Just downloaded yesterday on PS4 and started a new game on hard -- (which is my default for many purchased games ... I figure, if I bought the damn thing, I don't want to just breeze through it)

THAT SAID:

Bad guys are spotting me almost instantaneously. Like, I can hardly look around a corner before a guard gets spooked. This wouldn't be such a problem if there was some sort of lean mechanic where I could covertly track the baddies, but as far as I can tell, there isn't

IS THERE? (seriously, there really should be)

Am I missing something? I played through the original and don't remember getting spotted so quickly. It's a major pain in my butthole.

I guess I'll just bump down the difficulty but it seems unreasonable not to be able to view my surroundings on the DL.

Thanks...

If you're using a controller you hold Y to lean. You can lean left, right and up. But yea, the AI awareness is ruthless on hard. Its definitely been more of a challenge, especially with emily because enemies can see you when you tentacle grapple shit.

@mems1224:Well I feel dumb.

Thank you!

Don't remember learning that in the tutorial ...

And that's too bad about the tentacle spotty thing. Especially since playing as Emily first is the obvious choice, amirite?

Might I suggest the following tutorial?

@lawgamer: God DAMN you for beating me to this! Also, bless you, sweet child.

@mems1224@hoossy: Worth noting, there's a black bone charm you get fairly early on that makes you invisible while using the tentacle. If you're like me, and are obsessively collecting them all, you'll find it no problem. If not, I'd actually go out of my way to google it as it makes the game considerably easier. (Playing on Very Hard, I'll take every advantage I can get.) Also, if you're playing stealth like as Emily, definitely go ahead and invest in her shadow form (the crawly thing, you know what I mean). Especially from a distance, enemies can barely spot you; making it real easy to get a lay of the land, and/or do things to them that will require months of therapy to resolve.

I only payed on medium but I found that the guards still suck at looking up. Also, max out dark vision asap.

@mems1224: @hoossy: Haven't played the game yet but I'm sure this is really a knee-jerk from the developer since one of the major complaint about the first game was the really dumb AI. It was mostly towards the lean mechanic and how guards would not spot you when leaning which led to a lot of people chessing the game on higher difficulty.

@lawgamer: Thanks for that. Now it's time to go through the entire run of Flying Circus while grinding on diablo 3.

Are you crouching? That seems important to being stealthy.

@do_the_manta_ray: I actually didn't get that bone charm until mission 8. It seems like it might be random, or maybe they just switched up the order that you get them based on difficulty (I'm playing on the default difficulty).

The first game definitely randomised the charms at level load (so if you went back far enough with a reload to be in the last load area then the charms were different when you loaded forward) for almost all of the charms.

yeah, and to be fair the "hard" difficulty for most games these days is the equivalent of what "normal" used to be a long time ago. That's pretty dumb they spot that quick.

as other have said, dark vision is key. :)

but also kinda sucks, because i have it up almost all the time and i don't want to see the game in batman vision all the time :(

I recommend getting reach ability. Also the ability to chain 2 or more guards is amazing (domino i think). 1 sleep dart or just strangling one guard can take down multiple guards with the domino ability.

Also put bonecharm and some talent points into your skill in winning melee contests. That way you can also strangle guards faster in melee just by hitting ctrl at the right moment and being able to choke them.

@beachykeen: Bone Charms are randomized so each location doesn't have the same bone charm for everyone else. Finished my 1st playthrough last night and never saw the bone charm for faster choke outs (Even though its bugged last I heard).

On the one hand, not having access to a good charm is annoying (certainly in D1 there were far more charms than spaces to collect charms so even a completionist playthrough - and you really should collect everything because that's why you play stealth games, to be forced to stalk every corridor - would not see lots of charms) but on the other, it means your play and development is somewhat unique. We spend so long playing games that import the RPG mechanics of customisation via skill tree progressions that we choose to unlock to match our style that I think we often forget another key element of many RPGs is adaption to the environment and situations as a permanent development. *Your arm never quite heals properly from that damage and you now permanently have this debuff*

The random charms can make each playthrough slightly easier or harder (and can mean you could save-scum it if you really demanded a certain charm early on) but I think it's pretty cool as a design decision, especially if you don't read a wiki in advance or theorycrafting and so don't know what you're missing out on. Every good charm becomes a tempting option and you could go the entire game without something or have it right from the beginning. As long as none of them are too powerful then that's a cool randomisation of your character progression and even an incentive to go down a different skill path early on if the charms all push in one direction.

I felt this way in the first game and would thus never purchase the power in subsequent playthroughs. I guess it's really there to offset the issue the OP brought up.

I had this problem and I immediately bumped it back down to medium. Enemies still see you pretty quickly it feels.

Dark vision doesn't last particularly long in this installment. I feel like the developers were aware of this issue and went to some lengths to prevent it from reoccurring. It's also way flashier than in the previous game, obscuring the environments to such a degree that having it up constantly doesn't really feel viable. At least not to me.

It's Far Cry all over again

I never got it why you could use dark vision, eagle vision, batman detective vision, etc. while moving. Why don't they limit it to only be useable while standing still? That way people wouldn't play the game while seeing the whole world without textures and in purple.

It is, I was inclined to go with her too, and she supposedly has some neat, wacky combos... but everyone seems to be saying overall (as long as they played a lot with BOTH characters) that Corvo's moveset is much more fun and effective overall, especially before you get enough upgrades to make Emily's combos useful. Too bad, but still, can't complain too much about an otherwise great game, even if the PC version is kinda shit so far (just until it's patched, hopefully!).