Death Before...Whatever

I had high expectations for the new video game Dishonored. Everything I read about it made it seem as cool as hell. Having beaten the game now, I come away a little disappointed. I read on Steam that Dishonored was revitalizing the stealth genre, which is ridiculous...there have been plenty of stealth games lately. And the best comparison to Dishonored is Deux Ex:HR: both stealth games where the protagonist has cool powers and jumps around on rooftops.

Dishonored is better, of course, with more real choices and more open-ended gameplay. Also, swords.

But enough about the gameplay, let's talk about what interests me about the game. I know that some people weren't a fan of the setting, and the various elements it tries to combine. I like it, personally; it could have done with more fleshing out in the game, but I appreciate the effort to make something a little more unique and memorable. I did find it difficult to describe to my friends when I talked about Dishonored, finally settling on phrases like "dark steampunk" or "facist steampunk." Dishonored does a good job of creating an overall feeling of despair as a city dies, but it could have done with more random people trying their best to survive.

But while the setting of Dishonored is, to a certain extent, unique, the rest of the game is not. This is not, you understand, necessarily a bad thing. In marketing and product design, there's an idea called the twenty percent rule. Well, there are a lot of "twenty percent rules" in just about everything, but this particular one concerns change. People, as a general rule, aren't comfortable with big, sweeping changes. So when you design things, it's probably a bad idea to create huge changes, instead settling on changing one thing.

But the plot is what you expect from a game where your Empress (and, presumably, lover) dies in the introduction: a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. It's fairly paint-by-the-numbers, as you eliminate the support network of the bad guy before tracking him down for retribution. There's a plot twist in there, that I'm pretty sure that anyone who has ever played a video game before, ever, would have seen  coming. In just one game, just one, I wish the protagonist would spot the obvious and think of a way to turn it to his advantage, instead of just blundering into it like a moron.

Character-wise, the protagonist is basically a blank killing machine who doesn't even have a real voice...doesn't anyone remember that was one of the real draws of the ME franchise? An RPG protagonist with solid voice-acting? There is one nice touch, though; he always takes off his scary mask before talking to a certain character that he cares about. I would like to add, however, that this scary clockwork mask does essentially NOTHING, and probably weighs way too much...ever heard of a ski mask?

So yeah, Dishonored is pretty fun, although it does amuse me that in stealth games I prefer to play like a bloodthirsty maniac. Even in Thief (the first one). I'll be posting some more of my friend's draft and my thoughts later.