The release date is upon us...well, at least for those who pre-ordered (or those who just got lucky by getting their hands on a physical copy early) the game, since they're giving the chance to play one day early in that case, which would be wednesday-thursday night/early morning (10 hours to go over here as I type this). Hopefully not to sucker in everyone who are too impatient to wait for reviews, but we'll see. Let's just hope it'll be a positive surprise like the new Doom.

I'm certainly hoping it'll be. I didn't think the first Dishonored was a flawless masterpiece, but I enjoyed my time with it and really liked the stylized world built around the game. Fingers crossed this'll improve on each aspect of the previous title.

The Xbox Store says it unlocks at 11/10/2016, 12:00:00 AM EST. You're saying that it unlocks even earlier for people who pre-ordered? As in tonight? Sweet.

@dharmabum: Unlocks in like 20mins for me.

@ivdamke: Are you playing on Steam? Now I just noticed the Xbox Store on the console itself shows 11/10 @ 7PM EST so maybe that's the early access unlock time.

@dharmabum: Yea I'm on Steam, though now it's just saying "unlocks in less than an hour" for me.

Its unlocks a day early for people who pre-ordered digitally

I bought it from my US PSN account because I had $60 in credit from earlier this year that I used to preorder South Park but when it was delayed I got a refund! The clock currently says 12 hours and 40 minutes which is 5am here is the UK.

I could not be more excited. I played through Dishonored when it first came out and came away from it really underwhelmed. I then played through it again earlier this year and didn't kill anyone and had an absolute blast. Everything about the game clicked with me the second time around.

Giving early access to those who preorder and/or pay extra is such a shit trend. Hope it wins worst trend of the year.

Much better than a bunch of other shit they've done for pre-orders for other games. As long as you have a tiny bit of patience you just get early user reviews to tell you how the game is. Not a big deal.

Haven't been able to play (Still at work) but PC performance seems to be real rough. I'd be curious to see what people here are experiencing.

From some Steam reviews I've been reading it seems like it's a bit of a clunker on PC so I'm waiting for more people to get their hands on it. So far people are saying that unless you have a really powerful computer you should steer clear.

Yeah, that'll show 'em!

I VPN unlocked it early. Looks like more dishonored :) which is a good thing. Sadly, no SLI.

I'm not having any issues running the game (4k at 60fps). oh internet, sometimes i think people might not know how to take care of their PCs :)

@zurv: I mean, it depends on your PC really. If you're running it in 4K then I doubt you're the sort of person that needs to check system requirements.

The problem stems from when people who own mid range systems can't get mid range performance.

I'm reading people with 1070/1080s saying they are getting like 20-30fps at 1080p. Clearly something is wrong with their PCs. My gut tells me people don't know that the anniversary update was, in fact, a new OS. (this is the 3rd version of windows 10.) I always do a clean install for a new OS, i use DDU for each time a video driver is updates and never install evil GeForce exp. :) This saves a lot of issues. That said some games are just b0rked for perf. This isn't one of them.

The game does have adaptive performance setting too. But it is confusing. It is a sliding bar between 50% and 100% - the default was 75%. Maybe that is breaking something.

But what a great rich world. You COULD just escape to the ship right at the start.. or spend like an 45min sneaking in all the buildings, reading all the world flavor. So far the game is beating my expectations of it. If you are a sneaky sneaky, non-lethal player that likes to read all the codec stuff - then (from what I've played so far) i'd suggest taking a look at the game. :)

I'm on a 970/4690k/16GB RAM all stock clocks and the brief bit I've played on Ultra setting It's been hovering at 60-70fps minus the intro which was running at around 40. Not much else to say because I haven't played enough.

RPS said that it's been good thus far. The writer had to drop the settings to high to get a stable framerate while running a 970 at 1080p. Here's the link if you're curious.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/11/10/dishonored-2-review-preorder/

I hope they add HDR to the PC version. I think the ps4 pro version will have it. Shadow Warrior 2 has it on the PC (so it is technically possible.) The game does use Nvidia works (for the HBO+ and ansel)

first 20min:

Performance is really eh-ish. 970 GTX, regular dips into 40s on some areas with settings turned down.

Void looks pretty damn good.

Can anyone speak to how Corvo plays? Same/similar skills? Did they Daud-ify him?

Also, any word on how different each character is, story-wise?

To be honest at this point the FPS annoyances are enough for me to avoid playing the game for now. Maybe with the release happening for realsies sometime tomorrow that big patch will come out, because right now it's completely up in the air if that apparent day one 9GB patch is something that was even included in the pre-load for us. I have not had to update the game after completing the pre-load and unpacking the game.

Most annoying is that the FPS drops seem to be happening for little reason. Happens most often in big areas, so it is something to do the draw distance. But this isn't GTA we're talking about here. (Edit: Guess I should clarify. The game definetly has a look to it. However, just compared to other titles I have run flawlessly, there's really not a lot of crazy graphical fidelty stuff that's happening here).

Very positive impressions from what I have played. Karnaca is really something to run through, especially with the clear thought that went into the world building (such as streets designed in such a way that the blood from butchering fish and whales naturally runs down the street via a drainage type system).

I'll dump a few screenshots I have taken. I really recommend turning off objective markers to really have reason to take in the world. Unfortuantely some of these were taken before I realized that the adaptive resolution defaults to 75 for whatever reason.

Put a bit more time into it and yea performance is pretty bad, especially for how it looks. It doesn't look much better than the original game and performs significantly worse. Even dropping the settings to VERY LOW I can only just break 60fps in certain areas. Like @adequatelypreparedsaid the performance might be enough to just make me drop it until I get new hardware or they release some miraculous (highly unlikely) optimisation patch. Much like The Evil Within it seems like it will be a good game behind a shitty optimisation job.

I played through the first mission and it seems to be a consistent 30ish FPS on high with my 970M. As for the game itself, it sure seems like a sequel to Dishonored, which I happened to like a whole lot! Just from looking at Emily's power-set, it seems like there are a far wider variety of options than the first game. As always I feel the need to play every stealth-type game with a OCD no kill/no detection playthrough the first go-through... which is probably not healthy.

Sucks to hear about the performance. After my recent experience with Gears 4 looking amazing while playing extremely smooth I started to think maybe my PC wasn't that bad after all! Turns out it's just that game being really well optimized and quartered off into chunks that don't hog memory.

I guess it's back to the PS4 for me. This is one of those rare games I would prefer to play with mouse and keyboard but I want to be able to enjoy it rather than have this paranoia about frame drops in key moments or similarly negative experience that would sour the game for me.

Yup, rough performance here as well. Had kinda the same mindset with @humanity, except that it was Battlefield 1 I just tried recently and that played great on a mix of medium/high settings, while still looking really good. Guess I'll just see how the PS4 version performs like and then maybe prepare to grab a refund of the pc-version if it doesn't improve and the console version works fine.

I did still play around for an hour before the framerate started getting real bad and it felt great 'till that point. Don't think there really has been a stealthy game I've played between the first Dishonored and this, so it feels good to be back home.

I've been playing for about 3-4 hours now, playing through on Emily. I'm not sure how many different zones there are, but Karnaca seems MASSIVE. Plenty of little hidden nooks and crannies with story elements, loot and whatever else. Needless to say, it feels a lot more open than D1. Enemies are more intelligent than the first game it appears. They're more aware and can spot you fairly well. I can't really comment on the story as I haven't played through much of it, but man do the clockwork soldiers seem fucking cool. I can't really give a solid judgement because of played so little, but I can honestly say if you enjoyed D1 you'll probably love this as well.

@arbitrarywater: I'm exactly the same! I actually had way more fun with the original Dishonored when I did a no detection/no kill run. I have already had to reload my save a lot but the load times are surprisingly quick on PS4 so it doesn't really bother me.

Ordered it on steam and refunded it after an hour. Performance is not so bad, but for some bizarre reason mouse sensitivity must be tied to frame rate because every time it drops sensitivity goes way up. Unplayable. Haven't noticed any performance difference between lowest settings and ultra actually.

One new thing that I have encountered while trying to wrangle this port. Crashes. The game just seems to crash for almost no reason at all. Just boots you straight back to desktop.

Yeah, I know I mentioned it earlier, but I think I'm done for now.

yeah, the mouse for me seemed randomly really sluggish. That said, I'm playing it with a controller. It works great with that. I don't plan to be shooting much, so quick fine movements shouldn't be needed... i hope :)

also with the controller, i get sofa+dog+oled :)

@arbitrarywater RE: OCD. argh! when i saw the stats at the end of the first mission and that i missed ghost because someone saw me. I had to redo the mission :( The problem for me is the world is so rich i want to explore everything. That is hard when you also MUST!?!? get ghost too :)

@glots: yah it's unfortunate but thankfully with the new upgrade to Blink that got grandfathered in from the Knife of Dunwall DLC (time stopping when blinking) rapid mouse aim is not as clutch as in the original.

I did the first 2 mission as both of them. They are pretty much the same. I didn't like corvo's voice and story feels more "right" when played as emily (but it is still early on.) Also silly that non-combative NPCs ignore him even when he is sneaking around and has that mask on :) "nope.. nothing going on here.. i'm just the floor inspector..."

I think i found out part of the reason why some people are having performance issues.

"Incorporates 3rd-party DRM: Denuvo Antitamper, 5 different PCs within a day machine activation limit"

Wouldnt be the first time when using Denuvo as a drm presents issues with the framerate. Witcher games kinda proved that it isnt even needed for the game to sell well.

it shouldn't. There are a lot of Denuvo games out there. I'm sure it does more check that just activation, but that one would be when the game starts.

People are also saying that the CPU priority is set to low for the game exe. both my 2 systems, that have no problem running the game are 8 and 10 core. Maybe that is why i don't have an issue even if the priority is low. Also, the recommender specs are oddly high. pretty much only Pascal (with 6gig+ vram) on the NV side. Maybe it is vram thing?

maybe someone with a good system but running slow can try upping the CPU priority?

How?

Once the game starts, alt tab out and go to the task manager.

go to the details tab, find dishonored2.exe. Right click on it and it and "set priority" to normal or high.

@glots: @humanity: PC games are optimized, just often not for mid-end rigs. I have had 0 issues with all the games I've played on PC over the past 3 years. It's been 3 years since I had a high end PC with good quality components. I don't think it's a coincidence. That includes the notorious ones like Batman Arkham Knight and every single game that was reported to be a technical mess: 0 issues. Steady 60fps (or 30 if it was locked at that) all the time, no crashes, nothing.

@zevvion: Well I guess "Optimized only for top end PCs" doesn't have the same welcoming ring to it.

Harvey Smith has responded to dozens of tweets, saying that they're aware of the issues in the PC version and that they're looking into it. Hopefully a patch is incoming.

sweet. hopefully they can fix it. the game really is great.

btw, how are the console peeps doing with it? it is 30fps/720p, right? it is keeping that when outside?

from polygon:

Although there doesn’t seem to be any kind of permanent solution for the problems affecting PC users right now, some have suggested that the issue stems from TXAA anti-aliasing technology.

@zurv: I'm playing on PS4. I'm not sure if it's 720 or 1080 but it's definitely 30fps. I'm 3 missions into it and I haven't noticed any frame rate drops at all.

@zurv: The game has a stat screen that tells you if you have been spotted. Check that frequently.

@pompouspizza: i fear that my ocd to get a all ghost no kill play-thru will make me miss some in world gold :) But thanks for the tip about looking at the stat screen! :)

@zurv: no problem buddy. I have the same problem. My first play through is always ghost/no kill. Then on the second play through i murder everyone!!

sounds like a good game help back by a bad port, hope they fix it soon.

I was really looking forward to this one, but after the performance mess that was Forza Horizon 3, I think I'll pass on this one until they release a patch that fixes the issues. Such a shame though.

Anyone else not able to get a dualshock 4 to work with the pc version? steam recognizes it but it will not register with the game. Pretty silly if they did not add in ds4 support considering the game is also on the ps4...

@humanity: I guess not, I just wonder how much of that is realistic for a dev to account for. Time/money is a factor in that stuff whether we like it or not.

@zevvion: The time and dedication to proper optimization that accounts for a wider range of systems is what differentiates a good PC release from a shoddy one. To make your game run on top end hardware isn't as difficult as making that same game run well and still look good on mid-range systems. Doom and Gears from recent titles managed to do it and they were all the better for it. Games like Forza Horizon 3 didn't and after you get burned once or twice people tend to stay away at the first sign of trouble which isn't great for sales.