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.

The post Disshonored: Dishonored. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I have a somewhat proprietorial interest in planetariums. For the uninitiated, a planetarium is a big room with a dome ceiling and a projector which projects a distorted, kind of fisheye image into that ceiling. The curvature of the ceiling and the distortion of the image cancel each other out, meaning the image you actually see is a reasonable facsimile of what you’d see if you went out in a dark field at night, away from any built up areas or light pollution, and looked up at the sky – except because the image is computer generated and controlled, we can do some pretty spectacular things in a planetarium that we can’t in real life due to being stuck on dreary old Earth. There’s an excellent piece of free software called Stellarium that should give you a fairly decent idea of what planetariums are capable of: high detail renderings of planets, moons, constellations and nebulae; the ability to advance time and see how moons orbit around planets; bringing up a search box that can locate pretty much any stellar object on demand, that sort of thing.

Anyway, planetariums can be pretty amazing things, and the reason I’m so interested in them is because I used to go round schools giving planetarium talks. Our planetarium was basically just a big tent and our projector wasn’t up to much, but it did the job reasonably well and while the videos we showed to the kids had voiceovers that were cringe-worthy in their sheer badness, they also had a basic grasp of the sort of images we should be showing people in planetariums – animations of colliding galaxies, explanations of stellar redshift, breakdowns of the electromagnetic spectrum with a step by step guide detailing the sort of celestial object that would emit each type of radiation —basically stuff that might be a bit dry and boring when described in words or diagrams, but which the planetarium can really ram home in an interesting and special way.

Which is why I was more than a little bit aghast to discover that the Peter Harrison planetarium at Greenwich Royal Observatory – a proper, heavy duty planetarium with expensive equipment, air conditioning and incredibly comfortable chairs – is doing planetarium shows that wouldn’t even make the cut as a bad space documentary on the Science Channel. The particular show we were booked in to see was all about the Voyager probes (“Across The Universe”). When I read about this I thought it was a fairly neat way of teaching people some basic solar system science since the Voyager probes visited all four of the outer gas giants and made some pretty amazing discoveries in the process. What it actually turned out to be (and if you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know I should have intimate knowledge of this sort of thing) was a word-for-word summary of the Wikipedia article on Voyager. It was obvious almost from the start that the people who had written this thing didn’t have the first clue about science and were parroting all their information from another source, especially given the amount of stuff the show got flat-out wrong.

It started off with an incredibly bad render of the Titan II rocket that launched the Voyager probes along with some blurb about what the rockets were capable of, which was to me the equivalent of a giant flashing red light and an alarm klaxon screaming “WARNING. WARNING. ACTUAL SCIENTIFIC CONTENT OF SHOW PRACTICALLY NIL.” Nobody cares about rockets. I’m a space scientist and I don’t care about rockets except in so far as I can diss them for being crap ways of getting into space. People came here to learn about journey the Voyager probes and what they found out, not the damn rocket that kicked it along the first 0.000001% of its trip. The only reason you would start out a show about Voyager by talking about the rocket is if you have literally no sense of scientific proportion, which these people clearly didn’t.

Of course it then got worse. After the crappy render of the rocket we were then treated to a crappy render of one of the Voyager probes and a breakdown of what it could do. I was expecting this, but what I wasn’t expecting was for it to go on for ten minutes. Instrument after instrument on the probe was pointed out and described in excruciatingly vague detail; “The magnetometer is placed away from the main body of the probe to avoid interference from the electronics and was designed to take measurements of Jupiter’s immense magnetic field.” That’s great, guys, but why is this important? What did the probes find out about Jupiter’s magnetic field? There was no attempt to connect the instruments on the probe to any kind of concrete scientific outcome, just “This is thing X, and it does thing Y, and this is thing Z…” Even I was getting tired of this halfway through, and the friend who accompanied me said she thought it was by far the worst part of the show. I’m inclined to agree. It was the equivalent of somebody reading out a list of information they didn’t understand, which is what makes me think they were cribbing half of this stuff from Wikipedia.

This was followed by a little segment on the gravitational slingshot maneuvers the Voyager probes used to boost their speed and an animated render of the trajectory they took out of the solar system. This was the only legitimately good part of the show; it was proper science which effectively used the planetarium to show something counterintuitive that even scientists find tricky to visualise in their heads. The entire show should have been like this, not just two minutes out of twenty-five. Unfortunately it was soon over and was replaced by the guided tour of the gas giants that I thought I’d come to see – except because this thing has been picked out by astronomers and not astrophysicists (there’s a big difference) it was far more concerned with the pretty pictures the Voyager probes took rather than what they found out about these hitherto unvisited solar system bodies. I think the bit on Uranus was literally “Voyager didn’t find anything interesting about Uranus, but it took this great picture! Look! Look!” Assholes.

Then came the bit which made me mutter “Oh God!” out loud and which led to actual fist-shaking when I went on a rant about it a little later on in the day. First they made some assertions about Miranda that made zero fucking physical sense; basically they said that the weird-ass geological makeup of Miranda could be a result of the moon being shattered by an impact and then reforming under its own gravity (very plausible) or being pulled apart by Uranus’s gravity and then somehow reforming afterwards. If you remember my post about the Roche limit you should be able to figure out why this second assertion is bollocks: moons are pulled apart when the gravitational force of the planet they orbit exceeds the gravitational force of the moon that keeps it in one piece. Once they stray inside the Roche limit and get pulled apart it is physically impossible for them to reform under their own gravity unless they somehow manage to make it back outside it again, and I really cannot imagine how that would happen. Assholes.

After the previous twenty minutes of awfulness I should have known the perpetrators of this crime against science teaching would be saving the worst for last. After some blurb about the golden records attached to each probe (which I classify as harmless fluff) the show went completely off the rails, babbling about how the probes might eventually reach Andromeda, and then somehow fall into the atmosphere of an alien world and burn up, and from the surface of that alien world you can look up, and see the Milky Way, and orbiting a small pinprick of light in one of the spiral arms is the planet where the civilization that launched it might still exist!

Uh, no. Here are some numbers, assholes: the Andromeda galaxy is two million light years away. Voyager 2 (the faster of the two probes and the one squarely aimed at Andromeda) is travelling at 15.447 km/s relative to the Sun. 15.447 km/s is 0.00005% of the speed of light, meaning Voyager 2 takes about 20,000 times longer to travel the same distance as light does. This shakes out to it taking about 40 billion years to get to Andromeda, and a couple of things are going to happen before then.

1)      The Sun is going to swell up to a red giant in about 4 billion years, burning the Earth to a hot cinder.

2)      Andromeda is going to collide with the Milky Way in about 5 billion years, which I suppose means that Voyager 2 won’t quite take 40 billion years to get out there even if it’s Andromeda doing most of the hard work. Curiously given the fact you’re smashing a galaxy with 200 million stars in it into another galaxy with 1 trillion stars in it, there are going to be very few star-star collisions – or even near misses – thanks to galaxies being overwhelmingly made up empty space. If you can’t score a direct hit on a star with a fucking galaxy, what are the odds that your punk-ass little probe will magically manage to find its way into the gravity well of an alien world?

Jesus. There was so much bad information and woolly thinking in this planetarium show that it doesn’t even deserve to be called science, and it breaks my heart that the first-class facilities they have up there are being wasted on this crap. If you’re inLondonI’d avoid the planetarium this year, and if you do end up going there then for the love of god avoid “Across The Universe”. It’s bloody terrible.

The post The Peter Harrison Planetarium: A Review. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.