Renzatic on 11/10/2012 at 22:45

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Hey guys! You suck! Way to ruin a thread, as usual. Thanks for living up to my already low opinion of you!

Sincerely
-A TTLG moderator

We're this way because you and your mod friends emotionally wound us every chance they get. WE DON'T KNOW HOW ELSE TO BE! :(

Schwaa2 on 11/10/2012 at 23:17

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Is that sign in the game somewhere? Mercier was one of Russel's Thief Characters in Skyrim, hmmm...

june gloom on 12/10/2012 at 05:19

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There've been games the last couple years I've absolutely loved to death, like DXHR and Fallout New Vegas. But Dishonored is the best game to come out in over half a decade. I am 100% in love.

june gloom on 12/10/2012 at 10:48

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Finished the game just now.

I...

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this is the greatest game of the last 10 years. Not shitting you. That's not hyperbole. I've loved a great many games over the last decade or so -- MGS3, Half-Life 2, VtM Bloodlines, The Warriors, Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl and Call of Pripyat, Fallout 3 and New Vegas, and most recently Deus Ex Human Revolution -- but while all of those games are awesome, and many of them I'd put physical copies of in my pants (mmmmmm) they don't quite measure up. MGS3 Subsistence was perfect, and it still doesn't measure up.

The setting shouldn't work at all. It's this crazy mash-up of Thief, Deus Ex, Bioshock, with a healthy dose of Half-Life 2 -- the original, with its starker lighting and grander scope. It's like they dropped the 1600s black plague into a Victorian London that got 1940s-level tech a half-century early. It shouldn't work. But it does. It works brilliantly. Perfectly. Everything comes together cohesively, which is surprising given how many elements are involved. Not even Thief had gelled its blend of styles and themes as perfectly.

The design is a high point. I remember when HL2 came out, I thought the environs were fantastically done, all dirty and cluttered and kinda old, the lighting perfect. It doesn't hold up today, of course, but lives on in Dishonored -- junk and dirt and loose papers and garbage and bodies just everywhere. The lighting is masterful, surpassing even that of HL2's which at the time had some of the best, most realistic lighting I'd ever seen.

The gameplay... what can I say? It's brilliant. The levels are fantastically designed, particularly the ones in the first 2/3rds of the game. Thief fans were definitely behind some of this, the design aesthetic, the open-ended nature of the missions. And even towards the end, when it becomes a journey a la Half-Life 2 or perhaps Thief's Lost Quarter mission as you attempt to reach the Cathedral, the design philosophy doesn't let up. And you can approach things any way you want. I almost completely bypassed most of the last mission just going in along the girders and other infrastructure.

The powers you get... Blink is very powerful. Almost too powerful, really. And yet, if you fuck up, it'll be the only thing that saves you sometimes. The other powers have their uses, especially if you like being an asshole -- summing a swarm of rats is great fun. The weapons you get -- the pistol is ridiculously powerful, but it's so damn noisy. You have quieter options with the crossbow, yet you do have to be careful with projectile drop.

There's a darkness to this game I haven't seen in a while. The whole situation is dire and creepy, with the plague everywhere, so many rats..., the police state, everything seems to be crumbling down around you and though you're on a mission of revenge, deep down you know it's not going to mean much as Dunwall rots away from the inside. The weepers drive the point home -- they're everywhere, even as little as 10 feet away from the nearest City Watch patrol. It's clear the city simply cannot handle the sheer amount of strain the plague is putting on it, and it shows.

I love that there's little things that are never fully explained, like the Outsider, or Pandyssia or the other Isles, or the exact nature of Corvo's relationship to the Empress and Emily. It helps present the idea that there's a much bigger world outside Dunwall. I can't be the only one who noticed that the Abbey of the Everyman preaches against the Outsider and, you know, everything else, yet they do not seem to actually worship anything.

Remember when we were all wondering if Bioshock would lead the charge of less dumbed-down? And then it came out? But despite its gameplay problems, what it was trying to do story-wise, and what it was trying to present in terms of themes, were new territory for the current generation of gamers, and proved that there's an audience for deeper things than Generic Manshoots. Bioshock 2 took that up a notch, adding a strongly personal element to it; and say what you will about Call of Duty, but Black Ops brought a genuinely cerebral plot to the frat crowd (probably why they hated it.) And the fact that Deus Ex Human Revolution was 90% faithful to the original game, I considered that a fucking miracle in 2011. If Dishonored sells well, and I've been doing my part in yelling at everyone I can to buy a copy, it'll be proof that we can finally bring that certain je ne sais quoi of the old days and the old ways (I hesitate to use "immersive sim" because I still think it's a stupid term) to a new audience.

tl;dr: 10/10, drop what you're doing and play this now you miserable fucks

henke on 12/10/2012 at 12:40

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Oh maaaaaan oh God I was gonna wait too but it's starting to get hard to hold out under the pressure of all this unrelenting positivity.

If I order from Finnish netstore verkkokauppa.com it's 32 bucks but it'll arrive first in 2-4 weeks. On Steam it's almost 20 euros more expensive but I'll have it as soon as my internet connection can whisk it down and I'll be able to spend the weekend lost in this wonderful-sounding steampunk fantasy.

HHHHHNNNNNNNNNNGGGG :E

EDIT: BOUGHT. DOWNLOADING. I HAVE NO WILLPOWER.

edit2: it's gonna suck isn't it? There is no way it's gonna be as good as you're all saying it is. If I end up hating it I'm gonna hold all of you accountable for over-hyping it.

edit3: what difficulty would you lot recommend playing on? I normally save the harder difficulties for replays but this seems like it might be more rewarding playing on a rougher difficulty. Are there any difficulty-spikes or bossfights?