Current Events > Dishonored 2 worth playing if I didn't like how they handled 1?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I played a couple hours of one but what really annoyed me about it is how they punish you for killing people, with the whole rat system and giving you a bad ending... gameplay mechanics seemed cool but I hate being pressured to play a game a certain way. Did 2 fix that at all?

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no, 2 is the same way

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It's just dynamic difficulty, and the game is based around multiple play throughs. I think you can kill around ~20% of the guards without triggering high chaos. If you spec into lethal options, the default layouts are a cake walk. The additional enemies, game play wise, are there to offer a challenge when using the more powerful options. And even with additional enemies, you can still sprint around in plain sight and murder everybody with little issue on normal.

I really wouldn't worry about the story impacts of your decisions. The story really isn't that great imo, these games are about level design that caters to multiple approaches and experimenting with options.

There are a decent number of games that do this game play wise and just don't tell you about it. I believe RE4 has a similar system, where doing better will spawn more enemies in certain sections. They just didn't tell you about it.

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Yeah, I thought Dishonored was weird. Here's all these cool things you can do but don't do them!

The game knows you want to kill people, so it gives you more people to kill. Never understood this complaint.

Now stealth being comparatively limited, that I get. That also wasn't changed in 2, though there are a couple levels where perfect stealth feels amazing compared to the first game.

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KyerWiz posted...

Yeah, I thought Dishonored was weird. Here's all these cool things you can do but don't do them!

I really can't think of many stealth games that don't punish you for killing a lot of people. Hitman, MGSV, Thief, etc. all punish highly lethal options or have significantly better rewards for the nonlethal option. And from a difficulty standpoint, this serves to offset how much easier it is to simply kill somebody than to work around them and go undetected.

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I noticed in one level of Dishonored 2 (which I am currently playing) some rats did eat a guy I knocked out but I was surprised to find it didn't count towards my own kill count in the stats at the end. Pretty sure in the first game those were treated as your own fault

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DEKMStephens posted...

I noticed in one level of Dishonored 2 (which I am currently playing) some rats did eat a guy I knocked out but I was surprised to find it didn't count towards my own kill count in the stats at the end. Pretty sure in the first game those were treated as your own fault

They did, and it was infuriating of you were going for clean hands. NPCs are always safe in dumpsters, so if they're not inside it's highly recommended to use a dumpster lol.

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Jabodie posted...

I really can't think of many stealth games that don't punish you for killing a lot of people. Hitman, MGSV, Thief, etc. all punish highly lethal options or have significantly better rewards for the nonlethal option. All of these games have a wide array of lethal options, but nonlethal is almost always better from a reward standpoint. And from a difficulty standpoint, this serves to offset how much easier it is to simply kill somebody than to work around them and go undetected.

Edit: well thief doesn't have a bunch of lethal options, but you know what i mean

I understand the concept and even agree with it in general. Replaying it while knowing how it works and not really caring about the story would likely be a better experience. It's just that, in my personal experience in my one playthrough of the game where I cared about the story and wanted the "happy end", it often felt like the game was taunting me.

Which, hey, as far as storytelling goes, absolutely works. You want to take the moral high ground, then you have to resist the temptation of doing things the easy or "fun" way. It's just that unless you go back once you're done to play it "more freely", it feels like you missed a good chunk of the game.

KyerWiz posted...

I understand the concept and even agree with it in general. Replaying it while knowing how it works and not really caring about the story would likely be a better experience. It's just that, in my personal experience in my one playthrough of the game where I cared about the story and wanted the "happy end", it often felt like the game was taunting me.

Which, hey, as far as storytelling goes, absolutely works. You want to take the moral high ground, then you have to resist the temptation of doing things the easy or "fun" way. It's just that unless you go back once you're done to play it "more freely", it feels like you missed a good chunk of the game.

Yeah, my advice is definitely think of it more as a "game" and separate yourself from the immersion. If you're going to do one play through, you're going to spend a lot more time actually playing the game than experiencing the story. So I would just lean into the game play mechanics you like and fuck the world. For some it might even help to role play as somebody really angry and out for blood, fuck everything else. I know I did lol, at least in the base game (it didn't really work with the dlc though). It's a fun game to play with all the options.

I also think that the level scenarios are usually more interesting in high chaos, especially some of the later ones. I do think the whole "either EVERYTHING is great or EVERYTHING sucks" is a overkill in terms of how chaos affects the ending though.

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