Disshonored: Dishonored.

Can you make a game out of nothing but neat touches? This is a question that I had hitherto not really considered before buying and playing Dishonored, a game which appears to be the answer. The world and art style are neat, but simply having an interesting world doesn’t make a game on its own. The profusion of secrets and easter eggs scattered throughout the various levels and missions are neat, but the definition of a secret is that it’s secret. You can’t build a game around secrets. The way the various powers can interact with the world and with each other are neat, but these are the tools you use to tackle the game and their utility/entertainment value is contingent on the game providing you with the appropriate opportunities to use them. It is both a testament to just how many neat touches there are in Dishonored and a damning indictment of how rotten and worm-ridden the underlying structure they’re bolted to is that the whole thing doesn’t instantly come crashing down around the player’s ears. Instead it takes, oooh, a good seven hours for that to happen. So I guess you can make a game out of nothing but neat touches. Temporarily, anyway.

You are Corvo, Lord Protector to the Empress of Dunwall and the most incompetent bodyguard ever, as she gets offed in the world’s most obvious assassination attempt about three minutes after the game starts and leaves Corvo to be framed for the deed. The game then jumps forward six months because… uh, well, it just does. Corvo is in prison, and the people actually responsible for the assassination stop by just before Corvo’s execution  to do some supervillainesque mwa-ha-ha-ing about how they’ve taken over the city. Cue inevitable escape attempt and subsequent joining up with “the resistance” to overthrow the corrupt dictatorship of the Lord Regent and replace him with the Empress’s ten year-old daughter, because obviously that’s not a plan that’s massively open to manipulation by outside sources at all.

Now, there were two ways Dishonored could have gone. The first is the way I wanted it to go, where Corvo would have to figure out who was responsible for the assassination of the Empress all on his lonesome and then exact revenge whilst trying to avoid apprehension for being Public Enemy Number One. This would have required a little more work on the part of the player but would ultimately have been satisfying for placing the agency and the story directly into the player’s hands; I would have felt like it was me setting things right and changing the course of history rather than progressing down some badly-greased plot rails, which is the second avenue open to Dishonored and the path it ultimately elects to travel.

So you get out of prison, and are immediately told by the leaders of the resistance to go kill a guy. Then when he’s dead, you’re told to kill two more guys. Then when they’re dead, you’re told to kill another gu—wait, lady. Then when she’s dead, you’re told to kill another guy.  There is no choice on the player’s part about whether or not these people should die; Corvo simply accepts that they’re Bad Men (and women) who deserve their fate, whether that be Corvo shivving them in the neck or one of the various non-lethal methods of disposal that have been shoehorned into the game. For a game that’s supposed to be all about choice, Dishonored really is stingy with giving any sort of control to the player character. Sure, you can go in loud with pistol and sword, murdering the hell out of any City Watch that tries to stop you, or you can steal in quietly over the rooftops with the aid of the insanely useful Blink spell, but despite the amount of options you have in reaching your target, once you get there you have to get rid of them in order to clear the obstruction blocking the plot train from making its way to the next station.

I’m probably being rather unfair to Dishonored here as a linear series of levels with discrete events that moved the plot onwards is exactly how Deus Ex and Thief did it, but there’s something about Dishonored in particular which rankles with me. The protagonists of Deus Ex and Thief were portrayed as having their own opinions and independent streaks, occasionally speaking out against the orders and directions they were given and at least giving the appearance of concentrating decision-making power in the hands of the player. When Human Revolution introduced the fairly braindead character of Adam Jensen and took control out of the player’s hands entirely during cutscenes, people rightly complained that this was going against the spirit of what the game was supposed to be. Dishonored does the exact same thing, especially during the incredibly predictable plot twist1 during which I was screaming NO CORVO DON’T DO THAT YOU MORON at the monitor; Corvo is a silent protagonist who accepts his orders blindly and unquestioningly with no opportunities given to the player to argue about whether what he’s doing is actually a good idea. The open nature of the levels does much to enhance the actual gameplay, but this lack of overall player agency completely killed Dishonored as a coherent game world for me and turned it into just another FPS where the objective was to get to the end of the level.

This is the broad thrust of my philosophical problem with Dishonored; despite the incredible work that has gone into the world – the painterly visual style, the steampunk industrial design of the buildings and machines, the pieces of background fluff liberally scattered around for the player to pick up and read if they feel so inclined – it makes absolutely no attempt to support the suspension of the player’s disbelief at any point. The levels aren’t set up like places in a world, they’re set up like levels in a game; they have more in common with Doom than they do Deus Ex. In fact Dishonored reminds me of nothing more than Deus Ex for people with the attention span of a sugar-addled toddler, in that at no point is the player ever required to actually engage their brain to effect an entry or solve a puzzle and the game is prepared to break all sane rules of logic and reason in order to accommodate them. As a not-so random example that highlights Dishonored’s curious malaise, there are a number of combination-locked safes in the game which contain money and valuables. Opening them is entirely optional and never necessary to complete a mission, but this is a pointless affectation of choice when every single safe in the game bar one has an incredibly obvious clue as to the combination written down on a piece of paper that’s in the same room. Often it’s right next to the safe itself. The hardest one requires at most thirty seconds of effort to open. Perhaps I’m in a minority here, but I would say that while there is a choice between opening the safe or not that choice is the very definition of a no-brainer. It’s the most superficial way of implementing player choice possible, and I hate it.

 

Another curious artefact of Dishonored’s obvious nature as a game is the bizarre reactions NPCs have towards pickpocketing. This is a game feature that rarely surfaces as most of the people you’ll have the opportunity to pickpocket will be hostile towards you anyway, but there’s one level that involves infiltrating a party in a swanky mansion. As long as you keep inside the clearly delineated neutral zone the guards won’t go for you unless they see you’re up to something nefarious, and unarmed NPCs are programmed not to react to anything short of cold-blooded murder. This led to an absurd situation where my Corvo spent a good ten minutes shuffling around the party stealing everyone’s money pouches in broad daylight while about twenty aristocratic partygoers looked on in complete indifference. The rules of the scenario did not allow for Corvo to be exposed through pickpocketing, and so he was able to rob everyone blind without them – for example – running off to report his thievery to the guards who were literally standing right across the room. That is not a scenario that could take place anywhere except inside a game.

Perhaps the ultimate evidence of Dishonored’s naked artificiality can be seen in its morality metagame, which basically tracks the number of people you’ve killed so far and correlates it to a “Chaos level”, which can be low or high. Finish the game with a low Chaos level and you get the good ending, whereas sowing chaos by indiscriminately murdering everyone buys you the bad ending. First off, I have issues with any game based around “choice” that heavily leans on you to choose one option over others; you get all sorts of neat toys for killing people but if you want that good ending then you’re going to be stuck with sleep darts and choke holds for most of the game. Second, since when was a non-lethal playthrough an end in and of itself rather than a simple means to one? I think developers have looked at the non-lethal run possible in Deus Ex and completely misunderstood why that was amazing. Completing Deus Ex without killing anyone is actually really difficult and requires you to actively glitch the game out in one or two places, and as a consequence it’s a minority option that maybe one or two percent of players will ever attempt. The game still makes provision for it, though; if you haven’t killed Anna Navarre – something I thought was impossible to avoid until I read how to do it – then the game will acknowledge that fact in your subsequent conversations with Gunther. In the grander scheme of things Paul would chide you for slaughtering the NSF terrorist cells and Navarre/Manderley would chide you for not slaughtering them, but the crucial thing here was that the game didn’t force you to pursue a non-lethal playthrough to the point of absurdity; once MJ12 shows up the gloves come off and JC can kill whoever he wants without the game smacking him on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper, and doing things non-lethally after that is purely up to the player. While Deus Ex permitted that kind of playstyle if the player really wanted to do it, it wasn’t built around being non-lethal or not. It was a genuine moral choice, not a moral imperative.

Dishonored isn’t completely shallow in its acknowledgement of a non-lethal playstyle and some NPCs will drop the odd comment about it here and there (there’s even a fairly major event during the final level that changes substantially depending on which way you’ve done it) but unlike Deus Ex the major manifestions of this reactivity within the game – more rats, a darker city and a darker ending, or not — make no sense. It’s never explained why killing more people will result in a bad ending and bad reactions from characters, even if the people you’re killing are zombies, thieves and assassins who are actively trying to kill you. Not even Paul complained when you started icing MIBs in Deus Ex; this absolutist binary approach between lethal/non-lethal is a massively abstract and gamey way of tallying up the player’s actions, and is largely present because Deus Ex-style games are supposed to have non-lethal runs and multiple endings now, and this is a way of combining the two into an arrangement that confounds all rational logic. Human Revolution had one (although all you got for it was an achievement, putting it in the realm of fun challenge2 rather than a gameplay necessity) and now Dishonored has worked it into the very structure of its metagame, boiling it down to nothing more than a simple number of deaths which leads to one outcome or the other. Dishonored displays a level of moral complexity and ambiguity that is on par with Bioshock, for crying out loud. And it sucks.

(Fair play to Dishonored, though, in that there’s a lot of subtle stuff going on that you can miss if you’re not paying attention and/or exploring and which serves to flesh out the game’s backstory far better than any hundred in-game books. It’s just a shame that I consider it to be largely wasted effort in light of how flimsy the overplot and underlying game mechanics are.)

I haven’t even tried to give a fair and balanced assessment of Dishonored in this review; it’s basically 2,000 words of me giving it a damn good thrashing. That’s not to say that it’s all bad; it’s a game with a lot of good ideas – and neat touches — and there’s the odd level where everything comes together and it actually works the way I think it should. I certainly did enjoy a fair amount of the time I spent playing it, and it was only because I found the overall experience so hollow and unsatisfying that I decided to take the knife to it at all. I figure that if you want to read dewy-eyed praise for Dishonored, though, then all you have to do is visit one of the more reputable mainstream games review sites. Everyone else seemed to love the bloody thing. I didn’t.

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  1. Plot “twists” in games are starting to reach the point of parody in that they’re so obvious they don’t even qualify as twists any more; the player is expecting a twist to occur at some point because the laws of game narrative demand it, and so the twist, far from surprising them, is merely fulfilling their expectations. At this point it’d be more surprising to me for a game to play it completely straight.
  2. Non-lethality was also the powergamer’s choice in HE as it straight-up gave you more experience points than killing people did.
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17 thoughts on “Disshonored: Dishonored.

  1. Bink says:

    I haven’t played this at all, but I assumed from the trailers that this was going to be more akin to the Thief games than Deus Ex. Is it anything like the Thief series? If so, how does it compare on the stealthy-stealthy stealy-stealy (stabby-stabby) side?

    • Hentzau says:

      It does have rather more of Thief in its genetic makeup than it does Deus Ex, to the point where there were a couple of occasions where it felt like I was playing a not-at-all-bad modern update of the Thief games. There’s plenty of ancillary loot you can grab and several levels have secret rooms and vaults that you can locate and steal from if you feel like it. Unfortunately these moments are few and far between as most levels are rather linear and don’t do a particularly good job of disguising it.

      As far as the stealth goes it’s… a mix. You see, you can’t really get through a level stealthily without using some of the magic powers the game gives you, whether it be teleport or thief-o-vision or the time stop spell to sprint past unseeing guards. And there’s a couple of bits where you *cannot* bypass a guard and instead have to take him out somehow. I thought the stealth elements were above average, in general, but I resented these forced confrontations whenever they cropped up.

      I think what this boils down to is that if you’re looking for a Thief-em-up then Dishonored is a better bet than most, but you have to bear in mind that sneaking and stealing isn’t anywhere near as central to the gameplay as it is in Thief and there are very few big heist moments. It’s a neat extra, that’s all.

  2. innokenti says:

    You are obviously and objectively wrong. Completely and utterly. You know it deep down, I am sure.

    I do agree with a lot of the minor niggles, but I think they are inevitable flaws in an outstanding game rather that anything else. I would prefer if they were not there, but they bothered me for about a moment once or twice and were gone.

    I’d go through your meatier criticisms one by one… but meh. I am not sure there’s much point. In any case, you are exaggerating about the safes and I think you are incredibly unfair on the level design which, barring the one occasion where they funnel you into something extremely linear towards the end, is much more organic and fluid than Deus Ex and more on par with the Thief games.

    Everyone is entitled to their own wrong opinions and I suppose it would be disappointing if you had good things to say about this. I would certainly lose a little faith in you.

    • Hentzau says:

      List of non-linear levels in Dishonored: 1) The party level, 2) The final level, 3)???

      (And no, I don’t think a choice of entering a building through the front door or the side entrance counts as “non-linear”. I really enjoyed the party level, pickpocketing oddity aside, and if the entire game had been like that — a collection of huge environments where the target is just one of many potential marks and payouts — I would have had far fewer complaints. It wasn’t.)

  3. Zael says:

    That’s a really harsh assessment Hent. I don’t think it’s fair to thrash a game because it doesn’t give you choice in terms of narrative. There are plenty of great games that are very linear but still feel very atmospheric (Half-Life series being a good example). I understand that it can be something someone wants in a game, but not all games have to give the player a choice in the way the narrative goes.

    The game gave me a choice in how I wanted to play it, and that’s good enough for me. Similarly with the levels. Yes they’re linear but again I don’t view that as a bad thing. They’re very well crafted (Bridge level) and are designed in such a way where you can have a whale of a time(eh?) exploring with your powers. I think it deserves to be praised for its well designed linear levels, rather than criticised for the lack of openness to them.

    Your other complaints seem fairly minor. Yes pickpocketing doesn’t cause a massive furor. But honestly, how many games have a pickpocketing system where the guards do anything past making a comment about it or going on alert?

    As for the lethal/non-lethal debate, it kind of sounds like you’re just upset that you can’t get a “good” ending by killing a ton of people. I play all of these games as non-lethal as I can, and I for one am thrilled that a game has actually structured a story and consequence around playing a non-lethal approach.

    The chaos level makes sense to me. The game doesn’t spell it out to you but it’s quite obvious when you take a look at what’s happening to the world. The city is falling apart, weepers are getting more problematic and the guard is having a hard time repelling everything. So the more guards you kill the more everything falls apart.

    • Hentzau says:

      Pickpocketing: obviously there is a balance to be struck between guards that do nothing and guards that murder you for inadvertently picking up a soup bowl (hello, Oblivion). I think it would be easy to get it somewhere in the middle without producing an environment that is so obviously bound by discrete rules. It’s really jarring, for me, when I run up against the obvious boundaries of my environment, and the more a game attempts to camouflage that the more I tend to like it. I picked pickpocketing because it was exemplary of a hundred other things — yes, like the linear levels — that made it rather harshly obvious I was playing a game. Sometimes it is good for a game to be overt about its nature, but an immersive FPS like Dishonored is trying to be is not one of those occasions.

      And my problem with lethal/non-lethal is this: I get that killing what is essentially Dunwall’s police force — no matter how corrupt they may be — is going to tug at the fabric of the city. However, surely killing thugs is okay? Assassins? Zombies? Isn’t that basically cleaning up the city? I mean, it works for Batma– well, it would work for Batman if he killed people. I’m not upset that I can’t get a good ending by killing a ton of people, I’m upset that killing bad people precludes a good ending for reasons that the game never makes clear, because it can’t. There’s not even a hint of cause and effect there. Making a good ending dependent on a good moral choice isn’t enough; there needs to be some sort of connection between the two otherwise I’m not buying it. Like, Dishonored goes beyond Mass Effect 3/Human Revolution, at least, in that it’s contingent on the sum of your ingame actions rather than pushing a button at the end of the game, but the relationship between your ingame actions and the ending you get is so one-dimensional (a sole consideration of “did you kill people or not”) it barely even matters. There is no nuance here, just a broad-band binary outcome very similar to the aforementioned button-pushing.

      And yeah, the review was rather unfair and ranty but Dishonored was a game that really rubbed me up the wrong way in terms of wasted opportunity. I can’t remember where it was I saw it, but somebody said it’s an AAA game because it had lots of money behind it, and because it has lots of money behind it it plays like an AAA game. It plays it safe. Any differences between Dishonored and (for example) Bioshock are merely a result of setting and art style, and I’m not going to praise something for replicating the gameplay of a five year-old title that was itself a rather regressive experience when compared to its forebears. I accept that I’m in the minority, and that everyone else liked it. That’s fine. I didn’t, though, and I’ve tried my best to explain why.

      • Zael says:

        It distinguishes itself from Bioshock with a lot more than just setting and art style though. What the game lets you do with the powers you unlock is extremely expansive. Using Blink, I’ve never felt such freedom in a stealth game before. It’s amazing fun teleporting around these beautifully crafted levels.

        Even despite the levels being fairly linear the game does offer you great opportunities to use those different abilities to get to where you want to go.

        That alone far exceeds anything Bioshock did.

        • Zael says:

          Also I get what you’re saying about killing things that aren’t guards and I agree with that. But the mechanics behind the game kind of cover you in that regard. I read somewhere that you need to kill less than 20% of the enemies in a level in order to keep it at a low Chaos level.

          So basically if you limit yourself to just killing Weepers and the odd assassin then you’re going to have low chaos anyway. Especially since killing dogs/plants etc don’t count towards Chaos.

          • innokenti says:

            Yeah, I killed most weepers I encountered as well as the assassins at the end and still got a good ending… you have a fair amount of leeway there.

            And yeah, it definitely distinguishes itself from Bioshock in that all the component parts are very fun to play – the powers, the combat, the sneaking, it’s all at a very high level.

            And it by no means plays it safe. Maybe not as adventurous as they’ve tried before in Arx Fatalis or Dark Messiah, but they’ve certainly melded the goodies learned from their previous efforts into this.

          • Hentzau says:

            I think what it does is tracks running totals throughout the game. I killed everyone in the first level, and had a high Chaos rating. Went non-lethal from that point on and it went to and remained low, but on the assassin level I killed literally everyone I saw and it didn’t tip it back over into high or anything. So it does have *some* flexibility, but I don’t think it discriminates between guards and assassins at all. I could have murdered twenty guards in that level and the game would have been equally happy because I’d gone out of my way to keep everyone alive up until that point, even going so far as to tranq weepers with precious sleep darts.

        • Hentzau says:

          Really? I thought the teleport system was neat, but the range on Blink — especially the vertical range, which is deliberately shortened to keep you from climbing easily — frustrated me. It was more useful for teleporting behind guards to choke them than it was for climbing.

          I will say that I enjoyed Slow Time a great deal. Casting it, firing off 4-5 sleep darts and then coming back into real time to watch everyone suddenly collapse into a drugged stupor never got old, not to mention what happens when you try to use it in the assassin level.

          • Zael says:

            The range on Blink was a tad short but I made up for that by just making shorter jumps. There really wasn’t any rooftop I couldn’t hit using Blink.

            If you didn’t use it to explore the level then you’re really, really missing out. It’s pretty much the key element that keeps me playing.

  4. Avram Doull says:

    “In fact Dishonored reminds me of nothing more than Deus Ex for people with the attention span of a sugar-addled toddler, in that at no point is the player ever required to actually engage their brain to effect an entry or solve a puzzle and the game is prepared to break all sane rules of logic and reason in order to accommodate them.”

    I’ve begun wondering if that isn’t an inevitable consequence now that games are primarily produced with the console market in mind.

    I liked Dishonored’s level design and gameplay, and the semi-grotesque character design was neat, but the writing left a little to be desired and the whole experience seemed awfully short.

    What I wouldn’t give for a full-on Elder Scrolls-type game experience set in a similar world to Dishonored….

  5. Ambro says:

    “Any differences between Dishonored and (for example) Bioshock are merely a result of setting and art style”

    That argument nailed it, even more since the guys at Arkane where involved in Bioshock 2. And Bioshock also was pretty close to System Shock (surprised?) which dampened the whole experience for me on those titles. The heavy use and the widespread appreciation of ecleticisms in especially Bioshock and Dishonored makes me wonder which era or art style is going to be ripped off next.

    Don’t get me wrong, Dishonored is fun and entertaining to play and especially the first does an incredible job at the visuals and the smoothness of game controls – but they are in no way to be hailed as the new representatives of free choice in games.

    Ahh and yes – Blink is hopelessly overpowered.

  6. Ambro says:

    ahh… I also wanted to say: Dishonored reminds me a lot of Half Life 2, not just because the city’s lead designer is the same person. Also gameplay feels a lot a like in terms of HL2 being quite linear.

  7. vtastek says:

    “There is no choice on the player’s part about whether or not these people should die”
    We clearly played different games, I killed whoever I wanted and spared anyone I wanted.

    I think what you were thinking was:
    “There is no dialog on the character’s part about whether or not these people should die.”

    I thought Dishonored showed actions speak lauder, that we don’t need dialog options to have choice. I don’t think any number of dialog options would cover my unique moral approaches to the NPCs in this game.

    PS. I killed all thugs(except Slackjaw), Granny, all assassins, occasional guards, all targets except Lady Boyle, Lord Regent and Royal Torturer and still got the low chaos ending.

    I ignore moral systems in games and I hate forced moral consequences based on a game developer’s moral views. Games should acknowledge that people have different moral values. Best way to implement this: moral judgments should be made by individual in-game characters who hold different moral values, not by the game globally. Dishonored’s non-judgmental chaos mechanic is still a better solution.

  8. […] a big enough man to admit that my review of the original Dishonored was a little on the harsh side. Indeed, it was deliberately so, since I felt at the time that the […]

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