If you cast you mind way, way back to – oh, actually, Dishonored came out less than a year ago. Hmm. Well, anyway, Bethesda offered some pretty interesting pre-order bonuses for the Arkane Studios stealth-’em-up, and if you missed out on them at the time, you’re going to be able to grab ‘em now.

The four formerly-exclusive bundles are the Acrobatic Killer Pack, Arcane Assassin Pack, Backstreet Butcher Pack and Shadow Rat Pack. The four each have a book; a cash bonus; a collection of bone charms and an item that grants Corvo one extra slot for a bone charm.

You can have all of these for $4 by picking up the Void Walker’s Arsenal when it released on May 14, after which you’ll find them waiting for you in the Hound Pits.

Source: CVG

The announcement that Dishonored’s first DLC would be a bunch of skill tests and time trials was a bit of a disappointment. Many of us were hoping for a return to the world of Dunwall, and with so many interesting and spare NPCs kicking around it seemed a shame that they weren’t grabbing the bull by the horns straight away. But time passes, development continues, and now we find ourselves in the shoes of Daud, master assassin, ready to explore more of the world of Dunwall once more. So let’s get to it.

The Knife of Dunwall is the first part of a two-part story, set to conclude in The Brigmore Witches, and so it ends on a kind of confusing high point with a twist reveal that was telegraphed a mile away, and the sudden appearance of a new big bad guy whose bigness and bad-osity is never adequately explained. In other words, the story is messy and bit poor — but Dishonored, however, is not (and never has been) a game about story — it’s a game about perfecting the stealth kill, eating every tin of eel meet you find, and soaking in the atmosphere of the gorgeous world of Dunwall.

The first of the three levels on offer is set in a whale slaughterhouse, and finally brings us face-to-entrails with the creatures who power so much of Dishonored’s dystopian majesty. It’s a bloody, disgusting affair, and you’ll spend a lot of it crawling through sewer tunnels and runoffs filled with blood and intestines, and hiding from guards behind enormous whale carcasses. Near the end of the level you find a whale still breathing while it’s being hacked apart, and in the process of discovering what all the switches in the room did, I accidentally electrocuted it and killed it.

Strangely enough, this was the only time in the entirety of my Dishonored play (including the original) that I’ve ever actually felt bad about killing something — even though it was a mercy killing.

I don’t know what that says about me, but let’s move quickly on: the first level is easily the best, with the final two levels either heavily drawn from the first game or simply re-used wholesale, and while it’s great to be playing through a familiar space from an alternate perspective, it feels like The Knife of Dunwall opens on a high and goes downhill, rather than building to an epic cliffhanger conclusion.

When we first came across Daud in Dishonored we all of course immediately pegged him as an anti-Corvo, and so he’s a perfect fit for viewing the world through a darkened lens. Daud, unlike Corvo, already has an established character — where Corvo is a blank slate for you to write your own personality, Daud (we’re told) is a ruthless killer. So while I initially began the game in my traditional Corvo fashion as a ghost, I quickly found myself wanting to play more into the role Arkane had written for Daud and ended the game as a blood-spattered monster with a three-figure kill count.

Daud’s abilities seem to play more into this persona: with the ability to summon assassins and deploy disintegrating arc mines, it’s easy to think that Daud is a man for whom the most expedient option is the ideal one. This is a bit strange really, because with only three levels in the game if you decide to go in with guns blazing then you’re going to blitz it in maybe an hour or two at the absolute most. I opted for a stealth assassination approach and managed to draw it out to six hours of gameplay, which is a goddamned bargain at the $10 price point Bethesda are asking for.

The major difference between Daud and Corvo (aside from the skillset) is that Daud actually takes the time to speak to people upon occasion, which would have been fine except that voice actor Michael Madsen at times genuinely sounds confused and weirded out by the lines he’s being asked to read, almost as if he’s not sure he’s even in the right recording studio. With the amount of hesitancy in his voice it’s not hard to imagine that each recording session actually began with Arkane bursting into his bedroom at three in the morning, thrusting a script into his hand and yelling “Read this! Read it now!”.

He’s supposedly a man on the search for redemption, but at the end of the day all of his deep soul-searching doesn’t get in the way of him slaughtering everybody he meets and, when you come right down to it, there’s absolutely no motivation to behave in any other way than the one you find the most entertaining. I’ll take the arc mines, please.

In addition, while there are some neat new enemy types and the gameplay boasts the same level of superb flexibility as ever, The Knife of Dunwall also unfortunately includes the same annoying, stupid bugs as the original which I’d desperately hoped would have been ironed out by now. Guard bodies still disappear for literally no reason (I filled a rubbish bin with five corpses and when I came back with the sixth, they’d all disappeared) and living guards still teleport in out of nowhere for no reason at all. At one point in the first level two butchers came at me out of an empty room, and in the second level I was confused to see three guards come charging at me from the top floor of a building which I knew was empty and had no other access points. It’s just silly, and it breaks the immersion.

Ultimately, The Knife of Dunwall is a great piece of DLC that actually provides an interesting parallel narrative, and manages to expand on the main game without feeling like a hollow cash-grab. If you liked Dishonored, well, you’ll like this — and for a mere ten bucks, you can get yourself a few more hours of the same open-ended fun that made the first game so damn good. It’s not as impressive as it could have been and the story feels rushed, but it’s enough to get me excited for what’s to come.

Good:

• Only $10
• Interesting new enemies and power sets
• Daud actually has a voice and personality
• Same high level of open-ended sandbox gameplay
• Sets up next DLC nicely

Bad:

• Only 3 missions long
• The story is as shallow as ever
• The same stupid bugs with bodies disappearing and guards teleporting in
• You still can’t do a non-lethal drop takedown

Review product supplied by Bethesda.

Bethesda have released a trailer for the upcoming Dishonored DLC, The Knife of Dunwall, and it’s a great look into some of the new settings, enemies and powers that you’ll get to play with when April 16 rolls around.

Daud has a number of abilities unique to him and a number of tweaked Corvo powers, including the ability to summon Whaler assassins and new mines which disintegrate enemies. We also get our first close-up look at one of the enormous whales which power the world of Dunwall, and of course some more of everybody’s favourite Outsider. Take a look.

Source: Bethblog

Bethesda have begun patching up Dishonored to get it ready for The Knife of Dunwall, and they’ve used the chance to also fix a number of bugs both in the original content and in the Dunwall Trials DLC.

Those of you who have accidentally slid into Slackjaw and had it count as a kill on your no-kill playthrough may now rejoice, as this bug has been fixed! Check out the full list of changes below — and it’s a 700 MB update, so bear that in mind when you want to play.

New Features

• Adds support for Dishonored’s upcoming add-on, The Knife of Dunwall.

Bug Fixes (Dunwall City Trials)

• Fixes a bug in Back Alley Brawl challenge where live grenade remains in player’s hand when restarting match.
• Fixes a rare bug in Back Alley Brawl challenge where restarting match while cooking grenade causes disabled left hand.
• Fixes a rare bug in Back Alley Brawl challenge where you can fall down into The Void.
• Fixes a rare bug in Back Alley Brawl challenge where being killed by player killed by Warfare Overseers will restart challenge with lowered health.
• Fixes a bug in both the Back Alley Brawl and Bend Time Massacre challenges where a Headshot bonus is not awarded if an NPC dies after Bend Time II effects end.
• Fixes a bug in Bend Time Massacre challenge where Explosive Pistol does not count as an explosive kill.
• Fixes a bug in Bend Time Massacre challenge where achieving the Power Combo bonus using Blink is awarding 2 kills.
• Fixes a rare bug in Bend Time Massacre challenge where you are unable to possess Nobles after firing gun through glass.
• Fixes a rare bug in Bend Time Massacre challenge where restarting as the Bend Time effect ends causes the round to complete with zero score and a black screen.
• Fixes a rare bug where you can inadvertently receive the Time Management achievement/trophy after failing to get the bonus.
• Fixes a rare crash in Bend Time Massacre challenge during Waiting For Effects sequence.
• Fixes a bug in Oil Drop challenge where aim assist does not work on PC.
• Fixes a bug where file integrity check requires a game restart at Dunwall City Trials first boot on PC.
• Fixes a bug in Thief (Expert) challenge where key inventory is not reset when restarting from completion.
• Fixes a bug on PC where game displays keyboard and controller art together.
• Fixes a rare bug in Kill Chain challenge where countdown timer will stop after killing some enemies.

Bug Fixes (Dishonored)

• Fixes a bug on where you receive a kill in Player/Mission stats if sliding into Slackjaw after freeing him.
• Fixes a bug where City Watch does not leave attack posture when rewiring an arc pylon.
• Fixes a bug in Overseer Backyard where player could get stuck on chain.
• Fixes a collision issue when Corvo drowns.
• Fixes a bug where navigation in Piero’s shop was difficult when only one weapon upgrade remains.
• Fixes a bug in Overseer mission where loading autosave created after actioning poison causes Campbell & Curnow to run.
• Fixes Player/Mission Stats bugs.
• Fixes a bug in Lighthouse where patrols are broken and there’s no sound after reloading a savegame in low chaos.
• Fixes a bug where Specter Achievement does not activate upon completing requirements in Brothel.
• Fixes a UI bug where turning off Health/Mana gauge show gauges when powers are used via hotkey.
• Fixes a rare crash when signing out of your profile (Xbox 360)
• Fixes a rare bug where installation in Czech doesn’t work if the previous language was Polish (Playstation 3)
• Fixes a rare crash when rewiring a Watch Tower and taking a possessed rat into line of fire (PlayStation 3)

Source: Bethblog

The rumours are (almost) true: although this new DLC isn’t called The Other Side of the Coin as previously thought, it does see you fill the shoes of Daud — the other supernatural assassin haunting the streets of Dunwall.

“After assassinating the Empress, and forever changing the fate of Dunwall, you embark on a search for redemption,” reads the announcement. “The Outsider reveals the key to your atonement, but who — or what — is Delilah? Accompanied by the Whalers, your loyal band of mercenary assassins, your search will take you through never-before-seen districts of Dunwall as you face off against new and terrible foes. ”

Daud has his own set of powers: he can summon the Whalers to assist in combat with ‘Summon Assassin’ for example, as well as twists on Corvo’s powers such as ‘Void Gaze’ instead of ‘Dark Vision’, and a his own version of ‘Blink’. New gadgets are also available including Chokedust and Stun Mines, as well as a concealed Wristbow.

The Knife of Dunwall will hit on April 17 and set you back $14.45 (or 800 Microsoft Points). Daud’s story does not end here: it will conclude in the third and final DLC, ‘The Brigmore Witches’.

Source: Press Release

The official Dishonored Twitter account has released a new screenshot into the wild, teasing further Dishonored story-based DLC and promising news tomorrow.

In the screenshot, we see the player — presumably Daud, as he is basically anti-Corvo and would be perfectly easy to use as a protagonist — on a rooftop next to another assassin, looking at the Empress’ garden in the distance.

Chances are very good this is the ‘Other Side of the Coin’ DLC whose existence was leaked via PS3 trophies. Back in October Bethesda explained that there would be story-driven DLC featuring Daud releasing in March or April, and now’s the time.

Stay tuned tomorrow for more.

Source: Dishonored

A leaked list of PS3 trophies has revealed that Dishonored, my personal Game of the Year, is set to receive some new DLC entitled ‘Other Side of the Coin’.

According to the leaked list, players will enter the Rothwild Slaughterhouse and explore the estate of one Thalia Timish.

The trophies also indicate that it can be finished in both High Chaos and Low Chaos, similar to the main game. A new item called an ‘arc mine’ is also mentioned, which sounds delightful.

Source: PS3 Trophies via Eurogamer

Finished Dishonored? Replayed it again and got a completely different experience and ending? Good! Then you’re all ready for the first DLC: Dunwall City Trials, which is out today (well, last night, to be fair).

The DLC, which runs at $4.99 for a Steam key on Green Man (or 25% less with the code at the end of this article), includes “10 challenge maps that will test and track your combat, stealth and mobility skills”, challenging you to “creatively combine your supernatural abilities, weapons and gadgets to eliminate as many targets as possible, fight off waves of tallboys, guards, weepers and thugs, or take out targets in a non-stop run of drop assassinations.”

You can check out some screens of the DLC by clicking here, or head over here instead and watch the trailer (no dubstep, guaranteed).

Further, actually story-based DLC, is due around March, with a third instalment still undated.

Source: Press Release

While this first set of Dishonored DLC is yet to be released — available on December 11, in fact — we now have audiovisual explanation of the challenges that this DLC will put you through. Set to the tunes of some sort of Dishonored rap from YouTube (hey, it’s better than dubstep!), enjoy this video showing all sorts of stabbing, stealthing and brawling challenges. Take a look.

Bethesda and Arkane have overnight released the first post-release update for the excellent Dishonored, with the patch now available for all PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 players.

The patch fixes multi-screen support, properly saves and loads game settings, and addresses several issues with non-lethal playthroughs being un-completable.

Take a look at the full patch notes below.

• Support for playing the game on multiple screens.
• Game Settings are now saved and restored properly even when using Steam offline.
• Fixes for some interactions with Granny Rags that invalidated nonlethal playthroughs under certain circumstances. (Note: These fixes work even for savegames AFTER the final Granny Rags encounter.)
• Fix for a crash that could happen during loading/transition between areas – notably near Dr. Galvani’s house.
• Reworked “Choke” interaction to make it more reliable in valid contexts.
• Fixed minor localization issues (PS3/360).
• Fixed global post-process that sometimes worked improperly during some missions.
• Fix for a rare crash that could happen when killing a NPC with a possessed rat and spring razor (PS3/360)

Want to know why Dishonored is one of the best games of the year? Read our massive review.

Source: Bethblog

While EA may have scoffed at releasing a new IP “this late in the console cycle”, Dishonored has gone well beyond even Bethesda’s high expectations. “I can tell you that Dishonored is far exceeding our sales expectations, which is especially cool considering it’s new IP facing a host of well-established franchises this quarter,” claimed Bethesda’s PR man Pete Hines.

“We did terrific numbers again this past weekend, both in stores and on Steam, where Dishonored was listed as the #1 selling title over the holiday weekend. And Dishonored has really sold well overseas.”

“So, we’re very pleased and appreciate all the fans that have supported Dishonored and Arkane. We clearly have a new franchise.”

Does this mean there’s a Dishonored 2 on the way? Well, as somebody who thought the original game was superb, let me be the first to say: yes please.

Source: Destructoid

Bethesda have sent word that the final date and price for the upcoming ‘Dunwall Trials’ DLC have been locked in. Due on December 11, Dunwall Trials will set you back $8.45 on PC or PS3, or 400 Microsoft Points if you use one of them XBox 360s.

The DLC will include “10 challenge maps that will test and track your combat, stealth and mobility skills”, challenging you to “creatively combine your supernatural abilities, weapons and gadgets to eliminate as many targets as possible, fight off waves of tallboys, guards, weepers and thugs, or take out targets in a non-stop run of drop assassinations.”

We’ve also been sent a bunch of screens — check them out below.

Dishonored doesn’t need anymore trailers: the game is out and pretty well received all over (especially by us). But Bethesda’s PR have stitched together this video the best user content on YouTube, showing off some Killer Moves. This is three minutes of amazing stealth kills, power combos and all the general craftiness Dishonored has to offer.

I found the video a little difficult to follow at first, but there is some amazingly cool footage — if you can get past the music, which is apparently a remix of ‘Drunken Whaler’? I couldn’t hear it. Maybe watching with the sound off will help. Let us know what you think, in any case.

In our massive review of Dishonored, we likened the game very strongly to Half-Life 2, and not least of all because you’re a completely mute protagonist who takes orders from everyone. It turns out that this wasn’t always the plan: speaking to Official Playstation Magazine, creators Raphael Colantonio and Harvey Smith revealed that Corvo was originally intended to have a voice.

“(Making him mute) was a deliberate choice,” said Raphael (or possibly Harvey). “If we portrayed Corvo angry and seeking revenge, it might offend the nonlethal player who is seeking a stable outcome for the City of Dunwall, and vice versa”.

“We added some text input options for Corvo around alpha but never really went further. To this day, we wonder what the other version would have felt like in the game”.

The interview also revealed that the original pitch for Dishonored, in its shortest possible form, was “ninjas”.

Source: OPM

We all knew it was coming, but today’s announcement makes it official: Dishonored will indeed have DLC, with the first of three planned packs being scheduled to drop in December.

The first pack is named ‘Dunwall City Trials’, and will feature ten ‘challenge maps’, including “an arena battle against waves of enemy AI, a gravity-defying run of drop assassinations, and a race against the clock”. Dunwall City Trials will retail for $8.45, or 400 Microsoft Points, and feature a global leaderboard as well as new achievements.

The second pack give us a brief teaser only: centered around the character of Daud, it will allows us to make Daud’s own way through Dunwall and “discover Daud’s own set of weapons, powers and gadgets” what is described as a “story-driven campaign”. We’re also assured that the choices we make in this piece of DLC will affect the final outcome — we’ll find out around March or April.

The third and final (?) piece of DLC is completely undetailed — we’ll learn more “closer to its launch next year”. There’s still plenty of time to pick up Dishonored, a game that we thought exceptionally highly of, so start honing your skills for those leaderboards now.

Source: Bethblog (Thanks, Makena!)

Arkane Studios’ Harvey Smith isn’t entirely sure Dishonored needs a sequel, even as the immersive sim draws rave reviews and hungry cries of “moar”.

“Part of me would love to see future games leverage this world,” he told Kotaku.

“And part of me would love it if the vault door was just closed and that’s it. This is your one view into the Empire of the Isles and into the city of Dunwall.”

Dishonored’s setting, which draws heavily on Industrial Revolution influences mixed with occult mystery, has drawn almost as much praise as its Looking Glass-legacy mechanics. The stealth-’em-up is out now on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360; we think it’s pretty special.

Source: Kotaku

Some ATI users are reporting that Dishonored not only isn’t working for them, but crashes out leaving an exceptionally long error message about unavailable binaries.

If this is happening to you, you’re in luck — a solution has been found. Right-clicking on Dishonored in Steam, selecting ‘Launch Properties’ and adding -windowed to the end will force the game to boot up in a window and — apparently — seems to be working to stop the crashing.

The solution was suggested by a Bethesda moderator, who also advised that “I can’t say I know what it means or what the problem is, but maybe someone else does. The devs are checking this forum so they’ll be aware at least”.

If you still aren’t sure about Dishonored, why not read our massive review? There’s a code at the end to get it for $45 that expires today, as well!

Source: PCGamesN

In one of the middle-ish Dishonored missions, I find myself in a quandary. The city watch have blockaded a bridge to the next section of town and set up an arc pylon: a device that will detect me if I get close and automatically convert me into a small pile of ash via the medium of white-hot lightning. I can’t get close because the pylon is always watching, and I can’t sneaky-on-by because there’s no room and, oh damn, they’ve got dogs on patrol as well.

I leap to the roof and assess the situation. Every electrical device in Dishonored has two weaknesses: a control box, and a whale-oil power tank. The control box can be rewired to force it to attack enemies instead, while the power tank can be simply disconnected. I can see the power tank, but the control box is… wait. It’s facing away from the guards, over the edge of the bridge?

A couple blinks later and I’m on the docks, approaching the bridge from the side. There’s no cover by the control box, and I hear the tell-tale musical sting of a suspicious guard who has spotted somebody fiddling where they shouldn’t be. Calmly I open the power wheel and freeze time, rewiring and closing the box and then disappearing into the sea below. Time unfreezes, and the newly rewired pylon starts to spark angrily at all the enemies suddenly surrounding it. The death screams of the guards filter, muffled, through the water above me. I feel a twinge of sadness for the dog.

Immersive yourself in a world of rats

I’m not going to really bother recapping the story of Dishonored because frankly if you don’t already know about the supernatural-assassin-revenge-stab-stab plot line already then you’ve probably been living under a rock and, let’s be honest with ourselves, the storyline of Dishonored is pretty naff. It’s a tale of vengeance and betrayal painted in enough of a broad stroke to give you a justification for a bit of the ol’ revengey-stabby-stabby but really, when it comes down to it, isn’t going to win any awards. No, where Dishonored really shines — and shines greater than many other games in recent memory — is in its setting.

Dishonored’s setting is, as Penny Arcade accurately surmise, a melting pot — but it’s one that works. It’s a glorious world of dystopian alt-London steampunk whale-oil voodoo nonsense, with religious paranoia and devil-worship shades-of-grey stirred in over a furnace powered by a thousand scurrying, festering rats. It’s the creative genius of Raphael Colantonio and Harvey Smith, shaped by the watchful eyes and hands of Viktor Antonov’s artistic direction. It’s such a delightful, well-rounded and above all well-curated world that it would be a capital crime if it remained un-explored by future games.

In fact the Viktor Antonov connection is perhaps one of the most important here, because Dishonored and Half-Life 2 share not only Antonov’s stylish industrial European art direction, but the same basic conceit: the frankly uninteresting story of a personality-free and unconvincingly mute protagonist, told in a staggeringly well-crafted world full of weird gameplay systems that you can arrange in bizarre fashions to unexpected ends. Sure, Half-Life 2 doesn’t feature the ability to teleport from rooftop to rooftop and then summon a swarm of rats to give an unsuspecting guard an involuntary exfoliation, but hey, there’s plenty of time to fix that particular glaring error when (or if) Half-Life 3 ever makes it out. Get on it, Valve.

A swiss army knife disguised as a game

I always had Dishonored pegged as a stealth game, and if that’s what you want to do with it then it can certainly be that for you. It’s a fine stealth game and one of the best I’ve played in ages (and one that doesn’t allow you to get away with utterly unbelievable shadow-hiding that so many others do), but it’s so much more than that. Dishonored is a genuinely special game: not only does it actually make good on its promise to allow you to play any way you like, but it does it really well.

Unlike Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which shouted from the rooftops about its ‘four pillars of gameplay’ but ultimately was deathly boring if you were anything other than a stealth hacker, Dishonored’s gameplay systems are highly adaptable. Pure stealth? Not a drama. All-out combat? Get in. Ghost through the level, never seen even by your final target? Yep. Completely non-lethal? You can do that too – you’re never forced to kill someone literally ever in the entire game, not even in the boss batt- oh wait! There aren’t any boss battles. Snaps and dang.

You don’t get your supernatural powers until maybe an hour or so into the game, but here’s the ultimate kick in the teeth to the pre-scripted games which we’ve become so used to: even with all these amazing powers — possession, teleporting, stopping time — you don’t need to use them at all. You can reject The Outsider’s gift completely and finish the game as a normal, angry man with a sword and a gun who never inhabited the body of a rat in his life. Some might call this “hard mode”. I call it “a triumph of game design”.

The game supports this flexibility not only with its level design — which is beautifully filled with nooks, crannies, vents, basements, rooftops and tunnels — but with its mechanics as well. Enemies have a three-level detection system allowing you to fade from sight if a guard is getting suspicious, and a broad cone of vision coupled with occasionally unpredictable patrol routes to spice things up.

Even if you’re going in guns blazing you’ll find a system that rewards the thinker: careful parrying, blocking and sword-crossing is integral to success, as is knowing when to pop a blunderbuss into a guard’s torso and when to scamper away, bleeding.

Objectives emerge organically as you play through the levels. If you miss a conversation between two guards that reveals the existence of a non-lethal way to dispose of the target, tough luck. Pay attention to your surroundings, and you’ll see a handful of ways to reach — and get rid of — anybody. During the game’s final confrontation, I idly wondered if I could take out my ultimate target with a well-aimed crossbow bolt from 100 feet away. It turned out not to be a good idea as he and the person he was holding plunged to their death, but that wasn’t the point: there was an enemy, I had a crossbow, and nothing stopped me from shooting him in the face. There genuinely is no best way to play, and anybody who tells you otherwise is in need of a good kicking.

Take your time, hurry up, the choice is yours

Despite this, Dishonored has been the subject of some discussion around exactly how many hours of gameplay-bang you can expect for your buck. I personally clocked in at 21 hours, but I’ve been told you could do it in as little as eight or so if you just legged it for the objectives and ignored everything around you (or a matter of minutes if you’ve played before and know where to blink to). Don’t do this. I mean, sure, you can and the game won’t stop you — Dishonored rarely stops you from doing anything at all — but you’re cheating yourself.

With the amount of sidequests, optional objectives, loot, bone charms, runes and secret areas to find, there’s no reason at all to rush it other than a self-defeating desire to have as shallow a time as possible. Take your time, turn the HUD off, and see what Dishonored has to offer. You can always come back for another go — and you should, because with the way Dishonored tracks your progress and adjusts to your play style, you’d be crazy not to play it at least a second time.

Great PC support completes the package

On the subject of the HUD, Dishonored’s PC configuration options are sure to please: although they’ve already been extensively detailed ahead of time, in practice they’re still a delight. Your level of control is quite granular, with minutiae present like the ability to disable shadows on rats specifically because… well, let’s not question it.

Graphically speaking Dishonored is hands-down gorgeous, with a lovely painterly-texture and slightly distorted, stylised anatomy to it that brings the world to life in a way that the ultra-realism of modern military shooters has never achieved. The system requirements aren’t exactly going to push your rig to overheat, but with all the settings cranked up you’ll get a genuinely pretty game that’s a lot more than just a console port — and fully rebindable controls that actually recognise all the buttons on my mouse are the icing on the cake.

No game is perfect

I mentioned earlier that Dishonored’s storyline and character are a bit colourless, but from the excited words you’ve been reading so far you might think that’s the worst of Dishonored’s problems. It’s unfortunately not: although there is a bit of the ol’ repetitive dialogue and occasionally painfully dense AI, Dishonored’s biggest issue is that it will sometimes spawn enemies out nowhere just to frustrate you. During the Golden Cat level in particular, I was surprised multiple times when enemies came from behind me, despite the fact that I’d worked my way up through the levels and left every single guard sleeping in an office. At one point the guards literally appeared directly in front of me out of thin air, which was superbly illusion-breaking and more than a bit irritating. Corpses also have a tendency to disappear, which is unsettling to say the least. Presumably, both these are bugs that can soon be ironed out.

Dishonored can also sometimes be a bit heavy-handed in presenting its options. “Don’t touch the valve near the steam room,” a note might say. “Whoever is in there will be boiled alive! P.S. Also, the guy you need to kill is in there!” Or at the Boyle party, every guest you talk to will remark on what a mystery Lady Boyle’s real identity is and then in the very next breath loudly and unsubtly remind you that you could solve the puzzle by heading upstairs and reading the lady’s diary.

When I spoke to Dishonored’s executive producer Julien Roby about this, he lamented that players simply had no idea what they should — or even could do — if they didn’t get a little suggestion. Sometimes though, it feels like Dishonored’’s suggestion is more of a shrieking megaphone blast. You never need to obey these suggestions and you can, to Arkane’s absolute credit, always deal with a problem your own way. But it is a little bit jarring, and it does deserve note.

At the end of all things

Dishonored is part Bioshock, part Half-Life 2, part Deus Ex, part Thief, part Mirror’s Edge, and yet still a game and a world all of its own. It’s the game that the our industry desperately needs: a breath of fresh air in a release schedule filled with annual instalments of military shooters with tacked-on multiplayer and licensed sporting titles, a game that not only refuses to run pre-scripted events but tears the script up and throws it out the window. It’s not perfect, but it tries so hard and gets so many things right that to let it pass you by un-purchased and un-played would be a crying shame.

Good:

• Amazing systemic gameplay that allows you almost total freedom to accomplish your objectives
• Brutal supernatural powers that are a joy to use
• Gameplay that adapts to and reflects your choices as you progress
• Deeply compelling world and setting
• Gorgeous artistic direction
• Impressive replayability
• Purely single-player, no tacked-on multiplayer
• Solid PC support and options

Bad:

• Characters and actual story are fairly shallow, game is clearly built around world and mechanics
• Occasional bug with re- and de-spawning NPC’s
• Some unsubtle hints may discourage initial experimentation
• There’s no way to do a non-lethal drop-takedown on an enemy, for some bizarre reason

Dishonored is $80 AUD on Steam, or $60 from Green Man Gaming. Additionally, you can get it from GMG for $45 until October 12 with this code: GMG25-EVFWS-4Z4ZN.

Lead writer on Dishonored Austin Grossman has confessed to Kotaku that he thinks his character, Corvo, is better than other silent protagonists — namely Doctor Gordon Freeman himself! Remember, before you put on your Nasty Internet Comments hat, these are Grossman’s words, not ours:

“I hate what Valve does with the silent protagonist. I find it incredibly awkward and really creepy. I find Gordon Freeman creepy as hell,” he told Kotaku. “It’s people talking at him, about him and sometimes even for him. He just happens to be in the middle of this whole thing.”

“The difference between Dishonored and how it works in Half-Life 2 is that it’s a lot more personal. I think you get that involvement because the character has personal relationships with people from the beginning. And it’s very clear that people have [censored]ed with you in a very personal way. I’m biased, of course, but I think Dishonored grips you much more viscerally, more emotionally. And that’s on purpose. Corvo doesn’t talk and I think it works because everybody knows what Corvo would have to say.”

Mostly, ‘I’ma stab you good!’ I think.

Source: Kotaku

Adelaide’s The Pad bar is set to play host to an official, Bethesda-approved Dishonored Masquerade Party this Friday night from 6PM onwards. The Pad — formerly known as The Pimp Pad — will be giving out prizes and giveaways all night, including a ‘best dressed’ prize, a ‘best mask’ competition, and a bunch of other wacky steampunk-themed goods.

Attendees are asked to arrive wearing “elegant and fantastical costumes with steam technology aesthetics”, with Dishonored-themed drinks available all night. Click here for a gander at the invitation and, if you’re going, leave us a photo of your mask!

Each mission has a target, and clumsy would-be assassins will face some nasty fights, but Dishonored doesn’t have boss fights. Designer Harvey Smith told Kotaku that this was a deliberate move to distance the immersive sim from cut-and-paste game design.

“We’re very conscious of tropes in video games that are kind of lazy, frankly. Or dogmatic is the better word perhaps. You know: here’s a boss, he reveals his weak spot, you gotta hit it three times and then three times again, whatever,” he said.

“We never really felt the need for boss monsters. And it seems like a dogmatic feature. And sometimes it’s brilliant, right? One of my favorite games of all time was Shadow of the Colossus. If you count those as boss monsters, then wow—way to take that whole feature and make it your whole game and do something utterly brilliant. And it’s one of the best 100 games of all time in my opinion. But in our case it wasn’t the focus, and we are kind of careful about avoiding those kind of dogmatic tropes that video games are built on.”

Smith also commented that Arkane Studios avoided describing Dishonored as “steampunk” and tried to leave out design elements typical of that aesthetic for similar reasons.

“One of our tenets was avoid this overly familiar because god, if you’re gonna spend X dollars on something and X years of your life, you don’t have to do exactly what everybody else has done or what you’ve seen. You don’t have to draw your inspirations from what else is on the shelf.”

Dishonored releases on October 11. Start practicing your best pull-a-sickie phone voice.

Source: Kotaku

The Bethesda Blog is pleased to announce that Dishonored has gone gold – which means development is complete, it has passed certification and is ready for manufacturing. This is quite an impressive feat as Arkane has prepared 30 versions across all platforms, territories and languages.

That’s really all there is to say about that, except that Dishonored launches locally on October 11 and we are giddy with excitement.

Source: Bethesda Blog

The last of the ‘Tales from Dunwall’ animations is up, this latest episode being the most confusing and probably the most important. This latest episode, called ‘In the Mind of Madness’ stars a man named Piero, who is a key figure both in the city of Dunwall itself and Corvo’s story. I’ll be sad to see these go, as I’ve enjoyed watching Dunwall’s story unfold each day, but if you haven’t seen the first episodes, check them out here and here, respectively. Watch the final episode below, and let us know what you think of the Tales of Dunwall as a whole.

Yesterday, when the first episode of ‘Tales from Dunwall’ came out, we weren’t sure when the next episode of the three part series about Dishonored would show. Well, we didn’t have to wait long, it seems, with the next episode ‘The Hand That Feeds’ out now. This episode is a cautionary tale, starring a young boy who accepts supernatural aid from The Outsider. This episode is as dark and yucky and utterly tone-setting as its predecessor. Check it out below.

I’m not going to call this one a trailer, but there’s a new animated short for Dishonored telling us the dark and disturbing stories behind the game’s city, Dunwall. This first chapter in the Tales from Dunwall series, The Awakening, tells us the story of Esmond Roseburrow, the man behind the city’s technological revolution, and it sets the scene nicely for the game.

As I say, this is only chapter one, so while there are no clues given as to when the next episode will be out, Dishonored itself comes out on October 12 — so we will presumably see them all before then. Check it out below.

While you’re here, why not check out our interview with the game’s producer, or our hands-on time in Lady Boyle’s mansion?