I'm going to be visiting my grandparents house this weekend since they're moving to a retirement home, so odds are good that I won't have a video up this Monday. Sorry again that this one took so long to get out, it was uploading and failing to upload for 3 days straight!
Ok talking about the ps4 run speed as that bad is just wrong, your friend has a broken ps4 and starting this video with boring complaints about framerates is just a poor beginning
Your point about non lethal combat is completely pointless and ridiculous.....not everyone wants to or can be stealthy and non lethal at the same time as 90% of people will only do that for trophies, you're just drastically overreacting to everything and calling bloody murder to every change, this is a really unproductive way of looking at this game and how gameplay and set design works, but hey you've got 1 part of the video to go so maybe you'll not complain poorly
Your point about Rune discovery is more likely down to you not being observant as I and many people never saw this as an issue, the fact that it's a collectable that makes you stronger should be difficult to figure out how to find
Your tip for enjoying Dishonored is incredibly petty as well....hardly any players of this game would have played the original Thief series so this is just you making nitpick bland points for 30 mins instead of analysing everything from side characters, music and art to secrets, level design and powers, but nope....."runes are difficult to find and it runs poorly on my bad PC"
@Glorious Bastard The project was to look at how architecture is used and understood outside the regular industry (making buildings). Dishonored 2 had come out at around the same time, and I was playing through the palace when I noticed it was rather architecturally well designed. The whole space felt real enough to live in, it flowed with the environment (particularly with the mountains and shoreline), and it followed other design principles. I looked into it and it turned out Arkane hires architects to help design the levels and environments. So I did my presentation on all that. Turned out a little lackluster, but that's probably because I was playing the game instead of putting in the time on the project! 😂
Great video. I agree with all the points. One other thing that I found to be missing in D2 was an interesting hub. In the first game, there were people to talk to and stuff to look at in between missions, and it gave the game a greater emotional impact interacting with Emily, Piero, Samuel and the staff of the Hound Pits Pub, each of whom have their own story and views on the world and current events. In the second game we get a boat with an invisible crew and two characters, we already know from the first game (plus two optional and temporary new ones).
Huge facts and we had a mission where the pub was invaded which was really fun because you weren't expecting it at all. Whereas the dreadful wale is just a boring ship with nothing to explore except for like 3 or 4 notes.
I have bought dishonoured three times and have more than three dozen playthroughs and somehow never figured this out Edit: in hindsight, I didn't even know you could posses fish
Came back to dishonored recently. One thing that I still haven't been able to forgive is while the guards give good world building. They miss the insanity of the og guard. They never stopped talking about their whiskey and cigars
I disagree, I feel Dishonored 2 had a spark of personality the first was missing. The little altercations that occur constantly. Whether it be the howler ambush after robbing too many black markets, or the effect of playing high chaos on the street performers. In Dishonored 1 I feel like I was playing low chaos for an achievement, or to get a good ending; while in 2 I felt I was playing low chaos because I was the good guy. I felt like I made more of a difference in this whimsical world. I get what you mean about framing of levels, and to an extent I agree; but, aside from a few examples in Dishonored 1 that you mentioned, the same issue could be presented. I remember crawling my way through the cramped Flooded District, constantly getting dead ended or being unable to go somewhere because of icky rotations. In Dishonored 2 I feel these little moments are more fine tuned, I never feel cramped or forced to play a certain way. Every time I’ve played d2, I change my route significantly. But in D1 i feel restricted to going about many levels the same way. I appreciate the video though and believe some of what you presented is accurate. I just disagree that Dishonored 2 lacks a spark that the first game had. Subbed for the neat opinion about my favorite games :) edit from months later; after playing through both again a few times, i've come to realize that in D1 you have dark vision on more often than not. while in d2 i feel you don't. think that speaks volumes about how well the second game is designed to where you know about where a guard is by logic and your senses. which means your screen isnt constantly gross colors and i get to enjoy the beautiful scenery more. also i forgot how good crack in the slab was
Thank you this sums up my thoughts exactly. Dishonored 1 and 2 are both amazing games but Dishonored 2 is clearly an improvement. I thoroughly enjoy every section of dishonored 2 while dishonored 1 and the Brigmore witches both have their annoying areas. In dishonored 1 it’s the entire area after Daud up to getting back to hound pitts pub. Traversing back to the pub on foot every time is such a hassel and it makes me want to turn off the game. In terms of brigmore witches it’s Delilah’s mansion. I always forget that you have to crouch under the bit of rubble to get to the lantern, and I get frustrated to no end thinking that path is blocked and trying to find the key to the west wing door. I never had a moment like either of these in dishonored 2. Every moment was fun and engaging. Even when I was lost I was entertained.
Really? Because I didn't feel the need to stealth in Dishonred 2, going in and bashing faces was just better. Why bother with alternative routes when you can just smack the guards around like a bunch of errant children
Gopher Okay but sneaking through the clockwork mansion without touching a single lever or killing a single clockwork soldier. Leaving Jindosh completely unaware to your arrival until you shoot the heads off of the clockwork soldiers in his office and watch them slaughter him. Is incredibly satisfying. Or hitting the lever in his bedroom. Freezing time and busting ass to the draw bridge he stands on to try and meet the player in the main hall. Only to retract the bridge as he stands on it. Oh so satisfying.
Speaking of great World Aesthetics And Framing I just gotta recommend Wolfenstein The New Order.I may sound kinda basic but some scenes are just outright artful like for instance when you see Berlin for the first time and thus the might of your main enemy without any words,with just architecture.If you played the game I suspect you know about what scene I am talking about
@@Leadhead I think you should look at it for many of the same reasons you did this video, because the trichotomy between Wolfenstein the new order, Wolfestein the old blood, and Wolfenstein the new colossus is much the same as the trichotomy between dishonored 1, it's DLC, and dishonored 2. Wolfenstein 2 (like Dishonored 2) lacks that magic that truly bound together the first game and it's 'DLC' while containing many technical and gameplay improvements but by that same token the first game and it's standalone dlc had that magic in spades. And bonus, it's no immersive sim but Old Blood and New Order offer a great combat/stealth dichotomy that doesn't feel jarringly out of place like that same dichotomy elsewhere (it's also one of the few games that provides an uncompromisingly lethal stealth playstyle, simplistic as it is). I actually recommend doing a loud then stealth playthrough, so you'll see just how well designed the levels are. Areas I thought were 100% combat design turned out to have cool stealthy paths and alternate ways of doing things. Gameplay wise it does this really awesome juggle between 'akimbo arena shooter' , 'tactical cover shooter' and 'stealthy shooter' by using only the fun parts of each and ditching the lame parts (no glass fragility during combat, no convoluted/nonsensical stealth mechanics like throwing 30 rocks in a corner to distract the guards, no excessively bullet spongy enemies (if they aren't going down fast you're doing something wrong, even bosses)) so it ends up being a very fulfilling gameplay experience (and you can change your approach arena to arena which lends some great variety). Not to mention that the guns are masterclass in terms of FPS weapon feel, especially in the first one. Honestly, Wolfenstein the New Order was the first singleplayer game that made me LOVE the genre of singleplayer first person action/narrative games as a whole, from the overtness of Doom to the subtlety of Dishonored. Without it I absolutely would not have poured that same attention to pretty much all singleplayer FPS games I could get my hands on, and the games themselves I have played enough of to practically remember how to play every arena.
@Raed 928 you're not the only one. When I did my first playthrough I got hella confused and rewatched the trailer that showed the clockwork mansion and got dissapointed. Wished they added some flair. Make it where the entire layout changes on a timer and if the target notices you in the mansion he changes the layout at random just to fuck with you. Was wasted potential in the level
Me: "Oh nice, a video that might finally explain why I didn't like Dishonored 2 as much." Leadhead: "Welcome to Architecture 101, please take out your books."
@@theknight1573 Eh, not exactly. It was interesting to hear his perspective but I don't think he shares the same disappointment with the game that I have.
@@chrispysaid exactly how I felt. I feel it might be more about the weaker atmosphere, and fewer important characters that you care about. The two you interact with most don't even need your help, they're mostly there to help you, actually. And the biggest motivator doesn't work so well, when you only see them at the beginning and the end of a game. It might be cheesy, but some flashbacks to time well spent together might have helped... They even managed to make the Outsider worse. I'll never forgive them the voice actor change, but the script itself was not as good either. Didn't feel as powerful and mysterious as in the first game.
@@InfiniteDarkMass All that plus I do think the game design was significantly worse. The clockwork soldiers were a joke, I just threw down a stun mine upgraded to activate twice whenever I came across them and they were finished. I had to actively play worse in order to have the enjoyment of fighting them. I thought they’d be reinforcing the guards on the streets but nope, just patrolling hallways or sitting idle. I kept waiting a new trap device to be introduced, or at least for a nice challenge with arc pylons, but I think the only place one was used effectively was in that big central room in the clockwork mansion. My first time playing the Duke’s manor I eliminated him (with the non-lethal option!) within 10 minutes of reaching the place by coming in through the roof
“My first playthrough was below 30 FPS.” As someone regularly plays games with that sort of frames, lemme tell you that frame rate you’re showing us is *waaaay* worse than “below 30 FPS.”
You do realize that below 30 FPS covers everything form 29.99 repeating to 0, right? Well technically it covers negative to infinity but negative frames aren't possible.
Domino you don’t say? It’s just a different connotation than saying “below 15 FPS,” which I’d say is much more accurate. In other news, congratulations on taking my title of “biggest smartass on Earth.” Not to mention that you’re incorrect. “Below 30” does not cover “negative to infinity.” That makes so little sense I genuinely believe you just tossed it in there to sound smart. “Below 30” actually covers *29.99 repeating* to *negative* infinity. Not negative to infinity.
I found the non lethal gameplay in the first Dishonored to be tedious and annoying. Especially since they made it impossible to take down the tall boys non lethally. I much prefer the 2nd game in that regard. In the first game I found myself enjoying a lethal play through a lot more, because I was allowed to use all the tools at my disposal. This might be because I played through the game non lethally first.
Treehugers I agree. I disliked how the first game gives you an entire arsenal and then punishes you for actually using it. Non lethal just composed of stealth and choking which got very boring. At least the sequel fine tuned everything so that nearly every power could be used for non lethal, and you could engage with guards in firefights with knock out options available. Non lethal assault was my favourite play style for the sequel since you could pretty much be Batman
I see a lot of people trashing on Dishonored 2 for reasons such as these, but I feel like what a lot of people miss is that they weren't *trying* to recreate that same feeling all the time. When they tried, It succeeded. Walking through Delilah's Dunwall in Mission 9 brought me straight back to playing High Overseer Campbell for the first time. It told me all I needed to know about Dunwall by just walking down the streets. You mentioned framing, but I don't think Dishonored 2 is all bad with that. Edge of the World and The Dust District are some of my favourite missions for this. The buildings just look impossibly tall, you don't even think about climbing them like you would in Dunwall. They force you to look down to the ground, maybe at some balconies or street lamps. The design of the streets force you down to the ground, and gaining the high-ground is a constant struggle. Each street lamp is a luxury, each balcony that traverses into another section of the map is a miracle. I'm not saying it's *perfect*. Dishonored 2 did miss the mark in some places, but for better or for worse, they weren't trying to emulate the feeling of Dunwall all the time. As for character voicing, I think it's a mixed bag. The game is so clearly written for Emily. When playing as Corvo, all I could feel was "huh, Emily said that". Corvo didn't feel as genuine as he should have. Emily felt like more of a character than almost anyone else in the Dishonored universe, but the only rimes Corvo stood out were where he referenced the first game. As for the "Dishonored 2 is too fast" in Stealth, I kinda disagree. Some levels encourage that, some don't. Royal Conservatory is the best example of this. The witches increased perception, the high number of them, and the hounds all made me slow down and consider the map. You can't just sleep dart a guard and be done with it, like you could in a lot of D1 encounters. The best parts of D1 stealth were where there were a lot of guards, and you're forced to go down to the ground. Eg. The Wall of Light in mission 2 and 3. I do have to agree with the statement about runes and bonecharms. It's often that I traversed a level based on the bonecharm placement first, then the story would just come second. In Edge of the World, There's a dead whale to the left, which then leads you a bloodfly infested apartment that give a bonecharm. This always drew me to the left, because I'm getting such a high reward. There's no reason to use the other paths because there's always one optimal path that brings you to all the bonecharms. Again, not all levels do this. Royal Conservatory and Dust District handle this well IMO, but the worst offender is Stilton's Manor. There's SO MUCH I always missed because I followed the artifact trail. I do feel like the increased challenge to acquire bonecharms and runes is somewhat necessary though. Once you get that rune or bonecharm, it's yours forever. After 3 or 4 runs of the game, you've got enough artifacts to fully upgrade yourself before even leaving the Dreaful Wale the first time. In Dishonored 1, powers are constantly competing for upgrading and you have to decide if you want the reliable basics like Agility, Blink, and Dark Vision, the more useful abilities like Bend Time and Blood Thirsty, or more niche ones like Rat Swarm and Windblast. These runes are so important that placing them out of the way would just demolish the constant reminders of your purpose that D1 thrives in. The ability to mark an artifact was useful in countering this issue because you weren't having to switch from the heart to far reach constantly just to stay on track, but It also trivialized certain puzzles.
Perhaps a way to remedy the nonlethal stealth would be to have the nonlethal fall transition into the classic strangle animation. I still would include the guard throw though.
@denisucuuu yeah I have to agree on that too. I straight up enjoyed the first game better than the second game. And I’m saying that D2 is not a bad game or sequel, it’s just a rather good sequel and a little bit of an improvement over the first game. But the reason why I liked the first game better is because the story is a little bit predictable in my opinion.
It's interesting to me, that the best experience of this game lines up perfectly with the meta narrative. The antagonist of the first game was political machinations, specifically by a system that not only shuns but actively fights against those who worship the Outsider. Obviously, the Whalers and Daud are a villainous group in the story, but they aren't the antagonists. The antagonists are Hiram Boroughs, High Overseers Campbell and Martin, Admiral Havlock, The Pendletons. The Outsider graces you with the abilities to fight against a system that oppresses his worship, and thus you prove yourself to be apart from them. It's the polar opposite in Dishonored 2 and DOTO, the antagonists are fucking witches, cultists and followers of the Outsider. You fight people who exploit the Void, who use it and its abilities against the Empire of the Isles, against Emily and Corvo. It makes PERFECT sense that to prove yourself to be apart from that crowd, to overcome the Dishonour you've been handed, you fight without those abilities. Idk... makes sense to me.
@@myfaceisthefrontofshop ooh that’s an interesting POV. I took it that power inherently corrupts, which is why you have to continually remain self aware.
My main problem with Dishonored 2 was how your character's voice clips and personality were effected by things like kill count. I would scan every guard with the heart and get feedback like "he drowns puppies and blackmails children", so I'd kill them. But then Emily starts saying "hm yknow maybe I should have had more public executions"
it's playing off the dumb narrative trope of "killing terrible people apparently makes you no better than those terrible people you just killed" It sometimes ruins endings of games and movies for me when the hero who lost something/everything to the villain and attempts to exact revenge, and at the end has said villain on his knees and has just lost everything and the hero has a weapon pointed at him ready to kill...but then the Hero walks away thinking he's done enough, Sometimes under the context that the Villain can't hurt anyone anymore, sometimes because the Villain will suffer more if left alive. But in all seriousness, If Emily's common solution of getting past guards is killing them, then it might transfer over to when she takes back the throne, that she can order public executions on anyone who might be a potential threat to her power over Dunwall, using those executions to scare most dissenters into obedience. She may have killed those guards for a good reason, but you know as they say "A road to Hell is paved with good intentions"
@@derrinerrow4369 late reply I know but Emily was just an annoying character on high chaos. I really, really think they did voiced characters in deathloop so, SO much better. Colt and Juliana’s banter was so much fun and really helped expound their character, I haven’t even finished it yet (picked it up and finishing it finally while I have covid now that my pc’s fixed, and I’m on an arkane binge now that I can actually run their games now that they don’t tank performance so hard) by comparison corvo is just dry and Emily is whiny. In d1 you were directly fighting against the corruption, the dirtiness of the politics and the illegal government that had couped Jessamine. The Boyle level especially highlights that, the completel opulence contrasted against the empty, diseased surroundings. D2 is just “yeah Emily sucks as a ruler and her empire is pretty corrupt, but someone took her throne so we gotta get it back I guess” Boohoo I deserve my throne back! * she travels to Karnaca * damn this sucks I can’t believe someone let this happen! It’s like every presidential election, do you want terrible idiot who does insane shit or dumb idiot who allows institutional failures and corruption to continue? Oh you don’t want either? Too bad someone’s already chosen those answers for you TLDR: Emily’s character either needs to be an angry, vengeful character or a fair, conscientious character. Stop being so whiny and just lean into it, literally just make her edgier
@@jacksonneedham2792 I am sorry but this is such a dogshit take I can't treat it seriously lol It's clear emily is incompetent, but she's clearly not straight up evil like Delilah or Duke and the journey she goes through (depending on player choice) turns her into a true ruler Plus your point could be applied to Dishonored 1 as well so it makes even less sense
@@myfaceisthefrontofshop that’s why Emily was considered the dumb idiot in the dumb idiot who allows institutional failures and corruption vs. terrible idiot who does evil for fun analogy. I didn’t say she was evil, just incompetent and whiny, and canonically asleep at the wheel when it came to being the princess or queen. Like billy literally chastises her multiple times for not doing her job. The argument wouldn’t make sense in D1 because most of the things that are considered corrupt, morally reprehensible, and cruel (ie light walls, electric pylons, martial law, *killing the poor*) was instated by the lord regent directly after jessamine was killed. like it’s literally stated in the lore that lord regent Hiram burrows introduced the rat plague into dunwall to get rid of poor people. Jessamine didn’t have anything to do with it besides having a terrible political apparatus that conspired against her. I’m not and never was arguing that in D2 Emily was nearly as bad as Luca Abele or Delilah. Actually Luca abele sucked as a villain because he was barely a villain, he was just kind’ve a dumb hedonist. And Delilah was retreaded water and I would’ve been alright had her only appearance been in the KoD and Brigmore Witches dlc’s to be honest. But Emily is still better than both and I’m not arguing that. I don’t HATE d2’s story, it just falls flat from d1 for me. It’s still an incredibly fun game mechanically. I’m not a hater, I literally just redownloaded it on steam for the hundredth time to do another new game plus. This is probably my 5th cycle now. like I’ve unlocked all bone charms and runes by now lmao.
Dishonored 2 is my favorite fighting game. No lie, I really enjoy booting the game up, and trying to do a mostly-nonlethal assault playthrough using just my bare hands and the environment as much as possible. In generally, I think it's a wonderful platform for challenge runs. The game's myriad of options undermine and ultimately trivialize each other, but a challenge run where you select a few options to remove can really make the game's sandbox click.
having playing Dishonored after 2, i felt the complete opposite. Dishonored lacks the immersion of 2. exploration in the first game felt pretty one-note and too quick, whereas in Dishonored 2 all the environments feel fully realized. it really FEELS like i'm infiltrating buildings in Dishonored 2. in 1 it felt like i was getting past clear videogame obstacles in linear, scripted, predictable ways, even when player choice seems to be what devs were going for, and exploration was less thorough and thus less believable. Dishonored 1 just lacks the freedom that 2 affords the player. scaling my way to get to the Grand Palace for instance, i was blown away, and still am, by the scale of the simulation. the difference really reminds me of the new Hitman games compared to the older ones. why anyone would choose the older ones is beyond me.
Like a side entrance or something? I've always entered through the main entrance, then used the first switch and ran for the door to fool Jindosh into thinking it was a malfunction. After that you don't need to use any switches to reach him.
@@NeoLotex It's the same entrance. After pulling the lever, while the house is rearranging, it will create openings where you can enter easily. You have to do it while it's still moving and obviously before it stops.
@@SergioVarela I think I simply blinked through the upper window and then never touched the mechanism at all for the Silence trophy, on my no powers playthrough I pulled the lever and then crouch-walked towards the door in the back, went through it and then closed it behind me so the soldier wouldn't see me.
I also had the feeling of something missing from D2 that D1 had. And for a longest time I didn't know what it was. Yes, the stealth, powers, maps, etc... are different, and not as great, but for me, something was wrong with the atmosphere and the story. And then I realized that in D1 you have a connection with almost all of your targets built up from the beginning of the game. Campbell and Hiram Burrows fucked you over and tortured you, the Pendeltons have Emily with them, Lady Boyle, even though you don't know her from before, has a ton of puzzles, and lore around her, with one of the most special levels. The conspiracy members have been your comrades for the whole game, and Daud was the one who started the whole game. Sokolov is the only outlier, but you don't take him out, instead you get to speak to him later. In contrast, D2 has Hypatia, someone you only hear the same thing about over and over, and who, even if rescued, only has some filler lines and nothing to contribute to the story as a whole, Jindosh, who appears and vanishes in the story, filling the same spot as Sokolov in the first game, but without the actual interaction, Breanna, who you haven't even heard of before, and the Duke, who even though should be Delilah's big supporter has almost no previous lore outside of being a disappointment and an asshole. All of these targets are, rather than being parts of an alliance that you meticulously disassemble, just people who block your way to Delilah. The problem with D2's story is that it is disconnected from your actions, and the missions. Even the Outsider has basically no ties to it. In the first game he gave the powers to Daud, with which he pushed Dunwall into ruin, and with which Corvo has gotten an opportunity to restore it. But in D2, Delilah has basically nothing to do with the Outsider, and instead of getting immersed in the dark and mysterious ancient world of magic like in D1, the player only looks at these powers as tools to make stealth easier.
I 100% agree. Just goes to show how incredibly important story is, even in this type of game. The story is the reason you're doing all of this. It has to feel right and be engaging.
Even though the Outsider complains that Delilah is "part of me now and I don't like it", there is no back story to support that claim. Delilah just happened to get lucky in the Void, perhaps due to her Witchy-ness from D1, but there's no explanation or exploration of its connection to the Outsider.
I feel like the best plot in a Dishonored game is Knife of Dunwall and Brigmore Witches. It's less about a political power struggle with conspiracies and shady people, but more about Daud trying to either embrace the killer he's become or make up for the sins he's committed depending on your chaos level. It's not the most creative story, but it's certainly better than the predictability of D1's storyline.
Hey man hop on the hype of the hate train why would you EVER be happy you get to play as emily and corvo in the same game while they have a different set of powers giving us more content for the price of 35 idk why but it is just "missing the magic" huh
It's amazing how I disagree on almost every point that you hated. I guess that's art. I loved Karnaca more than I could Dunwell. A sunny whalepunk/ steampunk setting? Now that's rare. The first time you come out of the boat and see it in the distance with the background music was so visually striking. I loved the new void, when Corvo said it was endless cold and how the notes described it, the slight grey dark tone seemed more appropriate to me. The graphics was just as much water color as before, once with a generational leap in fidelity and better animations. Levels are more complex, more stealth options and for the first time you can complete the whole game without blink. It surpasses dishonored 1 in every single way for me.
in a stealth game though, the player should be attracted to dark and less visually prominent areas so they CAN HIDE. brightly lit objective paths are for other types of games where you aren't thinking in terms of stealth
Agreed. On my first playthrough my first reaction upon entering addermire. Was to immediately grab the bone-charm then hop up on the lamp. Seeing that the right area was empty I headed there first and grabbed the loot and blueprint. Upon circling back I noticed that dark hallway and teleported there cause there where shadows.
Why would people put stuff they want to keep safe in areas that are easier for a thief or an assassin to access? Plus Dishonored has ways of getting through well-lit areas without being detected anyway.
But dishonored's stealth isn't about light and dark. It has a small effect on your visibility but not enough to really make it worth it to seek out darker areas. It's about a normal person't territory and a teleporting assassin's territory. What do you instantly do when you enter a level? You look up to see if there's a spot you can blink to. Do you crouch walk along on the floor hiding behind cover or in the shadows? No, you either blink around above, or traverse through an alternate path. So most players don't often instinctively go to dark areas, they go to areas out of the enemy's territory, off or outside the ground level that regular people walk. So game designers get to use one of, if not the most important tools for guiding the player's attention: light. Brightly lit objects are exactly for the type of game dishonored is, a positioning-based stealth experience where everything is dependent on the divide between the enemy territory and your territory. and highlighting which territory is which is very important, thus guiding the player's eyes is very important, thus framing, thus using light, thus thus thus I'm not very good at writing.
I can't say I really agree with any of this. I come at this as someone who prefers the second game significantly more than the first so it might just be bias talking, nevertheless... The first point about framing strikes me as completely arbitrary. All this talk of poor signposting rather baffles me as it's a game where you ought to look around and explore, where the goal is to find your own way rather be shown the way. That's what the Clockwork Mansion offers, if you look for the least traveled path you'll find your way inside the ugly mechanical guts of it. It's not signposted because why would it be ? But it also had to be there because how could it not be ? Contrasted to that, saying that Dunwall Towers is unlike the Clockwork Mansion in that it makes your mind race with all the immediate possibility to navigate it and I just don't see that as a quality at all. All I hear is "the various ways around are obvious !" and I don't understand why that's supposed to be exciting at all. Which holds true to my experience with that first game. I know it's not necessarily the point but hearing that maps in D2 have none of the flair and character of D1's sounds completely backwards. One of the thing I'd praise about D2's maps is specifically how much more personality they have compared to the first one's. Specifically, they have their target's personality. The Addermire institute is an infested run down hospital, your target is a doctor with a murderous spit personality. Jindosh is a cruel genius, his mansion is an intricate maze designed for him to gloat at desperate intruders. Etc etc. Compared to the first game, the brothel is just a brothel. The Boyle mansion is just a mansion. I couldn't even tell you anything about Campbell's level to describe it, it's just a building. None of these levels add anything to their specific target or hold any significance to our understanding of Dunwall's current state and its leadership. The whole point about non-lethal combat devaluing non-lethal playthough is completely subjective so I'm not gonna make a case but I absolutely disagree, especially since on a purely technical level, nothing was lost in D2. Everything that stealth and non-lethal playstyle were in the first game are still here. That being said, tying it into the story seems completely pointless from my perspective given that the story has zero appeal but let's pretend it does, which path is the most likely to give you back your lost honor is debatable. I could just argue that an aggressive non-lethal playstyle is a far more overt display of your character taking the high-road compared to the ambiguity of non-lethal stealth and as such, a much more efficient way of signifying your honorable intent. Not that it matters much since the games don't really take it into account altho I wish they did. Agressive non-lethal is basically playing as Batman and it's definitely my favourite playstyle (which obviously doesn't work in D1), it strikes the proper balance between lethal, which I find too easy, and pure stealth, which tends to be too slow for my taste. Surprise surprise, I also disagree with how the games handle their runes and stuff. Instead of being tiny challenges on the way to your objectives, runes have become objectives in & out of themselves, forcing you to explore the map further if you want them. Which I appreciate far more, because I like those levels, I like exploring and in general, runes are never the sole reward for finding them, you find alternate path to your other objectives on the way, money, blueprints and all sort of world-building touches. So I don't think you're wrong for feeling the way you do by any mean but I hold the exact opposite opinions. Dishonored 1 is a game I was greatly disappointed by. It's obvious and straightforward, its allowances for multiple playstyle are very imbalanced despite the game verbally encouraging you to "play your way !", it's monotone in its delivery of its world and story. Dishonored 2 improves much of that in ways that actually had me engaged. Bigger and better themed levels with less obvious pathways makes for more satisfying exploration. Addition to your abilities makes for a wider range of playstyle and thus better opportunity to "play your way !" Story still sucks but it's better presented through better targets and protagonists so it doesn't feel as monotonous even if there technically aren't as many beats to the story as the first one.
Amazingly well said. I'm not very picky about stories so I'm the 1% that thought the plot was great but other than that, you echoed my problems with this video perfectly.
This is very well written, but i dissagree in a few ways For me the atmosphere is D2 is a step down in a lot of ways, the blood flys and the overal bright look never really sat with me, even with dishonored being another game to come out with a drab and dark artstyle, i always thought it was the peak of that kinda style I will agree that the level design is (mostly) a step up in 2, with the clock work mansion and the level after the dust district (its name evades me) being highlights of the entire series However another problem i have with the game is the combat, compared to 1 it feels rather clunky and quite unresponsive,
@@Crazydarkside I like the new bright and contrasty look but that's probably because I prefer that look in general. For example, I didn't like GTA 4's gloomy atmosphere as much as GTA 5's bright representation of Los Santos. I do however, agree with the combat. Combat in D2 just isn't as fluid as D1 which is sad considering how much of a step-up the new animations are.
Hmm I agree with both of you, I think the scope of 2 is monumental in a way d1 could not be, namely how designed the world is, to cut a long explanation short this results in environmental ‘lures’ being much harder to implement. Why is this a problem? It effects pacing of story beats, along with the frequency of critical information being communicated to or resolved by the player, because at its core dishonoured is a game about presenting options and letting the player find a solution d2s approach is messy, why? Well let’s take portal for example -the most important thing a level in portal can do is present the player with all the pieces of the puzzle as fast as possible, then let the player figure out the solution because that’s where the fun is, the rat dens are side content that rewards players engaging on a bit deeper level with the environments. In d2 bone charm locations have been turned into cameos in there own rights dragging the players attention away from the primary objective. Is this bad? No, not necessarily but also isn’t as tight as d1 but incredible from a technical perspective that this game even exists and I mean technical in every sense, artistically, coding and game design. Everything has been pushed thurther I don’t think any other studio would attempt what arkane did. As an artist I think perhaps the best metaphor I can come up with is if you focus on the detail too much you loose the big picture..... doesn’t stop you admiring the immense amount of pure love attention and skill put in though.
for me, dishonoured 2 will remain my favourate game in the series, primarily becouse of how strong its world-building & lore is. Although dishonoured established the world very well, it is expanded upon brillantly in dishonoured 2 imo.
The one point I disagree on is your assessment of the Addermire Institute. I think it was done wonderfully, and what it stands for is a very rare message--a scary research hospital, made scary not by possession or haunting, but neglect.
I finished D2 a few weeks ago, went back to D1 and was baffled to see there was no jump knock-out :l i just kept falling on top of this guard hahaha, i love D1 more for it's story elements, but maps, visuals, special enemies which actually feel dangerous, gameplay are top notch in D2, at least for me haha
While your analysis is very well organized and scripted and I do appreciate the tremendous effort you have put into this, some of the levels in this game ae pure textbook-style masterpieces - perfect examples on how game design in adventure/exploration games should be. The Clockwork Mansion and A Crack in the Slab could both go down in game history as two of the most intelligently designed levels ever. The Good Doctor also introduces another aspect that we have not seen as the main focus of the game - horror. Exploring an abandoned medical facility in its own must have been pretty scary to many Dishonored players, myself included. The Dust District also might be the one level where you have the most choices in both Dishonored 1 and 2. I do agree that the game might have been longer, I personally thought it would be so nice to have 1-2 extra levels as some other people mentioned and the ending cinematics were lackluster but other than that, I believe that this game and the lore is very well designed.
just keep in mind that dishonored 2 was launched with a horrible optimization, I guess he is referring to this. As time went by they released updates fixing these errors.
@@gimnasiayvino i played it at launch (i didnt get to update it for the first year since i didnt have internet for a long time) and didnt have frame rate issues for majority of the game.
I don't understand your argument about the fast paced non lethal playstyle. You yourself said the game benefits from more options. I've done a ghost low chaos run without using fast paced non lethal moves and the level design totally allows that, you can play the entire game the exact same way you would play the first game and you don't feel for a second that the game isn't meant to be played that way. I just don't understand why the new moves and options are a bad addition to the game if they're totally optional and you can avoid using them if they don't fit your playstyle.
"Avoiding using them" means the player has to make an arbitrary rule outside of the game's logic to make their experience more challenging. He thinks the game not being designed as such makes it inherently worse.
i feel this way exactly. I played on hard mode, so just slide bonking a group of guards wasnt an option for me, so i had to go lethal to get out of sticky situations. Drop knockouts were also a welcome edition for me because it meant i didnt have to spend 5 seconds holding a block button just to k.o someone. the higher perception on hard also meant i had to play slower and plan out my actions since guards could see me much more easily. most of his problems with the combat can be solved by playing on hard mode.
Each to his own I suppose. I really feel that Dishonored 2 is objectively better. The gameplay is way better with a lot more moves, the AI feels fun to play against due to its intelligence and it has many different possibilities (in power and different crossbow bolts for example). I replayed it very recently and most problems really have multiple solutions. I of course have my own problems with it, but the fact that I have none of them in common with you really shows that different players value different things. The point you had about the side objectives being the main focus of each level is what I love about it personally. I can never just go through a level, I have to explore every corner, visit every building and read each note. I feel like I'm really in a world, not just a level. You would have no reason to go to many of the side paths if you only care about the optimal path. And I mean it, even when I go in for a "main objective only play though" I still visit everything, I actually can't help it. That is why bone charms and runes make sense to me. They are a reminder that you should perhaps explore over here too. And, in doing so, you will very likely stumble across them. If you seemingly can't get to something try to understand the geometri, that's the puzzle. And when it comes to sign posts I don't really mind things being obscure. It feels more organic and rewarding that you have look around yourself. You have arrived at a strange new location. You are only given a direction and you have to figure out the details yourself. I like trial and error gameplay. You struggle with going through a certain path? Perhaps look around and see if there is somewhere else to go, it even says so in the tips. That's just my opinion THOUGH
I love dishonored 2. I prefer it to dishonored 1 but I had never considered your point of view until today. I disagree but I understand and appreciate your point of view with everything except for the clockwork mansion. The lack of sight lines and the mystery of all of the unseen avenues to take is entirely the point. You've had almost two full games to experience all the different ways a mission can be accomplished to this point. Not being immediately drawn to how everything works is the fun of figuring out that level.
Interesting video. I like Dishonored 2 way more than the first game (I love them both). I'd even consider Dishonored 2 the best game of the 2010s. Level design is absolutely amazing, the exploration is some of the best I've ever seen, levels are huge, etc. Gameplay wise it's got some of the best levels ever made.
@Merciless Freak what? The levels are huge and open and filled with little discoveries. They have the best level design in any commercially released game of the 2010s.
When I first played D1 when it came out, I thought it was good but didn't really reach its potential. When I played D2, I was home. It was the Dishonored experience I always wanted. I did a replay of the first one after completing D2 several times, and my opinion didn't change. D1 is a great introduction to this wonderful world, but D2 is the game that finally delivers.
In the first game I went looking at notes, books, listening to audio logs, eavesdropping on conversations, anything with extra information to add to the lore the game hands over to you in the main storyline and DLC so I could better appreciate what I was given. It was a habit done out of love that was driven by a hunger to get to know the setting the player is put in because I wanted to look in every nook and cranny. I had fun not leaving an inch of the city unchecked. It felt like a delicious meal I ate a bit too fast because it was so good and left me craving for more. Dishonored 2 made that kind of exploration feel like a chore just to get the same feeling I got in Dunwall that I wanted with Karnaca. Yes the city looked lived in but it didn't feel that way because the fat had been trimmed from the steak.
2:00 Gotta love those accidental epic moments like these. In Dishonored 2, I actually had a moment when I snuck up on a guard and choked him out that his buddy walked in on me. My reaction? Took the body of the guard I just choked out and tossed it at the other guard to knock him off balance. I lopped off his head shortly after. Montage worthy and definitely not something that I could easily recreate.
I completely agree with the artifacts becoming the main focus of each level. I'd usually spend so long on making sure I got all the artifacts that I forgot why I was even there or what the mission was.
I recognize the severe difference in level design. I'd say royal palace feels like a D1 map, and Brigmore Manor feels like a D2 map. But it's not even CLOSE to what bothered me. The writing. Hands down. Every single villain tries its damnest to pretend to be be deep and 3 dimensional, when they have nothing to back it up whatsoever. The plot of the missions is thusly: 1: escape delilah. Dispose of new villain. 2: go after new villain who has not been characterized in any way. You know where they are for no reason. 3: actually confront this villain and deal with them immediately. Accidentally left-in dialogue where corvo/emily claims the duke tricked grim alex into taking the serum, which isn't true in the final build of the game. 4: go after kirin jindosh to get sokolov. Also deal with him so he can't make an army of clockworks, even though the mission makes it extremely clear that he can't do this because each one costs more than a typical noble has in the bank. Kill him anyway. End mission has delilah info dump her sob story on us. The outsider and sokolov also chip in and claim delilah has suffered more than anyone, even if talking to emily who's been through all the same things, and more without becoming a monster. 5: go after a new villain who we didn't know even existed until 3 seconds ago, and who is no threat to us. Do this because we need to know how to kill delilah. Kill new villain anyway after she has like 3 sentences of dialogue. 6: still trying to find solution to killing delilah. 7: still trying to figure out delilah's immortality 8: finally going after source of delilah's immortality. Villain is funny hoohoo heehee man. 9: going after delilah. Delilah is conveniently beaten because she uses her asspull magic to just take over the world, writes a book explaining exactly how to beat her, leaves it out in the open, then just sits down like "i hope nobody looks at my plans while I'm sleeping." Then the nonlethal kill sends her to paradise because god forbid precious delilah be acknowledged as a horrible person and character for a microsecond. Especially when her only motivation is "bad things happened to me, so now I hurt innocent people.". She also doesn't take away your powers when you're killing her, even though she can. Fin: corvo/emily forgot to look for a way to save the one who's petrified in stone, so the stone curse just lifts when they touch the statue, which they could have done in mission 1. ALL this I can forgive. The real kicker was the karma system, which to their credit, they did remove in the game after dishonored 2. What is the moral of the story that is constantly told to us throughout the game? If you have great power over others, it's your duty to be the one to intervene and protect the world from bad people. The game constantly reminds us that corvo and emily slacked off and thus allowed bad people like delilah to run amock and hurt their citizens. Now. I challenge you to do this: do mission 1 and only kill the guy that tries to murder the newspaper printer, since the guy can easily come back to try again if he lives. Even let ramses live. Now, on mission 2, use the heart on every person you see. I've played through the game ten times and counting and done this at the start of each playthrough. Every. Single. Time. At least 60% of the people in the first level are homicidal. All 10 times. In a game that tells you that it's your responsibility to stop people who hurt others. In a game that turns your character into a monster if you kill 20% of your enemies or more. It gets worse. In the low chaos runs, corvo and emily defend the seven strictures when you inspect them, but in high chaos, corvo suggests wiping them out. I have news for you if you think this inclusion is justified. Do you know how the overseers get their recruits? They annually kidnap several innocent children from the city, march them outside the city, keep some, and execute the rest. Every year, these people mass murder children in attempt to breed people to be more devout. That's what those underground cages are for in the abbey in dishonored 1. That's what that note from an overseer's parents was about in the backyard level. Every single overseer you spare constantly participates in a ritual that involves the wholesale murder of children.
Good points. Attempting to boil something as complex, personal and sometimes subjective as morality into a simple "No kill=good, Kill=bad" system will always fail. It's ironic the whole point of an immersive sim is to build a world that reacts as wide a range of possibilities as possible, yet many of them (specifically Dishonored series) impose artificial consequences on top of the in-game consequences, which should take precedence. Imagine if instead of a good/bad ending and silly morality system stuff (like increasingly-psychotic dialogue on high chaos playthroughs) the game simply provided actual in-game consequences to whatever you chose to do. There are hints of this in the games (weeper/rat count in D1 and bloodfly count in D2) but there is so much more potential.
@@gaiusfulmen Exactly! They already do this a little bit with things like campbell becoming a weeper if spared, or timsh ending up in jail if he gets arrested. I could see a "system" of chaos being good if it were more like a plague spread system. So usually killing someone and leaving the body out would spread plague unless you disintigrated the body or fed it to slaughterfish. While killing weepers or someone like the brothel madame would lower the spread of plague. Other than that, there's really no use for a chaos meter at the end of a mission.
D2 was good, but I feel like it needed 1 or 2 more levels. Your point about Feng shui is extremely obvious in DOTO’s Bank heist level. I feel like if they gave it 6 more months of development it would have been so much better.
Mr. Obunga I think you’re forgetting all the launch day bugs and lack of playability on PC for like 2 months. What we have today wouldn’t have been much better but the game would have been received much better
Mr. Obunga I made 2 points. That it needed 1 or 2 more levels and that 6 more months would have made it way better. With 6 more months it would have given them time to bug test, do more okay testing, etc.... to improve the consoles and make the pc version actually useable.
Mr. Obunga ok? But they didn’t have “better people” just like they didn’t have 6 extra months. 2 different things can be true, nothing we’ve said is mutually exclusive.
That 11 second clip from Kaldwin's Bridge in Dishonored that showcased throwing Sokolov off the top, stopping time and grabbing him, blew my mind. I've played the game multiple times, and on my most recent playthrough, went straight to the roof and took out Sokolov first, then brought him through the rest of the place. Seeing that the game allows you so much freedom that you can throw a man to what would be his death, then simply using a combination of powers it provides you to not only save him, but also avoid a large chunk of level and make succeeding at stealth easier because of it astounds me.
Agreed. The first game is special but it honestly feels constraining to play considering how much more freedom dishonored 2 allows. Dishonored 1 gives you all these powers but basically punishes you into a bad ending for using them. Dishonored 2 changes that around by tuning them all out to work interchangeably with non-lethal play styles, and also allows players to get spotted by guards and engage in fights without actually killing anyone. Dishonored 1 did not have that
@@Bilboswaggins2077 That may be true but Dishonored 2 severely limits you in the way you deal with your targets, especially lethally. Most Targets such as the good doctor or even Jindosh are always in the same room. Why Dishonored 2 allows you far more freedom in level traversal, and in dealing with regular enemies but your encounter with the target itself, which constituted the climax of a level in the first game is usually a binary choice. You either Stab/Shoot/Filet-Mignon them in the same spot they always are in, (exception being the Grand Palace) or you do the scripted non-lethal route. In Dishonored 1 the targets were mobile and you could plot the perfect way to kill em based on their location, which was either a variable because they moved or it was reshuffled (Pendleton brothers) with every playthrough. This in turn let to an immense amount of replayability because depending on how you want to kill them, everything surrounding that factor changes as well, from guards you may encounter to routes you take. They tied in with the level you were playing. In the sequel, you have roughly a dozen new ways to off em, but whats the point when they are always sitting at the same damn desk? In 3 missions your target is actually alone in their room, so the rest of the level setup is actually irrelevant, because once you reach their room, its just you and them.
it feels like the presentation is different. like a small change that makes a big difference. there was something really cool about the roof tops in D1 that isnt there in D2. it doesnt detract that much from the game though and i personally think D2 is better
They completely changed the engine and I think that a has a huge effect on how it feels D1s engine felt so smooth D2 feels clunky when using powers often.
Leadhead, perhaps a parallel term to describe what you want would be 'Blocking' or 'Scene Composition, aside from 'Framing'. Its used a lot in cinema and arquitetural studies, and it describes the order and position of people and objects in a particular scene, with the objective of reaching the most harmonic alignment between itens. Its what makes memorable landmarks easy to recognize.
True, something was off in second game. That's what it was. Still a great game tho, especially with no powers run. And I made it my first run and in "if it happened, it happened" style without reloading if I failed stealth. No regrets.
I love you videos man and I’ve been going through your channel watching a bunch of them. I see the one with the shot of you driving, talking about framing and see the city that I live in. :) cool moment
You have a lot of like very contradictory points that basically boils down to 'i don't like dishonored 2 as much as dishonored 1 because the game gives me more options'. Which is the beauty of dishonored 2 over dishonored 1, which is a shame, because I love dishonored, but I can't go back and play it as much because once you get used to being able to alert eight or nine guards and having options besides "use sleep darts" or "run away" you just can't go back unless you wanna roll high chaos (also no matter how good Slackjaw is, it doesn't compare with not having Garret, Murder Dad). It makes Corvo feel like the master swordsman who he is supposed to be, and it makes emily feel like corvo has been teaching her how to fight for the past twelve years. And going back to not having it feels... wrong. I personally don't really have a problem with the framing or highlighting of routes, and frankly when you talk about this you sound like the tester who is the reason the game puts glaring lights on something and has a character tell you about it, twice. I find the maps generally intuitive and interesting, and when they aren't, I feel rewarded for exploring those maps. This is the true spice that makes the clockwork mansion absolute perfection. You have a ton of ways through the mansion, playing with rooms, slipping between the walls, and pouncing out like Murder Batman to to break jindosh''s toys so you can pelt him in the face with them later. Or sick his toys on him and each other and his guards. It's an absolute joy of a level, and so much so, I forget that the Aventa district is part of the same level. And the best part is that the Clockwork Mansion is a logical, geometrically real building. It's parts fit together and come apart and go away, and there's no tricks! It all makes logical sense, and you can understand how each room works and from this, intuit where the secret areas are on your own, so finding them becomes that much more rewarding. This works in Addermire too, imo, it's a little bit funky of a place until you figure out the geometry, but its the beginning of a mystery, and as a level, it works really well for that. It works both as a level, and as a metaphor for you figuring out the mystery of the crown killer and Grim Alex. The part I don't get the most is how you complain about how rewarding a self limited run is, and then complain that the game gives you too many options. You can still self limit yourself, the game takes great pains to let you do this too. Dishonored is built on freedom and exploration, and the freedom to do that exploration, and Dishonored 2 excels at this. yes, some bone charms or runes are hidden behind an morass of bloodflies a few times, but so what? You're in some trashed apartment building, finding the way through is part of the joy. It's not like you're just walking down a hallway pointlessly filled with balloons, it's a three dimensional puzzle. It's filled with bloodflies, not cazadores. Your biggest complaint seems to be 'more options and more level and less linearity' and I can't think of a single thing I want MORE from dishonored or any other of looking glass's bastard children.
Yup agree with you especially with a no powers run the thrill of needing to run away as fast as you can from guards instead of just blinking out of there is exhilarating
My biggest problem with Dishonored 2, which actually started back in the Brigmore Witches, is how often you're encountering witches and other special enemies with powers rivaling your own. It counteracts how uniquely gifted you're supposed to feel. In the original Dishonored, you've been gifted mystical magic powers through a connection to the void, a mysterious realm that many people don't even believe to be real. The most tangible presence of the void in the regular world is the Overseers, and they're presented as religious zealots balancing the fine line between heroic protectors and fanatic cultists of their own. They're often viewed as crazies preaching about wive's tales, and only you know how right they actually are. Encountering other characters with the power of the void makes you feel less special. The original game did it well by keeping these encounters scarce. For example, Granny Rags is built up as an old woman on the fritz, but you slowly discover her special connection to the Outsider and it actually has the opposite effect: it makes the void seem even more foreign and dangerous. At first, Delilah is also special because she's the only other character you meet that can rival you, but you soon find yourself combatting leagues of her witches, all tapping into the void in similar ways to you. All of a sudden, you don't feel very unique anymore, and neither does Delilah. In a slow transition from the DLCs to the sequel (and especially Dishonored 2's standalone DLC), the void becomes a hard magic system and way less mysterious and cool.
This, man. This is such a big part of what is wrong with this game. I recently picked it back up (never finished it) and I just cannot get into it. Thank you for putting it into words
But the assassins are in about as many missions as the witches. They also had the void connection. I felt it fit in, even though i prefered the assassins myself.
@@patrickhowell2502 well the assassins rarely do anything more than blink, which is generally established to be the most basic power. The witches are regularly doing crazy things that you can't like screaming out bullets
i agree that dishonored 2 feels a lot different than 1, just like you said, it's like something is missing. i tried to rationalize it to myself, and i think: 1. that in 1 you spent a lot of time on highground which was the safest place for the 95% of any mission including dlc's, you were rarely blocked in such a way you couldn't climb over it, the game in general was divided in highground and lowground, while in 2 there are lot more situations when you could be spotted balancing on a street lamp. in 2, levels become a lot more multileveled. this whole point could just be about different architecture of Karnaca, which looks more like Saints-Petersburg, but i remember having the same feeling even in Dunwall sections. 2. in 1 missions felt a lot shorter than 2 and the maps were much smaller and less complex, while in 2 the missions are longer and maps are larger and more complex 3. it's my personal beef but i just dont like the style of menus where each button has its own font and everything is so spiny geez
2:59 to be fair, can you blame arkane? In my opinion, dishonored 1 is, together with doom eternal, the only game I consider perfectly designed. It's not even close to my favorite game, but it is designed so that everything can be experimented with.
I haven't watched this video yet, but I love this series and want to talk about what I think makes 2 worse than 1. From a gameplay and graphics perspective, 2 blows 1 out of the stratosphere. The visuals and additions to gameplay are insane. From a game design perspective, while 2 is still good (and at some places absolutely phenomenal), overall, I think the design of the locations doesn't possess the charm of the original because every location feels too cluttered and claustrophobic. There aren't large expanses of free space that can be traversed through a hundred different means, there is just a long hallway with different levels to it. The sequel lacked a sense of the 'sandbox' freedom in its level design which I feel is a detriment to how the core mechanics of the game work. And on a second note, the game also doesn't have the small loveable memorable things in it like the first game. Where are the guards spouting the same 6 stupid lines over and over again that everyone puts in comments of a dishonored video, which always gets me to laugh. "Shall we gather for Whiskey and Cigars, tonight?" "Indeed. I believe so." "Never doubt it." "Blow off, Choffer!" These lines from the guards were great, but you don't get anything like that when playing the sequel. That's a bit of heart and charm I feel the sequel missed and it is a shame. The game is still phenomenal tho.
So coincidentally, I just finished my own Max difficulty, Clean Hands, Ghost, No Powers run, playing as Emily, and I LOVED it. You see, the sprawling level design that made little sense with blink and other movement powers was far more logical when i had to take routes a human being could manage. It made me think a LOT, whereas with powers i just sort of reacted, and played through gut instinct. The clockwork mansion was quirky, and it's main gimmick of room changes was interesting, but i agree that the puzzle of locating runes and bonecharms through it was tough. The main thing to take away is that I finished the powers run in under 30 hours, but the non powers run took me 60! I had a lot more fun limited by lack of powers than when i had the easy option. Time for me to go get my remaining 10 steam achievements :P
I agree with most your points other than the level framework and the artifact collecting which also happened to be your main point xD I think the bigger worlds and obscure hidden secrets encourage exploring the level design which I think is great
It could just be that you had expectations of 2 because you love 1 so much thus when it did not exactly fit what you wanted you felt disappointment. I think people often forget the part they play in there enjoyment of a game, book or movie. For example I didn't like botw when I first played it due to be being depressed at the time but when I played it again after I had less stress I enjoyed it much more. There were other parts to play aswell such as that it is quite open ended and I don't usually like that but the second time though I had an idea of what I was ment to do. But I think a large part of it was the depression.
I think thats a very true statement. I myself am biased, but the other way around. I like Dishonored 2 better for a couple of reasons. First of, I played D2 first. It was my introduction to the world, and I felt as though D2 set up a very mystical and creepy world with the dark, fragmented Void and the indifferent Outsider, an entity that moved around the Void with a fluidity as if he had total control over not only himself but the world he inhabited. A creepiness I didn't feel with the brightly coloured void and stiff outsider from D1 (of course, a limitation of the time. D1 is very much so a game of its time). Second, because Serkonos feels like home to me. I live in a tropical country, one of the oldest cities in Brazil. The brightly coloured Karnaca, with its blocky buildings and breathing, living shores is what the pier in my town looks like, so I felt immediately connected. And the last reason I felt more connected to Dishonored 2 is because I was a bit taken back with the lack of some of the mechanics in D1, like the drop knock out, the run/slide/kick to the throat... So yeah, for different reasons, I am biased towards D2
One thing I think was missing was the focus on the plague and it being dark. Through storytelling and environment. There was just this feeling of dread and I’m sure we all got the worst ending possible when we went in blind. You just couldn’t help doing bad things in a falling city
yeah, i just finished 1, Daud’s dlcs, and 2 for the first time over the past week, and I think that’s what was missing. I liked all three but 1 and especially Daud’s first dlc really had a hopeless vibe and i could feel the plague permeating everything around me, but 2 was missing that feeling of depression
@@geooooooooorge precisely. And the unique enemy types really brought the horrors to light. It’s a sad game to be sure but an amazing one with probably the best world building I’ve ever seen
I think arkane has made masterpieces: prey dishonored dishonored 2 and dishonored doto. They are all flawed in different ways but they are masterpieces in a way I can’t explain
I understand what you're saying but personally I felt more magic, it was different. I was so enamored with this game I was hooked for a long time. I rank it in my top 5 games with the first in my top 10. Love this game always.
Just to add a different point of view: I had quite the opposite experience with these games. To start with, I played both games originally on console (and dishonored 2 ran smoothly for me, because i was late to the party). I never played any of the thief games and I never really got into dishonored one. For all its incredible atmosphere and powers, I constantly felt limited. I don't think that difficulty is a one to one with enjoyment in this franchise. Certainly I prefer the limitation of a nonlethal run, but dishonored one limits the player in a variety of ways that i just didn't experience. The lack of a nonlethal takedown from above is one of these (i would argue its pretty much the only significant change in nonlethality for a stealth run of the game). Dishonored one is full of places where you go to the high ground only to have to drop back down again to take out an enemy. Or where you can explore incredible side paths but ultimately the main story is on a relatively linear line through the level (especially when compared to dishonored 2). I think the differences between these games can be exemplified by their standout levels. Dishonored one to me is defined by the Boyle Party level. The world is moody and atmospheric, the nonlethal options are ironic and morally dubious at best. Themes of class issues that you pointed out in your previous dishonored video are pervasive. But even so you are relatively limited. There's essentially one way into the Boyle estate and you will go through it at some point. You can explore the downstairs of the party all you like but eventually you're going to have to either kill everybody or go read diaries upstairs. A nonlethal run through that level is inevitably: ground floor, second floor, basement. I think this is thematically appropriate for the game. Corvo sees problems and solutions. Hes trained and knows what hes doing, so the world is quite linear to him, only opened up by his newfound powers. Dishonored 2 to me isn't defined by the addermire institute (though fun its the weakpoint of the game in terms of level design). Instead its defined by the clockwork mansion. Emily sees options in everything (and i'm going to stick to emily here because shes narratively the more logical choice for dishonored 2, corvo mainly being present for fans of the first game and thief voice). Shes new to this world and this city and not only is everything very different from dunwall and her life experience, shes not quite sure how to move forward. Traversal is a task in the second game in a way it wasn't in the first. The mansion changes and you don't quite know what to do. It takes time to get a footing and understand where you are. But once you understand what's going on, Emily is unstoppable in ways dishonored 1 corvo never was (especially if you save-scum yourself some bone charms). The challenge isn't in the puzzle of a small scale encounter but in the larger scale question of how each area works. Thematically I think dishonored 1 is the stronger game, but for all its narrative prowess, the world is just too small to ever encompass the world that I wanted to explore as a player. Dishonored 2 fixed that with style. I think Clockwork Mansion may be the best level design in any game I've ever played and perhaps ever will. Dishonored 1 tries to be a choose your own adventure, but dishonored 2 builds a world and then lets you explore. My first time playing dishonored 2 I played as emily and skimmed the books so badly that I missed that she had a boyfriend (a fact which is apparent within the first 20 minutes of the first level). Despite that I never felt that the game was narratively weak because frankly I didn't care about the individual characters the game was throwing at me, I cared about the larger world I could explore and all the microcosms I could find, like the Howlers willing to kill for a meal behind the carriage station in the aventa district.
TBH the first game doesn't really need a non lethal takedown since it's so easy to run through the entire game without ever touching the ground. I remember being so disappointed when in my first playthrough (on hard) I reached the end with no kills without any effort. I had to go back and kill everyone to see the bad ending. A non lethal takedown would make the game even more easy, but would be pointless for an "efficient" run.
Honestly I feel like the clockwork mansion is overrated. It felt the most linear out of any of the levels and there weren't even that many changes that could be made past the first area. I'd say the highlight was with the time piece.
Perfectly said. I’ve beat Dishonored 1 multiple times and it’s undoubtably in my top 5 favorite games ever. I’ve attempted beating 2 twice and just never have. I’m not able to say why. The gameplay is still smooth, level design is good, and on paper 2 seems like a solid improvement on 1, but there was just something that put me off.
Ironically dishonored 2 got me back into dishonored 1 by making me realize exactly what the original had that it was missing. I've played a decent amount of both (not nearly several hundred hours but close to a hundred in each) and dishonored 2 frustrates me more every time I play it because it's not a bad game, au contraire it's on the verge of greatness. But it's not there, and the more you look at it the more you see how painfully close it is and the more frustrating it gets. Many individual elements of dishonored 2 are frankly incredible and top quality for the series and for immersive sims in general, but what it lacks is the glue that makes these parts greater than their whole. That's it I suppose. Dishonored 2 is simply the sum of it's (good) parts whereas Dishonored 1 is FAR more than the sum of it's parts.
Can't say I agree at all. Dishonored 2 is far more creative, has sharper mechanics in every way that matters (people keep pointing to the cumbersome "oh you can duck under sword swings woaaaah" thing from Dishonored 1 but that's extremely hard to pull off and was never Arkane's intent, so it's not fair to criticise D2 for it) and your issues with the levels being far larger and more intricate is completely subjective, because a lot of us actually prefer them as opposed to Dishonored's relatively constrained levels. But I'll give you credit for A) not using the tiresome "Karnaca isn't as cool as Dunwall!!!" argument everyone makes, as if Dunwall is the only Victorian setting in gaming, and B) for eloquently putting your thoughts into words without disrespecting either the fans who enjoy D2 or Arkane themselves. Good video. (*cough* Prey is Arkane's best game anyways *cough*)
My big problem was that every ending to D1 was unique and cool and it feels like a massive cop out to just pick the good ending to D1 and make a sequel to that
Karnaca is absolutely beautiful. It's an incredible feeling going from the dark Dunwall atmosphere to the exotic, foreign environments in Karnaca. But yeah, I feel that a lot of people decide which game they say is better basing it too much on which city they liked more
I definitely agree with the corridor analogy, D1 definitely felt like a corridor, you always had a "straight" path towards your objective, while in D2 i always got the feeling of a more "twisty" level, like the devs got a D1 level and bent it
9:37 Haha! That background culling of the cliff face. The Void Engine is pretty good, but for whatever reason it struggles to appropriately cull unused assets.
Great essay, Leadhead. I felt like D2 improved on the mechanics of the game in pretty much every single way, but somehow something was missing. My main complaints were simply that I didn't like the setting as much, and I didn't care at all about Delilah (we had already taken care of her as Daud), and the assassination targets weren't very interesting (with the exception of Jindosh) so the story just felt bland. The environments in D2 were more detailed and full but somehow felt less lived in. Maybe the developers lost the script while making everything high res. In defence of the level design: I agree with your gripes about the bloodflies and feeling like a collector, but honestly, some levels in D2 were the best I've ever seen. The Jindosh mansion and the crack in the slab mission were breathtaking. And in DOTO I absolutely loved the bank heist. It was so satisfying.
This was really well explained and well done. This far better explains why I dislike D2, as opposed to me just screaming into the Void about how they butchered The Outsider's character. Which, to be fair, they absolutely did. But there is so much more that it's lacking in comparison to the original Dishonored, and you nailed it.
These games make killing so much fun I've never been able to do a low chaos run, I tend to go for the complete genocide run where I kill everyone I physically am able to
I didn't think of these points at all and played through all 5 games and equally enjoyed them. After watching this video I realised how different the stories were related to you as the main character. The other points yes I disagree, but of course, to each their own. The only thing I felt was different between 1 and 2 was that 1 gave me headaches if I played for more than an hour (and this is with FOV changes). I have spent a total of nearly 600 hours playing these games. I felt that I could explore better in D2, a for eg. Going to Jindosh using a hidden path, or the crack in the slab mission, or in the good doctor, where instead of going straight through, I went on the "first roof" from the right side of the entrance. D1 did annoy me due to some quirks.
Great video, Thank you for talking about the framing of levels, Felt it but never really knew how to put it into words. Another thing I really dislike about dishonored 2's art style is that it went for a more realistic take rather the oil painted aesthetic of the original. I think why it feels this way to me is because Dishonored 1's World and geometry is made of paint - If you look at any surface in the game you can clearly see the many block colors of oil paint, all combined to created a gritty, grimy surface texture and in that paint you can see the different colors smudge together, the places where it was obviously dabbed on with a brush, you can see the brush strokes and it really does feel like this world was made with a brush and canvas, not a computer. Next time you play Dishonored, just put your nose right up against a wall, door or crate and see the texture, then do the same in D2 and see the more generic, realistic ones. This is something I see a lot in Arkanes games since Dishonored, and I really miss the oil painting aestetic which has been replaced by one much more focused on stylized realism.
This is a wonderful video with some great insights. I've felt the same way about D2 for a while now, so I appreciate the "new" direction to embrace. There're a few more no-powers runs in my near future! Thanks.
Good critique. You nailed how annoying it is to hunt down runes and bonecharms in 2, whereas in 1 it was fun exploration. If you were a negative guy, you could have elaborated more on how they messed up in many other areas, but you politely touched on them and moved on. Props.
I think the point of the runes and bonecharms in D2 was to force you to explore the new big levels. I would have preferred DOTO's approach of giving you small sidequests instead, but, sigh, hunting collectibles is what gaming has become nowadays.
@@veselinnedkov643 honestly it had the opposite effect on my first playthrough. I found myself not caring enough about runes to bother searching for the entrance to addermire’s basement, and in the more complicated levels like the clockwork mansion, I said “fuck that shit” and didn’t look for any runes at all.
@@mr.cup6yearsago211 d2 didn't have all those loading screens that separated the runes which is the big reason I think atleast. And that rune under addermire is literally the only one I cannot find for the life of me and I have like 10 playthroughs.
@@hankhill8344 to my understanding, to get that rune you need to get up on top of the elevator, and destroy the cables so that it crashes down into the basement. Yeah, it’s fucking stupid.
So I was accidentally a genius and ended up playing Dishonored 2 before Dishonored 1, thanks to D2 having a demo on PS4 that took you all the way to the Addermire Instititute. Honestly, I feel like I like D2 slightly more as a set of unique challenges, but I like D1 more as a game. Moment to Moment gameplay versus the whole experience, I suppose.
I completely agree with you.For some reason I can't remember anything of note besides the pretty aesthetics of the second game but I remember every single part of the maps of the first one.
nailed it. just played dishonored 2 and I was intimidated by the massive amount of bone charms and runes I'd have to spend time getting. it actually made me a bit annoyed because of how much I'd have to run around trying to find them instead of just picking them up on my way to the main mission.
I think this is the video i disagree with you most on. The clockwork mansion alone elevates 2 above 1. Not to mention crack in the slab. Dishonored 1 doesn't play with the players abilities like these 2 levels do.
These two levels do nothing with the player's abilities. They're a technical marvel, but Crack in the Slab even takes away your powers, severely limiting your character. And while these two levels are stand outs, so are Lady Boyle's Last Party and The Flooded District, not even mentioning the Daud DLC's.
@pastichiorocker nah they both test the abilities of the player. Crack in the slab precisely because it takes away your powers making you rely on stealth skills (and the other power it grants you) and clockwork mansion is generally regarded as one of the harder dishonored levels. They both test the players abilities to use the enviornment to their advantage. CWM by altering it, CITS by jumping back and forth through time.
Reading through comments it amazes me how good of an audience you have. I expected to see people fight each other over opinions, but here people seem to accept other opinions and it's great. I personally love D1 to the point of having an outsider's mark tattoo on my forearm (I changed it a little to fit it better). I love every mission of it and I feel D2 didn't capture ""something"" that I like about D1 so much. At least, I felt that, now I know what exactly D2 did worse. I still love both games and intend of beating them in every playstyle I can think of, but for me D1 is better.
Para mim, Dishonored 2 é um Upgrade em basicamente tudo, não fez absolutamente nada de errado, terminei o Dishonored 1 e suas DlC's e então fui para o Dishonored 2, e caramba, eles transformaram ouro em Diamante.
Thank you for putting into words why my no powers playthrough was inexplicably my favorite playthrough of the game. I couldn't figure out *why* it was the most fun I'd had even if I had 120+ hours put in before that. Surprising how taking away the magic made the game seem more magical.
Alright. Yeah. Wow. This hit the nail right on the head and I am definitely going to be picking this game back up to do a no powers run now. Thank you for finally putting this elusive feeling I had about this game into words for me
I watched this some time ago and I watched it again just recently. You make some excellent points. I don't know, I mean I remember on playing both for the first time and thought that the second complements the story after whats happened in the DLC of the first one and it does it really well. As for the visuals it reminds of a city on the south cost of France or on the Mediterranean compared to the London... Dunwall influence. Further to the landscape that we see more of the streets in the DLC of this, Dishonored 2. I don't know. I'm currently in Stockholm Sweden, and on my way here i got to see more of the Cities of Western Europe, Like Amsterdam Gothenburg, Copenhagen, (before the lock-down). I can see the developers maybe using theses cities as influences on a follow up a possible third dishonored. How they would do that, I have no idea, I'm not the writer.... I appreciate your augment, it has made me think. Thank you.
Nothing of what you talk about bothered me in D2, but the one thing I missed from the first game and what kinda ruined the mood for me is that they left the nautical theme behind. Even though our home base is an actual ship. Everything in D1 was about the water, the whales, everything felt cold and wet, hell, even part of the city was flooded. Karnaca is a place of heat, wind and sands. A lot of the time the ever so important whale oil is replaced by wind turbines. Very different atmosphere, we are not dependent on the sea anymore and we are losing the cultural connection with it. It's not bad, but it's not what I was hoping for... And it felt especially jarring and disappointing, because I played the games so close one after the other. The Outsider's supposed connection to the whales feels a bit eh now, to the point where I was thinking they could have replaced the bone charms with something else, just like replacing the rats with bloodflies. And speaking of, the bloodflies also felt a bit shoehorned in. The Rat Plague was an important part of the plot in the first game, it had ruined the entire city, while the bloodflies felt like a mild nuisance at best.
I like having the more options but I do find myself almost naturally restricting my use of them in places just to show that I am better then the guards.
The thing about scaling rooftops and always coming from above you praise about the first game i don’t think wasn’t here because of a mistake but i think it was intentional the ability to just stay above ground or get out of the enemies sight quickly, I think was seen as a flaw with the intention to push you into areas where you could be seen and you would need to need to be situationally aware or risk being seen i think the best example of that is the dust district where safe and danger zones are delineated by a titlecard so if you want to relax you need to find a way out. I prefer this because it makes me feel more tense, but I could understand why your opinion differs
Where there's no doubt improvements were made, ranging from deeper environments, to quality of life like NG+ and non lethal agression; but I can never get over the loss of quirks and movement depth. Your abilities, jumping, sliding, interactions are all lessened. You mention less detail, and that's not only in the levels. Moments like that bullet blocking with the grenade, ducking under sword strikes, anything like that. It's mostly gone. Leftover is what the developer intended, and that's just not as rewarding as the first game. Major bummer.
Huh? Nah man you can still duck under the sword to dodge the attack. Your other arguments are super valid, but they haven't removed that feature from the game
My biggest problem with Dishonored 2 was the chaos system. It felt completely meaningless. In the first game you see huge changes in every level starting from the Lord Regent mission. Hiram hides in a safe room on high chaos, making the fight up there way cooler and more fun. The loyalists fight with each other a lot more on high chaos leading up to the betrayal. The flooded district is more flooded, there's more tall boys, and the survivors all turn to weepers. And the final level is the best of all, with Samuel condemning you, the total change in weather, the siege on the tower, it's awesome. The game made you feel like your actions truly had consequences. I was hoping that Dishonored 2 would expand on the system and make it even more intricate, but it just made it worse. The chaos level barely affects anything. You get some slight dialogue changes and some more bloodflies, but that's it. There's no level changes or anything, and it's a huge disappointment.
I'm going to be visiting my grandparents house this weekend since they're moving to a retirement home, so odds are good that I won't have a video up this Monday. Sorry again that this one took so long to get out, it was uploading and failing to upload for 3 days straight!
Ok talking about the ps4 run speed as that bad is just wrong, your friend has a broken ps4 and starting this video with boring complaints about framerates is just a poor beginning
Your point about non lethal combat is completely pointless and ridiculous.....not everyone wants to or can be stealthy and non lethal at the same time as 90% of people will only do that for trophies, you're just drastically overreacting to everything and calling bloody murder to every change, this is a really unproductive way of looking at this game and how gameplay and set design works, but hey you've got 1 part of the video to go so maybe you'll not complain poorly
Your point about Rune discovery is more likely down to you not being observant as I and many people never saw this as an issue, the fact that it's a collectable that makes you stronger should be difficult to figure out how to find
Also you say Dunwall tower is the second to last mission which it clearly isn't so lord knows what else you've got wrong
Your tip for enjoying Dishonored is incredibly petty as well....hardly any players of this game would have played the original Thief series so this is just you making nitpick bland points for 30 mins instead of analysing everything from side characters, music and art to secrets, level design and powers, but nope....."runes are difficult to find and it runs poorly on my bad PC"
I did a whole architectural presentation on the grand dukes palace.
Dude can you share it somewhere that sound so cool.
TheBoshman95 yeah pls share
@@eliteslayerkillamaja Thanks! But the powerpoint got lost when my hard drive got fried. I wish I still had it!
TheBoshman95 turn it into a video essay
@Glorious Bastard The project was to look at how architecture is used and understood outside the regular industry (making buildings). Dishonored 2 had come out at around the same time, and I was playing through the palace when I noticed it was rather architecturally well designed. The whole space felt real enough to live in, it flowed with the environment (particularly with the mountains and shoreline), and it followed other design principles.
I looked into it and it turned out Arkane hires architects to help design the levels and environments. So I did my presentation on all that.
Turned out a little lackluster, but that's probably because I was playing the game instead of putting in the time on the project! 😂
Great video. I agree with all the points. One other thing that I found to be missing in D2 was an interesting hub. In the first game, there were people to talk to and stuff to look at in between missions, and it gave the game a greater emotional impact interacting with Emily, Piero, Samuel and the staff of the Hound Pits Pub, each of whom have their own story and views on the world and current events. In the second game we get a boat with an invisible crew and two characters, we already know from the first game (plus two optional and temporary new ones).
Huge facts and we had a mission where the pub was invaded which was really fun because you weren't expecting it at all. Whereas the dreadful wale is just a boring ship with nothing to explore except for like 3 or 4 notes.
@@hankhill8344hubs get invaded/destroyed in so many games
there are at least 3 ways into dunwall tower. you can also swim through a sewer entrance if you possess a fish
I have bought dishonoured three times and have more than three dozen playthroughs and somehow never figured this out
Edit: in hindsight, I didn't even know you could posses fish
@@infamousgamer767 hahaha me niether I did it by accident the first time tbh
in case you didn't already know: you can also enter the golden cat by fish. enjoy :)
No way! Fucking amazing!
Came back to dishonored recently. One thing that I still haven't been able to forgive is while the guards give good world building. They miss the insanity of the og guard. They never stopped talking about their whiskey and cigars
I disagree, I feel Dishonored 2 had a spark of personality the first was missing. The little altercations that occur constantly. Whether it be the howler ambush after robbing too many black markets, or the effect of playing high chaos on the street performers. In Dishonored 1 I feel like I was playing low chaos for an achievement, or to get a good ending; while in 2 I felt I was playing low chaos because I was the good guy. I felt like I made more of a difference in this whimsical world. I get what you mean about framing of levels, and to an extent I agree; but, aside from a few examples in Dishonored 1 that you mentioned, the same issue could be presented. I remember crawling my way through the cramped Flooded District, constantly getting dead ended or being unable to go somewhere because of icky rotations. In Dishonored 2 I feel these little moments are more fine tuned, I never feel cramped or forced to play a certain way. Every time I’ve played d2, I change my route significantly. But in D1 i feel restricted to going about many levels the same way. I appreciate the video though and believe some of what you presented is accurate. I just disagree that Dishonored 2 lacks a spark that the first game had. Subbed for the neat opinion about my favorite games :)
edit from months later; after playing through both again a few times, i've come to realize that in D1 you have dark vision on more often than not. while in d2 i feel you don't. think that speaks volumes about how well the second game is designed to where you know about where a guard is by logic and your senses. which means your screen isnt constantly gross colors and i get to enjoy the beautiful scenery more. also i forgot how good crack in the slab was
Thank you this sums up my thoughts exactly. Dishonored 1 and 2 are both amazing games but Dishonored 2 is clearly an improvement. I thoroughly enjoy every section of dishonored 2 while dishonored 1 and the Brigmore witches both have their annoying areas.
In dishonored 1 it’s the entire area after Daud up to getting back to hound pitts pub. Traversing back to the pub on foot every time is such a hassel and it makes me want to turn off the game.
In terms of brigmore witches it’s Delilah’s mansion. I always forget that you have to crouch under the bit of rubble to get to the lantern, and I get frustrated to no end thinking that path is blocked and trying to find the key to the west wing door.
I never had a moment like either of these in dishonored 2. Every moment was fun and engaging. Even when I was lost I was entertained.
Understandable have a nice day
Really? Because I didn't feel the need to stealth in Dishonred 2, going in and bashing faces was just better. Why bother with alternative routes when you can just smack the guards around like a bunch of errant children
Gopher Okay but sneaking through the clockwork mansion without touching a single lever or killing a single clockwork soldier. Leaving Jindosh completely unaware to your arrival until you shoot the heads off of the clockwork soldiers in his office and watch them slaughter him. Is incredibly satisfying.
Or hitting the lever in his bedroom. Freezing time and busting ass to the draw bridge he stands on to try and meet the player in the main hall. Only to retract the bridge as he stands on it.
Oh so satisfying.
I agree with both opinions here, to a degree honestly.
Speaking of great World Aesthetics And Framing I just gotta recommend Wolfenstein The New Order.I may sound kinda basic but some scenes are just outright artful like for instance when you see Berlin for the first time and thus the might of your main enemy without any words,with just architecture.If you played the game I suspect you know about what scene I am talking about
I'll give it another look! Haven't played it since launch, before I was really thinking about games the way I do now
@@Leadhead I think you should look at it for many of the same reasons you did this video, because the trichotomy between Wolfenstein the new order, Wolfestein the old blood, and Wolfenstein the new colossus is much the same as the trichotomy between dishonored 1, it's DLC, and dishonored 2. Wolfenstein 2 (like Dishonored 2) lacks that magic that truly bound together the first game and it's 'DLC' while containing many technical and gameplay improvements but by that same token the first game and it's standalone dlc had that magic in spades. And bonus, it's no immersive sim but Old Blood and New Order offer a great combat/stealth dichotomy that doesn't feel jarringly out of place like that same dichotomy elsewhere (it's also one of the few games that provides an uncompromisingly lethal stealth playstyle, simplistic as it is). I actually recommend doing a loud then stealth playthrough, so you'll see just how well designed the levels are. Areas I thought were 100% combat design turned out to have cool stealthy paths and alternate ways of doing things. Gameplay wise it does this really awesome juggle between 'akimbo arena shooter' , 'tactical cover shooter' and 'stealthy shooter' by using only the fun parts of each and ditching the lame parts (no glass fragility during combat, no convoluted/nonsensical stealth mechanics like throwing 30 rocks in a corner to distract the guards, no excessively bullet spongy enemies (if they aren't going down fast you're doing something wrong, even bosses)) so it ends up being a very fulfilling gameplay experience (and you can change your approach arena to arena which lends some great variety). Not to mention that the guns are masterclass in terms of FPS weapon feel, especially in the first one.
Honestly, Wolfenstein the New Order was the first singleplayer game that made me LOVE the genre of singleplayer first person action/narrative games as a whole, from the overtness of Doom to the subtlety of Dishonored. Without it I absolutely would not have poured that same attention to pretty much all singleplayer FPS games I could get my hands on, and the games themselves I have played enough of to practically remember how to play every arena.
Clockwork mansion was a masterpiece.
@Raed 928 you're not the only one.
When I did my first playthrough I got hella confused and rewatched the trailer that showed the clockwork mansion and got dissapointed.
Wished they added some flair. Make it where the entire layout changes on a timer and if the target notices you in the mansion he changes the layout at random just to fuck with you.
Was wasted potential in the level
It was but oh boy did I hate it the first time I set foot in there. That and the stilton place are the most memorable levels imo.
Idk, it just felt confusing to me, especially when I started going into walls
I pity anyone who didn't absolutely enjoy that level. It was amazing imo.
@@ember-brandt I still don't understand how can you get to Jindosh without him knowing without using the cheesy window at the start
Me: "Oh nice, a video that might finally explain why I didn't like Dishonored 2 as much."
Leadhead: "Welcome to Architecture 101, please take out your books."
Lemme guess, he still answered your question? XP
@@theknight1573 Eh, not exactly. It was interesting to hear his perspective but I don't think he shares the same disappointment with the game that I have.
@@chrispysaid aight, would've been funny tho XD
@@chrispysaid exactly how I felt. I feel it might be more about the weaker atmosphere, and fewer important characters that you care about. The two you interact with most don't even need your help, they're mostly there to help you, actually. And the biggest motivator doesn't work so well, when you only see them at the beginning and the end of a game. It might be cheesy, but some flashbacks to time well spent together might have helped...
They even managed to make the Outsider worse. I'll never forgive them the voice actor change, but the script itself was not as good either. Didn't feel as powerful and mysterious as in the first game.
@@InfiniteDarkMass All that plus I do think the game design was significantly worse.
The clockwork soldiers were a joke, I just threw down a stun mine upgraded to activate twice whenever I came across them and they were finished. I had to actively play worse in order to have the enjoyment of fighting them. I thought they’d be reinforcing the guards on the streets but nope, just patrolling hallways or sitting idle.
I kept waiting a new trap device to be introduced, or at least for a nice challenge with arc pylons, but I think the only place one was used effectively was in that big central room in the clockwork mansion.
My first time playing the Duke’s manor I eliminated him (with the non-lethal option!) within 10 minutes of reaching the place by coming in through the roof
“My first playthrough was below 30 FPS.”
As someone regularly plays games with that sort of frames, lemme tell you that frame rate you’re showing us is *waaaay* worse than “below 30 FPS.”
You do realize that below 30 FPS covers everything form 29.99 repeating to 0, right? Well technically it covers negative to infinity but negative frames aren't possible.
Domino you don’t say?
It’s just a different connotation than saying “below 15 FPS,” which I’d say is much more accurate.
In other news, congratulations on taking my title of “biggest smartass on Earth.”
Not to mention that you’re incorrect. “Below 30” does not cover “negative to infinity.” That makes so little sense I genuinely believe you just tossed it in there to sound smart. “Below 30” actually covers *29.99 repeating* to *negative* infinity. Not negative to infinity.
@@mr.cup6yearsago211 I have under 1000 fps... more or less 2fps
Domino clearly you have never played on MY copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, right back to the beginning.
Yeah, and PS4 runs much, much better than that footage, also.
I found the non lethal gameplay in the first Dishonored to be tedious and annoying. Especially since they made it impossible to take down the tall boys non lethally. I much prefer the 2nd game in that regard. In the first game I found myself enjoying a lethal play through a lot more, because I was allowed to use all the tools at my disposal. This might be because I played through the game non lethally first.
Treehugers I agree. I disliked how the first game gives you an entire arsenal and then punishes you for actually using it. Non lethal just composed of stealth and choking which got very boring. At least the sequel fine tuned everything so that nearly every power could be used for non lethal, and you could engage with guards in firefights with knock out options available. Non lethal assault was my favourite play style for the sequel since you could pretty much be Batman
I did a no powers clean hands ghost playthrough and just ignored them
Bilbo Swaggins No, I’M BATMAN!
I can't play through the thing non-lethal anyway LOL...I'm always spotted too.
BossTech I spent probably an average of 4 hours on each level.
I see a lot of people trashing on Dishonored 2 for reasons such as these, but I feel like what a lot of people miss is that they weren't *trying* to recreate that same feeling all the time. When they tried, It succeeded. Walking through Delilah's Dunwall in Mission 9 brought me straight back to playing High Overseer Campbell for the first time. It told me all I needed to know about Dunwall by just walking down the streets.
You mentioned framing, but I don't think Dishonored 2 is all bad with that. Edge of the World and The Dust District are some of my favourite missions for this. The buildings just look impossibly tall, you don't even think about climbing them like you would in Dunwall. They force you to look down to the ground, maybe at some balconies or street lamps. The design of the streets force you down to the ground, and gaining the high-ground is a constant struggle. Each street lamp is a luxury, each balcony that traverses into another section of the map is a miracle.
I'm not saying it's *perfect*. Dishonored 2 did miss the mark in some places, but for better or for worse, they weren't trying to emulate the feeling of Dunwall all the time.
As for character voicing, I think it's a mixed bag. The game is so clearly written for Emily. When playing as Corvo, all I could feel was "huh, Emily said that". Corvo didn't feel as genuine as he should have. Emily felt like more of a character than almost anyone else in the Dishonored universe, but the only rimes Corvo stood out were where he referenced the first game.
As for the "Dishonored 2 is too fast" in Stealth, I kinda disagree. Some levels encourage that, some don't. Royal Conservatory is the best example of this. The witches increased perception, the high number of them, and the hounds all made me slow down and consider the map. You can't just sleep dart a guard and be done with it, like you could in a lot of D1 encounters. The best parts of D1 stealth were where there were a lot of guards, and you're forced to go down to the ground. Eg. The Wall of Light in mission 2 and 3.
I do have to agree with the statement about runes and bonecharms. It's often that I traversed a level based on the bonecharm placement first, then the story would just come second. In Edge of the World, There's a dead whale to the left, which then leads you a bloodfly infested apartment that give a bonecharm. This always drew me to the left, because I'm getting such a high reward. There's no reason to use the other paths because there's always one optimal path that brings you to all the bonecharms. Again, not all levels do this. Royal Conservatory and Dust District handle this well IMO, but the worst offender is Stilton's Manor. There's SO MUCH I always missed because I followed the artifact trail.
I do feel like the increased challenge to acquire bonecharms and runes is somewhat necessary though. Once you get that rune or bonecharm, it's yours forever. After 3 or 4 runs of the game, you've got enough artifacts to fully upgrade yourself before even leaving the Dreaful Wale the first time. In Dishonored 1, powers are constantly competing for upgrading and you have to decide if you want the reliable basics like Agility, Blink, and Dark Vision, the more useful abilities like Bend Time and Blood Thirsty, or more niche ones like Rat Swarm and Windblast. These runes are so important that placing them out of the way would just demolish the constant reminders of your purpose that D1 thrives in.
The ability to mark an artifact was useful in countering this issue because you weren't having to switch from the heart to far reach constantly just to stay on track, but It also trivialized certain puzzles.
Perhaps a way to remedy the nonlethal stealth would be to have the nonlethal fall transition into the classic strangle animation. I still would include the guard throw though.
@Mr. Obunga • 20 years ago people who skip tutorials are straight up idiots.
Why not just have the target pass out for a limited amount of time when you drop attack them?
@Gopher The Gopher _only_ when you drop attack them.
Bruh what is wrong with the current one?
Yeah, Dishonored 2 *is* a good game. But there was just something missing. Your video explained it amazingly. You need more subs.
I would agree
@denisucuuu yeah I have to agree on that too. I straight up enjoyed the first game better than the second game. And I’m saying that D2 is not a bad game or sequel, it’s just a rather good sequel and a little bit of an improvement over the first game. But the reason why I liked the first game better is because the story is a little bit predictable in my opinion.
Woah compared to one the visualls are so dull
@@dexnacorn7807 well sometimes I mean Karbaka is a fairly beautiful place but the former mental institution is just very depressing to look at
In my opinion it was the protagonist dialogue, and the lack of the “cartoonish” style from dishonored 1
It's interesting to me, that the best experience of this game lines up perfectly with the meta narrative.
The antagonist of the first game was political machinations, specifically by a system that not only shuns but actively fights against those who worship the Outsider. Obviously, the Whalers and Daud are a villainous group in the story, but they aren't the antagonists. The antagonists are Hiram Boroughs, High Overseers Campbell and Martin, Admiral Havlock, The Pendletons. The Outsider graces you with the abilities to fight against a system that oppresses his worship, and thus you prove yourself to be apart from them.
It's the polar opposite in Dishonored 2 and DOTO, the antagonists are fucking witches, cultists and followers of the Outsider. You fight people who exploit the Void, who use it and its abilities against the Empire of the Isles, against Emily and Corvo. It makes PERFECT sense that to prove yourself to be apart from that crowd, to overcome the Dishonour you've been handed, you fight without those abilities.
Idk... makes sense to me.
No, it doesn't since the actual point is proving that power doesn't corrupt
@@myfaceisthefrontofshop ooh that’s an interesting POV. I took it that power inherently corrupts, which is why you have to continually remain self aware.
@@myfaceisthefrontofshopdoes power not corrupt tho? because i struggle to find counter examples in the real world
@hmilles George Washington. He could of carved out his own dynasty of kings, but chose the opposite.
My main problem with Dishonored 2 was how your character's voice clips and personality were effected by things like kill count. I would scan every guard with the heart and get feedback like "he drowns puppies and blackmails children", so I'd kill them. But then Emily starts saying "hm yknow maybe I should have had more public executions"
it's playing off the dumb narrative trope of "killing terrible people apparently makes you no better than those terrible people you just killed" It sometimes ruins endings of games and movies for me when the hero who lost something/everything to the villain and attempts to exact revenge, and at the end has said villain on his knees and has just lost everything and the hero has a weapon pointed at him ready to kill...but then the Hero walks away thinking he's done enough, Sometimes under the context that the Villain can't hurt anyone anymore, sometimes because the Villain will suffer more if left alive.
But in all seriousness, If Emily's common solution of getting past guards is killing them, then it might transfer over to when she takes back the throne, that she can order public executions on anyone who might be a potential threat to her power over Dunwall, using those executions to scare most dissenters into obedience. She may have killed those guards for a good reason, but you know as they say "A road to Hell is paved with good intentions"
@@derrinerrow4369 late reply I know but Emily was just an annoying character on high chaos. I really, really think they did voiced characters in deathloop so, SO much better. Colt and Juliana’s banter was so much fun and really helped expound their character, I haven’t even finished it yet (picked it up and finishing it finally while I have covid now that my pc’s fixed, and I’m on an arkane binge now that I can actually run their games now that they don’t tank performance so hard) by comparison corvo is just dry and Emily is whiny. In d1 you were directly fighting against the corruption, the dirtiness of the politics and the illegal government that had couped Jessamine. The Boyle level especially highlights that, the completel opulence contrasted against the empty, diseased surroundings. D2 is just “yeah Emily sucks as a ruler and her empire is pretty corrupt, but someone took her throne so we gotta get it back I guess”
Boohoo I deserve my throne back! * she travels to Karnaca * damn this sucks I can’t believe someone let this happen! It’s like every presidential election, do you want terrible idiot who does insane shit or dumb idiot who allows institutional failures and corruption to continue? Oh you don’t want either? Too bad someone’s already chosen those answers for you
TLDR: Emily’s character either needs to be an angry, vengeful character or a fair, conscientious character. Stop being so whiny and just lean into it, literally just make her edgier
@@jacksonneedham2792 your right they nailed the characters in deathloop. Colt and juilianna were hilarious
@@jacksonneedham2792 I am sorry but this is such a dogshit take I can't treat it seriously lol
It's clear emily is incompetent, but she's clearly not straight up evil like Delilah or Duke and the journey she goes through (depending on player choice) turns her into a true ruler
Plus your point could be applied to Dishonored 1 as well so it makes even less sense
@@myfaceisthefrontofshop that’s why Emily was considered the dumb idiot in the dumb idiot who allows institutional failures and corruption vs. terrible idiot who does evil for fun analogy. I didn’t say she was evil, just incompetent and whiny, and canonically asleep at the wheel when it came to being the princess or queen. Like billy literally chastises her multiple times for not doing her job.
The argument wouldn’t make sense in D1 because most of the things that are considered corrupt, morally reprehensible, and cruel (ie light walls, electric pylons, martial law, *killing the poor*) was instated by the lord regent directly after jessamine was killed. like it’s literally stated in the lore that lord regent Hiram burrows introduced the rat plague into dunwall to get rid of poor people. Jessamine didn’t have anything to do with it besides having a terrible political apparatus that conspired against her.
I’m not and never was arguing that in D2 Emily was nearly as bad as Luca Abele or Delilah. Actually Luca abele sucked as a villain because he was barely a villain, he was just kind’ve a dumb hedonist. And Delilah was retreaded water and I would’ve been alright had her only appearance been in the KoD and Brigmore Witches dlc’s to be honest. But Emily is still better than both and I’m not arguing that.
I don’t HATE d2’s story, it just falls flat from d1 for me. It’s still an incredibly fun game mechanically. I’m not a hater, I literally just redownloaded it on steam for the hundredth time to do another new game plus. This is probably my 5th cycle now. like I’ve unlocked all bone charms and runes by now lmao.
I'm so glad I had not a single performance issue playing Dishonored 2.
An absolutely amazing epic experience.
It's optimization is abysmal on console, DoTO runs 1000x better.
Dishonored 2 is my favorite fighting game. No lie, I really enjoy booting the game up, and trying to do a mostly-nonlethal assault playthrough using just my bare hands and the environment as much as possible. In generally, I think it's a wonderful platform for challenge runs. The game's myriad of options undermine and ultimately trivialize each other, but a challenge run where you select a few options to remove can really make the game's sandbox click.
having playing Dishonored after 2, i felt the complete opposite. Dishonored lacks the immersion of 2. exploration in the first game felt pretty one-note and too quick, whereas in Dishonored 2 all the environments feel fully realized. it really FEELS like i'm infiltrating buildings in Dishonored 2. in 1 it felt like i was getting past clear videogame obstacles in linear, scripted, predictable ways, even when player choice seems to be what devs were going for, and exploration was less thorough and thus less believable. Dishonored 1 just lacks the freedom that 2 affords the player.
scaling my way to get to the Grand Palace for instance, i was blown away, and still am, by the scale of the simulation. the difference really reminds me of the new Hitman games compared to the older ones. why anyone would choose the older ones is beyond me.
You can enter the Clockwork Mansion through the space that is created when you activate the mechanism that rearranges everything.
I thought that was the only way lol
Like a side entrance or something?
I've always entered through the main entrance, then used the first switch and ran for the door to fool Jindosh into thinking it was a malfunction. After that you don't need to use any switches to reach him.
@@NeoLotex It's the same entrance. After pulling the lever, while the house is rearranging, it will create openings where you can enter easily. You have to do it while it's still moving and obviously before it stops.
@@SergioVarela I think I simply blinked through the upper window and then never touched the mechanism at all for the Silence trophy, on my no powers playthrough I pulled the lever and then crouch-walked towards the door in the back, went through it and then closed it behind me so the soldier wouldn't see me.
@@NeoLotex You are still unseen if you do it like I mentioned. Jindosh gets confused because he thinks the mechanism activated by itself.
I also had the feeling of something missing from D2 that D1 had. And for a longest time I didn't know what it was. Yes, the stealth, powers, maps, etc... are different, and not as great, but for me, something was wrong with the atmosphere and the story. And then I realized that in D1 you have a connection with almost all of your targets built up from the beginning of the game. Campbell and Hiram Burrows fucked you over and tortured you, the Pendeltons have Emily with them, Lady Boyle, even though you don't know her from before, has a ton of puzzles, and lore around her, with one of the most special levels. The conspiracy members have been your comrades for the whole game, and Daud was the one who started the whole game. Sokolov is the only outlier, but you don't take him out, instead you get to speak to him later.
In contrast, D2 has Hypatia, someone you only hear the same thing about over and over, and who, even if rescued, only has some filler lines and nothing to contribute to the story as a whole, Jindosh, who appears and vanishes in the story, filling the same spot as Sokolov in the first game, but without the actual interaction, Breanna, who you haven't even heard of before, and the Duke, who even though should be Delilah's big supporter has almost no previous lore outside of being a disappointment and an asshole. All of these targets are, rather than being parts of an alliance that you meticulously disassemble, just people who block your way to Delilah.
The problem with D2's story is that it is disconnected from your actions, and the missions. Even the Outsider has basically no ties to it. In the first game he gave the powers to Daud, with which he pushed Dunwall into ruin, and with which Corvo has gotten an opportunity to restore it. But in D2, Delilah has basically nothing to do with the Outsider, and instead of getting immersed in the dark and mysterious ancient world of magic like in D1, the player only looks at these powers as tools to make stealth easier.
I 100% agree. Just goes to show how incredibly important story is, even in this type of game. The story is the reason you're doing all of this. It has to feel right and be engaging.
@@percival_xii9166 Yeah, even though Dishonored's story wasn't special, it was enough to get invested and to feel something about the targets
Good notes on game design
Good that you mention it. You actually meet Sokolov at the very start of the Game and he is mentioned countless times.
Even though the Outsider complains that Delilah is "part of me now and I don't like it", there is no back story to support that claim.
Delilah just happened to get lucky in the Void, perhaps due to her Witchy-ness from D1, but there's no explanation or exploration of its connection to the Outsider.
Jindosh manor ? Time travelling ? Duke Palace ? DIshonored 2 did everything right to be as inovative as Dishonored 1 was at his time
The thing D2 lacked was a strong compelling plot. Everything else was amazing.
Patrick Howell d1 didn't have a strong plot either. Plot twist near the end was very predictable.
@@PlumbumChannel it atleast felt more targeted.
I feel like the best plot in a Dishonored game is Knife of Dunwall and Brigmore Witches. It's less about a political power struggle with conspiracies and shady people, but more about Daud trying to either embrace the killer he's become or make up for the sins he's committed depending on your chaos level. It's not the most creative story, but it's certainly better than the predictability of D1's storyline.
Hey man hop on the hype of the hate train why would you EVER be happy you get to play as emily and corvo in the same game while they have a different set of powers giving us more content for the price of 35 idk why but it is just "missing the magic" huh
It's amazing how I disagree on almost every point that you hated. I guess that's art.
I loved Karnaca more than I could Dunwell. A sunny whalepunk/ steampunk setting? Now that's rare. The first time you come out of the boat and see it in the distance with the background music was so visually striking.
I loved the new void, when Corvo said it was endless cold and how the notes described it, the slight grey dark tone seemed more appropriate to me.
The graphics was just as much water color as before, once with a generational leap in fidelity and better animations.
Levels are more complex, more stealth options and for the first time you can complete the whole game without blink.
It surpasses dishonored 1 in every single way for me.
Agreed!! Dishonored 2 is a masterpiece for different reasons than why Dishonored 1 is a masterpiece
The new void was ass, had no personality at all
in a stealth game though, the player should be attracted to dark and less visually prominent areas so they CAN HIDE. brightly lit objective paths are for other types of games where you aren't thinking in terms of stealth
Agreed. On my first playthrough my first reaction upon entering addermire. Was to immediately grab the bone-charm then hop up on the lamp. Seeing that the right area was empty I headed there first and grabbed the loot and blueprint. Upon circling back I noticed that dark hallway and teleported there cause there where shadows.
Why would people put stuff they want to keep safe in areas that are easier for a thief or an assassin to access? Plus Dishonored has ways of getting through well-lit areas without being detected anyway.
Yeah, that's one of his many nonsensical points.
But dishonored's stealth isn't about light and dark. It has a small effect on your visibility but not enough to really make it worth it to seek out darker areas. It's about a normal person't territory and a teleporting assassin's territory. What do you instantly do when you enter a level? You look up to see if there's a spot you can blink to. Do you crouch walk along on the floor hiding behind cover or in the shadows? No, you either blink around above, or traverse through an alternate path. So most players don't often instinctively go to dark areas, they go to areas out of the enemy's territory, off or outside the ground level that regular people walk. So game designers get to use one of, if not the most important tools for guiding the player's attention: light. Brightly lit objects are exactly for the type of game dishonored is, a positioning-based stealth experience where everything is dependent on the divide between the enemy territory and your territory. and highlighting which territory is which is very important, thus guiding the player's eyes is very important, thus framing, thus using light, thus thus thus I'm not very good at writing.
I can't say I really agree with any of this. I come at this as someone who prefers the second game significantly more than the first so it might just be bias talking, nevertheless...
The first point about framing strikes me as completely arbitrary. All this talk of poor signposting rather baffles me as it's a game where you ought to look around and explore, where the goal is to find your own way rather be shown the way. That's what the Clockwork Mansion offers, if you look for the least traveled path you'll find your way inside the ugly mechanical guts of it. It's not signposted because why would it be ? But it also had to be there because how could it not be ?
Contrasted to that, saying that Dunwall Towers is unlike the Clockwork Mansion in that it makes your mind race with all the immediate possibility to navigate it and I just don't see that as a quality at all. All I hear is "the various ways around are obvious !" and I don't understand why that's supposed to be exciting at all. Which holds true to my experience with that first game.
I know it's not necessarily the point but hearing that maps in D2 have none of the flair and character of D1's sounds completely backwards. One of the thing I'd praise about D2's maps is specifically how much more personality they have compared to the first one's. Specifically, they have their target's personality. The Addermire institute is an infested run down hospital, your target is a doctor with a murderous spit personality. Jindosh is a cruel genius, his mansion is an intricate maze designed for him to gloat at desperate intruders. Etc etc. Compared to the first game, the brothel is just a brothel. The Boyle mansion is just a mansion. I couldn't even tell you anything about Campbell's level to describe it, it's just a building. None of these levels add anything to their specific target or hold any significance to our understanding of Dunwall's current state and its leadership.
The whole point about non-lethal combat devaluing non-lethal playthough is completely subjective so I'm not gonna make a case but I absolutely disagree, especially since on a purely technical level, nothing was lost in D2. Everything that stealth and non-lethal playstyle were in the first game are still here.
That being said, tying it into the story seems completely pointless from my perspective given that the story has zero appeal but let's pretend it does, which path is the most likely to give you back your lost honor is debatable. I could just argue that an aggressive non-lethal playstyle is a far more overt display of your character taking the high-road compared to the ambiguity of non-lethal stealth and as such, a much more efficient way of signifying your honorable intent. Not that it matters much since the games don't really take it into account altho I wish they did. Agressive non-lethal is basically playing as Batman and it's definitely my favourite playstyle (which obviously doesn't work in D1), it strikes the proper balance between lethal, which I find too easy, and pure stealth, which tends to be too slow for my taste.
Surprise surprise, I also disagree with how the games handle their runes and stuff. Instead of being tiny challenges on the way to your objectives, runes have become objectives in & out of themselves, forcing you to explore the map further if you want them. Which I appreciate far more, because I like those levels, I like exploring and in general, runes are never the sole reward for finding them, you find alternate path to your other objectives on the way, money, blueprints and all sort of world-building touches.
So I don't think you're wrong for feeling the way you do by any mean but I hold the exact opposite opinions. Dishonored 1 is a game I was greatly disappointed by. It's obvious and straightforward, its allowances for multiple playstyle are very imbalanced despite the game verbally encouraging you to "play your way !", it's monotone in its delivery of its world and story.
Dishonored 2 improves much of that in ways that actually had me engaged. Bigger and better themed levels with less obvious pathways makes for more satisfying exploration. Addition to your abilities makes for a wider range of playstyle and thus better opportunity to "play your way !" Story still sucks but it's better presented through better targets and protagonists so it doesn't feel as monotonous even if there technically aren't as many beats to the story as the first one.
Amazingly well said. I'm not very picky about stories so I'm the 1% that thought the plot was great but other than that, you echoed my problems with this video perfectly.
This is very well written, but i dissagree in a few ways
For me the atmosphere is D2 is a step down in a lot of ways, the blood flys and the overal bright look never really sat with me, even with dishonored being another game to come out with a drab and dark artstyle, i always thought it was the peak of that kinda style
I will agree that the level design is (mostly) a step up in 2, with the clock work mansion and the level after the dust district (its name evades me) being highlights of the entire series
However another problem i have with the game is the combat, compared to 1 it feels rather clunky and quite unresponsive,
@@Crazydarkside I like the new bright and contrasty look but that's probably because I prefer that look in general. For example, I didn't like GTA 4's gloomy atmosphere as much as GTA 5's bright representation of Los Santos. I do however, agree with the combat. Combat in D2 just isn't as fluid as D1 which is sad considering how much of a step-up the new animations are.
Basically my thoughts exactly. Nicely put.
Hmm I agree with both of you, I think the scope of 2 is monumental in a way d1 could not be, namely how designed the world is, to cut a long explanation short this results in environmental ‘lures’ being much harder to implement. Why is this a problem? It effects pacing of story beats, along with the frequency of critical information being communicated to or resolved by the player, because at its core dishonoured is a game about presenting options and letting the player find a solution d2s approach is messy, why? Well let’s take portal for example -the most important thing a level in portal can do is present the player with all the pieces of the puzzle as fast as possible, then let the player figure out the solution because that’s where the fun is, the rat dens are side content that rewards players engaging on a bit deeper level with the environments. In d2 bone charm locations have been turned into cameos in there own rights dragging the players attention away from the primary objective.
Is this bad? No, not necessarily but also isn’t as tight as d1 but incredible from a technical perspective that this game even exists and I mean technical in every sense, artistically, coding and game design. Everything has been pushed thurther I don’t think any other studio would attempt what arkane did. As an artist I think perhaps the best metaphor I can come up with is if you focus on the detail too much you loose the big picture..... doesn’t stop you admiring the immense amount of pure love attention and skill put in though.
To me, Dishonored 1 was missing something, and Dishonored 2 added it. 1 is a great game, but 2 is one of my all time favorite games.
100% agree
for me, dishonoured 2 will remain my favourate game in the series, primarily becouse of how strong its world-building & lore is. Although dishonoured established the world very well, it is expanded upon brillantly in dishonoured 2 imo.
The one point I disagree on is your assessment of the Addermire Institute. I think it was done wonderfully, and what it stands for is a very rare message--a scary research hospital, made scary not by possession or haunting, but neglect.
I finished D2 a few weeks ago, went back to D1 and was baffled to see there was no jump knock-out :l i just kept falling on top of this guard hahaha, i love D1 more for it's story elements, but maps, visuals, special enemies which actually feel dangerous, gameplay are top notch in D2, at least for me haha
While your analysis is very well organized and scripted and I do appreciate the tremendous effort you have put into this, some of the levels in this game ae pure textbook-style masterpieces - perfect examples on how game design in adventure/exploration games should be. The Clockwork Mansion and A Crack in the Slab could both go down in game history as two of the most intelligently designed levels ever. The Good Doctor also introduces another aspect that we have not seen as the main focus of the game - horror. Exploring an abandoned medical facility in its own must have been pretty scary to many Dishonored players, myself included. The Dust District also might be the one level where you have the most choices in both Dishonored 1 and 2. I do agree that the game might have been longer, I personally thought it would be so nice to have 1-2 extra levels as some other people mentioned and the ending cinematics were lackluster but other than that, I believe that this game and the lore is very well designed.
Something must be wrong with that PlayStation. I play dh2 on a PlayStation 4 and have very smooth frames
just keep in mind that dishonored 2 was launched with a horrible optimization, I guess he is referring to this. As time went by they released updates fixing these errors.
@@gimnasiayvino i played it at launch (i didnt get to update it for the first year since i didnt have internet for a long time) and didnt have frame rate issues for majority of the game.
@@partydue123 oh mb I forgot to mention that I was referring to the PC version, I guess console just handles it better
@@gimnasiayvino could be or just random luck
My cousin bought the game for his ps4 and immediately stopped playing after seeing 15fps on the docks (at launch) i got it on my pc and it ran fine
I don't understand your argument about the fast paced non lethal playstyle. You yourself said the game benefits from more options. I've done a ghost low chaos run without using fast paced non lethal moves and the level design totally allows that, you can play the entire game the exact same way you would play the first game and you don't feel for a second that the game isn't meant to be played that way. I just don't understand why the new moves and options are a bad addition to the game if they're totally optional and you can avoid using them if they don't fit your playstyle.
I agree with you. The new non-lethal moves are an addition to your skillset. You are not being forced to usen them in any non-lethal run.
"Avoiding using them" means the player has to make an arbitrary rule outside of the game's logic to make their experience more challenging. He thinks the game not being designed as such makes it inherently worse.
@@radekseky4571 But it's not outside of the game's logic though. It rewards you for sticking to that playstyle by giving you the good ending.
@@deathfrombelow1193 No, it gives you the good ending for a non-lethal playstyle, not for abstaining from certain moves during a non-lethal playstyle.
i feel this way exactly. I played on hard mode, so just slide bonking a group of guards wasnt an option for me, so i had to go lethal to get out of sticky situations. Drop knockouts were also a welcome edition for me because it meant i didnt have to spend 5 seconds holding a block button just to k.o someone. the higher perception on hard also meant i had to play slower and plan out my actions since guards could see me much more easily. most of his problems with the combat can be solved by playing on hard mode.
Each to his own I suppose. I really feel that Dishonored 2 is objectively better. The gameplay is way better with a lot more moves, the AI feels fun to play against due to its intelligence and it has many different possibilities (in power and different crossbow bolts for example). I replayed it very recently and most problems really have multiple solutions. I of course have my own problems with it, but the fact that I have none of them in common with you really shows that different players value different things. The point you had about the side objectives being the main focus of each level is what I love about it personally. I can never just go through a level, I have to explore every corner, visit every building and read each note. I feel like I'm really in a world, not just a level. You would have no reason to go to many of the side paths if you only care about the optimal path. And I mean it, even when I go in for a "main objective only play though" I still visit everything, I actually can't help it. That is why bone charms and runes make sense to me. They are a reminder that you should perhaps explore over here too. And, in doing so, you will very likely stumble across them. If you seemingly can't get to something try to understand the geometri, that's the puzzle. And when it comes to sign posts I don't really mind things being obscure. It feels more organic and rewarding that you have look around yourself. You have arrived at a strange new location. You are only given a direction and you have to figure out the details yourself. I like trial and error gameplay. You struggle with going through a certain path? Perhaps look around and see if there is somewhere else to go, it even says so in the tips. That's just my opinion THOUGH
I know you didnt mean it literally, but saying its objectively better contradicts what you said about "To each his own."
I love dishonored 2. I prefer it to dishonored 1 but I had never considered your point of view until today. I disagree but I understand and appreciate your point of view with everything except for the clockwork mansion. The lack of sight lines and the mystery of all of the unseen avenues to take is entirely the point. You've had almost two full games to experience all the different ways a mission can be accomplished to this point. Not being immediately drawn to how everything works is the fun of figuring out that level.
This guy just analyzed hallways. Awesome.
Interesting video. I like Dishonored 2 way more than the first game (I love them both). I'd even consider Dishonored 2 the best game of the 2010s. Level design is absolutely amazing, the exploration is some of the best I've ever seen, levels are huge, etc. Gameplay wise it's got some of the best levels ever made.
@Merciless Freak what? The levels are huge and open and filled with little discoveries. They have the best level design in any commercially released game of the 2010s.
When I first played D1 when it came out, I thought it was good but didn't really reach its potential. When I played D2, I was home. It was the Dishonored experience I always wanted. I did a replay of the first one after completing D2 several times, and my opinion didn't change. D1 is a great introduction to this wonderful world, but D2 is the game that finally delivers.
In the first game I went looking at notes, books, listening to audio logs, eavesdropping on conversations, anything with extra information to add to the lore the game hands over to you in the main storyline and DLC so I could better appreciate what I was given. It was a habit done out of love that was driven by a hunger to get to know the setting the player is put in because I wanted to look in every nook and cranny. I had fun not leaving an inch of the city unchecked. It felt like a delicious meal I ate a bit too fast because it was so good and left me craving for more. Dishonored 2 made that kind of exploration feel like a chore just to get the same feeling I got in Dunwall that I wanted with Karnaca. Yes the city looked lived in but it didn't feel that way because the fat had been trimmed from the steak.
Wow, what a gripping critique lol
2:00 Gotta love those accidental epic moments like these. In Dishonored 2, I actually had a moment when I snuck up on a guard and choked him out that his buddy walked in on me. My reaction? Took the body of the guard I just choked out and tossed it at the other guard to knock him off balance. I lopped off his head shortly after. Montage worthy and definitely not something that I could easily recreate.
"Anton Sokolov made this lock."
Not the information we wanted, but the information we needed.
I played dishonored 2 about a month ago and it's now my favorite game ever
When you accidentally alert someone while trying to do a no kill play through in dishonored 1: No no no no, wait wait wait, WAIT WAIT WAIT!
I completely agree with the artifacts becoming the main focus of each level. I'd usually spend so long on making sure I got all the artifacts that I forgot why I was even there or what the mission was.
I recognize the severe difference in level design. I'd say royal palace feels like a D1 map, and Brigmore Manor feels like a D2 map.
But it's not even CLOSE to what bothered me.
The writing.
Hands down.
Every single villain tries its damnest to pretend to be be deep and 3 dimensional, when they have nothing to back it up whatsoever.
The plot of the missions is thusly:
1: escape delilah. Dispose of new villain.
2: go after new villain who has not been characterized in any way. You know where they are for no reason.
3: actually confront this villain and deal with them immediately. Accidentally left-in dialogue where corvo/emily claims the duke tricked grim alex into taking the serum, which isn't true in the final build of the game.
4: go after kirin jindosh to get sokolov. Also deal with him so he can't make an army of clockworks, even though the mission makes it extremely clear that he can't do this because each one costs more than a typical noble has in the bank. Kill him anyway. End mission has delilah info dump her sob story on us. The outsider and sokolov also chip in and claim delilah has suffered more than anyone, even if talking to emily who's been through all the same things, and more without becoming a monster.
5: go after a new villain who we didn't know even existed until 3 seconds ago, and who is no threat to us. Do this because we need to know how to kill delilah. Kill new villain anyway after she has like 3 sentences of dialogue.
6: still trying to find solution to killing delilah.
7: still trying to figure out delilah's immortality
8: finally going after source of delilah's immortality. Villain is funny hoohoo heehee man.
9: going after delilah. Delilah is conveniently beaten because she uses her asspull magic to just take over the world, writes a book explaining exactly how to beat her, leaves it out in the open, then just sits down like "i hope nobody looks at my plans while I'm sleeping." Then the nonlethal kill sends her to paradise because god forbid precious delilah be acknowledged as a horrible person and character for a microsecond. Especially when her only motivation is "bad things happened to me, so now I hurt innocent people.". She also doesn't take away your powers when you're killing her, even though she can.
Fin: corvo/emily forgot to look for a way to save the one who's petrified in stone, so the stone curse just lifts when they touch the statue, which they could have done in mission 1.
ALL this I can forgive. The real kicker was the karma system, which to their credit, they did remove in the game after dishonored 2.
What is the moral of the story that is constantly told to us throughout the game?
If you have great power over others, it's your duty to be the one to intervene and protect the world from bad people. The game constantly reminds us that corvo and emily slacked off and thus allowed bad people like delilah to run amock and hurt their citizens.
Now. I challenge you to do this: do mission 1 and only kill the guy that tries to murder the newspaper printer, since the guy can easily come back to try again if he lives. Even let ramses live.
Now, on mission 2, use the heart on every person you see. I've played through the game ten times and counting and done this at the start of each playthrough.
Every. Single. Time. At least 60% of the people in the first level are homicidal. All 10 times.
In a game that tells you that it's your responsibility to stop people who hurt others.
In a game that turns your character into a monster if you kill 20% of your enemies or more.
It gets worse. In the low chaos runs, corvo and emily defend the seven strictures when you inspect them, but in high chaos, corvo suggests wiping them out.
I have news for you if you think this inclusion is justified. Do you know how the overseers get their recruits? They annually kidnap several innocent children from the city, march them outside the city, keep some, and execute the rest. Every year, these people mass murder children in attempt to breed people to be more devout. That's what those underground cages are for in the abbey in dishonored 1. That's what that note from an overseer's parents was about in the backyard level.
Every single overseer you spare constantly participates in a ritual that involves the wholesale murder of children.
Good points. Attempting to boil something as complex, personal and sometimes subjective as morality into a simple "No kill=good, Kill=bad" system will always fail. It's ironic the whole point of an immersive sim is to build a world that reacts as wide a range of possibilities as possible, yet many of them (specifically Dishonored series) impose artificial consequences on top of the in-game consequences, which should take precedence. Imagine if instead of a good/bad ending and silly morality system stuff (like increasingly-psychotic dialogue on high chaos playthroughs) the game simply provided actual in-game consequences to whatever you chose to do. There are hints of this in the games (weeper/rat count in D1 and bloodfly count in D2) but there is so much more potential.
@@gaiusfulmen Exactly! They already do this a little bit with things like campbell becoming a weeper if spared, or timsh ending up in jail if he gets arrested.
I could see a "system" of chaos being good if it were more like a plague spread system.
So usually killing someone and leaving the body out would spread plague unless you disintigrated the body or fed it to slaughterfish. While killing weepers or someone like the brothel madame would lower the spread of plague.
Other than that, there's really no use for a chaos meter at the end of a mission.
D2 was good, but I feel like it needed 1 or 2 more levels.
Your point about Feng shui is extremely obvious in DOTO’s Bank heist level.
I feel like if they gave it 6 more months of development it would have been so much better.
Mr. Obunga I think you’re forgetting all the launch day bugs and lack of playability on PC for like 2 months.
What we have today wouldn’t have been much better but the game would have been received much better
Mr. Obunga
I made 2 points.
That it needed 1 or 2 more levels and that 6 more months would have made it way better.
With 6 more months it would have given them time to bug test, do more okay testing, etc.... to improve the consoles and make the pc version actually useable.
Mr. Obunga ok? But they didn’t have “better people” just like they didn’t have 6 extra months.
2 different things can be true, nothing we’ve said is mutually exclusive.
That 11 second clip from Kaldwin's Bridge in Dishonored that showcased throwing Sokolov off the top, stopping time and grabbing him, blew my mind. I've played the game multiple times, and on my most recent playthrough, went straight to the roof and took out Sokolov first, then brought him through the rest of the place. Seeing that the game allows you so much freedom that you can throw a man to what would be his death, then simply using a combination of powers it provides you to not only save him, but also avoid a large chunk of level and make succeeding at stealth easier because of it astounds me.
Its more interesting and badass to do a run with him through the whole place though....that's my excuse anyway lol.
Agreed. The first game is special but it honestly feels constraining to play considering how much more freedom dishonored 2 allows. Dishonored 1 gives you all these powers but basically punishes you into a bad ending for using them. Dishonored 2 changes that around by tuning them all out to work interchangeably with non-lethal play styles, and also allows players to get spotted by guards and engage in fights without actually killing anyone. Dishonored 1 did not have that
@@Bilboswaggins2077 That may be true but Dishonored 2 severely limits you in the way you deal with your targets, especially lethally. Most Targets such as the good doctor or even Jindosh are always in the same room. Why Dishonored 2 allows you far more freedom in level traversal, and in dealing with regular enemies but your encounter with the target itself, which constituted the climax of a level in the first game is usually a binary choice. You either Stab/Shoot/Filet-Mignon them in the same spot they always are in, (exception being the Grand Palace) or you do the scripted non-lethal route.
In Dishonored 1 the targets were mobile and you could plot the perfect way to kill em based on their location, which was either a variable because they moved or it was reshuffled (Pendleton brothers) with every playthrough. This in turn let to an immense amount of replayability because depending on how you want to kill them, everything surrounding that factor changes as well, from guards you may encounter to routes you take. They tied in with the level you were playing. In the sequel, you have roughly a dozen new ways to off em, but whats the point when they are always sitting at the same damn desk? In 3 missions your target is actually alone in their room, so the rest of the level setup is actually irrelevant, because once you reach their room, its just you and them.
it feels like the presentation is different. like a small change that makes a big difference. there was something really cool about the roof tops in D1 that isnt there in D2. it doesnt detract that much from the game though and i personally think D2 is better
They completely changed the engine and I think that a has a huge effect on how it feels D1s engine felt so smooth D2 feels clunky when using powers often.
As a person who loves Dishonored 2 and considers it my favorite game, I can easily agree with you on alot of the things listed in this video 👌
Leadhead, perhaps a parallel term to describe what you want would be 'Blocking' or 'Scene Composition, aside from 'Framing'.
Its used a lot in cinema and arquitetural studies, and it describes the order and position of people and objects in a particular scene, with the objective of reaching the most harmonic alignment between itens.
Its what makes memorable landmarks easy to recognize.
True, something was off in second game. That's what it was. Still a great game tho, especially with no powers run. And I made it my first run and in "if it happened, it happened" style without reloading if I failed stealth. No regrets.
I love you videos man and I’ve been going through your channel watching a bunch of them. I see the one with the shot of you driving, talking about framing and see the city that I live in. :) cool moment
You have a lot of like very contradictory points that basically boils down to 'i don't like dishonored 2 as much as dishonored 1 because the game gives me more options'. Which is the beauty of dishonored 2 over dishonored 1, which is a shame, because I love dishonored, but I can't go back and play it as much because once you get used to being able to alert eight or nine guards and having options besides "use sleep darts" or "run away" you just can't go back unless you wanna roll high chaos (also no matter how good Slackjaw is, it doesn't compare with not having Garret, Murder Dad). It makes Corvo feel like the master swordsman who he is supposed to be, and it makes emily feel like corvo has been teaching her how to fight for the past twelve years. And going back to not having it feels... wrong.
I personally don't really have a problem with the framing or highlighting of routes, and frankly when you talk about this you sound like the tester who is the reason the game puts glaring lights on something and has a character tell you about it, twice. I find the maps generally intuitive and interesting, and when they aren't, I feel rewarded for exploring those maps. This is the true spice that makes the clockwork mansion absolute perfection. You have a ton of ways through the mansion, playing with rooms, slipping between the walls, and pouncing out like Murder Batman to to break jindosh''s toys so you can pelt him in the face with them later. Or sick his toys on him and each other and his guards. It's an absolute joy of a level, and so much so, I forget that the Aventa district is part of the same level. And the best part is that the Clockwork Mansion is a logical, geometrically real building. It's parts fit together and come apart and go away, and there's no tricks! It all makes logical sense, and you can understand how each room works and from this, intuit where the secret areas are on your own, so finding them becomes that much more rewarding. This works in Addermire too, imo, it's a little bit funky of a place until you figure out the geometry, but its the beginning of a mystery, and as a level, it works really well for that. It works both as a level, and as a metaphor for you figuring out the mystery of the crown killer and Grim Alex.
The part I don't get the most is how you complain about how rewarding a self limited run is, and then complain that the game gives you too many options. You can still self limit yourself, the game takes great pains to let you do this too. Dishonored is built on freedom and exploration, and the freedom to do that exploration, and Dishonored 2 excels at this. yes, some bone charms or runes are hidden behind an morass of bloodflies a few times, but so what? You're in some trashed apartment building, finding the way through is part of the joy. It's not like you're just walking down a hallway pointlessly filled with balloons, it's a three dimensional puzzle. It's filled with bloodflies, not cazadores.
Your biggest complaint seems to be 'more options and more level and less linearity' and I can't think of a single thing I want MORE from dishonored or any other of looking glass's bastard children.
Yup agree with you especially with a no powers run the thrill of needing to run away as fast as you can from guards instead of just blinking out of there is exhilarating
My biggest problem with Dishonored 2, which actually started back in the Brigmore Witches, is how often you're encountering witches and other special enemies with powers rivaling your own. It counteracts how uniquely gifted you're supposed to feel. In the original Dishonored, you've been gifted mystical magic powers through a connection to the void, a mysterious realm that many people don't even believe to be real. The most tangible presence of the void in the regular world is the Overseers, and they're presented as religious zealots balancing the fine line between heroic protectors and fanatic cultists of their own. They're often viewed as crazies preaching about wive's tales, and only you know how right they actually are.
Encountering other characters with the power of the void makes you feel less special. The original game did it well by keeping these encounters scarce. For example, Granny Rags is built up as an old woman on the fritz, but you slowly discover her special connection to the Outsider and it actually has the opposite effect: it makes the void seem even more foreign and dangerous. At first, Delilah is also special because she's the only other character you meet that can rival you, but you soon find yourself combatting leagues of her witches, all tapping into the void in similar ways to you. All of a sudden, you don't feel very unique anymore, and neither does Delilah.
In a slow transition from the DLCs to the sequel (and especially Dishonored 2's standalone DLC), the void becomes a hard magic system and way less mysterious and cool.
This, man. This is such a big part of what is wrong with this game. I recently picked it back up (never finished it) and I just cannot get into it. Thank you for putting it into words
But the assassins are in about as many missions as the witches. They also had the void connection. I felt it fit in, even though i prefered the assassins myself.
@@patrickhowell2502 well the assassins rarely do anything more than blink, which is generally established to be the most basic power. The witches are regularly doing crazy things that you can't like screaming out bullets
4:15 heavy PT vibes kicking in
i agree that dishonored 2 feels a lot different than 1, just like you said, it's like something is missing.
i tried to rationalize it to myself, and i think:
1. that in 1 you spent a lot of time on highground which was the safest place for the 95% of any mission including dlc's, you were rarely blocked in such a way you couldn't climb over it, the game in general was divided in highground and lowground, while in 2 there are lot more situations when you could be spotted balancing on a street lamp. in 2, levels become a lot more multileveled. this whole point could just be about different architecture of Karnaca, which looks more like Saints-Petersburg, but i remember having the same feeling even in Dunwall sections.
2. in 1 missions felt a lot shorter than 2 and the maps were much smaller and less complex, while in 2 the missions are longer and maps are larger and more complex
3. it's my personal beef but i just dont like the style of menus where each button has its own font and everything is so spiny geez
2:59 to be fair, can you blame arkane? In my opinion, dishonored 1 is, together with doom eternal, the only game I consider perfectly designed. It's not even close to my favorite game, but it is designed so that everything can be experimented with.
I haven't watched this video yet, but I love this series and want to talk about what I think makes 2 worse than 1.
From a gameplay and graphics perspective, 2 blows 1 out of the stratosphere. The visuals and additions to gameplay are insane.
From a game design perspective, while 2 is still good (and at some places absolutely phenomenal), overall, I think the design of the locations doesn't possess the charm of the original because every location feels too cluttered and claustrophobic. There aren't large expanses of free space that can be traversed through a hundred different means, there is just a long hallway with different levels to it.
The sequel lacked a sense of the 'sandbox' freedom in its level design which I feel is a detriment to how the core mechanics of the game work.
And on a second note, the game also doesn't have the small loveable memorable things in it like the first game. Where are the guards spouting the same 6 stupid lines over and over again that everyone puts in comments of a dishonored video, which always gets me to laugh.
"Shall we gather for Whiskey and Cigars, tonight?"
"Indeed. I believe so."
"Never doubt it."
"Blow off, Choffer!"
These lines from the guards were great, but you don't get anything like that when playing the sequel.
That's a bit of heart and charm I feel the sequel missed and it is a shame.
The game is still phenomenal tho.
So coincidentally, I just finished my own Max difficulty, Clean Hands, Ghost, No Powers run, playing as Emily, and I LOVED it. You see, the sprawling level design that made little sense with blink and other movement powers was far more logical when i had to take routes a human being could manage. It made me think a LOT, whereas with powers i just sort of reacted, and played through gut instinct.
The clockwork mansion was quirky, and it's main gimmick of room changes was interesting, but i agree that the puzzle of locating runes and bonecharms through it was tough.
The main thing to take away is that I finished the powers run in under 30 hours, but the non powers run took me 60! I had a lot more fun limited by lack of powers than when i had the easy option.
Time for me to go get my remaining 10 steam achievements :P
I agree with most your points other than the level framework and the artifact collecting which also happened to be your main point xD
I think the bigger worlds and obscure hidden secrets encourage exploring the level design which I think is great
It could just be that you had expectations of 2 because you love 1 so much thus when it did not exactly fit what you wanted you felt disappointment. I think people often forget the part they play in there enjoyment of a game, book or movie. For example I didn't like botw when I first played it due to be being depressed at the time but when I played it again after I had less stress I enjoyed it much more. There were other parts to play aswell such as that it is quite open ended and I don't usually like that but the second time though I had an idea of what I was ment to do. But I think a large part of it was the depression.
I think thats a very true statement. I myself am biased, but the other way around. I like Dishonored 2 better for a couple of reasons. First of, I played D2 first. It was my introduction to the world, and I felt as though D2 set up a very mystical and creepy world with the dark, fragmented Void and the indifferent Outsider, an entity that moved around the Void with a fluidity as if he had total control over not only himself but the world he inhabited. A creepiness I didn't feel with the brightly coloured void and stiff outsider from D1 (of course, a limitation of the time. D1 is very much so a game of its time). Second, because Serkonos feels like home to me. I live in a tropical country, one of the oldest cities in Brazil. The brightly coloured Karnaca, with its blocky buildings and breathing, living shores is what the pier in my town looks like, so I felt immediately connected. And the last reason I felt more connected to Dishonored 2 is because I was a bit taken back with the lack of some of the mechanics in D1, like the drop knock out, the run/slide/kick to the throat... So yeah, for different reasons, I am biased towards D2
One thing I think was missing was the focus on the plague and it being dark. Through storytelling and environment. There was just this feeling of dread and I’m sure we all got the worst ending possible when we went in blind. You just couldn’t help doing bad things in a falling city
yeah, i just finished 1, Daud’s dlcs, and 2 for the first time over the past week, and I think that’s what was missing. I liked all three but 1 and especially Daud’s first dlc really had a hopeless vibe and i could feel the plague permeating everything around me, but 2 was missing that feeling of depression
@@geooooooooorge precisely. And the unique enemy types really brought the horrors to light. It’s a sad game to be sure but an amazing one with probably the best world building I’ve ever seen
I’ve been searching what was exactly wrong in 2 for so long, god did you help me. Thanks for this vid man
I think arkane has made masterpieces: prey dishonored dishonored 2 and dishonored doto. They are all flawed in different ways but they are masterpieces in a way I can’t explain
I understand what you're saying but personally I felt more magic, it was different. I was so enamored with this game I was hooked for a long time. I rank it in my top 5 games with the first in my top 10. Love this game always.
Just to add a different point of view: I had quite the opposite experience with these games. To start with, I played both games originally on console (and dishonored 2 ran smoothly for me, because i was late to the party). I never played any of the thief games and I never really got into dishonored one. For all its incredible atmosphere and powers, I constantly felt limited. I don't think that difficulty is a one to one with enjoyment in this franchise. Certainly I prefer the limitation of a nonlethal run, but dishonored one limits the player in a variety of ways that i just didn't experience. The lack of a nonlethal takedown from above is one of these (i would argue its pretty much the only significant change in nonlethality for a stealth run of the game). Dishonored one is full of places where you go to the high ground only to have to drop back down again to take out an enemy. Or where you can explore incredible side paths but ultimately the main story is on a relatively linear line through the level (especially when compared to dishonored 2).
I think the differences between these games can be exemplified by their standout levels. Dishonored one to me is defined by the Boyle Party level. The world is moody and atmospheric, the nonlethal options are ironic and morally dubious at best. Themes of class issues that you pointed out in your previous dishonored video are pervasive. But even so you are relatively limited. There's essentially one way into the Boyle estate and you will go through it at some point. You can explore the downstairs of the party all you like but eventually you're going to have to either kill everybody or go read diaries upstairs. A nonlethal run through that level is inevitably: ground floor, second floor, basement. I think this is thematically appropriate for the game. Corvo sees problems and solutions. Hes trained and knows what hes doing, so the world is quite linear to him, only opened up by his newfound powers.
Dishonored 2 to me isn't defined by the addermire institute (though fun its the weakpoint of the game in terms of level design). Instead its defined by the clockwork mansion. Emily sees options in everything (and i'm going to stick to emily here because shes narratively the more logical choice for dishonored 2, corvo mainly being present for fans of the first game and thief voice). Shes new to this world and this city and not only is everything very different from dunwall and her life experience, shes not quite sure how to move forward. Traversal is a task in the second game in a way it wasn't in the first. The mansion changes and you don't quite know what to do. It takes time to get a footing and understand where you are. But once you understand what's going on, Emily is unstoppable in ways dishonored 1 corvo never was (especially if you save-scum yourself some bone charms). The challenge isn't in the puzzle of a small scale encounter but in the larger scale question of how each area works.
Thematically I think dishonored 1 is the stronger game, but for all its narrative prowess, the world is just too small to ever encompass the world that I wanted to explore as a player. Dishonored 2 fixed that with style. I think Clockwork Mansion may be the best level design in any game I've ever played and perhaps ever will. Dishonored 1 tries to be a choose your own adventure, but dishonored 2 builds a world and then lets you explore.
My first time playing dishonored 2 I played as emily and skimmed the books so badly that I missed that she had a boyfriend (a fact which is apparent within the first 20 minutes of the first level). Despite that I never felt that the game was narratively weak because frankly I didn't care about the individual characters the game was throwing at me, I cared about the larger world I could explore and all the microcosms I could find, like the Howlers willing to kill for a meal behind the carriage station in the aventa district.
TBH the first game doesn't really need a non lethal takedown since it's so easy to run through the entire game without ever touching the ground. I remember being so disappointed when in my first playthrough (on hard) I reached the end with no kills without any effort. I had to go back and kill everyone to see the bad ending. A non lethal takedown would make the game even more easy, but would be pointless for an "efficient" run.
Honestly I feel like the clockwork mansion is overrated. It felt the most linear out of any of the levels and there weren't even that many changes that could be made past the first area. I'd say the highlight was with the time piece.
Perfectly said. I’ve beat Dishonored 1 multiple times and it’s undoubtably in my top 5 favorite games ever. I’ve attempted beating 2 twice and just never have. I’m not able to say why. The gameplay is still smooth, level design is good, and on paper 2 seems like a solid improvement on 1, but there was just something that put me off.
Ironically dishonored 2 got me back into dishonored 1 by making me realize exactly what the original had that it was missing. I've played a decent amount of both (not nearly several hundred hours but close to a hundred in each) and dishonored 2 frustrates me more every time I play it because it's not a bad game, au contraire it's on the verge of greatness. But it's not there, and the more you look at it the more you see how painfully close it is and the more frustrating it gets. Many individual elements of dishonored 2 are frankly incredible and top quality for the series and for immersive sims in general, but what it lacks is the glue that makes these parts greater than their whole.
That's it I suppose. Dishonored 2 is simply the sum of it's (good) parts whereas Dishonored 1 is FAR more than the sum of it's parts.
I am sorry but this is laughably pretentious wordsalad that doesn't mean anything at all
Can't say I agree at all. Dishonored 2 is far more creative, has sharper mechanics in every way that matters (people keep pointing to the cumbersome "oh you can duck under sword swings woaaaah" thing from Dishonored 1 but that's extremely hard to pull off and was never Arkane's intent, so it's not fair to criticise D2 for it) and your issues with the levels being far larger and more intricate is completely subjective, because a lot of us actually prefer them as opposed to Dishonored's relatively constrained levels.
But I'll give you credit for A) not using the tiresome "Karnaca isn't as cool as Dunwall!!!" argument everyone makes, as if Dunwall is the only Victorian setting in gaming, and B) for eloquently putting your thoughts into words without disrespecting either the fans who enjoy D2 or Arkane themselves. Good video.
(*cough* Prey is Arkane's best game anyways *cough*)
My big problem was that every ending to D1 was unique and cool and it feels like a massive cop out to just pick the good ending to D1 and make a sequel to that
But saying that D2's mechanics are less cumbersome and more creative is just as subjective as larger levels being bad for the gameplay.
Karnaca is absolutely beautiful. It's an incredible feeling going from the dark Dunwall atmosphere to the exotic, foreign environments in Karnaca. But yeah, I feel that a lot of people decide which game they say is better basing it too much on which city they liked more
@@rickfan7 If you do a High Chaos run in D2 then the High Chaos run of D1 is considered canon for that playthrough. It's not a lot, but it's there.
11:00 so the critism is that an old destroyed house is shady on one half? xD
I definitely agree with the corridor analogy, D1 definitely felt like a corridor, you always had a "straight" path towards your objective, while in D2 i always got the feeling of a more "twisty" level, like the devs got a D1 level and bent it
9:37 Haha! That background culling of the cliff face. The Void Engine is pretty good, but for whatever reason it struggles to appropriately cull unused assets.
Great essay, Leadhead. I felt like D2 improved on the mechanics of the game in pretty much every single way, but somehow something was missing. My main complaints were simply that I didn't like the setting as much, and I didn't care at all about Delilah (we had already taken care of her as Daud), and the assassination targets weren't very interesting (with the exception of Jindosh) so the story just felt bland. The environments in D2 were more detailed and full but somehow felt less lived in. Maybe the developers lost the script while making everything high res.
In defence of the level design: I agree with your gripes about the bloodflies and feeling like a collector, but honestly, some levels in D2 were the best I've ever seen. The Jindosh mansion and the crack in the slab mission were breathtaking. And in DOTO I absolutely loved the bank heist. It was so satisfying.
This was really well explained and well done. This far better explains why I dislike D2, as opposed to me just screaming into the Void about how they butchered The Outsider's character. Which, to be fair, they absolutely did. But there is so much more that it's lacking in comparison to the original Dishonored, and you nailed it.
These games make killing so much fun I've never been able to do a low chaos run, I tend to go for the complete genocide run where I kill everyone I physically am able to
ik this is a bit late but man i loved the one where you travel through time
I didn't think of these points at all and played through all 5 games and equally enjoyed them. After watching this video I realised how different the stories were related to you as the main character. The other points yes I disagree, but of course, to each their own.
The only thing I felt was different between 1 and 2 was that 1 gave me headaches if I played for more than an hour (and this is with FOV changes).
I have spent a total of nearly 600 hours playing these games.
I felt that I could explore better in D2, a for eg. Going to Jindosh using a hidden path, or the crack in the slab mission, or in the good doctor, where instead of going straight through, I went on the "first roof" from the right side of the entrance.
D1 did annoy me due to some quirks.
Great video, Thank you for talking about the framing of levels, Felt it but never really knew how to put it into words. Another thing I really dislike about dishonored 2's art style is that it went for a more realistic take rather the oil painted aesthetic of the original. I think why it feels this way to me is because Dishonored 1's World and geometry is made of paint - If you look at any surface in the game you can clearly see the many block colors of oil paint, all combined to created a gritty, grimy surface texture and in that paint you can see the different colors smudge together, the places where it was obviously dabbed on with a brush, you can see the brush strokes and it really does feel like this world was made with a brush and canvas, not a computer. Next time you play Dishonored, just put your nose right up against a wall, door or crate and see the texture, then do the same in D2 and see the more generic, realistic ones. This is something I see a lot in Arkanes games since Dishonored, and I really miss the oil painting aestetic which has been replaced by one much more focused on stylized realism.
Feng shui isn't a matter of aesthetics.
This is a wonderful video with some great insights. I've felt the same way about D2 for a while now, so I appreciate the "new" direction to embrace. There're a few more no-powers runs in my near future! Thanks.
Good critique. You nailed how annoying it is to hunt down runes and bonecharms in 2, whereas in 1 it was fun exploration. If you were a negative guy, you could have elaborated more on how they messed up in many other areas, but you politely touched on them and moved on. Props.
I think the point of the runes and bonecharms in D2 was to force you to explore the new big levels. I would have preferred DOTO's approach of giving you small sidequests instead, but, sigh, hunting collectibles is what gaming has become nowadays.
@@veselinnedkov643 honestly it had the opposite effect on my first playthrough. I found myself not caring enough about runes to bother searching for the entrance to addermire’s basement, and in the more complicated levels like the clockwork mansion, I said “fuck that shit” and didn’t look for any runes at all.
I had exactly the opossite experience but I wouldnt call 'fun' having to get every rune/bonecharm but it was somewhat annoying in 1 for me
@@mr.cup6yearsago211 d2 didn't have all those loading screens that separated the runes which is the big reason I think atleast. And that rune under addermire is literally the only one I cannot find for the life of me and I have like 10 playthroughs.
@@hankhill8344 to my understanding, to get that rune you need to get up on top of the elevator, and destroy the cables so that it crashes down into the basement.
Yeah, it’s fucking stupid.
So I was accidentally a genius and ended up playing Dishonored 2 before Dishonored 1, thanks to D2 having a demo on PS4 that took you all the way to the Addermire Instititute. Honestly, I feel like I like D2 slightly more as a set of unique challenges, but I like D1 more as a game. Moment to Moment gameplay versus the whole experience, I suppose.
I completely agree with you.For some reason I can't remember anything of note besides the pretty aesthetics of the second game but I remember every single part of the maps of the first one.
nailed it. just played dishonored 2 and I was intimidated by the massive amount of bone charms and runes I'd have to spend time getting. it actually made me a bit annoyed because of how much I'd have to run around trying to find them instead of just picking them up on my way to the main mission.
I think this is the video i disagree with you most on. The clockwork mansion alone elevates 2 above 1. Not to mention crack in the slab. Dishonored 1 doesn't play with the players abilities like these 2 levels do.
These two levels do nothing with the player's abilities. They're a technical marvel, but Crack in the Slab even takes away your powers, severely limiting your character. And while these two levels are stand outs, so are Lady Boyle's Last Party and The Flooded District, not even mentioning the Daud DLC's.
@pastichiorocker nah they both test the abilities of the player. Crack in the slab precisely because it takes away your powers making you rely on stealth skills (and the other power it grants you) and clockwork mansion is generally regarded as one of the harder dishonored levels. They both test the players abilities to use the enviornment to their advantage. CWM by altering it, CITS by jumping back and forth through time.
Reading through comments it amazes me how good of an audience you have. I expected to see people fight each other over opinions, but here people seem to accept other opinions and it's great. I personally love D1 to the point of having an outsider's mark tattoo on my forearm (I changed it a little to fit it better). I love every mission of it and I feel D2 didn't capture ""something"" that I like about D1 so much. At least, I felt that, now I know what exactly D2 did worse. I still love both games and intend of beating them in every playstyle I can think of, but for me D1 is better.
Para mim, Dishonored 2 é um Upgrade em basicamente tudo, não fez absolutamente nada de errado, terminei o Dishonored 1 e suas DlC's e então fui para o Dishonored 2, e caramba, eles transformaram ouro em Diamante.
Thank you for putting into words why my no powers playthrough was inexplicably my favorite playthrough of the game. I couldn't figure out *why* it was the most fun I'd had even if I had 120+ hours put in before that. Surprising how taking away the magic made the game seem more magical.
Alright. Yeah. Wow. This hit the nail right on the head and I am definitely going to be picking this game back up to do a no powers run now. Thank you for finally putting this elusive feeling I had about this game into words for me
9:45 and a giant wall cloud that may or may not be a tropical cyclone.
I watched this some time ago and I watched it again just recently. You make some excellent points. I don't know, I mean I remember on playing both for the first time and thought that the second complements the story after whats happened in the DLC of the first one and it does it really well. As for the visuals it reminds of a city on the south cost of France or on the Mediterranean compared to the London... Dunwall influence. Further to the landscape that we see more of the streets in the DLC of this, Dishonored 2. I don't know. I'm currently in Stockholm Sweden, and on my way here i got to see more of the Cities of Western Europe, Like Amsterdam Gothenburg, Copenhagen, (before the lock-down). I can see the developers maybe using theses cities as influences on a follow up a possible third dishonored. How they would do that, I have no idea, I'm not the writer.... I appreciate your augment, it has made me think. Thank you.
One thing I noticed from watching this, is the levels you mentioned were the best, are my favorite levels.
Nothing of what you talk about bothered me in D2, but the one thing I missed from the first game and what kinda ruined the mood for me is that they left the nautical theme behind. Even though our home base is an actual ship. Everything in D1 was about the water, the whales, everything felt cold and wet, hell, even part of the city was flooded. Karnaca is a place of heat, wind and sands. A lot of the time the ever so important whale oil is replaced by wind turbines. Very different atmosphere, we are not dependent on the sea anymore and we are losing the cultural connection with it. It's not bad, but it's not what I was hoping for... And it felt especially jarring and disappointing, because I played the games so close one after the other. The Outsider's supposed connection to the whales feels a bit eh now, to the point where I was thinking they could have replaced the bone charms with something else, just like replacing the rats with bloodflies. And speaking of, the bloodflies also felt a bit shoehorned in. The Rat Plague was an important part of the plot in the first game, it had ruined the entire city, while the bloodflies felt like a mild nuisance at best.
Yeah, the best I can say about bloodflies is that they creeped me out a little more and thats it.
I like having the more options but I do find myself almost naturally restricting my use of them in places just to show that I am better then the guards.
I'm surprised you didn't mention that Dishonored 1's story was more cohesive.
The thing about scaling rooftops and always coming from above you praise about the first game i don’t think wasn’t here because of a mistake but i think it was intentional the ability to just stay above ground or get out of the enemies sight quickly, I think was seen as a flaw with the intention to push you into areas where you could be seen and you would need to need to be situationally aware or risk being seen i think the best example of that is the dust district where safe and danger zones are delineated by a titlecard so if you want to relax you need to find a way out. I prefer this because it makes me feel more tense, but I could understand why your opinion differs
Where there's no doubt improvements were made, ranging from deeper environments, to quality of life like NG+ and non lethal agression; but I can never get over the loss of quirks and movement depth. Your abilities, jumping, sliding, interactions are all lessened. You mention less detail, and that's not only in the levels. Moments like that bullet blocking with the grenade, ducking under sword strikes, anything like that. It's mostly gone. Leftover is what the developer intended, and that's just not as rewarding as the first game. Major bummer.
Also: Fun Fact! I couldn't figure out the painting thing so I literally tried every combination on the safe
That's what's so sad about it. So, so much potential to be even better than the first games. It hit the notes, but it missed the rhythm
Huh? Nah man you can still duck under the sword to dodge the attack. Your other arguments are super valid, but they haven't removed that feature from the game
@@KalilIllinois Huh! My mistake
Ah yes, the old throw a grenade to block a bullet trick
My biggest problem with Dishonored 2 was the chaos system. It felt completely meaningless.
In the first game you see huge changes in every level starting from the Lord Regent mission. Hiram hides in a safe room on high chaos, making the fight up there way cooler and more fun. The loyalists fight with each other a lot more on high chaos leading up to the betrayal. The flooded district is more flooded, there's more tall boys, and the survivors all turn to weepers. And the final level is the best of all, with Samuel condemning you, the total change in weather, the siege on the tower, it's awesome. The game made you feel like your actions truly had consequences.
I was hoping that Dishonored 2 would expand on the system and make it even more intricate, but it just made it worse. The chaos level barely affects anything. You get some slight dialogue changes and some more bloodflies, but that's it. There's no level changes or anything, and it's a huge disappointment.
I played this before the first game and I loved the series immediately