Um, no, not really, the side missions, I did them, Slackjaw, Granny Rags, etc., and so forth. I think *possibly* the fact that I stealthed (and didn't die a whole lot, maybe two or three times) the first play through did make it a little faster, but dying to lengthen gameplay (a la Dark Souls) isn't really an answer. I finished up with 4 of my non-passives "maxed" (two levels, how can you really justify replay based on that?), so no real replay there for that reason. Why? Just to jump higher and max out my "rat pack"? Doesn't make sense. Perhaps if I wanted to play it as an FPS. This second playthrough I'm going full on stealth, no kills, but it's still essentially the same, less the killing. And I'm only doing this to get to a "better" outcome. Honestly, I don't even know if I can stay with it because, same character, same powers, same missions. Maybe if you like branching linear story lines and want to see all of the branches, but this isn't my cup of tea and, honestly, that type of game is transparent in its "turn to page X" differences. So, no, no replayability for me there either. When a game doesn't have a TRULY different, replayable story, 10 hours is extraordinarily short. Mark my words, Dishonored will go down in gaming history as a shrug because of this, once the shine has worn off. In a year, I doubt anyone in any appreciable measure will be playing it. And as far as branding or franchise, nope, just don't see it.

Oh, it's a great half game, but it's still only half a game.

The named sidequests are not all the sidequests. They aren't all just handed to you.

As for dieing my two runs involved only a couple deaths each adding not much more than maybe 30-45 minute total still putting me easily between 25-30 hours.

The only reason it seems to be half game to you is only because you refuse to acknowledge the other half.

I can do that to. Skyrim is half a game. No replayability and I can only play as a charge in swordsman. Sure it has 300 hours worth of content and a variety of other builds but all that doesn't count because I don't feel like doing it.

Same with Alan Wake. I quit half way through and refuse to finish so it's half a game. It doesn't matter that there is another half of story there I refuse to acknowledge it so it doesn't exist.

Same with the Witcher 2. I only played through once and don't feel like playing again so all that other content doesn't matter because I refuse to use it and therefore it doesn't exist.

Just because you don't feel like taking advantage of all the replayability does not make it non existent and does not make the game incomplete because of it.

If you want to ignore all the replayability and other bits of content that is fine, that is your choice but that does not make the game half a game. It just means you only played half of it.

I am not asking for Corvo to be overpowered. Just for the enemies to be less overpowered. Take away the ridiculous dodge and the inability to miss without you having to wear a special charm and the gun guys are now challenging without being overpowered. Take away either the push back of the music box guys and they are no longer overpowered. Tall boys actually wouldn't be so bad if you could actually get the stab to work more than a quarter of the time. I have lost count of how many times I have blinked up right up against the tall boys' bodies and still had the stab move refuse to respond.

These changes would not make the enemies that much less dangerous. They would all still be a viable threat they just wouldn't be cheap one.

I don't find the music box guyw or people with pistols that overwhelming and I play on very hard.

As for tall boys, you can only stab them if they are unaware of your presence.

You do find out the origin of the plague, you just have to find it.

Plus why should Corvo focus on curing the plague? Have you forgotten who he is. HE IS A BODYGUARD. Not a scientist, not a grand protector of the world. He only has two goals. Take down those that betrayed him, save Emily. At no point does his character show any reason to care about anything else. Stopping the plague is not his job. Its scientists jobs ,such as Sokolov and Pierro, which is why both of them have been working on elixers.

And rationale for the beginning? Were you asleep during that whole section? The reasoning is obvious based on the first scene with the empress and the cutscene after her death. Burrows did not agree with her attitude on how to handle the plague, and did not feel she was the "strong leadership" the city needed. People have killed for a lot less reason throughout history.

not true. I have stabbed them while they are aware before.

And how do you not find the music box guys overwhelming? You can't get close to them, you can't shoot them, if you get to close to them you start to take damage, and you can't use powers on them. spring razors don't work because you can't get close enough to plant one on them, grenades work if you happen to have one or two handy but if that grenade happens to miss you are screwed.

As for gun guys you can shoot them but with the number of them most missions seem to have you run out of ammo fast, on top of this if you try to run they still shoot you with ridiculous pinpoint accuracy that only misses if something happens to get in the way or if you get lucky and the charm decides to have them miss. Even doing the run slide is useless as they still shoot you either way. If you do get close 99% of your attacks don't work because they do this ridiculous dodge or block. Even if they just made it so that they would put the gun away at short distance (seriously it is ridiculous when they maintain a pointed gun when you are less than 2 feet away from them.

What? It's the same story in the same branching line, every time you play (almost done on a second play through, it won't get a third, that's for sure). Oh, yeah, I found ONE sidequest I missed the first time, only it required me to go out of my way to find. In RPGs, you have different classes you can play that change the gameplay significantly. Not so in adventure games. You are the same char each time through in Dishonored and the differences in how you choose to play that character are not significant enough, and don't impact the story, really, at all but for the minor branching differences. Same missions, same characters, and so on. There's nothing to "acknowledge" other than the fact that you can mix and match, what, half a dozen active skills (the passives have really no impact on gameplay for me, ditto ammo carry buffs), two levels each, of which you can max, what, 4 per play through if you so choose and without hunting down runes. No sorry, there's nothing to acknowledge other than that different play throughs garner the same branching linear story.

In games like Skyrim, you can choose your own path, do what you want, when you want, in the order you want, or not do them at all. Each character can be substantially different, mage, thief, warrior, combinations thereof, that significantly impacts play and story. You have NO choice in Dishonored, only the illusion thereof, and the difference between those choices really makes no signifcant difference other than which page you turn to before going back to the default "continue story here" page. Like I said, it's a shame, because if it was a longer play, a longer story, it could have been the best adventure game ever. As it is now, though, I can rank others that are easily better, within the same genre, specifically because Dishonored fails in length and, like all adventures for me, offers no replay. If there is a Dishonored 2, for me, it will easily be skippable.

Really? Whenever I tried it never worked, but it works 100% when they are unaware.


I normally try to take them out before they even start winding their box, but if i fail at that a shot from the gun staggers them long enough for me to swap to blink then tele behind them and kill.


I've been able to dodge their shots just by running and jumping around. Sometimes I manage to run and slide then attack a guard before he shoots me, and that manages to trip him up. Also Blink is really useful in comtat.

Basically you don't like adventure games.

I'm on my fourth playthrough in Dishonored (36 hours in) and I'm planning a fifth.

The 70+ hours I've spent in Dishonored is easily better than the 200+ hours I spent in Skyrim.

Not as a side note, as a branching questline (even if you can *choose* not to follow it). My version of Corvo isn't that simple. He's a much more complex man who truly cares about Jessamine and Emily (who may even be his daughter). And further, cares about making the world a better place for Emily. He even takes time out of his day to play a game of hide-and-seek when she asks. So yes, he would care about the plague, even more so since (trying not to spoil here) certain parties seem to have a vested interest in status quo. You have absolutely no clue, no proof, no nothing to justify Jessamine's assassination. There's nothing up front to validate her "weakness". There aren't weepers assaulting nobility, nor commoners allowed in secure zones, nothing. For all you KNOW, as Corvo, absolutely nothing changes after her death other than the name of the person "in charge". Only later do you find out, if you pay attention, that the who responsible is not who you may have initially thought. But, at that point, confirmation is a moot point, and makes no difference to the story at all. Sokolov was really an extraordinary opportunity to expand the story that was completely lost. IF you could side with Sokolov in a plague cure scenario, THAT would drastically change the ending, and the world. As it is, it's the same old, same old with each short play through. And sorry, a game that can be finished in a day? And played through in three or four basic ways COMPLETELY in a week or so? No absolutely not worth the price tag, nor any awards, unless there are game awards for "shorts", which Dishored absolutely is... short. Other than that, it's near flawless. But that's one big honking bit of coal in an otherwise flawless 2 carat diamond.

i like the art style and for what it is unreal did its job showing it off. but i feel like the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. the textures themselves are terrible (the grass outside the pub looks like ps2 graphics) but when its altogether it looks great. i just cant help but wonder if zenimax media had id software let arkane use id tech 4 (prey2) or id tech 5 (rage) this game would've looked unreal! see what i did there?

Now that I'm finally done with the game ...

• I would have liked to see slightly tighter and more complex stealth and combat systems.
  
• The world's too dreary in the second half. The locations should have been more varied.
  
• I know everyone's going to disagree with me, but I didn't like the brothel. I wasn't crazy about the section after Daud, either; it was too corridor-y. Also disliked the last level, which felt too cobbled-together.
  
• I don't like how Granny Rags turns out. She's a pretty cool character, initially, but the last time you meet her she's just too much ...
  
• Hiram Burrows' voice actor is too hammy.

That's it, I think.

I'm not finding them cheap or overpowered at all. If you play the game like an FPS and try to take them head on, single-handedly, frankly then I would wonder how the hell they ever took power in the first place. If they can be defeated by just one man, it's a wonder they survived long enough to become an empire. I play on very hard and I rarely ever take a scratch. But that's because I will avoid fighting more than one on one. Two on one I'll accept if I'm surprised. 3 on one and I'm getting the hell out of there, because I have a better chance of escaping than winning the fight. This is not cheap or overpowered, this is realistic. Like I said, even a master martial artist like Bruce Lee would struggle against 3 armed men at once - not so much if they were unarmed. It's correct the way it is. Essentially you just said "I don't want Corvo to be overpowered, I want the enemies to be underpowered." You call them overpowered simply because they can stand on nearly equal footing with Corvo himself. Because they're not weaklings who lack the skill to face you. That Corvo is more skillfull than they are is well-represented by the fact that he can take any one of them head on and, alone, they might wound him but they're basically screwed.

However the very realistic fact that when you're outnumbered, skill rapidly becomes irrelevant, is also well represented by the way, once you're outnumbered, it no longer matters how skillful Corvo is. Against so much as 2 or 3 enemies, the odds quickly turn against you. Just like they would in real life. That's not overpowering the enemies. That's you needing to find a smarter approach than to fight them head on. It's a stealth game after all, not a conventional one-man-army kill-everything-that-moves FPS.

Note: Chapter 1 spoilers contained within.

Knowing the key players isn't the hard part in almost any revenge tale. Creating an opening to reach them is. By this reasoning, we should simply be able to kill the Lord Regent without going through any underlings, simply because it's Corvo's city. Yes, it's filler, but it also allows more time to build up the key players and give a greater sense of connection between the world and story being told.

The problem with Dishonored isn't that it's a short game. The problem is that the game rushes through the material so quickly the player doesn't have time to really embrace what's going on. Ex: Killing the Empress within the first five minutes. There's no room to get to know her. Or even to care about her, unlike that adorable sequence where you play hide and seek with her daughter. Likewise with the villains responsible for her murder. It didn't even feel like betrayal because the game gave almost no interactions with any of the key villains before finding out that they were actually responsible. Dishonored has phenomenal world-building, it's just so far diverted from the main plot Corvo is involved with. To use Bioshock as a point of comparison, every area was marked by a cast of memorable characters. None of Corvo's actual targets are really given the same respect. Sokolov is featured more in Dishonored's world-building than the main villain, which is a huge problem

It doesn't feel like the story gave me a reason for the mission. It feels more artificial; like they designed the mission, then tacked on a brief motivation to explain why I'm doing it. Which is fine for a game. But considering that the story is about as thin as a Hitman game, they could at least have provided more actual assasination targets for the player to engage.


You do realize advlts want different things? I wouldn't recommend narrowing every advlt in the world into your category. We don't all want a game we can kill in ten hours. My favorite developer? Bioware. And good luck finding a Bioware game with less than 20 hours of play.

I can handle short games. Some of my favorite games were extremely short (Half-Life 2, Portal 2, The Darkness). It's just that in Dishonored's case, the length doesn't quite do justice to the story's premise.

ENEMY. AWARENESS.

seriously there were times (on very hard mind you) where I felt like every guard was on drugs. "Someone's supposed to be on patrol here" I got excited, thinking he was going to trip an alarm or enter an alert phase. but nooooo he just keeps walkin, also how exactly does the pendleton in the steam rooms NOT NOTICE A DOOR FLYING OPEN DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF HIM? Why are all the doors the most silent creations ever?

Thats my biggest complaint about this game, those damn doors don't do anything, if they had been removed from the game nothing would have changed as far as playing stealthily goes. This was a serious immersion breaker for me.