What are you playing right now

[Malcador]

In Human Revolution at least it "kinda felt belonging together". In MD right at the beginning you just jump from random cutscene to random cutscene... Basically all the walking you'd normaly do inbetween is removed, which leaves a bunch of awkward dialogues and then a linear dungeon with enemies to get past.

That sounds pretty terrible, to be honest. Maybe I'll wait for bargain bin

[GhostofAnakin]

I thought the Daedric quests were the best quests in Skyrim.

 

I've only come across one so far.  Apparently I suck as an explorer.

[Katphood]

I am playing a whole bunch of games as usual:

 

Sunless Sea: Very engaging and addicting gameplay. I think I am on my 3rd captain right now and yesterday I just barely survived an attack. After the attack was over I didn't have enough fuel to get to the pirate ship's wreckage. I made a stone sacrifice a voila! Got 1 fuel, looted the ship and docked the ship at the next Island.  

 

Stardew Valley: Bought it on sale for 10 bucks and my goodness, the SNES-like graphics are so gorgeous! The mouse control feels a little wonky though and I couldn't find any mouse configuration in the options. Glad I bought it, this will serve me well alongside Dragon Quest Builders!

 

Kirby Mass attack:  ... it was on sale for the Wii U :3

I really love how you can play your favorite DS games on the Wii U.

[Lexx]

 

In Human Revolution at least it "kinda felt belonging together". In MD right at the beginning you just jump from random cutscene to random cutscene... Basically all the walking you'd normaly do inbetween is removed, which leaves a bunch of awkward dialogues and then a linear dungeon with enemies to get past.

That sounds pretty terrible, to be honest. Maybe I'll wait for bargain bin

 

 

It gets even worse. In the second(?) dlc they again tried real hard to push this stupid multiplayer game mode. Complete waste of time, imo.

[Raithe]

Finished my first run-through of Dishonored 2 as Emily.   Hm, dang it, missed my total ghost by being seen by 1 person, Delilah, on the very last mission. Not sure how to get past that. you get a cutscene thing, and then it's like no-matter where I've moved to on the map she sees me regardless. I must be missing something obvious.

 

Ah well. I shall give it a break for a bit, then maybe consider doing a run with Corvo in the near future.

[Starwars]

Dishonored 2 looks quite good but... 60GB download... ffs. 

[GhostofAnakin]

I ended up buying Dishonored 2 because of the Black Friday sale.

[redneckdevil]

Because I'm broke and Christmas shopping for kids, I bought me and my son knights of pen and paper 2 (first one me and him both love) and bought adventure time Zelda looking game for a dollar. I'm a sucker for adventure time and that's my Christmas present to myself lol

[Fenixp]

Finished my first run-through of Dishonored 2 as Emily.   Hm, dang it, missed my total ghost by being seen by 1 person, Delilah, on the very last mission. Not sure how to get past that. you get a cutscene thing, and then it's like no-matter where I've moved to on the map she sees me regardless. I must be missing something obvious.

With Corvo, I have found that while Delilah isn't affected by stopping time, her duplicates are. It was then a simple matter of placing stun mines where real Delilah is going to spawn before eliminating the last duplicate.

[Keyrock]

Failure to integrate the DLC into the main game aside, is the System Rift DLC for DX:MD any good, on its own merits?  I've heard grumblings that it's a glorified advertisement for the Breach Mode that apparently no one plays.  On the other hand, it does have Frank Pritchard, and I really liked that character in the previous game.

 

If the story DLCs turn out to be crap, I might eschew them altogether and just get the base game and nothing more ever.  I certainly don't care about whatever bonus weapons, gadgets, and one use currency they threw into the season pass.

[Majek]

I didn't but anything on Black Friday sales... i still have plenty in my backlog and yet i only play Destiny, U4 Mp and Dark Souls 3... ;_;

[Labadal]

I didn't but anything on Black Friday sales... i still have plenty in my backlog and yet i only play Destiny, U4 Mp and Dark Souls 3... ;_;

I didn't buy anything either. there was nothing that I really wanted.

[Tale]

Since Square Enix doesn't want to sell me Final Fantasy IV at a cheap price, I'll just move on to my other weaboo obsession. Visual Novels! I am Tale, devourer of stories!

 

Up now is Muv-Luv. Which is apparently the story of a high schooler and his childhood friend. Wacky hijinks ensue when he wakes up to a mysterious woman in his bed.

 

I'm yelling out loud WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON about once every five minutes.

[HoonDing]

Muv-Luv anime just gurls with big b00bies

[Malcador]

Finished the Covert Ops campaign for SC2. It was alright I guess, those last missions were pretty damn hard for me - gave up and just did the last one on Casual rather than Hard, pathetic but I realized my limit there. Ending was pretty meh, but what else does Blizzard deliver

[Fenixp]

All right, I have finished my Clean Hands/Ghost run of Dishonored 2 yesterday. This took me around 30 hours, but I have replayed some bits and I'm a slow gamer, not to mention my need to see EVERYTHING. I'd say the game should take a competent stealth games player like 15-20 hours to achieve ghost/clean hands, or about 10 if you just fight through the game and murderize everybody (and even less than that if you don't bother to explore in the process.) Yes, I'll write a wall of text now and yes, I don't care if anybody reads it.

 

Level Design

I have got to start with this, because level design in this game is a highlight and a standard entire industry should be striving towards. It's on par and sometimes even surpasses classics such as Deus Ex or Thief - no big surprise, considering Harvey Smith, of System Shock and Deus Ex fame, is also currently level designer at Arkane. And it shows. Levels not only offer an insane amount of approaches for the player to take, all of these approaches are also organically integrated into individual levels to create a believable locale as opposed to playground for the player, but which also happen to be a playground. The level of detail is absolutely astounding - each apartment has a bathroom and a toilet for instance, but it doesn't stop there. At a glance, you can distinguish whether the apartment belongs to a rich or a poor denizen. All rooms have their in-world purpose and are logically connected.

 

Levels also tend to offer a lot of verticality, considerably more than in the original game. While it's still not a rule, you're able to reach rooftops surprisingly often, and you'll be moving about tall, multi-storied structures with ease. And the best part is that I seldomly looked at a building and thought "Oh, that's a platform for the player there." - it was more along the lines of "Oh look, that balcony has a bit more modern look than the rest of the building, somebody attached it after building got constructed."

 

You'll also see a lot of variability in level design - from dust storms which blind enemies for a while, through ever shifting clockwork mansion all the way to time travel. I won't spoil, but what the game designers attempted here is incredibly, and they succeeded. Sound design tied to level design is absolutely perfect, mind you.

 

Now, there are some small issues, like enemies sometimes being placed into a location where they have no way of getting to, but these are rather rare. What feels a bit more obvious given insane detail of the rest of the game are apartments which are inexplicably sealed off by barricades, but I suppose wanting Arkane to model every single room of every single building in every single level would be a little insane.

 

Karnaca

Closely tied to level design is the world design - and Arkane did not disappoint. Apparently, a year of development time has been spent purely on creating and writing this place to bring player a believable experience. Waves of architecture, social shifts and immigration was simulated, inspired by southern coastal cities of Europe and America. You can see how the industrial revolution affected Karnaca, and how does it deal with its own, local problems and considerations (strong winds blow over the plateau it's built beneath, so massive wind corridors to direct the wind and wind turbines to make use of its energy had been erected). It doesn't end there tho - you can see many details of much more mundane nature, like most rich people's houses built anywhere in the vicinity of silver mines having mechanical air filters to help with the dust.

 

And while the game's story is rather poor, lore is incredible, and the game contains tons of enviromental storytelling of just about anything from "How did that building get infested by bloodflies?" to "Why are overseers searching that apartment?" Based on various notes and books you find around the game world, conversations you get to overhear and acts you get to witness, you feel like a part of a larger world, which lives and breathes. Karnaca is filled with rich culture and history, but it goes beyond - it's a part of an intriguing world you get to explore through books, maps and various mentions.

 

Gameplay

It's a much more refined version of the original Dishonored, but it's not more than that. One big advantage over the original is that the whole game has been designed to be playable without supernatural powers which you may choose to refuse at the start of the game, bringing a huge shift in gameplay style. Second is that you get to choose your character - you can play as Corvo or Emily, each getting their own unique set of powers.

 

In addition to lethal gadgets, you also get a decent amount of non-lethal ones, but not to the point where every lethal attack would get a non-lethal alternative - so you get your good old sleep darts, but also stun darts and ... Um, neurotoxin darts. You also get stun mines that zap enemies who approach them, because of course you do. You may, this time around, do a non-lethal drop assassination, where you direct your accumulated energy from a fall into a powerful punch in the face. How you or your victim survive this when executed from 150 feet is anyone's guess.

 

Gameplay also tends to be more varied - typical stealth sections tend to be interrupted by parts of the levels with bloodfly infested buildings, which is where you'll get to fight things even on non-lethal run. Game also introduces purely mechanical opponents, whom you may destroy without getting a kill.

 

While we're at the topic, AI was improved tremendously from the first game. They notice open doors that weren't open previously, missing friends, disabled security devices, and they work together on locating the player. The moment AI becomes suspicious, the entire dynamic of their patrols changes up indefinitely and they may warn others, changing their partols too (or interrupting them from an idle activity where they weren't patrolling at all). Generally speaking, the less you disrupt the natural going-ons in a level, the easier time you'll have sneaking through it and the more suspicious guards are, the more you'll meet them in areas you think already cleared.

 

Other than that tho, it's still good ol' Dishonored, for better or worse - and yes, it also offers the insane attention to detail of the original and its crazy amounts of reactivity, leading to huge replay value.

 

Problems? Problems!

Let's start with the obvious skeleton in the closet, technical issues. While they got more or less fixed for owners of nvidia cards, AMD users still get the shaft. But even owners of good builds sometimes encounter game crashing and such. It's a mess, but Arkane is actively working on improving their mess and thus far, each of their patches was a big improvement.

 

There's not just that tho. I've encountered some minor irritations like getting stuck in a vent that protagonist refused to climb through for whatever reason in spite of doing the same thing seconds ago. It might have been me making sounds, but I have noticed guards sometimes spotting me through a wall. This is a very rare bug I assume, but once, when saving on a mobile platform, the game has inexplicably moved me like 10ft to the right upon loading the game, exploding the barrel I was holding and alerting everybody. Don't save on moving things. Guards can also rarely get stuck, with the only way of un-stucking them being rendering them unconscious or murdering them.

 

And then there's pet peeve of mine with Dishonored in general, and that's the fact you can't unequip the blade that I wasn't using 90% of the time anyway, leading to such 'hilarity' as accidentally murdering somebody because I pressed the wrong button. Oh well.

 

The biggest problem I have with the game, however, is the storyline. It's incredibly straightforward, offers very little emotional investment and generally only serves as a reason to go to the places you go to as opposed to being compelling in itself. I would welcome at least a twist, even if it was as poor and predictable as in the first game - but nah.

 

TL; DR and Summary:  Dishonored 2 is not without its problems, but it's everything Mankind Divided wanted to be and more. If you have an nvidia card, buy it. If not, either buy it for a console or wait for more patches. You might think "But Fenixp, you're a Dishonored fanboy, you're not to be trusted!" - and yes, I am, but all this means is that I hold second game to a much higher standard. It lives up to it.

 

Edit: Oh right, dem graphix, here's my screenshot gallery. That's not remotely maxed out, by the way.

Edited November 26, 2016 by Fenixp

[Mamoulian War]

More Tales of Zestiria for me. I have just finished the Second Trial for Shepherd and moving slowly forward with the story. It had already some interesting plot twists, but the equipment chaining leveling and fusing is really complicated, so I am not having my character on highest equipment level and some bosses are kicking my ass while trying to defeat them :-D No need to farm at all in the game, if you don't want too, but you will have few harder boss fights that way )

[Gorgon]

I might bite on Dishonoured on the strenght of that. Just got a GTX 1070.

[HoonDing]

I'll surely buy it on Sale in a year or two if i don't forget about it.

[ShadySands]

Nearing the end of my 3rd Tyranny playthrough but taking a break to play DCUO after watching Suicide Squad and getting inspired by that

[Gromnir]

bought eight or so steam games, including xcom2 digital deluxe for $26.  

 

...

 

not playing anything though.  gotta find a more comfortable way to sit at our computer while our ribs heal.  big p#$$%.

 

HA! Good Fun!

[GhostofAnakin]

One of my biggest pet peeves rears its ugly head again -- mountains/terrain that cannot be climbed, thus making it frustratingly annoying to find a spot you want to get to when it's surrounded by said mountains and there is no clear path to take.

 

Skyrim is bad for this.  I'll have to reach a location that is located in the mountains, but I'll spend an hour (an actual hour) running around the giant mountain just trying to find a path that goes up the mountain.

 

Dragon Age Inquisition was annoying with this as well, especially when collecting those damn shards.

[mkreku]

 

The original? The original Deus Ex is one of my absolute favourite games of all times. If it's like the original it's an essential purchase, if it's like Human Revolution I'll skip it.

 

MK is bigger than HR, and it does some very cool stuff, but I'd still put it closer to HR than the original.  

 

 

Thanks. Yeah, I kind of figured so I gave it a miss.

[WDeranged]

One of my biggest pet peeves rears its ugly head again -- mountains/terrain that cannot be climbed, thus making it frustratingly annoying to find a spot you want to get to when it's surrounded by said mountains and there is no clear path to take.

 

Skyrim is bad for this.  I'll have to reach a location that is located in the mountains, but I'll spend an hour (an actual hour) running around the giant mountain just trying to find a path that goes up the mountain.

 

Dragon Age Inquisition was annoying with this as well, especially when collecting those damn shards.

 

Skyrim is one of the only games where this doesn't bother me in the slightest.  I loved how mountains made the world feel huge and after several playthroughs I'd keep finding hidden dungeons and shrines.

[GhostofAnakin]

 

One of my biggest pet peeves rears its ugly head again -- mountains/terrain that cannot be climbed, thus making it frustratingly annoying to find a spot you want to get to when it's surrounded by said mountains and there is no clear path to take.

 

Skyrim is bad for this.  I'll have to reach a location that is located in the mountains, but I'll spend an hour (an actual hour) running around the giant mountain just trying to find a path that goes up the mountain.

 

Dragon Age Inquisition was annoying with this as well, especially when collecting those damn shards.

 

Skyrim is one of the only games where this doesn't bother me in the slightest.  I loved how mountains made the world feel huge and after several playthroughs I'd keep finding hidden dungeons and shrines.

 

 

The mountains themselves were nice to look at.  The mountains where I couldn't figure the hell out where I needed to go to get up them were a pain.