Quick Look: Dishonored: The Knife of Dunwall

And the Thief games never had the "bad" stuff about stealth games that the guys seem to hate. You absolutely did not have to quicksave/quickload constantly, and apart from one or two specific missions, there's no insta-fail either; you can always make a swift getaway and hide in the shadows.

As someone who really liked Dishonored, this DLC scratched that itch very well. One thing that patrick didn't notice is that Daud's blink freezes time when you aren't moving, allowing you to choose where you want to go at your leisure and making some of the jumps significantly easier as a result. To those interested in length: it's 3 missions that are a bit smaller than the ones in the main game.

I started playing it as soon as it came out and stopped after 20 mins of getting my ass kicked. I loved Dishonored and played 100% stealth, but so far this DLC has been rough. Perhaps it is just that being away for so long, this game is not something you can just hop back into.

Of course I am gonna play it, but hopefully it is just me getting used to the mechanics again and not bad level design.

Patrick sure does say "balls" a lot in this video.

Patrick not crouching is driving me fucking nuts.

@soulglove said:

Yeah, that is a huge improvement. Weird that Patrick would miss that.

Wait, everyone really loves Dishonored that much? I never realized that. I didn't thought it was that great. The scripting was pretty poor in more than a few places. I also didn't much care for how there was no penalty whatsoever for skipping ahead to the objective. I guess that rarity is somewhat unique, but it still led to a very short game.

I don't know, I just found it pretty off putting how easy the game was and then to boot you could just skip past even that. Every time I tried to play it like how they showed it, I just kept getting frustrated at the insanely weird reasons why guards could sometimes magically see you or non-lethal attacks counted as kills. It just led me to not want to try and play it any other way than just skipping to the objective.

I had fun with the game overall, but it certainly was not GOTY material for me. I actually thought that dude at PAX asking about Mass Effect to Brad was joking when he said Dishonored. I don't really see how anyone thought it was the best game of that year while there was so much really solid stuff.

To each their own of course. I've never truly been into stealth games where you had to reload and restart until you got the exact thing right, so maybe on the surface the game isn't supposed to be for me.

Dishonored is a fine game. I just wish you didn't have to stealth to get the Good Ending - like Patrick, I have no love in my heart for stealth at all. I spent most of the game ruing the fact that I had a powerful pistol and fine blade in my hand, that I pretty much couldn't use for fear of compromising the ending.

Still, its a damn good game. And frankly, as someone who *hates* stealth games, it was quite an achievement by this game to engage me so much.

Well, you're sure gonna beat Brad with all the dying . :D

A ship named "Diversity"

"Have you ever had Mad Dog 20/20?"

"I don't drink energy drinks."

C'mon man.

The levels are too varied in terms of quality, with too few out and out triumphs for it to have deserved GotY. It does have some great levels, but it has plenty of dull ones too. The early levels are probably the best ones, actually. That's when you get the greatest opportunity to roam about and see some regular places in Dunwall - i.e ones that aren't abandoned buildings, quarantined zones and/or fortified enemy strongholds. As the game goes on, you increasingly move away from civilisation, and end up constantly creeping around secret bases or restricted zones etc. So the early bits with the Distillery District and The Golden Cat brothel (IMO the best level by far), shine the brightest.

The game is also a hotchpotch of different ideas and many of them feel very underdeveloped. The Outsider just popping up and saying 'Hey, fancy some super powers?' with no explanation (ever) is just bizarre. He seems a bit like The Riddling Reaver (for those who know the reference), but in game his motives and whole presence in the story seem absurdly contrived, just to give Corvo magical abilities for the player to use.

Plus the whole plague zombies thing is nice on paper but a) has basically no relevance at all to the main story and b) only really matters at all if you are playing for the Bad Ending, and are committing mass murder everywhere you go. If you don't (as most people don't), then they tend not to show up, being shoved off to the periphery, and often serving as an indicator that you've gone the wrong way in the main story! There are many such examples of elements that are very lightly touched on.

At the end of the day though, I found it all very interesting. And under the principal of 'Less is More', I found that the lack of development on many of these aspects actually added a certain mystique to proceedings. I'm not sure I really want those blanks filled in either, be it from DLC or a sequel. I'm happy to leave my experience as it is.

I'd prefer it if Patrick just played how he normally plays instead of saying, "this is not how I normally play" while running to his death repeatedly. It would show off more of the game and be more interesting to watch.

The DLC was quality, but it was too short; only three missions. The mission designs are just as good as the main story missions, but the DLC ends too quickly. Still it reminds people what's great about Dishonored. And it should have been higher on the GOTY list of 2012, regardless of what Jeff and Brad thinks.

I personally despised the game for exactly that reason. They give you all these lethal combat abilities, touted them up in the marketing, clearly spent a lot of time developing them, and then basically tell you you're a bastard if you actually use them. Meanwhile, they provide a grand total of two non-lethal ways to deal with enemies; one of which has a small, strictly limited ammo capacity despite every lethal weapon in the game having an upgradable ammo capacity. I thought going through the game using only non-lethal methods was tedious and boring because your options are so limited. The lethal combat options are significantly more inventive and entertaining in addition to greatly outnumbering the non-lethal options.

The game's morality system feels like it was tacked on at the last minute. The manner in which it's handled is terrible - you get this overt, 4th wall breaking message when you start the game that if you kill guys, you'll get the dark (i.e. bad) ending. They probably had to put that message, because otherwise no one looking for an entertaining experience would actually choose to play the game non-lethally given all the fun lethal powers. That they have to so blatantly hold the threat of a bad ending over your head to get you to play nice demonstrates just how broken it is. I mean the enemies in the game are the same 1-dimensional, kill the player on sight baddies of every other shooter; what limited dialog they have portrays them as steampunk nazis. I feel absolutely no empathy for them whatsoever. The game provides no natural motivation to play non-lethally. So they tack on this artificial, very "video-gamey" restriction that if you want to the good ending, you have to play the game in most constricted, least varied way possible.

I'm a stickler for being a "good guy" in games, and forced myself to play non-lethally. I hated the experience. Granted some of that is my fault for being OCD about wanting to get the good ending. I should have just played the game the way that was most fun and looked up the good ending on YouTube like everyone else. Had I played the game that way, my opinion of it might have been much different. The way they implemented the morality system really did that game a disservice.

I would very much like to know if Patrick got the good ending - was he even aware that it was something to worry about.

No wonder Patrick had so much trouble using blink to climb up edges, he sprints through the entire game hardly ever crouching and not taking enough time to actually aim the blink.

Cause everyone drinks alcohol, especially ever bit of alcohol ever made.

What are the Helgast doing in DIshonored?

BALLS

Klepek is shockingly bad at showing this game off, no wonder everyone else in the office doesn't like this game.

Who the fuck is Dodd?

I just don't get it when Patrick compares it so much to Deus Ex. It's only similar in that it's free form gameplay to an extent. It has nothing of Deus Ex's world interaction or choices. It looks way more like Thief. Also, I'll never understand why he feels it's so impossible to fight in other stealth games if you get noticed. Outside of a certain few that require stealth or else they give you a game over, most stealth games allow you to get yourself out of a scrap, Human Revolution absolutely included. You just have to know how to handle yourself.

As for Dishonored, I just can't get into it. Reminds me too much of Bioshock's spartan storytelling, and the world itself(visual style and such) is just super bland looking. Just not for me.

Dishonored plays so much better with a mouse and keyboard it's not even remotely close to funny. Watching awkward lining-ups of blinks with analog sticks is so painful, and explains so much of why so many didn't "get it".

The Eurogamer review of this expansion even stated that you could "now" blink mid-air, which leads me to think the reviewer didn't even consider trying it in the original game where it was something I used near constantly. It's probably smart of Arcane to freeze time when lining up blinks now, but with a mouse it is simply not a concern. You just point and go.

I don't think that would be boring. Says somebody who enjoys watching Demon's/Dark Souls LPs....

The explanation i've got for how unskilled this showing went is that you can't really focus on talking and playing well at the same time, that's why i like the quick looks with 3 peeps, because the one guy can just focus on driving and the two others do the chatting about it.

But yes, this is definitely not how i play Dishonored.

Also i think the argument about "you can keep playing this, even if you're detected" is kind of moot if you're a serious player and go after getting all achievements... I've found myself doing quite some reload on that playthrough, wish DX:HR were this clear about you being detected or not at mission's end, though. That achievement is a bitch.

You think that the only way to know that MD20/20 is is to drink every alcohol ever made?

Do you also think that every college student in America must be dying of liver failure right now?

This and Patrick is probably one of the most frequent drinkers according to shit he's said on the podcast. Him and Brad.

This DLC got a really high ball score on Patrick's balls based review sale.

Woohooo, I miss Dishonored!

Gonna get me some of this action. Man i love me some Dishonored and was kind of shocked that no one besides Patrick really enjoyed it (or so it would seem). Also did Patrick lean during the quick look? I played it with a controller (ps3) and could perfectly pull of impressive acrobatic blinks.

That's your ass.

Hey let's talk about energy drinks during the middle of exposition. That sure won't bite us in the ass later when we're complaining about confusing story beats.

@inquisitor: Yeah, I don't think it would that boring, but there are definitely some games which are better to watch than others and I think it is their perception that a proper stealth QL would involve lots of waiting around which people might find tedious, especially if that waiting was not informing the viewer about the game in much detail.

My opinion is that they should play the games in the same fashion that they would play them at home, because that is the way to best show what it is trying to achieve and how well fulfills its potential. I don't think there is much of point just rushing through a stealth game in a QL. While you might have lots of action on the screen it is not representative of how the average player will experience the game and doesn't test the mechanics and systems stealthy playing will encounter.

However I don't think it matters too much in the case of DLC for a familliar game, the aim then might just be to check new areas and mechanics. I think for a new release it might just mean they have to do a little more homework than normal in order to find a section which they can play in a style which is true to the game but is also fun to watch.

I still don't understand Patrick's complaint with other stealth games when he gets spotted and says, "This is the time I would normally quick load." It looks just like every other Stealth game I've ever played when you get caught, enemies swarm you and have you to kill all of them.

And that's why you don't play Dishonored fast and loose, unless you are appropriately armed. It's really a game to take time over: To be strategic, silent and deadly.

Stanton Dowd.

I'm sorry but I thought this game was absolute trash, a waste of my $60.

Wish this was stand alone so I could pick it up on PC. Don't have my 360 version anymore.

As someone who loved Dishonored, this DLC look awesome, can't wait to play it.

I'm glad you get to play as Daud as well, I was actually thinking that they might of saved it for the sequel but I guess I was wrong.

I miss Ryan being funny at the beginning of Quick Looks. :'(

ABC, Always Be Crouching.

smh at patrick instantly draining his entire mana bar