Played up until mission 4, low chaos, as Emily on ps4 so far. Pre day 1 patch the framerate was really choppy, but now it's started to be a solid 30 pretty much constantly. It looks not amazing, but the general aesthetic makes it interesting at least. I'm enjoying it a fair amount so far, more than the first game. My major problem seems to be Far Reach. The aiming feels clunky and jumpy, and I don't really have any idea how far it reaches or why I'll be tossed forwards at times instead of landing on the thing I was very clearly targeted at. Maybe I'll get used to it as I keep playing, but right now I'm just confused.

This.

Also, the "optimised for high-end system" is just nonsense. If a game is only optimised for high-end rigs it just means it's not optimised at all. Besides, people seem to have problems on gtx 1080s and i7s, as it was the case with Forza, so it's not even optimised for those systems. It will now be interesting to see if and how quickly they manage to fix the issues after release, as there have been a number of AAA games lately that have had serious performance issues on high-end rigs (Mafia III and Forza Horizon 3 to mention just a couple) and whose issues have not been resolved yet months after release.

I'm about 3 hours in and have explored the majority of the first hub area of Karnaca. It definitely feels like a sequel to Dishonored which is pretty much exactly what I wanted. Playing non-lethal and undetected for the most part first playthrough (going to avoid save scumming as much as possible).

The core movement (mantling, sprinting, sliding, far reach-ing) feels even more fluid than before, and it was already solid. Love the look of the engine that they're using and the art direction is as strong as the original game also.

Edit: I recommend turning the friction level down to 0 if you're playing with a controller, and no objective markers if you want to get the most out of exploration.

The PC version seems pretty rough right now, at least from my end. Running at 1440p, the game recommends what is essentially the "low" setting with one or two things at medium. I have an AMD Fury, I shouldn't have set any game to low to get it to run properly. The kicker is that performance is largely the same whether I select "very low" or "ultra" in most cases, and it kind of doesn't run well enough for me to play it right now. Hopefully someone can figure out a fix or Arcane gets on it quickly.

I am seemingly one of the lucky few, as I'm running a 970 GTX and so far, I'm experiencing a crispy 50-something-60 frames on a mix of ultra and very high, leaning more towards ultra. The frame-rate does dip occasionally in larger areas teeming with a great deal of enemies, but not far beneath 30.

Being able to play this here game without the majority of the luggage ya'll seem to have to deal with is a genuine treat to me, as I am absolutely, head-over-heels inlove with this game. Now, take that with a grain of salt as I was also a huge fan of the first Dishonoured (the proper way to spell it), and played through it multiple times. That said, this seems not just a sequel, but an advancement of all the ideas and tricks they had up their sleeves. They teased out improvements across the board, everything from the movement, to using your powers feels a lot more fluid and dynamic. That said, the real star of the show is the level design. Now, as very few of you probably remember, I'm something of a horror aficionado. I will eat the crumbs from the tables of the horror industry, digging through the trash in order to get my hands on that one gem. And this is just that.

This game has a level early on that did more for me in that "oh, but my pants were clear mere moments ago" regard, than any proper horror title has for over a year. Maybe more. It achieves that by not just being eerie as hell, but also by making the characters, and locations, feel tangible if not real. So much of that is in the small details of the environments, and the handwritten notes and journals you find; but as someone who remembers the Thief games fondest when they scared your pants off, this game is firing on all cylinders.

The writing for the main story is.. Somewhat predictable so far. But the smaller stories you encounter along the way are incredible, and lend so much to the world. I have not liked a game this much in.. Quite a while, let's just put it like that.

Oh, and for the record, I'm playing as Emily, non-lethal and quiet-like on the hardest difficulty, doing my very best to hold myself back from save-scumming and living with my decisions and fuck-ups alike, which for the record, are not mutually exclusive.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=223933446&postcount=473 acording to most of what I read, most of the issues are tied to a bug setting the game process to low, hope a quick patch fixes it.

I used to hate the art-work, but by the end of the first Dishonored, that shifted to loving to hate it. Seems to fit that cocaine-ruined nose, dark Machiavellian world quite well. It seems a continuation of that from what I read here. And besides the usual birthing issues on PC, sounds like it is holding to form.

I think maybe I will finish of Shadow Warrior 2 tomorrow, and get on with this.

So another day one embargoed game has performance issues on pc? Surprising!

Did they really keep that lame chaos mechanic in? I want to use all the tools you give me, game, but if I do I'll just get the bad ending. That was my main issu with the first one too. I played a no kill run to avoid the chaos mechanic and it was super lame. Knocking guys out and ghosting a level is no fun in that game. Stoping time and blowing up three dudes and shooting a fourth one before time unfreezes is where the fun is at. Did they even have game designers working on this franchise?

@pyrodactyl: Yes, it's still there, although they front it a little more at the end of a level by giving you a chart telling showing you why you got the rating you did.

Fair warning though, it seems like it's far more strict than the first game. Getting spotted seems to count against you a lot more than in the first game, even if you don't kill anyone (they've now given you a non-lethal riposte option). I only killed one dude in the opening level and still got high chaos by getting into open combat three or four times after that, even though I only knocked my opponents out.

Don't like the sound of that very much.

Gamefly copy shipped Thursday morning. Starting to get excited! First game was fantastic.

I ended up getting spotted towards the end and ran through about 3 groups of enemies, I had a lot of alerts but I killed nobody (got spotted and non-lethal riposted one guy prior to that being the only 'combat' encounter I had) and I ended w/ low chaos. I think I had 4 bodies found and 14 alerts all together?

EDIT: Played 2 hours after work (about 3 hours total) and haven't even gone to the next part of the first mission, still in the very first area....this may take me longer to beat than expected...

I don't post much in the forums here, but I'm a huge Dishonored fan and was really hyped for this, so here's some more impressions to add to the pile.

I'm playing on Xbox One, so I can't really address anything technical, other than to say there are a few, rare framerate drops when there is a lot of stuff on screen (mostly cinematics) and the draw-in can be a bit messy (it clearly "forgets" textures and objects that are not in direct line of sight like most FPS titles and is sometimes a millisecond late in rendering them...maybe a patch with improve this). I have also noticed a few strange bugs with the AI behavior. The game has more NPCs now, presumably to give the levels a feeling of being more alive as opposed to the relatively empty worlds of the first game which pretty much only had hostiles. This seems to have introduced some weirdness into the game here and there. On a few occasions, I have seen NPCs go into alert mode when they were not even anywhere near me or a body or anything like that, and begin reacting like they were in combat only with no one around, or just other friendly NPCs. This didnt seem to count against me score-wise, but it is very strange.

The game is basically more Dishonored, which I would assume is a good thing for most people. I really like that Arkane didn't try to mold the game in any one direction and still allow you to play as you wish. I am hoping this holds out for the entire game; I thought it was very ballsy, but cool, that the first game could literally be played beginning to end without combat or forced confrontations, so I am hoping this doesn't pull a Deus Ex somewhere and suddenly have a forced boss encounter with a chaingun robot or something like that. The game is a bit harder than the first, it feels like. Enemy perception seems a bit better and it is much harder to hide...you have to plan your routes and ideas a bit more carefully. I'm playing as Emily so I cannot speak if there is a huge difference, but it feels like Leap starts off being much more powerful than it was in D1 (you can go way farther pre-upgrade) while the dark vision is much weaker, pre-upgrade. You are also given an option right up front to not take any abilites at all, so for those of you who liked the hardcore playthrough, it's an option right from the start. (Dishonored 1 at least let you use leap without counting against you, it seems in this game you don't even get *that* ability if you want to go power-less). I have mixed feelings about possession being removed from the game. The skill trees are kinda weird. The added thing of being able to make charms and runes is weird, but I guess it will probably be more useful later in the game or on successive playthroughs if they let you do the game again with your present "level." The whole high chaos/low chaos thing is back, and, in one of the few flaws here, it seems to be just as binary as the first game...the line between either is pretty thin (even just being spotted a few times can result in a high chaos rating) and I'm going to guess the game has only two endings.

The levels are pretty big an involved, similar to D1, but maybe even more so. There's a TON of hidden things and routes to explore and even when I have been positive I really explored an area, it turns out a missed a few things. One minor annoyance: the heart now seems to have a range, which is kinda pissing me off. I don't recall this in the first game; when you used the heart to locate items, it always directed you to them no matter how far they were. Now it seems like you have to be about 100 yards-ish near an item or else it won't even show up with the heart, whcih means you're bound to not find certain runes and charms unless you are using the heart constantly. That said, I do like the ability to target runes and charms now to leave them on your HUD. The gameplay is almost identical to D1, but with a few new aspects here and there...stuff that feels organic to the new environments.

The story is decent, thought it improves as you go along it seems. It ties in with D1's add-ons featuring Daud, so in a way D2's storyline is almost geared more towards fans of the first game who already have some familiarity with the setting and background details established there. It's weird having a vocal protagonist, but I kinda figured that would happen in a sequel.
Well, I don't want to get into a wall of text here, but basically I am giving it a thumbs up unless something drastically changes. It has everything that I really enjoyed about the first game and feels like an honest continuation of the spirit of the game, so I think most fans will be happy with it.

DS4 support is still in beta. For now just use inputmapper or DS4Windows.

@humanity: Are they though? I'm kind of doubting that. We've seen so many games that aren't optimized well for mid-end PC's, yet I do not see a strong decline in PC game sales anywhere particular. Specifically I know Warner doesn't sell any less even though they are consistently shit in that aspect. Don't get me wrong, we're in agreement that it sucks, I just don't know if it makes too much sense for them to do it. If it turns out to be very hard, a long process and costing a lot of money, then I get why they don't.

@laethe First off, your username is fucking awesome. Second, not all parts work as well together. You can have a 1080 all you want, you're going to get less performance if that 1080 doesn't work as well with certain memory as it does with other type/brand of memory for instance. I'm not saying it's your fault when a game has issues, nor am I saying a dev shouldn't optimize it for the widest range of rigs possible, but I am wondering if there is a good reason for them to do it. It would be great if they cared if one customer had a silky smooth experience and another did not, but so long as they both bought the game does it really matter to them? I've seen so many people say 'fuck this I'm out' over the years when it comes to buying videogames, but you always see those people play them anyway.

@zevvion: as an end consumer yourself it's very depressing how casually you "get why they don't"

Yah sure I get why they wouldn't want to spend more money on development too, but thats a really terrible argument to make when you're the one paying for this less-than-stellar effort. Maybe it really doesn't impact sales all that much, who knows, personally it makes me wary of my next purchase but then again hundreds of thousands of people keep buying Fallout games, and even standing up in defense of those ludicrously buggy releases for some reason. I mean I get why you would just shrug your shoulders cause as consumers what can we do really? The binary choice of "buy or don't buy" isn't as simple as some make it out to be as we all want to experience these games and unfortunately are more often than not willing to swallow our pride and put up with various annoyances and developer shortcomings for them. But treating this complete disregard for quality control as some sort of given cause yah, obviously the idiot masses will gobble it up regardless so why bother putting in the extra effort - I dunno man thats even too bleak for me to accept. There need to be some boundaries, developers should take some minimal pride in the product they put out that others pay honest money for. Stand up to your publisher, stand up for the years of hard work, for the countless hours you poured into this project and make sure it's the best damn thing that people like you and I can possibly play.

I know that got a little soap boxy there and I apologize but man I'm just really tired of this PC lottery. One game is fine another is a trainwreck. You never know what you get. I'm just too old for this stuff. When I was younger I had the time and patience to dig through forums, edit .ini files and force things to work. These days I get 2-3 free hours a night to either play games, draw some stuff for GB that no one cares about, or waste it on YT - I can't be wasting that precious time digging around forums looking for ways to make these games not run like garbage because they just had to get it out the door by the end of the third quarter.

Once again apologies for the rant, you're an intelligent guy (gal?) so I know this is all pretty obvious to you anyway.

I keep on trying to play this game because goddamn it's good. Then it crashed and I think I'm done again. Weird thing though: I am 99% certain that every time it has crashed is right after I hit 2 on the keyboard for a shortcut. It doesn't happen every time I hit 2, but every time it has crashed I had just hit 2.

@humanity: But understanding the opposition seems like a smart way to think to me. When a dev introduces microtransactions and implements them in a way nobody likes, what goes through your mind besides the rage and disgust? Are they doing it to piss you off? No, I'd wager they are doing it because people are paying for it and nobody, or almost nobody, actually cares enough to stop playing. I'm in full belief a developer creates a game because they want to show what they can do and create an awesome experience for people, but it would be naive to think they would pass up more money if they made it a little 'less awesome'. Similarly, while I fully admit I don't understand the ins and outs of optimizing a game for PC, but if I were to guess that it's hard to pull off, takes a lot of time and costs a lot of money, it would be naive to think they would do that because it's 'the right thing to do' even if it costs them all that money and time. I dare bet they'll only do it if they know it will sell less if they don't.

If they sell less games if it's less optimized, I do not know. I have no data to back that up at all. I just suspect that they don't, unless it's catastrophically bad. Understanding motivations for this is not the same as saying they are okay. Again, I don't think it's okay.

But if you don't have time to dig around how to get games to work, then it sounds like PC isn't for you no matter how you slice it. Even great games sometimes don't work and have weird work arounds to get them to work perfectly. That stuff happens all the time. Gears is no different. It works immediately for some, others might have to do some weird stuff to get it to work properly. I don't know if that can be avoided.

EDIT: I'm a guy.

To expand on my last post, I played about 4 hours last night. Enough to get through the opening level and into the "main" section of the 2nd one. I would say that I'm finding it quite a bit harder than the 1st game if you want a low-chaos playthrough. That seems to be for a variety of reasons:

1. The 1st mission you need to do without any powers. This was true in the 1st game too, but the opening level here is much bigger and more involved with a lot more guards who travel in groups.

2. The high chaos/low chaos thing is a little better fronted. At the end of each mission you get a four quadrant graph showing you how did. Clockwise from the top the attributes are Stealth, Non-Lethal, Assault, and Lethal. Scoring farther to the upper right appears to be low chaos while lower left seems to be high chaos.

3. There is now a non-lethal riposte option in combat, which involves you spear handing a guy and then choking him out. However, the game appears to count to damaging/knocking out enemies after you've been spotted as "assault," so I think it still counts as a high-chaos action even if you don't kill the guy. The non-lethal riposte seems to be intended more as a way of using a guy as a human shield than an "oops I got spotted but don't want to kill anyone."

4. This might be subjective, but it feels like the choke out now takes a little longer to pull off. I counted it as four seconds, which is an eternity in a stealth game and particularly problematic here since more enemies seem to move in groups. There was a bone charm in the first game that greatly reduced the choke time, but I don't know if it's still there. I haven't found it yet if it is.

5. Enemies are now more observant if one of them goes missing, which makes it harder to take a guy out and just hide his body, as others will notice he's gone and search around a bit.

6. You can now only carry 5 Sleep Darts, down from 10 in the first game. I haven't found a way to upgrade this yet (the quiver capacity upgrade isn't affecting Sleep Darts).

So yeah, overall it's harder to do a low-chaos playthrough, at least in the opening levels. It seems to be more weighted towards avoiding enemies altogether and only removing ones directly in your way than quietly taking an entire level of them out.

Not a fun answer, but the answer is don't buy games right when they come out. I got in this habit a year ago or so and it works out really well. When you get to a lot of PC games a little later they are fixed up or you know they turned out to be a train wreck like say Arkham Knight so you avoid them. If they don't want to do the work to optimize for PC, don't reward them with early, full price sales.

At some point you need to do something about it vs walking into the same trap over and over again and complaining about it like you don't have any control. You can debate the rest until you're blue in the face but you don't know what the developers reasoning or failures really are and I doubt you would ever get answers about it.

@sabby_po: Why does it matter? You're getting it on release day and people who took the risk of pre-ordering get the , potential, reward of getting their copy early.

@zevvion: Understanding is all fine and good as long as it's not simultaneously excusing blatantly bad development decisions. If they introduce DLC then it's obviously because they think it will add a viable revenue stream from a potential player base that is succeptible to microtransactions. Ok, I understand. But if the DLC they offer is selling players content that should have been part of the original package at exorbitant prices then no amount of seeing it from their side will excuse that.

PC gaming is just fine for me as long as it works, and we've sadly come to the point where a game not working properly is expected and the onus is placed on the consumer to find a fix for themselves. This should not be the status quo but it is what it is.

Hopped over to PS4 and boy is it good to have a steady framerate, except for a few hiccups. The game continues to be good as well, especially now that I'm able to fully focus on just playing it. Got almost three hours clocked in and I've barely started exploring Karnaca. So far I've played by sneaking around and not killing anyone, but I think I might have to use some of Emily's more lethal powers on a few unfortunate test subjects, just for the sake of testing it. Not too fussed about the world's outcome, as long as it's not full chaotic by the end.

Also felt good to bump into that first safe and open it with the (0)451 combination.

@glots: I'm also on PS4 and have not really noticed any hiccups. I'm on the 4th mission and have been playing for 11 hours. I have been taking my sweet time reading everything and exploring.

I'm just so happy to be back in this world again. At work now, but I played enough this morning to get to Karnaca and walk around a bit. Looking forward to exploring the rooftops of another weird steampunk nightmare city.

I'm feeling this way too. It seems like upgrading Far Reach and Shadow Walk are the only real options for non-lethal players. I might do the same and play around with her new stuff, then save the ghost playthrough and achievement hunting for later.

Only noticeable part for me was arriving to Karnaca, where the framerate would almost die if you looked at a few specific spots during the boat ride to the shore.

So other than PC performance the game is good? That is kind of the vibe I'm getting here. I have a PS4 as well and I'm gonna try to hold out for the PC version to be fixed but it's good to hear console versions are solid.

I played the first one and all the dlc probably a year ago and forgot how much I absolutely loved it, I've got quite a few games on my plate right now but I can't wait to grab this game in the near future.

How is the story so far for people? The first one had just enough story to keep me interested but it was mainly the world that really captured me.

Not excusing, understanding. If they can create a game, then cut the cost of creation by 20% and sell that as DLC, why wouldn't they do that if people buy it en masse? Do you remember this picture?:

This is how it works in practice. What people claim to want and what they are willing to pay for are two very different things. I'm just saying this might be a situation where they look at the numbers at go: 'Nah, forget optimizing it, it won't affect sales'.

@sackmanjones: i'm sure any gaming PC can do the 30fps 720p with lower settings as the ps4 :) But somehow it is a nightmare to do that on the PC (30fps and 720p is a nightmare IMO) but ok on a console. That said, something is wrong with the game and hopefully they fix it.

@artisanbreads: Agreed - there's unintended pros to this pay more, play early approach and this is a big one. I'm totally alright with this, even though you shouldn't perorder period - if you're in the position where it makes sense for you, more power to you. I did early enlister on BF1 and was really happy, spread my impressions best I could, and hopefully helped out with some people out there.

@glots: Now that you mention it, I had the same problem.

I've played the game for about 5 hours on PC so far. I think the game that's underneath the performance issues is fantastic, but they're making it difficult to enjoy.

I'll continue to play it, but I think I'll start the game over if they release a patch in the middle of my playthrough, because the mouse stuttering and the frame rate constantly fluctuating between 20 and 60 FPS is really distracting.

@zevvion: well then you are basically excusing their shitty attitude of profits first, consumers second, by saying it's cost effective to screw people over. They can cut costs in a variety of different ways as well that won't impact them but will impact the consumer but it's not like they should be doing that. I'm just not sure how you can adopt such an attitude of passive acceptance when this is stuff that is ultimately negatively affecting you as well.

something is totally wack with the game, while i have no problems playing with it, i did play around with what impact there should be to changing settings. What is crazy is no matter what i changed, the FPS was always the same. very odd.

I wasn't even specifically referring to this "play early" trend, just buying right at release at all, but you're absolutely right about that too. I much prefer it to outlandish pre-order bonuses. I get to hear how the game is early and just have to use a little patience.

Wow does this game take the style of the first game and just slather it with beauty in spots.

I'm waiting for the promised performance patch, I think.

When I started the game I was getting a steady 100+ fps indoors but as soon as I went outside it would randomly drop into the low 40s, with big stutters as it did so. Like people are saying, fiddling around with the graphics options didn't help at all.

I loved the first game but the sequel, performance issues aside, isn't doing it for me anywhere near as much. Granted, I'm only a couple of hours in but Corvo's (who I'm playing as) voice acting is becoming hugely annoying.

You were practically mute in the first game and now you're a gravelly-voiced Steve Buscemi. Cut it out!

It took me about 4 hours to realise Corvo just sounds like an older gruffer version of Garrett but had no idea it was the man himself!

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1592197/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t7

Glad he's still getting work, not quite good enough for Thiforth but good enough to play Corvo.

@adequatelyprepared: why does it look so blurry?

@horseman6: i think he said he had adaptive resolution on.

here is a random pix :) (his are in better spots) - hrmm.. these look blurry too. maybe GB site does some magic funk to them?

Really enjoying my time with this! Closing in on eight hours played and I've just entered the Manor. Could've probably added few mores to that, if I had found every collectible item and whatnot.

@sunbrozak: What are your other specs? I'm on a 980 as well but so far I have the game on the ultra preset at 1440p and haven't has any issues with framerate drops or anything. Maybe it's because I haven't moved on to the second area yet, but all the way up to the boat (not really a spoiler but in case anyone cares) it has been running great for me. Hopefully the next time I load up the game and open the door into the next section everything doesn't go to shit!

Also happy to hear Emily talking a LOT less (at least it seems that way) than Corvo was in the UPF.

Enjoying my time with the game so far, Picked Emily because I heard she was more combat/killing dudes focused and she has been pretty fun to play as so far. I do have a couple of gripes with the game. First the AI seems a bit random for want of a better word. More then once guards have been freaked out simply because I was in the same area as them even though none of them spotted me. For instance there was a section in a kitchen where I was perched on top of a metal cabinet. Four guards where standing outside and all of a sudden they came running into the room I was in and started searching even though no one spotted me and I never moved. The second annoyance is it seems random if you will get a button prompt to knock out guys who are sitting in chairs, I have had it pop up once but most of the time I end up having to take a swipe with my sword and kill them because the option for a non-lethal take down never shows up.

wow. i'm really loving this game. I hope they get the issues fixes soon so everyone else can play.

it seems the devs are confused that there are perf problems and that it isn't a port. (and are working to fix it)

http://wccftech.com/dishonored-2-game-director-distressed-pc-performance-issues-says-not-port/