Dishonored EP7: Have You Lost Your Senses?

By Shamus Posted Saturday Mar 9, 2013

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 87 comments


Link (YouTube)

Thanks again to Jarenth for filling in while I was moving. I’m glad he did such a good job, although I’m kind of disappointed that he did such a good job that nobody missed me. Also, I’ve decided to blame him for the rash of puns on my name, even though I think he’s the only person who was blameless in the matter.

A few things to note because I wasn’t there for the recording:

Samuel still reminds me of Al Pacino.

Anyone notice how Havelock’s pistol is somehow a semi-automatic?

You know, I used the zoom feature all the time at the Hound Pitts, and it never once dawned on me that I was doing it with the mask off. Derp.

I think the problem with the mission briefings is that it doesn’t feel like these guys have enough going on. Running a conspiracy ought to keep you busy. It feels too much like these jokers are hanging out while they wait for you to overthrow the entire country for them.

It kills me that the game gives us audiologs of people that we know and can speak to directly. Audiologs are usually a hack for when direct communication isn’t possible. It’s like the game was afraid of going for too long without the player shanking someone, so most of the characterization was dumped in this non-gameplay ghetto of exposition dumps. Since Corvo has a quasi-dialog wheel, it would have been much better to take some of these audiologs and move their contents into conversation branches. It would still be optional for the impatient, but it would round out our conversations with them and allow the exposition to happen more naturally. It would also fix this layers-of-emotional-removal problem that Chris was talking about.

 


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87 thoughts on “Dishonored EP7: Have You Lost Your Senses?

  1. Hitchmeister says:

    Before everyone jumps into talking about Dishonored again, I figured I’d spring a preemptive derail and link this for Shamus and anyone else who might not have seen it.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9MiMjQwd2VE

    The Kickstarted Shadowrun game is looking pretty good in alpha. I’m excited about the team based, turn-based, no voice acted nature of the thing. It might seem old-fashioned to some, but it’s something I’ve missed.

    1. djshire says:

      I was a $125 backer for it

    2. Grampy_Bone says:

      Wasteland 2, Shadowrun Returns, Project Eternity, and now Torment? SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!

  2. Johan says:

    “It feels too much like these jokers are hanging out while they wait for you to overthrow the entire country for them.”
    I haven’t played the game, but I was thinking about this. Does it even have a few throwaway lines like “Oh, Bob was supposed to kill this guy but he was captured and executed to we need you to”

    1. MrGuy says:

      I think that’s a bad thing about this game. I’m just so numb to it because it’s a reasonable critique of almost EVERY game.

      You’re a giant Mary Sue who’s the only one who can do anything and also happens to be The Chosen One.

      I don’t know why game publishers do this. I guess in theory it’s supposed to be immersive? Look, the world changes when YOU change it! Without you, nothing happens. See how important you are?

      1. Yeah, this is a major problem.
        The worlds of so many video games are just empty of agents of change. There’s no sense that anything is going on beyond you, and there’s no fear that something will happen that screws up the conspiracy (or whatever) in a manner which is outside your control.
        It’s sad, really.

      2. Chauzuvoy says:

        At least some games will attempt to justify why your character is special and the only one who can do anything, though. In Skyrim you were the Dovahkiin, and the only one who could permanently kill off a dragon. In Mass Effect 1 you were the only one other than Saren who had gotten the vision from the prothean beacon. Human Revolution had your rare and powerful military-grade augs. Sure it’s often kind of ham-handed, especially in games where they can get away with being the Chosen One of The Prophecy, but at least its there.

        The reason it stands out here (imo) is that while there is a legitimate reason for Corvo to be out doing protagonist things (specifically his crazy outsider powers), nobody really seems to care. It’s like everything else. There is the core of a really great world and story here, but the game almost goes out of its way to distance the player from it.

        1. MrGuy says:

          Right. But there’s a difference between “special” and “only.”

          I have no problem with (to take your Skyrim example) the player being special – being the only one who can kill a dragon. The problem is that “lack of ability to kill dragons permanently” isn’t the one and only thing standing between “everyone else in the world” and “doing something useful.” There are plenty of useful things other people could be doing that would advance the plot, but they don’t.

        2. newdarkcloud says:

          There’s also the fact that only Martin would even be able to recognize that Corvo has been marked by the outsider, since he’s an Overseer.

          I mean, he does at least realize it, but it’s hazy exactly when he does.

          So they might not even realize that Corvo’s special until the end of their scheme for all we know.

      3. Sabrdance (MatthewH) says:

        I have long said that I want a game where I am part of something bigger, not a solitary hero. I think it’s part of the reason I liked X-Wing and TIE Fighter. From the very start you are very clearly part of a squadron which is part of a larger fleet which is part of the larger war.

        I even try to fly in formation, though I don’t always succeed.

        In StarFox I did the training level so many times just trying to stay in formation during the stunt-sequence…

        I thought an MMO would be a great place to do this, but MMOs aren’t about to let me build a character whose sole purpose is to stand in a phalanx and charge agross the plains of Gaugemela.

        1. Alphadrop says:

          That’s why I loved Star Wars Galaxies at launch, you weren’t a special snowflake with his own way of holding a lightsaber and a destiny to single handily change the universe but rather an average shmuck who can join either side as a soldier or agent or just stay separate from the whole galactic war shebang and make weapons and armour.
          Social classes are sorely lacking in modern MMOs.

          1. Thomas says:

            I’m finally slowly making my way through The Old Republic and it’s making me sad because there was a lot of opportunity for brilliance here and a lot of the things (like voiced quests) and the time into making areas could have really made a difference in a better game.

            But I really wish they’d gone down the SWG route instead of the special snowflake one. I still believe that Bioware don’t know what they’re doing when they put together a game, they only know how to make the individual bits good. Instead of embracing the MMO and saying that they’re going to give players the experience of being 1 of 1000’s of active Jedi all dedicating themselves to fighting against the Sith threat, in -10 seconds of actually playing the game I already knew they’d gone wrong because they told me my character was exceptional (which, by the way, is intrusive to roleplaying) and I had to ignore the fact I was surrounded by other people who’d been told the exact same thing instead of incorporating those people into my world

  3. silver Harloe says:

    I could be wrong, because this is a real arse-pull of a guess:

    But I get the impression everyone was directed to be distant and detached. That it was supposed to be part of the atmosphere. A kind of “this world needs a shakeup because the powers that be are so jaded that they can’t even be bothered to care if it’s their own brother being killed. Their aristocratic air of detachment has become their real personality through years of reinforcement and you need to break them out of it.”

    Just a guess. I’d call it a failed direction even if it were true (not failed in that they seem to be phoning it in, but failed in that the player clued to it)

    1. MrGuy says:

      Interesting thought.

      I don’t buy it, though, because the conspiracy exists. If everyone was too jaded to care, it wouldn’t. They’d have accepted the new regent with an air of mildly disapproving disappointment.

      I realize if the conspiracy didn’t exist there would be no game, but the point is there’s at least something these people would risk their lives for and kill for.

      Being innately jaded and detached can’t (or at least shouldn’t) be something that comes and goes. Even if you’re right, and it’s what they were going for, it would be bad direction. But I think you’re giving them too much credit to begin with.

      1. Chauzuvoy says:

        What’s more is that you can’t really distinguish “jaded and detached” from “phoning it in” when that’s the only voice anyone ever uses. It’s a cool idea to have one or two perma-jaded characters, but it can’t be completely universal. And even they should break down at some point, especially where the conspiracy is concerned. Nihilism is not a philosophy conducive to action.

        1. Sabrdance (MatthewH) says:

          I, too, think the direction was deliberate. And it might have worked. Victorian stiff-upper-lipping and all that. The problem is that the monologues are so long and one-sided they stop sounding like “keeping it together under a facade of indifference which is wearing thin by the day” and start sounding like “good lord is this recording session ever going to end?”

          The recordings could have helped in this regard – if Corvo finds what are supposed to be secret recordings and in these recordings there is real emotion, then we would realize that we’re getting an act from the characters.

          Instead, we get Lord Pendelton, who seems strangely unemotional about describing the tortures he endured growing up, and equally unemotional about finally getting his revenge -even if on his own brothers.

  4. Exetera says:

    I didn’t think there was anything wrong with Pendleton’s voice acting. That audiolog you ran by made it pretty clear that he hated his brothers. It’s not really socially acceptable to want your brothers dead, so he’s pretending to not want his brothers dead. He’s not actually any good at this, but that’s in-character bad acting instead of just lame direction.

    1. Cupcaeks says:

      I didn’t find Pendleton all that bad either. He came off as someone who cared a great deal about how he appeared to others, to the point where his public, composed persona was somewhat at odds with the bitterness and insecurity that really shows in his private audio logs. I think it fit the character very well.

  5. Cupcaeks says:

    I think it would’ve been more interesting if there was some disparity between the information you got from the conspirators face-to-face and what was stored in their respective audiologs/diaries. Maybe make the logs a bit more difficult to access by locking them away somewhere or something along those lines. The disparity wouldn’t need to be too big, quite the opposite. Just enough little off-details to make the player question their motives, but nothing concrete enough to confirm anything either way would be ideal. The way it is now, the ‘plot twist’ felt too hammy and telegraphed to be much of plot twist in my opinion.

    1. MrGuy says:

      If you’re going that route, it would be even better if they took precautions to hide the audio logs. Under the bed, in a safe, in a secret room. Make the player dig a bit to find what the NPC is “really thinking.” Leaving the “I hate my brothers!” audiolog out for any curious passer by to listen to isn’t really in character.

      1. Exetera says:

        To be fair, breaking into the guy’s room is a bit more than a “curious passer-by” would typically do, RPG standards aside.

      2. silver Harloe says:

        oi – the things the maids in this world must know, since all they have to do is “accidentally” elbow a machine to get everyone’s confessions.

        1. Brandon says:

          The audiologs really bothered me for that reason.. because of the way the machines were set up, they had to be stationary (Unlike similar audiolog setups in other games like System Shock or Bioshock, where they were played on a portable sound player that the PC had on them).

          This had a few really odd effects on the feeling of the game. Since it was a stealth game, I felt like it was really stupid to A) Turn on something that caused sound that a guard could overhear, and B) Sit nearby and listen to it play out. Additionally, it made no sense how many absolutely damning things were recorded on these audiologs, and then just left sitting around in a machine for anyone to just wander in and have a listen. They are even sometimes left completely out in the open, although most often they are in someone’s bedroom or office or something. Even so, those bedrooms or offices rarely have locked doors.

          On that subject, it was kind of surprising how frequently things like offices and bedrooms didn’t even have locked doors. I mean, consider the Hound Pits Pub. There is a conspiracy of murderers there, and none of them lock their doors? They trust each other THAT much?

          1. Daemian Lucifer says:

            You can even play them while they are in the room with you,and theyll give you zero reaction.

      3. Sleeping Dragon says:

        For that matter this game doesn’t really need audio logs, especially not for the characters in the pub whom you can approach at your leisure and without worry, because you have the ultimate exposition machine in the form of the heart! You could provide all this background info this way.

        Heck, they could even create a mini-level for each character (I’m thinking something like the first Outsider meeting) that either the heart or the Outsider himself could let you access at some point the game. For that matter have the Outsider taunt you about invading their privacy and question what drove you to it, do you not trust these people? Are you simply abusing the power to satisfy personal curiosity?

  6. Jonathan says:

    I must be different somehow, but I actually thought the voice acting in Dishonored was fine. Hell, I liked it even.

    Actually when I think about it, this is something that I’ve noticed in the past with Spoiler Warning when it comes to voice acting. I liked Mark Meer and I thought he did male Shepard fine.

    Weird.

    1. Cupcaeks says:

      I didn’t think Mark Meer was terrible. It’s just that the lines written for Shepard tended to be completely devoid of any kind of character, since they were mostly just prompts for exposition dumps. I actually felt that improved a bit with each game.

      As far as Dishonored goes, I don’t think it’s nearly as bad as is made out in the video, though it does vary quite a bit from moment to moment. I liked Cecilia’s voice acting in particular. She just sounds so mousey and downtrodden, which is exactly what you’d expect from someone who’s perpetually abused or ignored, even by the other servants. I thought Pendleton sounded fine as the over-compensating noble. Piero I’m somewhat iffy on, but overall I think the ‘eccentric genius’ thing came off pretty well. Lydia as the somewhat-jaded barmaid and Wallace as the uppity servant both sounded fine. Samuel always came off as somewhat naive and idealistic, which I thought was great. Callista sounded apprehensive about everything to me, which made sense considering the position she was in. Havelock was kind of ‘meh’ for me when it came to briefings, but I don’t think he was terrible, and the “back in my day” personality came off quite well. The only one I would even consider bad is Martin because he just sounds so boring and ambiguous, but even that kind of fits his character. Outside of the Hound Pits area, I think most of the NPCs were well voiced, too. Maybe I just have lower standards, but I feel a lot of the criticism the voice acting is getting comes from expecting something that was never intended. However, not knowing what the director was actually thinking, I just have my own perceptions to go by.

      1. Yeah, I never really hated the acting, just thought it should be less exposition and be done with a little more inflection.
        If the volume is turned up a bunch, you can actually hear some subtelty and interest in the voices, but with the lower volumes used for spoiler warning, it’s a little harder to hear.
        But still, it could have been so much better if they had spent the time to actually make it more emotionally involving.

        EDIT: Actually, the more I think about it, the more I realise that I had absolutely no involvement in the “story” at all.
        I’m retracting my statement about it not being that bad. It’s terrible, as it fails as a storytelling device. If we just look at it as geting info for the next mission, it succeeds (but drags on too long), but if we are looking at dishonored as a work of fiction, it completely fails in engaging the player in the machinations of its plot.

        1. Cupcaeks says:

          I agree about not really feeling involved in the story, but I stand by my statement that the voice acting wasn’t bad. What was bad about the dialogue was how it was written, not how it was spoken. I think this is most apparent with the Outsider. The whole detached elder god thing really could’ve worked, BUT his dialogue amounted to nothing but:

          “Corvo, you did this thing this way. I wonder what you’ll do next, you interesting, interesting man.”

          With lines like that, no amount of good voice acting is going to save the dialogue from sounding stupid. Unfortunately, most of the briefings are written in a similar manner, and they probably make up the majority of the dialogue you’re going to hear on any given playthrough.

          1. hborrgg says:

            I don’t know, that sounded pretty fantastic.

          2. MrGuy says:

            Bad writing makes for bad dialogue. There’s definitely some serious blame for the writers.

            But even if the writing is poor, there’s a lot a good voice actor can do for it. A good actor can bring emotion, inflection. A good actor really knows and gets into their character, and thinks about how their character would say these lines. Trust me on this – I used to work in theatre, and I’ve seen dozens of auditions. The difference between how “someone who knows what they’re doing” reads a scene and “someone who’s just reading straight off the page” will sound is immediate, obvious, and significant. Even reading the same lines (I highly recommend the audition scene from the movie Mullholland Drive here).

            The bit here with Pendleton is a great example. Is the writing flat? Sure. But a good actor who’s really trying (and isn’t told “don’t do that” by the director) can breath life into this. They can show you things that aren’t in the words on the page. They can let you see that this is deeply emotional, or let you see they’re putting up a front but not pulling it off, or show you that they really are heartless and don’t care. That’s the skill.

            And that’s why there seems to be such a waste here. Why hire any experienced talent if you’re not going to use their skills in any way? People who can read blandly off the page are a dime a dozen.

            1. Sabrdance (MatthewH) says:

              Like the old crack Harrison Ford supposedly said to George Lucas: “You can write this, but you sure can’t say it.”

              I agree that the writing is mostly to blame -I think the length of the speaches is the main culprit. Even if it is period appropriate, it needs to be tightened up.

              And it wasn’t as bad as the crew made it out to be. Cecelia in particular actually had pretty good delivery before Rutskarn started mocking it. I think they were just running short of material to mock.

      2. Jonathan says:

        You know, I actually did notice male Shepard feeling more and more… emotive across ME to ME 3. I felt it was particularly noticeable in ME 3.

        1. Gruhunchously says:

          Well, to be fair, ME3 did give him more meaty material to work with. Shepard in that game is a bit more of an emotional center and less of an exposition prompting machine. It’s just a pity that it also means that almost all player input into his personality is stripped away apart from few token dialogue prompts, and that all the various Shepards of the previous two games were railroaded into becoming this new preset character with…

          Eh, right…the is the Dishonored season, isn’t it. One day I’ll be able to let go of the Mass Effect series. One day.

    2. LunaticFringe says:

      I love Mark Meer’s voice acting in Mass Effect, mostly because he’s got that borderline Zapp Brannigan pulpy scifi commander voice. Hale’s voice acting is great, but there’s just a certain bit of charm in hearing idiotic lines like ‘we fight or we die’ from a voice that could start talking about how we have to ‘hit the Reaper’s automated killcount by constantly throwing men at them.’

      1. Sabrdance (MatthewH) says:

        Put me down in the “Mark Meer was pretty good” camp as well.

  7. Thomas says:

    Does killing weepers lower chaos? Because they’re plague carriers right? Or at least capable of being a danger to people and guards and so surely it’s easier to fight the plague if they aren’t running around

    1. anaphysik says:

      From what I understand… NOPE.
      Killing them actually raises chaos, because STUUUUPID.

      1. newdarkcloud says:

        Yep. Weepers count as people killed and raise your Chaos factor.

      2. Grudgeal says:

        Because killing the vectors of a disease, spreads the disease. Obviously.

  8. Was this uploaded at a lower resolution than previous episodes? I’m seeing a LOT of artifacting when I watch it using the “large player” setting on YouTube.

    Not that the visuals are the best part. I was just wonderin’.

    1. Raygereio says:

      Did you watch the video at a low quality setting?
      In case you don’t know: You can change that with the cog icon in the bottom right of the youtube player.

      1. Weird. Either someone else was using my computer or the cache thing everyone’s been experiencing extends to my presets. Loading the previous ep of Spoiler Warning kept it at high resolution, but this one required my input.

        1. Raygereio says:

          Youtube automatically sets the quality depending on your internet speed. Or more specifically: what it percieves to be your internet speed. For example if you’re downloading something, it will probably set the quality lower.

          If you’re logged in to youtube, you can set an option to always use the highest quality setting.

  9. This is a weird Steampunk prejudice I probably have, but… I wish everyone in this game had some kind of European accent. It just seems to fit with the aesthetic better to my mind for some reason.

    Not to mention it might make the lack of inflection less of a problem.

    Edit: It’s also worse in this game since half the dudes look like relatives of TF2’s Heavy.

    1. Dragomok says:

      They remind me more of the Soldier, to be honest.

      Many even have similiar jawlines.

  10. Paul Spooner says:

    Where are all the morbid puns about weepers? More “grim weeper” puns!

    1. Don’t fear the weeper.

    2. hborrgg says:

      I think that would have been a wee perdictable.

      1. Not to mention that Corvo is a bit of a weeping tom.

        1. False Prophet says:

          He’s making weeping changes to the city, that’s for sure.

  11. Alex says:

    “Ah yes, ‘weepers’. We have dismissed this claim.”

    1. Dragomok says:

      “What is a weeper? A miserable pile of germs and zomboitis!”

  12. X2-Eliah says:

    Ruts has a point – if you are only doing one playthrough, then the effects of low/high chaos are not explicitly spelled out for you until the very final mission.

    However.. how would you make such effects explicit? Put a highlight? An achieveement ding and a pop-up notification like with wildwasteland in F:NV? Because that would be seriously crappy… I’d say that the subtle changes are good, because for the first playthrough, what does it really matter if you know what’s reliant and what’s fixed? You know the game adapts to what you do, in some ways, and you just take everything you see as it appears. Then, the potential of change is there for the next playthroughs.

    And yes, the popup was presented way too late.

    About the voiceacting – eeh. Yeah, it was underwhelming in Dishonored. I wouldn’t say bad, but just.. lacking. And I really liked Mark Meer’s VAing of cmdShepard (at least on a not-asshole Shep).

    In fact, Dishonored maybe would have been better without the whole revenge plot, but just with you acting as the Royal Assassin / Fixer, in the same world with the sae lore and plagues and such, but without the Empress getting killed and you embarking on a quest of doing chores for some loyalists..
    That would still allow chaos mechanics, and all the spare/kill choices you want, without needing to overindulge in a lacking story. Heck, you could still have Emily react to your actions and everything, but optionally at the home base (castle), from which you get your assassination contracts. That would also integrate far far better with DLC and such.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      There is one place where you can explicitly see the difference.If you do a low chaos run,in the end youll have this huge chunk of the level completely empty,with nothing to do in it.

      1. X2-Eliah says:

        Yes, that’s kinda why I said “until the very last mission”.

    2. MrGuy says:

      However.. how would you make such effects explicit?

      You use the mechanism you’ve set up precisely for this. The Outsider. He’s the one who can (and really should) explain chaos to you.

      For example, after the first tutorial mission with powers, make the player (maybe as part of being brought to do the mission) see a guard tower. If chaos is high, have two towers, if low only one.

      If chaos is high, Outsider says “Good, Corvo, good. Do you see? Because of the chaos you have brought to the city, they’ve thrown up a second tower here overnight. As you continue to bring my chaos to the city, they will watch more, guard more, FEAR more. How glorious!”

      If chaos is low, Outsider says “Do you see, Corvo? That tower is no barrier to you. They guard, but they do not guard well. They do not yet fear my chaos. Bring my chaos to them, Corvo. Make them paranoid. Make them jealous. Bring armed bands to the streets, the better to turn on each other. You have this power, Corvo.”

      If you want to get fancy, if there are two guard towers, make one of them solid and well-built, and make the second one of hasty construction. They work the same, but the hasty one should be visibly less structurally sound and less well constructed. Have the “new” towers as chaos increases have this look. Maybe give some lines of dialogue to some of the “new” mobs of guards grumbling about being pressed into service “I’m no soldier – I’m a candle maker!”

      It doesn’t have to be perfect, but you can definitely do more to play up the “chaos makes more guards” idea, and you can do a few things to make the “here are some guys you wouldn’t be fighting otherwise” a little more explicit.

    3. Viktor says:

      Have 2 missions in a row in the same place. Then make it explicit that the changes are your fault. If you go high chaos, say “since you went through last time, the plague has spread through all the corpses, and the city has added new security in response.” it wouldn’t be hard to do.

    4. Thomas says:

      There’s definitely a way of presenting changes so people recognise they came from player actions without even having to be explicit about it.

      I don’t know what it is yet, but I’m excited about finding out, because on of the surprised about The Walking Dead season were all the places I didnt think there was choice and yet it turned out there way. On the other hand, on my first Alpha Protocol playthrough it was really clear that my actions were having an effect even though I hadn’t seen anything of the alternate paths.

      Not that you necessarily want them visible, you could be going for a Shadow of the Colossus thing where the visual changes are meant to be almost unnoticeable because they’re slowly pointing towards the final story point

  13. P_johnston says:

    Did anyone else enter the conversation with Havelock the first time and wonder why the hell he has his pistol strapped to the front of his chest instead of say on his hip? just seemed like really awkward placement.

    1. AJax says:

      Actually, every guard with a pistol has one strapped in front of his chest. The body-weapons proportions in this game look incredibly weird in this game due to the weird(awesome) art style.

    2. Ygor says:

      Old flintlock pistols were strapped to the chest since in the heat of battle you could only fire once, then spend like minute and half reloading that damn thing. So you usually came equipped with more than one pistol, and one of the places that is quick to reach for is the chest area- think about modern holsters for weapons, done in similar fashion.
      But yeah, it looks silly, since they are carrying only one pistol, that can fire repeatedly (if I’m not mistaken).

  14. hborrgg says:

    The Hound Pits is another area provided for the player to explore and play around with his abilities, what wouldn’t make sense is if they didn’t let you zoom. The way I figured it since you still had the mask with you then it was easy to just put it back on whenever you needed to.

    I also think I get why they put the chaos tutorial where they did. After the first mission you come back to the same area and see the effects of your actions. And while by the second time through it becomes pretty clear how little difference it actually makes, the first gets the high chaos players thinking “wow, I caused all this?” and the low chaos players thinking “wow, this is what flowers and sunshine looks like? glad I don’t have high chaos.” I think the golden cat level actually was the point in my play-through when I decided that I needed to stop murdering everyone I meet.

    1. LunaticFringe says:

      I think that’s possibly why they threw in that Granny quest early on as well, as a chaos tutorial for side quests. Of course it’s still really out of place.

  15. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Oh man,the twins.Thats one really fucked up mission to do non lethally.And the guy even thanks you for giving his brothers a fate worse than death.

    1. newdarkcloud says:

      But Daemian, they may be suffering greatly, but at least they’re not DEAD!!! That’s what matters.
      That’s pretty much what he says. He’s glad that at least he can see them again.

  16. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Wait,joss whedon is playing the game with you guys?

  17. Dragomok says:

    Typo, right at the beginning of the post:
    Thanks gain to

  18. Talby says:

    Some weapons that would’ve made non-lethal runs more fun and varied;

    Gas bombs as an alternative to grenades for stunning enemies
    Stun traps that trigger on proximity
    Smoke bombs for evading enemies
    Some kind of blackjack/club weapon for the main hand as an alternative to the blade. It’s kinda silly for Corvo to carry around this deadly knife if you’re going for a no-kills playthrough

    The thing is, they could actually add this stuff in DLC, and it would be a rare case where a weapon addon DLC would actually improve the base game.

    1. X2-Eliah says:

      Aye, more nonlethal weaponry would have really been appreciated. The game does quite suffer when the only two real nonlethal-stealth-weapons are sleeping darts and your hands in choke mode.

      1. newdarkcloud says:

        Thirded. The non-lethal playstyle needed more options. I do’t mind if they are harder to use than lethal equivalents, but I would like to have them there.

    2. Grudgeal says:

      Fourthed. Another cool idea could the addition of some flashier variant takedowns rather than just ‘choke from behind’, like in Arkham Asylum (dive takedowns, running takedowns… Set up different types of non-lethal ambushes). Or, heck, even some varied takedown animations like in Alpha Protocol. If you’re first going to make the game about combat and coolness factor, offer those options to both approaches.

  19. Grudgeal says:

    I used to joke about Corvo having a mechanical eye when I noticed the zoom thing in the hound pits too. And then adding that Garret’s also had nightvision, which makes Corvo’s a gyp by comparison.

  20. Vect says:

    I remember Yahtzee having a similar complaint about how all the dialog just sounds like pure exposition with little else.

    I don’t really dislike the voice acting. Then again, it takes a certain level to really grate on me.

    1. Jokerman says:

      Its just a little dry,i do not know if that is deliberate or not…but since a whole cast of good actors talk in the same dry tone, i would say yes. Not a good choice though.

  21. LunaticFringe says:

    Dammit Shamus, now I’m imagining the last mission of Dishonored in a totally different context. You’ve played with high chaos, and as you approach the island, Samuel expounds on your actions. Being a good man, he finds your actions appalling, claiming that you’ve fundamentally changed and that you’re no better then the people who condemned you. As a parting remark, Samuel damns Corvo with his final line…

    “THE EMPRESS, SHE GOT A GREAT ASS…AND YOU GOT YOUR HEAD ALL THE WAY UP IT!”

  22. Jason says:

    You can definitely jump and Blink down the chain. I’ve done it.

  23. sofawall says:

    So now that Jarenth has appeared on an episode of Spoiler Warning, is he going to get a fancy gold comment box?

  24. P_johnston says:

    Looking back at the scene where Pendelton is talking to you about how your about to kill his brothers who else thinks that conversation would have been a million times better if he had been visible and audibly drunk instead of just drinking from the flask?

  25. Ateius says:

    “Anyone notice how Havelock's pistol is somehow a semi-automatic?”

    He only appears to shoot twice before reloading, and multi-barreled pistols were a thing prior to the invention of the revolver. A simple double-barrel would allow Havelock to fire in the manner observed.

    Now I’m interested to know if his pistol’s model actually reflects this or just looks like a generic one.

    1. Asimech says:

      There’s a single barrel as far as I could tell.

      1. There is an upgrade that allows you to fire more than one shot before reloading. I know that much.

  26. newdarkcloud says:

    Hey guys, you may want to post the Dishonored season on the SW page. Just saying.

  27. Oh gosh, running into those assassins we see at the end of this episode was one of those “big moments” for me–mostly because of how it played out.

    There’s… I don’t know… four or five of those guys hanging around in a fairly concentrated area, and I was running all over that looking for stuff and didn’t see ANYONE at first. I ran into one of the abandoned houses to see the letters and journals left by the mother as her husband and children were taken by the plague before she was. I then turned around to see one of those guys with his back to me looking out the window, where before no one was there, and I literally jumped. That’s when he turned around and it seemed like we just stared at each other for a second or two as if we were both processing there was someone else in the room we did not see before. A frantic knife fight ensued and ended almost as quickly as it started, then I looked out the window to see there were more of them roaming on the roofs (where again I saw none before), and I thought, “Oh geez. Oh and they’re blinking around too! Wait, these are the guys from the start of the game!”

    I don’t know; it turned into this great little moment.

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