Dishonored DLC – Brigmore Witches EP4: The Trouble With Trimble

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Mar 22, 2017

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 44 comments


Link (YouTube)

I like this idea that the Geezer is a prisoner in his own fortress, and someone else is using his power. The poison gas is a nice angle that does a good job of pitting expedience against morality, and morality against chaos, so that the low chaos route isn’t automatically the right thing to do. (This is not to say that sacrificing all these mooks so the selfish crime boss can get his wish is the right thing to do. I’m just saying this isn’t an obviously clear-cut choice.

Then again: Looking at it from an in-character perspective, if I was Daud I’d think there had to be a way to disable the poison gas bomb so that it would be safe to kill the geezer without dooming everyone else to die. Somewhere in the system there’s a trigger that will release poison gas if the geezer dies. If I was Daud I’d want to see if I could find that trigger. Or find a way to spoof the system into thinking geezer was still alive. Or trigger an evacuation. Or expose Trimble’s scheme to the Geezer’s men.

Maybe some of these possibilities are addressed in the game. Like I said, I haven’t played this, but these are the first things that came to mind when watching Josh play.

 


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44 thoughts on “Dishonored DLC – Brigmore Witches EP4: The Trouble With Trimble

  1. TheJungerLudendorff says:

    Wait, who was the fourth person with the mark? Chris and Josh were talking through eachother, so I couldn’t hear it and can’t for the life of me remember.

    1. Warclam says:

      Granny Rags.

      1. Mersadeon says:

        But what about the executioner/torturer?

        1. Josh says:

          He was Rags’ apprentice, in the same sort of fashion as Billie Lurk and all the others that Daud and Delilah gave their power to.

          1. guy says:

            Yep, though according to the creators she has the “Apprentice” power rather than Daud and Delilah’s “Arcane Bond” power, and it lets her give someone Outsider powers she doesn’t personally have.

            1. MrGuy says:

              Always two there are. No more, no less. A master, and an apprentice.

      2. TheJungerLudendorff says:

        Thanks!

        Not sure how I managed to forget her tbh, she’s not exactly forgettable :P

    2. evilmrhenry says:

      Emily. (Plus Corvo, Daud, and Delilah.)

      EDIT: I guess not?

      1. Yummychickenblue says:

        Emily doesn’t get her mark until the second game.

      2. Ilseroth says:

        Emily wasn’t marked at this point

        Ninja’d >.<

  2. Ilseroth says:

    I have to say, really impressed with the whole “overhear the plan through the door unlocking new option” thing that showed up. Do you have to have darkvision for that to happen, or if you are just close enough to the door do you hear it?

    Also, I really appreciate that talking camera angle where the sword is through her arm and she’s bent over and the conversation is still happening… Maybe it is endless first person games where people just stand square shouldered to each other and exposit makes any variation seem fresh.

    Kinda disappointed I never picked up the DLC at this point; seems like high quality gameplay; may pick it up anyways… or go replay more of Dishonored 2.

    1. Christopher says:

      Yeah, that scene was very well done. Also, it wasn’t bloody and she didn’t seem to be very pained by it, so despite being rough it didn’t hurt to watch either.

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        It does show that she is not just some defenseless civilian you are torturing,but your equal that you managed to get a drop on.The scene tells so much with very little words.

  3. MrGuy says:

    Curious – is it still obvious how the whole “Nurse Trimble is manipulating the Geezer” plot works if you didn’t save that guy in the last level and get his helpful-though-awfully-on-the-nose exposition dump?

    1. guy says:

      You get enough info to piece it together elsewhere.

    2. Tizzy says:

      Not obvious, no. But at some point you’re going to have to go into the Geezer’s room, and either cutscene (with or without Trimble) triggers when you do. And those have all the details you need.

      But yeah, I was surprised the first time it happened.

    3. Cybron says:

      I played through this for the first time not too long ago and only found out because I killed the nurse in front of the Geezer (which makes him pretty happy). I was on a chaos run so I went along with it, fun stuff.

      That said, I recall finding a note a bit later that suggested what was going on.

  4. MrGuy says:

    You’re drunk, Mr. Hat!

  5. Christopher says:

    Dishonored 2 has robots, right? I think that’s a good way to have combat in a nonlethal playthrough, certainly better than… whatever those river crust things are supposed to be. Sorry to bring this up every time, but it’s my primary stealth series: Metal Gear Solid 4 was very good about this. There were lots of robots around, so you actually had an opportunity to use all the explosives and lethal weapons even while not killing anyone. Even the boss team all used exoskeletons or mecha suits, so you could blast them apart and still beat the woman inside nonlethally after messing up their robot body. Although there was an extra prize for beating their robot forms with nonlethal weaponry too.

    1. IFS says:

      The Robots are pretty cool and do a nice job of letting you use the lethal moves and remain low chaos, but the thing Dishonored 2 does to make nonlethal more fun is add a ton of new nonlethal moves you can do. The big one being the ability to start choking out a staggered enemy mid-fight even if they’re aware of you. Timing a parry right staggers them, but so does shooting them in the leg with a crossbow bolt (I believe a pistol shot might also work, but that does enough damage you risk killing them much more).

      Other new nonlethal moves include the ability to just deliver a swift kick to any enemy on the ground to knock them out (most easily achieved by grabbing them for a choke and then throw them away, faster than choking them out but much noisier), the new nonlethal version of the plunging attack, and the sliding attack (if you time it right you can convert sliding into an enemy into a swift takedown, lethal or nonlethal depending on what you go for). Emily also has some powers that really help the nonlethal playstyle like Domino, and if her Far Reach (her version of blink) is upgraded enough you can grab enemies with it from a distance and pull them right in for a hug or a stab depending on your preference.

      Once you have a good handle on all the moves, powers, and gadgets at your disposal a nonlethal Emily playthrough feels rather like you’re playing as Batman (just replace a few of his gadgets with magic powers, far reach in place of his grapple hook for example).

  6. Decius says:

    That lock is three cylinder, ten numbers per cylinder. Brute forcing that isn’t hard. Spin the right one nine times, the middle one once; iterate nine times, spin the left one once, iterate fewer than nine times.

    (spin the right one, except if the three-digit total is divisible by nine, spin the middle one, except if the two leftmost digits are a number divisible by nine)

    That’s a technique that I developed for puzzles with more permutations in Betrayal At Krondor.

    1. Grudgeal says:

      You can tell how much time it will take to brute-force something mathematically. In this case, 10 numbers, 3 tumblers each equals a total of 10^3 = 1000 possible combinations on the lock. Doable for a human. Laughable for software. It depends on how much time you’ve got on your hands and how obvious you are I suppose. For example, I expect trying to brute-force someone’s gym locker would probably start netting me some ugly looks before I had gone through 50 combinations.

    2. TheJungerLudendorff says:

      Also, I’d imagine most people would not be willing to sit through hours of mind-numbing cycliner-turning. If you wanted to get in that much, you’d probably just search the area or check a walkthrough.

      1. You’d be surprised how quickly your brain goes on auto-pilot (source, Bossman with 3 number code suitcase who had to change it frequently and could never remember the current combination). I got pretty darn fast at cracking it (with his permission as big important bossman couldn’t be bothered with such grunt work as opening the damn suitcase he locked). Even kept track of the numbers he’d used in a grid format (aka 1 has shown up in the tens place 5 times, 7 in the hundreds place 4 times) in hopes of coming up with a better algorithm than start from 000 and go up.

        There’s also supposed to be a way to crack them by feel, but I never got the hang of that. It’d be neat to see implemented in a game though.

        I quit after they got him a 5 digit locking suitcase. 20 min to an hour opening a box for an idiot, fine. But that was my limit.

  7. silver Harloe says:

    Thief (the first Thief) was released without knowledge that people might enjoy the stealth gameplay, so they injected a little “normal shooter” gameplay. On the easiest goal settings, there was no penalty for killing people (though it was still best done with an arrow from a hidden position), and some levels had zombies and other monsters you could kill without breaking your harder goal settings. The levels featuring monsters heavily were widely considered the worst levels in Thief (citation needed), so in Thief 2 they dialed monsters down to a minimum (though they did add mechs, those could be disabled with a water arrow to the boiler and thus were more like obstacles than monsters you had to fight)

    River krusts kinda remind me of the monsters from Thief.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Zombies were awful in the original,because they were always present in the most maze like levels,and the ways to kill them were very limited.What made them even worse was that you encounter them in level 2,where the only way to kill them was with holy water,which meant having a stock of water arrows,finding the holy water well,then quickly running from the well to the zombie because the holy thing was timed.And you had to do all of this in the worst maze of the game.

      Frankly,its a miracle that so many people managed to endure through that one.Also a testament to how good the rest of the game was.

      1. silver Harloe says:

        It was released in the days of playable demos, and level 1 (Lord Bafford’s Manor) was the demo. I must’ve played that level 20 times before the rest of the game came out. So while level 2 annoyed me, I was already hooked, lined, and sinkered hard.
        That is merely an anecdote, but I imagine it was similar for other people.

        (Similarly, the demo for Deus Ex was level 1 of that, and I played through the statue of liberty dozens of times before Deus Ex was released. Ah, those were the days).

  8. Mr Compassionate says:

    The true secret is that Doud has actually gone loopy and thinks there’s a conspiracy of normal looking women who are secretly witches and that statues are talking to him.

    1. MrGuy says:

      Deep down, Doud is secretly afraid of girls and whales.

  9. Daemian Lucifer says:

    It really is surprising to watch Josh play this like a regular game,reloading when he screws up.Usually he sticks by his mistakes.

    1. el_b says:

      its a little harder to fuck around in a game with a morality system when youre trying to play by the rules…to some extent.

  10. Ranneko says:

    I had the same problem with the Geezer conversation Josh had here. I think you have to actually let the nurse go a ways before rushing into the room, otherwise he notices and comes back, resulting in the weird fight as soon as the conversation finishes.

    On that note I think I did this by choking out everyone in the building and dragging them outside. A forced evacuation if you will.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      In practically every stealth game,there really is no penalty to just making everyone in the level go to sleep and then waltzing around freely.To prevent this,I usually see games give you a time limit or just swamp the level with enemies.Which is a shame,because there is an easy fix to make stealth games incentivize you to not do this:Give you a “No one even knows you were there” bonus for doing the level without ever touching anyone and remain undetected.

  11. DGM says:

    Hey Rutskarn,

    You started saying something at about 17:30 before getting cut off. Care to complete the thought?

    1. TheJungerLudendorff says:

      It sounded like everone’s audio just cut off for a whole minute.
      An editing mistake perhaps?

      1. Chris says:

        Rutskarn started lagging suuuper hard, and normally when that happens we wait to see if it picks back up. This time he…. didn’t, so there was just silence.

        Like, sometimes the lag will kick in and you’ll hear: “What I really think abo- (10 second pause) -ut this is that the game is it’s fun.” So when someone cuts out we just all go quiet and wait for it to come back, because otherwise we’ll start talking and get overrun by the second half of the sentence.

  12. Grudgeal says:

    Stabbing through the wrist and the radial/ulnar artery? With what you’ve been doing with that knife? Yep, that woman’s dead.

    If she’s lucky she’ll bleed out while unconscious. If she doesn’t, blood poisoning and infection in a world with no Penicillin will get her. While the arteries get thinner (and less crucial) the further you get from the shoulder to the wrist, you still don’t want anything puncturing them if you can avoid it.

    Also, I’m impressed at her composure. There are some *major* nerve clusters in the shoulder, and if you’ve ever dislocated or had your shoulder pop out of joint (I have) like what Daud is doing to her, you’ll know you’re not very coherent when it happens. Mostly you just go “ow ow OW OW ow ow oh**** oh**** ow!”

    1. TheJungerLudendorff says:

      Then again, you can knock people unconsious for hours by choking them for 10 seconds. And people have no problems running around with a crossbow bolt stuck in their feet. So i’d imagine most people just have very specific tolerances for pain and other physical trauma :P

    2. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Keep in mind that she is not an ordinary woman but one that has whale magic infusing her body.Some sort of a healing factor is not out of the ordinary for such people in this world.

    3. silver Harloe says:

      We’ve seen the player character punched, burned, stabbed, shot, dropped 20 feet, bitten, electrocuted, folded, spindled, and mutilated and it’s all the same – the screen gets some red around the edges and the health bar lowers, with zero chance of infection and no disability to movement or magic.
      As Daemian points out, she’s also (indirectly) touched by the Outsider, so probably obeys the same rules and should be fine (but really I think all NPCs operate on the same rules, just with smaller health bars)

  13. Cybron says:

    I don’t think anyone mentioned that there’s a third way to get the engine lock, if you don’t want to deal with the nurse or geezer. You steal the sewer key from the nurse, take the key from the dead engineer, and go to his house. In his locker is a note for the geezer that includes the combination. This is by far the best way to do it if you’re trying to ghost the level.

    I didn’t see the rescued guy in either of my playthroughs, that was cool.

    As far as randomization goes, I imagine like most things in the DLC it’s randomized to one of a set of defined possibilities, rather than just flat random. Like Lizzie, who can be in one of 6 cells IIRC.

  14. methermeneus says:

    Okay, I know Rutskarn already made a “Hey there Delilah” reference back in “Knife of Dunwall,” but a different song just popped into my head while watching this episode, and it just makes everything more hilarious when you get to the line, “And then you make me slightly mad when you pee all over my Chippendale suite.”

    (If that’s too confusing, “Delilah” by Queen is about a cat.)

  15. anaphysik says:

    Disappointed that no one said, about the potential newly-ritual-weds, “Get a rune, you two!”

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