Dishonored: Death Of The Outsider is an expandalone for Dishonored 2 that came out towards the end of 2017. Given that Dishonored 2 and its sci-fi stablemate Prey are two of my favourite games of the last few years it’s possibly a little surprising that it’s taken me two years to get around to playing it; however they also came out within six months of each other and Death Of The Outsider looked like more of the same, so I decided to let it breathe for a few months and come back to it when I was ready. As it is now 2020 I appear to have gotten a little bit distracted between now and then, but that’s actually done Death Of The Outsider a considerable favour: it is, arguably, just more Dishonored, and if I’d played it so soon after Prey and Dishonored 2 I’d likely be much more critical of it. However, since both games underperformed it’s highly unlikely we’ll see more of either from Arkane in the near future. Death Of The Outsider is the last Dishonored thing we’ll be getting for some time, and if you view it through that lens it being more of the same is no bad thing at all.

As is now tradition for Dishonored DLC, Death Of The Outsider puts you in the shoes of a supporting character from the main game. This time around you’re playing ex-assassin Billie Lurk, who has gotten tired of spending most of Dishonored 2 masquerading as Emily/Corvo’s chauffeur and has gone off to find her mentor, the master assassin and previous series antagonist Daud. Both of them have the same gameplay-enabling eldritch powers as Emily and Corvo, and both got them from the same place: a magical brat called the Outsider, who is the closest thing the Dishonored setting has to a god. Daud and Billie are far more jaded about both the powers and the Outsider, though, to the point where Daud now sees the Outsider as responsible for everything bad that happened over the past two Dishonored games and has hatched a plan to kill him. Unfortunately he’s basically an OAP at this point, and so the bulk of the actual god-murdering legwork falls to you as Billie.

Death Of The Outsider is much smaller in scope than Dishonored 2: it’s just five levels (which translates to between 6 and 9 hours of playtime depending on how sneaky you’re being), and one of those is a short and mostly-linear tutorial where you rescue Daud from the gang that’s captured him. Arkane have also taken a hammer to your Outsider-derived superpowers; the hilarious Time Stop, Domino and Doppelganger abilities have all vanished¹, and in their place are three powers that represent the bare minimum required for Death to feel like a Dishonored game:

• Displace, which is a medium range teleport power much like Corvo’s Blink. It differs in that your first click plops down a teleport marker at your location of choice, and your second click then teleports you to it. This gives you much more fine control over the timing of your teleport, as well as letting you telefrag unfortunate guards who happen to be walking through the marker at the same time as you teleport to it.
• Foresight, a pretty standard scouting and enemy-tagging power. Billie sends her spirit shooting out of her body, and it has the ability to both see through walls and pass through closed doors. Guards and objects of interest are highlighted, and up to four guards can be tagged so that they remain visible when you turn Foresight off.
• Semblance, which lets you disguise yourself as any NPC you’ve knocked out. Potentially useful for getting by areas with a high guard population, but also very costly in terms of mana and dogs aren’t fooled by the projection.

And that’s it. Given that two of these are just the same enemy tagging and disguise mechanics you can find in literally any game released in the last five years you’d be forgiven for thinking that maybe Arkane cut things down a little too far and that Death is in danger of feeling alarmingly lightweight. Instead, though, I found it proved that all Dishonored really needs is that mobility power; having absurd vertical and horizontal mobility is what enables the interesting level design and exploration that powers Dishonored, and Displace might just be the best version of it that Arkane have come up with, especially once you attach a few special effects via bonecharms that give it a bit more flexibility when you’re under pressure.

And because your magical toolkit is so limited you end up falling back on both the powers that you do have (both Foresight and Semblance got solid workouts where I might not have bothered with them otherwise) as well as your physical gadgets. Ever since the series started Dishonored has been constantly struggling with its gadgets, since most of them have lethal effects despite the game implicitly placing a higher value on a non-lethal approach by having this lead to an unambiguously better ending. If you want the “good” ending you can’t use springrazors, grenades, most of the crossbow bolts or even your sword, and have historically been relegated to choking guards out again and again. Thankfully Death Of The Outsider moves things much closer to where the series should always have been: while it does still track lethal/non-lethal takedowns these don’t appear to have any impact on which ending you get this time around, making a non-lethal run a genuine player choice just like it was back in the days of Thief and Deus Ex. It also adds a few more non-lethal gadgets, and while these are basically just remixed versions of the lethal ones (there’s now a stun grenade that knocks people out instead of killing them, while the new Hook Mines have explicit Lethal and Non-Lethal settings) it’s enough to make me feel like playing non-lethally isn’t restricting me from having fun. Of course because I knew I wasn’t being scored on this stuff outside of the end-of-mission summary screen I felt free to toss around a few springrazors and actual grenades and made a wonderful mess; Dishonored is at its best when you have the freedom to use your entire moveset, not just the half of it that aligns with your current ending goal.

Still, having an actually varied moveset that enables multiple approaches to a problem doesn’t mean a thing if your level design doesn’t do the same thing, and it’s here — and somewhat unusually for Arkane — that Death Of The Outsider falls down somewhat. As I stated up top, there’s only five of them, but to compensate for that the four non-tutorial levels are bloody massive, easily matching the size of the largest levels from Dishonored 2. However, since one of them is one of the largest levels from Dishonored 2 — a remixed version of the Royal Conservatory — that’s hardly surprising, and this recycling of content is something I honestly found a little disappointing given how imaginative the base game was. It’s not a bad level as such, it was just hard to get away from the feeling that I was replaying something I’d done before instead of experiencing something new. The final level of the expansion pack was a very long one and threw in a few interesting dimension-shifting effects, but it also struck me as unnecessarily constrained, like it was Arkane’s take on Call Of Duty-style linear level design that funnels the player through a series of chokepoints. Again, it wasn’t something I’d necessarily call bad, but once I was finished with it I had precisely zero desire to replay it because I felt I’d already seen everything it had to offer, which is something I’d never say about any of the levels from Dishonored 2.

Let us focus instead on the two levels that Death Of The Outsider actually does right. After springing Daud from the tutorial level Billie ventures into town to investigate an Outsider-worshipping cult, and this level is both sprawling and pleasingly open, with a ton of secrets ferreted away in the various nooks and crannies of the map. The highlight is a raid on the high-security mansion of a cultist opera singer, which is split off into its own little sub-area with at least three different methods of entry and its own isolated security systems to defeat. Once you’re in there you discover that the cult is hiding a crucial Outsider-related macguffin inside the fortress-like bank that you’ve walked past many times as you crisscross the level, and so the next level is something which inevitably ends up being the best part of any Thief, Dishonored or Deus Ex game: a good old-fashioned bank heist.

In my opinion the bank heist level, on its own, is sufficient reason to buy Death Of The Outsider, because it is absolutely outstanding. For starters it’s so big it’s split into three different segments. First there’s the approach from outside, which offers a variety of different points of access along with a couple of things you can do to make your life easier once you’re inside, like dumping a load of sleeping gas into the ventilation system. Then there’s the bank interior – the lobby, counters, offices and so on — which present a series of barriers that need to be bypassed in order to access the vault area. This is the final part of the bank, and it’s protected by patrolling guards and clockwork soldiers, voice access systems and electrified floors — and once you get past all of those, you still need to deal with the fact that the vault itself is suspended fifty feet off the floor and needs to be lowered to ground level in order to access it. Even if you’ve gassed everyone this still presents a rather tricky challenge, since the bank staff and guards are genuinely asleep instead of knocked out and they’ll wake up if they hear any significant noise. Of course you could just murder your way inside, but there’s more than enough guards to ensure that you’d have significant difficulty winning the ensuing fight, even with a full set of grenades, mines and bullets.

This meant that the bank was the first time Dishonored’s level design has properly risen to the challenge presented by its toolset. Dishonored 2 had some fantastically imaginative levels but they weren’t all that great at forcing you out of your comfort zone, and you could quite happily get through them by using the same three or four moves or powers over and over again. By contrast the bank scatters so many obstacles on your path to the vault that I needed to use everything in order to get there in one piece; it took me two hours to clear this one level, and from a mechanical viewpoint it’s the most fun I’ve had with a Dishonored game yet because I was constantly experimenting to see what worked and what didn’t. It doesn’t quite compare to Clockwork Mansion or A Crack In The Slab because at the end of the day it is just a bank, but it comes damn close for something so comparatively mundane. And it does also sum up Death Of The Outsider’s general mindset pretty well, I think; by removing most of the powers it’s stripped down the amount of stuff you can do in a level, but it has substantially raised its expectations of the amount of stuff you must do in order to complete it.

Oddly enough I think it’s the removal of the Chaos system — where the game tracks exactly how many people you’re killing and alters certain things based on this, including giving you the Good Ending/Bad Ending depending on whether you finish the game in a Low or High Chaos state — that has enabled this change in philosophy, and which justifies Death Of The Outsider existing as a separate entity at all. It’s ironic because a lot of people would point to the Chaos system as one of the things that defines Dishonored, and I will admit that the game does lose a little something as I missed the cool environmental tells in the levels that accompanied high Chaos/low Chaos runs. It also doesn’t make the ending situation any better, as instead of going Lethal for the Bad Ending and Non-Lethal for the Good Ending you’re instead just presented with a binary choice at the end of the game as to which ending you want. I think the tradeoff is well worth it, though, as Dishonored is a much stronger game when you have the freedom to do everything in a level which actively demands experimentation on the part of the player. Death Of The Outsider ultimately doesn’t avoid being “just more Dishonored” since the level design doesn’t really live up to that ideal and is rather too uneven to sustain it all the way through, but for a few brief hours it does end up in a markedly different place from the mainline Dishonored games. That, for me, made Death Of The Outsider a worthwhile experience.

The post Thoughts: Dishonored – Death Of The Outsider appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I’m 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 universal praise it was receiving from all practically all quarters of the internet was a little bit over the top and wanted to provide some balance. And so I went to town on Dishonored’s structural problems and gave it a thorough kicking, and in the process glossed over far too much of what it did that actually worked, and worked well. Much of that has only really become apparent to me in hindsight as I’ve played other games that have tried similar things only to stuff them up quite badly, but that’s just made me quite excited for the Dishonored 2: the first one was a good game with some serious flaws, but what are sequels for if not fixing what you couldn’t get quite right the first time around?

It’s true that where Dishonored 1 was a good game, Dishonored 2 is a great game. Like, genuine classic levels of great. It’s certainly the best Thief-alike I’ve ever played, and is in many respects far better than the original Thief games themselves; that’s not really a fair comparison to Thief as it is nearly two decades old and had to do the hard work of establishing that sub-genre in the first place, but Dishonored 2 being the first game in eighteen years to come along and almost effortlessly swipe that crown says a lot about the quality of both games. It’s how Dishonored 2 manages to make that leap from good to great that has surprised me, though, as instead of making any big changes to address the problems with the original it’s instead doubled down on everything — both the things it did well and the things I felt were a handicap for it — with only minor tweaks to existing mechanics to try and smooth them out a little bit.

For most other games this would simply mean more of the same, and for almost any other game I’d be even more critical a second time around thanks to a perceived failure to innovate. Even the plots are largely identical: Dishonored 2 takes place fifteen years after series protagonist Corvo’s coup-induced murder/sleepy-time rampage in the first game, and it kicks off with… another coup. Corvo is now both Royal Protector and Royal Spymaster, and he once again fails utterly at both roles when he first fails to notice half of the royal guard force being subverted by the evil witch Delilah¹ and her stooge of a Duke, and then fails to stop them just walking into the palace and killing everyone who might potentially disagree with Delilah taking the throne. Fortunately this time around the Empress Emily Kaldwin is far from being a helpless child; she’s a fully-trained assassin in her own right and so this time around you get to choose to play through the game as either Emily or Corvo — the one you don’t pick is conveniently turned to stone by Delilah so they don’t have to be in the story any more, but on the plus side the one you do pick is fully-voiced throughout the game which removes the “idiot protagonist” complaint I had about the first Dishonored – after which they flee the palace and get on a boat to the southern city of Karnaca to start unravelling the conspiracy behind the coup and eliminating the conspirators.

In mechanical terms the choice between Emily and Corvo is an interesting one. Most games would make one of them the stealth character and the other the combat character and lock them into fairly static playstyles based off that one choice at the very start of the game, but while Dishonored is certainly about heavily incentivising a certain style of play thanks to its heavy-handed Chaos system it balks at actively dictating your options in any way. So Emily’s set of Outsider-granted eldritch powers very slightly leans towards being stealthy, but there’s nothing particularly non-lethal about her and she can mix it up in a fight just as well as Corvo can. Conversely Corvo does get some perfectly good stealth options of his own, they just happen to be a little more situational than Emily’s. There is a significant difference in what they can do since each of them has a very different powerset, but how those powers are used is left entirely up to the player. The focus has been on making the powers interesting in and of themselves rather than trying to force the player down a particular path.

As to the specifics of what those powers do: Emily arguably has the better selection, with Domino (linking together up to four enemies so that killing one of them kills all of them) and Doppelganger (summon up to two shades of Emily to fight alongside her) allowing for all sorts of chicanery such as Domino-ing your own Doppelganger with some guards and then killing it, or summoning a Doppelganger mid-fall to break it via a Drop Assassination. Corvo’s powers are a sort of greatest-hits selection from the original Dishonored with Blink, Rat Swarm, Possession and Bend Time all making a second appearance; Emily is no slouch in the mobility stakes herself, however, as she gets Far Reach (throw out a tether to either pull yourself to the target point or pull your target towards you) and Shadow Walk (morph into a stealthier shadow form that moves quickly and can fit into those tiny rat gratings). The difference between Blink and Far Reach is what really sums up the difference between Emily and Corvo, I think; they’re both fairly similar in function, being primarily used to zip around Dishonored 2’s vast levels, but where Blink is almost 100% focused on ethereal movement — and is way better than Far Reach in that regard — Far Reach opens up far more opportunities for fucking with enemies and the environment in general.

(Mind you, I’m not calling Corvo’s powerset boring in any way. No powerset that lets me literally stop time, fire off six crossbow bolts, back off a little to watch them just hanging in mid-air, and then restart time to watch them all score simultaneous perfect headshots could possibly be called boring. I just think Emily’s carries off the fine Arkane tradition of asshole physics a little bit better, is all.)

The powers are backed up with a range of weapons and gadgets that, again, we’ve mostly seen before in Dishonored. If you’re playing lethally you get to use a sword, a pistol, a crossbow, incendiary bolts for the crossbow, springrazor mines, grenades and sticky grenades. If you’re playing non-lethally you get, uh, stun mines and sleep darts. This would be my number one complaint about Dishonored 2: there has been an absolute shitload of time spent on making lethal gameplay so fluid and fun and giving you all of these little toys and abilities to play with, and then if you’re playing non-lethally you get two gadgets which are in extremely short supply (you can only carry five sleep darts and three stun mines at a time), meaning that most of the time that a lethal player would spend dismembering guards in any one of a hundred gruesome ways is instead spent choking them out again and again and again. It gets more than a little bit repetitive after a while. I don’t necessarily think the relative paucity of interesting non-lethal options is a huge problem in and of itself since a non-lethal playstyle should be a personal choice for the player to make — doing things the non-lethal way has been an interesting gameplay challenge ever since Deus Ex, but while characters in Deus Ex made moral judgements on how you were playing the game itself did not, and so you were perfectly free to play one way or another.

It’s here that the thing I hated so much about Dishonored comes back to bite it in the ass, though: the Chaos system is back, and while it’s a little less blunt in how it is applied it’s still a ridiculously gamey way to splice in a morality system. People do now have individual Chaos scores that are linked to the secrets that the Heart whispers to you whenever you thrust it in their general direction — so killing somebody who drowns cats is going to be worth less Chaos than somebody who saved their rations to feed starving orphans or whatever — but since those attributes are randomly-determined rather than being authored by a designer it still boils down to kill more people = higher Chaos rating. It might have been interesting if the Chaos ratings were distributed in an intelligent way that, if a player figured them out, would allow a perfectly murderous approach to a situation. Unfortunately that’s not the case, and since low Chaos results in the good ending and high Chaos results in the bad ending — and they are very unambiguously so — you’re heavily pushed towards playing non-lethally if you give the tiniest iota of a shit about the outcome of your actions and don’t want the empire to slide into the toilet the moment you’re done clearing up the conspiracy.

So the plot is the same, the gadgets are mostly the same, nothing has been done to fix the those big structural issues I had with Dishonored 1 and the powers, while very good, probably wouldn’t be enough to save Dishonored 2 all on their own. Why, then, did I spend so much time singing Dishonored 2’s praises in the opening paragraphs? Well, it’s because while all of those things are quite important to how a Thief-style game functions, none of them are anywhere near as critical as the level design; Thief itself would have been nothing more than a curiosity if it didn’t have levels like Lord Bafford’s Manor and Shipping And Receiving² to show off its mechanics in the best possible way.   And while the strengths and flaws of the mechanics are much the same as they were in the original Dishonored, the level design has improved to a frankly ridiculous degree. It’s astonishing how good Dishonored 2’s levels are, really; there are “only” nine of them in the game but they’ll each take multiple hours to work your way through all of their nooks and crannies, and of the nine I think there are three that can instantly be regarded as all-time classics. Two more just barely miss that mark and merely qualify as “really fucking good”, and the nastiest thing I can say about Dishonored 2’s worst level (annoyingly it’s the opening one) is that it felt a little average in comparison to the rest of it.³

Let’s talk about the Clockwork Mansion as an example; this is probably the best mission in the game (although it’s a damn close-run thing between this and A Crack In The Slab) and will have a shitload of articles and blogposts written about it in the future trying to dissect why it’s so good, so I don’t feel all that guilty by getting a headstart and spoiling it a little bit. The Clockwork Mansion is the home of a genius inventor on the side of the conspiracy called Jindosh, who is responsible for building the clockwork soldiers that have featured quite heavily in the publicity for Dishonored 2. Emily/Corvo have to infiltrate the mansion to eliminate Jindosh to cut off the supply of soldiers while rescuing an ally in the process. The level opens with you making your way to the mansion through the streets of Karnaca; probably half of the levels in Dishonored 2 start this way, and it’s used as a freeform opportunity to tool up via black market shops and maybe pick up some extra intelligence/side objectives before tackling the meat of the mission itself. Once you enter the mansion, however, the tenor of the level changes completely. This is the home of one of Dishonored’s renaissance men, and he’s constructed his abode to incorporate particular elements of his genius – and his madness. The reason it is called The Clockwork Mansion becomes abundantly clear the moment you walk through the front door and are confronted with an apparent dead end, with only a solitary lever for company. As soon as you pull the lever everything changes, and literally so — you’re suddenly surrounded by the clanking of clockwork as the walls judder backwards, a balcony appears, stairs rise from the floor and the ceiling is hoisted upwards to form an appropriately grand atrium. This clues you into the level’s big gimmick, but it’s a fantastic one: the entire mansion really is constructed of clockwork and you can change its configuration on the fly by pulling these levers to alter the layout of the rooms inside it, and the level designers have exploited this conceit to the hilt when laying out paths through the level.

I’ll use my own experience as an illustration. The first time I went through the mansion I played it completely straight, as I imagine most people will. When you pull that first lever you’re greeted over the mansion’s PA system by Jindosh, as activating the mansion has alerted him to your presence; he’s wired into all of it thanks to it being constructed almost entirely of clockwork mechanisms stuffed full of sensors for testing his clockwork soldiers, and he makes suitably snide comments on your progress as you make your way through the mansion. I blew up the two clockwork soldiers he sent after me (if nothing else I was happy to finally find a use for my grenades here), snuck downstairs into a greeting room, choked out a couple of guards, teleported up to a balcony and through into Jindosh’s bedroom, choked out a couple more guards, took an elevator down into the dedicated testing area for the clockwork soldiers, and then bypassed a Wall of Light to get to yet another elevator that led to the service area for Jindosh’s lab, from where I was able to make a clean kill. That’s a quick explanation of my first run that glosses over a lot of playing with mechanisms to figure out how the mansion was put together, but you can play the entire thing without really deviating from how you’d play a typical Dishonored level.

The second run couldn’t have been more different, though. There’s an achievement for taking out Jindosh without him ever knowing you’re there, so you have to somehow get into the mansion without pulling that first lever to get yourself out of that initial dead end. Obviously this is possible, but the implementation of how you do it really opened my eyes to what a good level it is: the interchangeable clockwork features of the mansion aren’t just videogame jiggery-pokery, but are instead actual mechanisms inside the building that somebody has gone in and designed and put into the level. I know this because the way you get that achievement is by using your noggin to enter the spaces behind the walls — in which you can see the various wall segments, display cases etc. when they’re not in use and have been stored away in a rather mechanistic fashion that aids their clockwork deployment — and using them to proceed through the mansion away from Jindosh’s prying eyes (and most of the guards), which at the same time provides you with a wonderful sense of having peeked behind the curtain to see what the secret is.

Speaking of secrets, this is another thing this level (and Dishonored 2 in general) does incredibly well and you have to keep a particularly attentive eye on the shifting walls as they change from one configuration to another to figure out where everything is hidden. The hunt for loot is a significant driving force behind your exploration — as it should be in any decent Thief-alike — and there’s also very large chunks of backstory hidden a surprisingly long way away from the beaten path, which I found quite refreshingly contrary to prevailing trends in modern game design.⁴ Dishonored 2’s plot really isn’t anything to write home about, but its world is a different matter and its levels are absolutely seeping with incidental flavour thanks to the excellent visual design, the level layouts and these hidden bits and pieces of background info all blending together into something that actually feels halfway natural. It’s let down a little bit by the ending, and if I’d known how perfunctory it was going to be I probably wouldn’t have cared quite so much about keeping things in a Low Chaos state, but it’s also packed with a ton of little reactive bits and pieces that change based on concrete things that you’ve done in the game. I thought this was a far better way of dealing with choice and consequence than the “you killed too many people so you get the bad ending now” Chaos system, and it ensured that I didn’t feel too bad about the game finishing on something of a low note; the fact that the first thing I did after finishing it was to immediately start another playthrough is evidence enough that it didn’t put me off that much.

Dishonored 2 can be best summed up as “Dishonored, but with the best non-linear FPS level design ever.”  Dishonored 2 might not change your opinion on the Dishonored series at all; if you fundamentally disagreed with the first one then playing the second probably isn’t going to result in some Damascene conversion as they’re very similar in their moment-to-moment gameplay. Fortunately the moment-to-moment gameplay of the first Dishonored was fun enough that, when combined with the supercharged levels of Dishonored 2, I think it’s created something truly outstanding. Certainly it’s now more than good enough for me to be able to overlook the crap parts that I wrote that long rant about back in 2012; they’re still present and they’re still annoying, it’s just that the rest of it is so good that they do rather pale into insignificance now. Dishonored 2 is a game that will, if there’s any justice, be talked about for years to come. Time will tell whether those conversations are conducted in the same hushed tones of reverence used to talk about Thief, but for my money it’s even better, and while eighteen years is a long time to wait for a Thief-beater I can’t help but be pleased that one has finally come along at last.

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