This edition of The Weekly Playlist is a special issue, rather than bring you a smorgasboard of gaming stories, Rob and Jeremy argue the case for which of them is playing Dishonored "right". Should Dunwall be delivered from its corrupt overlords by way of the knife or the sleeping dart? Is Rob's violence playing into the hands of those being disposed of? Or, is Jeremy's nonlethality simply an exercise in moral self-deception?
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When we all celebrated Mother’s Day two months ago in the UK, Americans were conspicuous by their absence. None of us said anything at the time, of course - in this country, politeness trumps pragmatism. But somebody must have realised their mistake yesterday, and suddenly everyone in the US was driving across town to see their mothers, to try and rectify their mistake.
One of those people was Dishonored producer and game designer Seth Shain, who decided this weekend to detail to his mum precisely what he does for a living. Here’s how it went.
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This week's playlist has death, intrigue, and cuddly little villagers. Rob's returned to League of Legends where he finds the reward for training hard and honing your skills. Jeremy taken to the streets and rooftops of Dunwall to enact his voyeuristic desires. Matt's discovering the problems of injecting the 80s into a tactical island shooter. And Julian plays the puppet master in indie god game Reus. He also has a problem with his stoats.
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While preordering a game may be a slightly strange concept in this digital age where there is almost no worry of games stock ever running out and thus requiring copies to be put aside, companies have taken to rewarding the practice with added gubbins. An exclusive weapon here, a VIP map there, a statue of a dismembered woman’s corpse, what have you.
Though, if you weren’t into the whole preordering schtick you may have missed out on Dishonored’s miscellany. Have no fear Bethesda are releasing the extras as a DLC pack called the Void Walker Arsenal.
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The Knife of Dunwall’s defining characteristic is confidence. Confidence in its setting, the world that Arkane created with Dishonored. Confidence in you, the player, and your ability to navigate increasingly dense and dangerous levels that are as unforgiving as anything in the core game. Confidence in itself, in being able to break free from its predecessor and pursue a story with a character whose fate we already know.
From the outset, we understand that our character, the assassin Daud, is doomed. His godlike patron, The Outsider, tells him as much in the opening scene. He cannot escape what his assassination of Empress Kaldwin has set in motion, and it will be the end of him. But is he damned as well as doomed? It is possible, in this powerful expansion to one of last year’s best games, to find some redemption in the twilight of a long and bloody career. But you still have to face Dunwall.
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Thousands of identical Empresses will be murdered across the globe today in scenes muddy onlookers will describe as, “harrowing, but sorta familiar". Yes, Dishonored’s alternate-perspective day-to-day-Daud sim is out, it’s the best game of last year’s first story-driven DLC campaign to date, and it’s probably going to be brilliant.
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I’m getting a distinct dying-whale-growl vibe from this latest Dishonored DLC trailer. You’ll have to see for yourself, but there’s just the faintest whiff of blubber-borne shame about the whole affair.
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I was careful, let me assure you of that. God knows I took my time. But by the time I’d hopped, skipped and temporally jumped my way through Dunwall, I’d been credited with at least two murders that I couldn’t for the life of me remember committing. Fortunately I’d caused an accident with an errant guard and a bomb back in the prologue, and didn’t retain any pretensions of a clean playthrough. But given Dishonored’s meticulous approach to score-keeping, an even slightly wonky mission stat kill list is unforgivable.
This week’s Steam update is partly about that: fixing the rare occasions when the game declares deaths unwarranted. But it’s also about Dunwall City Trials, the challenge mode released in December that’s still, for a few more days, the game’s only expansion to date.
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As well as a great many talks and a lot controversy GDC plays host to the Independent Games Festival awards and the Games Developer Choice awards, the Sundance and Oscars equivalent of our little industry.
Last night this year’s winners were announced and they’re not exactly everything you may have expected.
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Dishonored is Dunwall and Dunwall is Dishonored: never has a game been more inextricably tied to a fictional place. But when Arkane first conceived the game, Dishonored was to be set in medieval Japan. In a GDC talk entitled 'World of Dishonored: Raising Dunwall', Art Director Sebastien Mitton revealed that the idea was dropped because of the difficulties it presented in marketing, and because Arkane didn’t know the culture.
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The more diligent newsmen and women among you will have already have opened your comment boxes to reinform us that, actually, Michael Madsen already was Daud, and if you were to fire up Dishonored you’d find him still there, growling through a faceful of scars. The news, however, is that Madsen will reprise his role for Daud’s newly significant role as protagonist in two planned chunks of DLC: The Knife of Dunwall, and The Brigmore Witches.
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Dishonored was all about revenge, or justice, I think. It’s been a while since I’ve thought about it. It was a game about a man, Corvo, who was so angry that he literally couldn’t speak, so instead he expressed his feelings by stabbing men and throwing them off ledges, which is probably healthier than bottling them up. The feelings I mean, not the men.
In The Knife of Dunwall however you play as Daud, tangential antagonist of the original game, who is tormented by remorse having prostituted himself to the Lord Regent by assassinating the Empress of Dunwall, thereby triggering the events of Dishonored. Daud talks a lot. Daud has a flapping tongue and a ticking brain, which makes this DLC feel altogether different in contrast to the unsettling silence of the original. It feels chattier, Daud feels more like Garrett, so the game feels more like Thief.
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A screenshot yesterday let us know that our DLC journey in the jet-black shoes of blink-prone assassin Daud would begin with the killing of the very Empress we were tasked to protect in the game proper. A press release today reveals what’ll happen next - a personal tale of redemption, to be told in single-player across April’s DLC, The Knife of Dunwall, and its planned follow-up, The Brigmore Witches.
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Dishonored’s second DLC pack will see the player don the exquisite cracked leather gloves of Empress-killer Daud in a new story-driven campaign. This much we knew. What we didn’t know is that we’d actually be doing the Empress-killing ourselves.
Update: A tweet from the official Dishonored account promises more news tomorrow.
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Are you ready to hear a fact? The very best games of the last year - even the cross-platform ones - all had their roots firmly embedded in the soft peat of PC gaming. That state of affairs was gently drummed into everybody’s skulls at regular beats during last night’s gaming Baftas, which saw Dishonored, Far Cry 3 and XCOM loaded up with plaudits.
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Cor, Bethesda pick a good music man, don’t they? Morrowind’s title theme has long since passed into the Halls of Irrefutable Brilliance, of course, but the same applies to the sonics of every one of their recentmost first-person bad-botherers.
If you’ve played any RPGs in the past ten years or so, you’ll have been hard-pressed to avoid the work of these men: it’s Jeremy Soule’s sprawling otherness that’s woven through Icewind Dale, for instance, and Inon Zur’s controlled cacophony that clings to Baldur’s Gate 2 and Dragon Age: Origins.
We’ve not here for those games, though. We’re here to hear the Elder Scrolls, and Fallout, and Dishonored. You’ll have to pay a little extra for Skyrim.Read and Comment
There is this scene in Unbreakable where Bruce Willis’s awakening superhero, David Dunn, stands in the center of a train station and lets the crowd buffett him. With each touch, he sees the crimes perpetrated by the people around him. He eventually discovers a killer in the crowd, and sets off to stop him.
But what stays with me is all the crimes he let pass. He stood in a sea of malignance, letting thieves, thugs, and rapists go free. I always wondered how he could do that.
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“GAME OF THE YEAR!," booms host Samuel L Jackson, before holding a long, wistful gaze with somebody in the 177th row. We're at an alternate version of coarse US award-chute the VGAs that exists only in my head, and Dishonored is cleaning up.
“Game of the motherfucking year," he sighs, swearily. He’s sitting now, cross-legged on a sticky, black stage. His anguished expression suggests he’d like the sticky blackness to open up and swallow him whole. “Sheee-it. But it won’t change a goddamn thing."
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Mass Effect 3’s Codex has 210 entries: 40 ‘primary’, 170 ‘secondary’. They provide a comprehensive history of all of the galaxy’s races, living and dead; their planets, their ships and their weapons; their biology and last breakfasts. It doesn’t end there, though - there’s even a ‘personal history summary’ for the emotionally inattentive. Depending on which origin story you picked for yourself in character creation, you’ll be informed either of how “eager" you were to find a better life than that on Earth, or how “all you loved was destroyed" on your colony home planet.
Practically all of these 210 entries will pop up in clusters over the course of an average playthrough. And when they do, each player will have to make a decision. Do I eat my story peas now before I dig into the steak, and get them out of the way? Or face the prospect of 100 or so unread entries later? If the latter, do I catch up on the Codex during my commute with the Mass Effect 3 datapad app, as an alternative to the Financial times?Read and Comment
There are two reasons I’m excited to play Dunwall City Trials. Firstly, it puts me in mind of Mirror’s Edge’s Pure Time Trials DLC, an exposed-brick jungle gym created with the sole intent of pushing the game’s key mechanics to their limits - utterly abstracted, assembled by level designers with fingers still hot from the digit-treadmill of full production. Secondly, it’s a chance to play with Dishonored’s finer tools for wanton murder away from its moral scorekeeping.
At time of writing, it’s been out for two hours and neither you or I are playing it yet. What’s up with that?Read and Comment
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