Dishonored (2012)

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Bioshock + AC

--indeed!!!

[ryangg]

One of the game that i will be buying in the future. Dili ba ni parehas sa Max Payne 3 na game play?

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Dishonored Preview

Official XBOX Magazine | Dishonored preview


Imagine that in some alternate reality, the Industrial Revolution was powered not by coal, but an entirely different fuel source…whale oil. And the supernatural. That gives you an idea of where first-person stealthy adventure game Dishonored and its surreal spin on an assassin’s life is headed.

The developers at Arkane Studios are quick to point out that the steampunk-styled Dunwall isn’t a location you’d find on Earth. That much is apparent as we’re introduced to our character, Corvo, a former royal guard who’s been recently framed for the murder of the city’s Empress. Eager to clear your name and find the real culprits, you’ll roam the city to solve the mystery and reclaim your honor. But that central whodunit is only a carrot on a stick — it’s how you’ll tackle the task with your various powers and which of the game’s multitude of paths to any given objective that hints at the intriguing journey Dishonored will provide.


Like any good stealth game, planning your infiltration and exfiltration is among the best part of each mission.


As Corvo, you can seemingly teleport from location to location just by pinpointing it through a handy spyglass. And that’s just one of the strange supernatural abilities — which populate a “power wheel” you can pull up on the fly — that came in handy during the mission we saw. Your job is to infiltrate the Golden Cat, a bustling brothel teeming with painted ladies and their clientele, in order to track down a pair of good-for-nothing nobles: the Pendleton Twins.


How you find your targets is entirely up to you. For us, Arkane reps showed off two opposite approaches to the same objective: stealthy and aggressive. Surprisingly, the sneakier route seemed slightly less nerve-wracking. Staying out of sight and using your power of possession to inhabit everything from a fish in the city canal — so you can swim up and into the brothel’s underbelly — to one of the establishment’s employees so you can learn important info and gain access to normally off-limit areas is key to slipping through undetected. And once you lift a Master Key off a Madam you’ve eavesdropped on, you find one of the twins chatting up a prostitute in a room situated, conveniently enough, next to a steam-pipe control machine. Use a valve to redirect and release a powerful burst of steam into the adjacent room and voila! A suffocated Pendleton without blood or alarms.


That must've been some seriously bad Taco Bell last night.


The second Pendleton is found in a more compromising position with a brothel staffer in a room overlooking the harbor. This location was a bit trickier to sneak into, but using Possession, we only needed to inhabit this fellow’s body, then walk him out to the balcony for a quick neck-snap and toss over the railing. The panicked prostitute inside who sees it all unfold gets a few quick tranquilizer darts to the neck, and your objective is done! In fact, the team assures us that you can even play through the game non-lethally. Of course, all of this sneakery is more difficult to pull off than it seems in the demo, we’re sure. But none of it is nearly as harrowing as taking the more run-’n’-gun approach sampled in the second, more aggro run-through of the same mission.


You’ll still have to find one of the several different ways to break into the brothel, be it swimming into the bath house as a possessed fish or slipping into an upper-level window. But once you’re inside, you’ll be able to brutally assassinate enemies and innocents alike with your knife or crossbow to get to your goal. In a few instances, Corvo’s impressive Windblast power was used to simply blow targets off ledges. Decapitations and throat-slitting ensued as well, with Arkane hinting that you’ll also have access to a time-halting power — allowing you to freeze enemy bullets, then possess the people who fired them in the first place, position them in front of the suspended projectile, and watch them get hit with their own gunfire when time resumes. Compared to the stealthy route, this more aggressive approach felt like a hyperactive crimson geyser, thanks to slashed throats and crossbow bolts.


Can these ladies help you get to your target? Or would you rather just get them permanently out of the way?


But no matter how you play it, Dishonored’s strange world and open-endedness offer up an adventure that’s as deadly as you want it to be. With different endings based solely on how you play throughout the entire game, perhaps we’ll have ample motivation for multiple playthroughs.

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18 Things About Dishonored That You Should Know

18 Things About Dishonored That You Should Know

Earlier this week, I received a wood-framed clock in the mail. It was a promotional tchotchke from the people making Dishonored, the kind of thing a big video game company sends a gaming reporter to make sure they remember their game exists—and perhaps to cultivate some favorable emotions about the game.

It is, of course, a bit weird. What does one do with this unrequested clock?

It's also unnecessary, because Dishonored needs no clock to help me remember it, and won't need a clock for you to give a damn about it.

Dishonored is an ambitious game made by some talented folks in Texas. It's a first-person game that you can play as an action blockbuster or as a stealth adventure. It might remind you of some other very good games, but it has lots of distinct flair.

Raphael Colantonio and Harvey Smith, the game's co-creative directors at Arkane Studios, showed me the game in New York City last week. I watched as one of their colleagues played an early mission. They played through it twice, to show the flexibility of the Dishonored experience. I won't give you a blow-by-blow. Instead, I'll tell you what jumped out at me:

The prevailing fantasy in this game is to be a "supernatural assassin". So picture a first-person game in which you might emit magical powers with your left hand, slit throats with your right, while jumping/warping from rooftop to rooftop and then possessing the person next to the guy you've been assigned to kill.

The game is set in a beautiful, strange city called Dunwall, which had its look designed by Viktor Antonov and Sebastien Mitton, the former being the artist who conceived the look of Half-Life 2's City 17. They're going for a mid 1850s America look mixed with Victorian England. Dash in a bit of whaling town, and don't call it Steampunk, because it's not exactly that. There will be no rivets or brass in this game, Antonov mentioned, at least as a general goal. There's also no clear sense of day or night, because they want players to feel more of a dreamlike mood where it could always be sort of either time.

18 Things About Dishonored That You Should Know

You may peek through any door that has a keyhole as you skulk through the game, which tells you plenty about the level of technology in this game's world and the game developers' interest in letting you snoop. The main level we were shown was set in the Golden Cat Bathhouse, which, you can imagine, would have some secrets on the other side of its keyholes.

You can possess a fish, thanks to the game giving you the power to possess any living thing, including the people you're trying to save, the people you're trying to kill or even the rats scurrying at their feet. This is one thing that qualifies you as a "supernatural assassin."

If you possess a rat, a guard might step on you. Just know that you can't possess anything or anyone forever; only for a few seconds.

This is a linear game with more powers than you can get in one playthrough. It's a game that will have you acquiring special powers, attaining more potent versions of them, accruing weapons. Basically, you're building your own arsenal that suits your strategy and the whole point of the developers showing me the same level twice was to show how differently you could handle it, depending on your abilities and interests.

In this game, there are lots of ways to do the same thing.Take the Bathhouse building I saw during the demo. It's where the action was going to be. And while we could possess a fish to go inside, there were supposedly seven other ways to get in there, too.

18 Things About Dishonored That You Should Know

One of your best powers is called Blink. It lets you scoot forward a few yards in space, like a short-distance warp. Combine this with agile jumping and you can dart not just across rooftops but through open space, suddenly appearing in a crowd or getting to the other side of an open doorway without ever walking past it.

One of the powers they didn't mean to give players, but did involves free-falling from the top of a building but then possessing a guard before you smack into the ground. The designers said that their test players figured it out and it seemed too terrific to remove. So, yeah, kill a guy on a balcony, and then jump off the balcony before his bodyguards can seize you, drop a few stories but body-hop into a regular citizen who is walking down the street in the nick of time.

You can see where your enemies see if you activate a special power that causes their vision cones to be visibly emitted from their eyes. If they see you, trouble. If they see a painting on a wall, they might comment about it.

If you have to compare this to another game, think more Deus Ex than BioShock. Co-creative director Smith waved off my guess that all these player powers mixed with combat might make BioShock the closest apt comparison to Dishonored. No, think more of the Deus Ex games, he said (and, hey, he was one of the main creators on the first two, so it all makes sense). The difference? As far as I can tell, while both games offer the players lots of choices, Dishonored offers a wider range of them and is more explicitly designed to let you play in stealth.

And with your right hand you will kill, because that's the hand that will wield the games guns and blades. The first person melee combat you'll do with the knife got me wondering about another comparison, to Colantonio's former project Dark Messiah: Might & Magic but he said that game's focus on first-person melee is not exactly replicated here. There will be a block and counter system in Dishonored, but not one with Dark Messiah's depth.

18 Things About Dishonored That You Should Know

Two corrupt aristocrats needed killing in the level I was shown. These brothers, the Pendleton Twins, are two of the many scumbag aristocrats who are keeping the people of Dunwall down while trying to avoid whatever mysterious illness is now plaguing the lower classes.

You, by the way, are Corvo Attano, former bodyguard of the Empress, wrongly accused of her murder.

You can dispose of your targets in many ways, some of them fatal, some of them wickedly clever. Imagine, say, you discover one Pendleton Twin in a room with a prostitute. You may walk in and shoot him or knife him or summon a pack of rats to eat him (and possess one of those rats while you're at it). But you also could have never entered the room and just locked it, turned up the steam in his room and boiled him alive. But why not just help out a local crime boss by breaking into the Bathhouse and finding the combination to a safe he wants access to. Give him the combo and he'll take care of the Pendletons by shaving their heads and sending them to work in the mines they ruthlessly run. You know, you don't have to give the crime boss the combo before you go open that safe yourself and take what's in it. This game is supposed to be open to any branch you can imagine taking. You're expected to experiment.

You could go through the game without killing anyone, but then you'd never have approached the second Pendleton twin, poisoned him, possessed him, walked him over to the balcony, jumped out of his body (yours appears when you do this), pushed him over the edge and then bailed.

The world will adapt to you, Smith told me, saying that you might hear different conversations or see more guards or even witness entirely different scenes of squalor or hope depending on how brutally you're playing. He refrained from describing any pat formula, so I couldn't tell if playing without killing, for example, equals seeing more cheerful things. It seems like they're going for something subtler than that. We'll have to see how that plays out.

The walkers you'll remember seeing are called Tallboys. They appeared in a more action-heavy sequence that took place in an area called The Flooded District. There are men in those powerful walkers and, yes, you can possess them.

18 Things About Dishonored That You Should Know

Dishonored showed well. Its world is vivid and interesting and it does appear to offer a good range of play styles that will let players figure out just how bloody they want their revenge quest to be. All games are best judged when you play them yourselves, doubly so for malleable games like this that are pitched as letting you dabble and push at its seams to see what's possible.

This is the kind of game that entices you to try and break it. Say, let's see what happens if I try to kill this guy this way or try to finish this level as a rat!

This, therefore, is the kind of game it's easy to get excited about. No clocks necessary, though I should mention who sent the timepiece. Arkane is owned by Bethesda/Zenimax, the Skyrim people. They know how to push games, so you're going to be hearing a lot more about this one—with good reason.

Dishonored will be out later this year for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC.

[pyang2x]

the only reason im intrigued about this game is because im a big fan of bethesda. just wanted to ask what type of game play will this be? please compare to other games na pariha ani... please

[negative_black03]

im really gonna hyoe this game kase, i like what im reading bout this...

GameSpy: Preview: Dishonored is a Series of Unexpected Events - Page 1

"You can stop a bullet in mid-air using Bend Time, possess the guy who shot at you, and then walk him around in front of it," explains Dishonored Co-creative Director Harvey Smith. "When time resumes it kills the guy and he'll have this shocked expression on his face."



Considering Smith's resume includes System Shock and Deus Ex, I'm not surprised with Dishonored's approach to emergent gameplay design and reactionary AI. With both Smith and fellow Co-creative Director Rafael Colantoino, known for his work on Arx Fatalis, expectations are pretty darn high for Dishonored to be something special when it comes out later this year.

But through all of the sword fighting and sneaking around Smith showed off, one constant seemed to stick out to me above all of the brass and dark metals that cover this magical steampunk world: gameplay in Dishonored is surrounded by a series of unexpected events that enhance the living and breathing universe, and it's these aspects that help make it such a tantalizing prospect.

Emergence Day

"One of the things about Dishonored is the design of the powers; it's very general purpose. And so far people have figured things out all the time that we didn't plan," says Smith during a gameplay demonstration that introduced protagonist Corvo Atano. "Jumping off a five-story building normally would have killed him. But on his way down he possessed a woman leaning on a rail. So it kills the inertia of the fall, and now he can walk past the guards disguised as the woman. We never planned that; that's just what players started doing."




Moments ago I witnessed Atano runing across rooftops, then sneaking through shadowy alleyways to avoid members of the local militia, and infiltrating The Golden Cat brothel by possessing a fish (yes, a fish) in order to sneak through the sewers that ran underneath the building's foundation. It's this possession power that makes Dishonored intriguing -- every living being is possessable for at least a short period of time, be it small creature or human. The more complicated the creatures (a human, for example) will have a shorter duration of possession compared to a small animal, such as a rat.

Every living being is possessable for at least a short period of time, be it small creature or human.
But it's also interesting to see how some of the NPCs will react to the type of character you have possessed. For example, if you've taken control of a guard, those around you will look at you strangely and ask if you're okay. Whereas if you happen to take control of a rat and try and sneak under tables or by guards, you run the risk that you'll be stepped on and killed -- a hazard that Smith claims was completely unplanned. And death is the caveat of possessing these bodies -- if your host dies, you'll die along with them.

Time After Time

Another notable power is the aforementioned Bend Time, which allows you to freeze the world around you for roughly 10 seconds. You can use this to your advantage by sneaking by guards or combining it with lethal attacks -- for example, freezing time and shooting a series of arrows at the craniums of your targets, then watching them all strike their targets at once. But what can make this even more interesting is how the world responds to your character as you move through these frozen moments in time.



"A bottle you threw, or fish you see swimming in the water, all of that -- you're the one moving and anything you touch will move into your time," explains Smith. "Say you're climbing on a wall and there's a bottle there. If I touch the bottle, it moves into my time, and as soon as it gets a foot away from me, it stops again. So a lot of fun things happen along with that."

Using any of these magical abilities requires a certain amount of time to recharge. So while there are numerous ways to approach every mission in Dishonored, you need to be smart about what you spend your spiritual energy on.

Keeping Tabs

And while Dishonored appears to give us a ton of different ways to go about playing around in this universe, it's also keeping tabs on how we've been playing -- have you been trying to sneak through levels without killing anyone, or have you cruelly left a trail of innocent victims behind you?


- they are the Tallboys

"There's a system in the background that tracks the number of people you've killed and side quests you've completed with a harsh outcome, versus how surgical you've been and how few people you've killed," says Smith when explaining the background metrics of Dishonored. "And there's consequences to that, to the way characters react to you, like if you've been playing violently, there will be more guards on patrol in the next mission. There are branches later here and there -- it also drives the endgames that you get."

It all still sounds incredibly ambitious, but if Smith and Colantoino can truly accomplish all they're setting out to do, then we should be in for one hell of a treat later this year.

[darkpilas666]

i think it's more of a bioshock-ish game except for some elements of the game.

[Dk.Enigma]

Scifi game nasad...tsk tsk tsk/

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October 9 Official Release Date

[negative_black03]

well, the game looks outdated graphically, but im still ecstatic for this game!!