference.
But it doesn’t mean these games won’t look great when you disable the fakeness and run it with brute force GPU power 10 years from now.
I honestly think the current graphics we can achive are fine and where the true improvements should come from are better animation and actually good art direction.
I’m no expert on the matter, but I know this yt channel argues that the technology is already available. The thing is, big players like unreal engine devs make sub-optimal decisions when implementing these new features, leaving a lot of games being blurry and/or mal-ajusted simply by not knowing any better. Of course, art direction will always be important for a games graphics, but when the vast majority of tools available make things look bad by default, it makes sense that people will assume a better result is just not available yet.
That’s the guy who’s asking for a million dollars to “fix” unreal engine 5 despite having 0 programming experience and sends out dcma strikes for any videos that call him out on it, lol
I think the primary reason for the GPU stagnation has been the AI / GPU compute bubble over the past 5 years.
So much on-die space has been diverted away from raw rasterisation power towards CUDA, that it has artificially held back GPU progress.
When we do see the current AI bubble burst (and it does feel like we’re fast approaching that point, due to all the recent incestuous business dealings), hopefully we can see some innovation return to the sector.
I think calculating the rays in a different way does constitute as rethinking the pipeline, especially when we consider that path tracing is one of the most computationally heavy processes in computer graphics. In fact path tracing is so heavy we don’t even do full path tracing (as in we don’t calculate all the possible rays), we essentially cheat by calculating a handful of rays and then sending it through a denoiser (which is why it takes a second to calculate the shadow of your character). There’s a lot of performance to be found in raytracing and if they’ve found some then that’s a pretty big deal.
I do know all of this, it’s just dedicated hardware for a step we’re currently simulating in shaders. Dedicated hardware that if I’m not mistaken exists on NVIDIA graphics cards already.
That’s an added capability, not a rethinking. But it will enable raytracing in a way that is far less expensive.
arstechnica.com
Aktywne