Yeah, pretty much. If I could have, I would have placed a pre-order for the tarot/paying cards set, however. Alas, only the super-special Americans got that.

A CE with an art book might get my attention. But then probably only Americans would get that, too.

I almost never get CEs heh, but this time I was actually willing to put down the money for it, and... Nothing.

The tarot cards were also available in Europe at a couple of retailers.

Well, I don't live in Europe.

I would make another review about this review, but I would like my warning meter to stay empty.

Anyway. OP, you didn't give anything to troll about (Other than the topic itself). As for the (bare) story, it is a little dry. Arkane said in an interview that this style of game isn't very popular, so they wanted to use a classic story to draw people in. Not only that, you (the player) create your story.

The npc's were a plot device, to give you some direction. Rather than drop you in a sandbox with no idea what to do.

Well, well. Another day, another opinion I disagree with. (OP's)

This! I've been hyped for games many,many times only to be bitterly disappointed when I finally play them. Dishonored is a remarkable game that has exceeded my expectations and regardless of how some have panned its narrative,its pretty deep if you really pay attention to the world around you.

Yeah, I can't quite grasp what people have against it. It's barebones, sure, but it's pretty decent.

Absolutely. It's been in the top 10 played and top 10 RPG sellers on Steam for a year now, so I know I'm not alone. As far as I know, it is also the only SP-only game that holds this distinction. For me, Skyrim IS the highest rated game of all time. No other game has ever come even remotely close to giving me 1,000 hours of play time, which I'm fairly sure I'm coming up on with 4 or 5 hundred hours on XBox and over 400 on PC.

Dishonored? Two play throughs, virtually identical despite drastically different play styles, 18 total hours... that's not even a full game. In fact, I've never played a game THIS short (on a single play through, 10 hours) in my life besides Brink. And Brink went bargain bin used at gamestop not even a month after release. Don't get me wrong, it IS great, where it actually IS anything. What was done was done exceptionally well. But the pacing and game as a whole is SO off, it will never be "best of all time" and doubtful even "best of year", even for adventures. Stacked up against, say Alan Wake, Dishonored is edged out, but only because of that major too short, too fast paced flaw.

That's an interesting comparison. Alan Wake is more cohesive, but it's also (much) more limited in pretty much everything. AW has a more interesting story (tropes and all) than Dishonored does. That said, AW's ending was awful. Disohonored's was okay.

But ... Alan Wake is Stephen King, and Dishonored is Stan Lee. They're not really up for comparison.

Edit: Skyrim, up until the first dragon you fight, is amazing. It quickly falls apart after that. Dishonored kept me going right until the end. But, again, Skyrim and Dishonored aren't really comparable because they're very different games.

True, and I am, admittedly, an RPGer, mostly. Agreed, AW is tighter and less derivative, but it's also paced a LOT better (and agreed, ending, not so great). But, even with Dishonored's sometimes predictable and cliche story, the missions, the gameplay, the powers, all make up for what (seems like) minimal flaws there are in the story. With that one glaring exception, half the story seems to be missing. The in-betweens, whole portions of the world. It has a feel of being slightly more than a demo and much less than a game. Like I've said, I absolutely love what it IS, but what it's lacking is too great a flaw for Dishonored to ever be more than a 6/10 for me.

Dishonored is an awesome game

most of the bad reviews come from PS3 players who have never played the game but are angry at Bethesda for not releasing Skyrim DLCs for the PS3

A bit more variation would have been cool, but I can understand why it is the way it is. This is the first of an original IP, it was done on a small budget by a newly-acquired studio, and it's the end of a console cycle. It would be difficult to fit much more onto a DVD, anyway, which isn't a problem for Steam, but it is a problem for consoles. As the initial salvo in (what I hope is) a great new world, I love it. There's DLC coming, which I imagine will be more varied in what it offers up. And hopefully a sequel, with or without Corvo, set or not in Dunwall.

While there are a few missteps here and there, on the whole the game is good. The story is basically an excuse for the gameplay, which does have it's problems from time to time but makes up for it with the amount of options at the players disposel. If they don't make a sequel, I hope that they take the lessons learned and create another title with an equal amount of complexity wrapped up in a story and a character that I can actually get behind. Corvo comes across as an empty body that you fill, which makes the whole revenge aspect fall flat because as players we aren't invensted enough to actually care.

Yeah, only thing is, because of the game, I have no desire to even consider any DLCs, and any sequel will have to be out for months (and probably bargain basemanted) before I'd even consider it. First impresions and all...

There are tons of terrible games that got high review scores.

What? He just said Skyrim falls apart after the first dragon fight...which is the beginning of the game lol? You just said Skyrim is the best game of all time.

Read the rest of my post, it was in reference to Alan Wake and Dishonored, not in reference to Skyrim at all. I absolutely do not agree with the Skyrim statement at all.

For the record neither do I.

How do you make a game that is an "excuse" for gameplay? Isn't a game... you know, sort of about gameplay? And no, no, no, don't stick in any of that third person cinematic prefab character linear nonsense into these games. There are enough of those. There are very few games which step back from that, from imposing an authorial POV and a heavy developer's hand in the story, and give the player the freedom to create their own main story line within a world that's absolutely suffused with story. Dishonored does it beautifully.

How is it possible that you played through in 10 hours? I've played 16 hours and I am on mission 6. Plus the figure doesn't take into account that the game plays so smoothly that I didn't spend hours fiddling and fussing and reloading.

It wasn't really all that difficult. There ARE only 9 missions, after all. Like I said, 1 or 2 deaths, no need to restart or reload, no need to explore everything. The levels are quite easy and the paths are blatantly obvious once you've played for more than a few minutes. If you invest in Possession "stealthing" through with 0 kills is easy as pie, too easy, even on hard. I *mostly* enjoy RPGs, but my diversions were 3D FPS from Wolfenstein up, including playing Doom and original Quake Deathmatch on dial-up servers, so "dying" in non-PvP is something rather abnormal for me in an adventure game. Without the deaths, without indecision, and without the desire to find every last valuable, it's quite easy to run it in 10 hours without rushing. My second play through took 8 hours, even though I explored and discovered more, on stealth. It's main goal, being an adventure game, it should have been at least twice as long, twice the content, without relying on the "action content" "difficulty" to extend play. That said, at least I finished Dishonored, twice, unlike the abomination that Dark Souls (mentioning difficulty as a method of extending play brought that to mind) was, which I quickly tired of.

played a friends copy

while the game play was extreamly fun trying to find every route through and find new ways of killing people *mass murder*lol

thing that made me glad i did not purchase the game was the length of it
i finshed it in a single day after 2 playthroughs low and high chaos there was nothing left to do


i will prob pick up my own copy once price drops to 40 or so dollars but will not pay 60

Yup. I'd be willing to bet a REAL speed through, skipping cutscenes (that can be skipped), could be done in about 4-6 hours. THAT is a dish that is pitifully short on the meat and incredibly heavy on the parsley.

Mind blown.