Also, if this is set in Tyvia and is supposedly a sequel, why include the Lord Regent's insignia?
Rumor alert: Gamescon reveal incoming?
According to the site’s report Dishonored 2 is in the works at Arkane Lyon, with Harvey Smith as lead. It will star a new protagonist, and although our hero (or anti-hero)’s identity ahs not been confirmed. Arkane reportedly weighed up the possibility of letitng players take the role of empress Emily Kaldwin, suggesting a later time period than the original game.
Hope whomever's the lead has a voice this time. Sucks that Corvo didn't say nyet. Daud spoke and it worked just fine.
The Empress possibly doing some knife work, eh? Sweet!
Last edited by MrDuck; 16th Jul 2014 at 01:39.
If it's staying at the Lyon office, then hopefully we can expect more maps from Digi & Purah.
I didn't mind Corvo being a blank, but doing that twice in a row (DLC notwithstanding) would be pretty uninteresting. The world and missions had personality, let's give the player character personality as well.
Curious to know if they change up the mechanics of the game at all, or they just keep rolling with what they have. I'm on board with it either way, of course, but after the disaster that was Thief 4, I wouldn't mind seeing some more in-depth stealth elements.
I can second that.Originally Posted by Thirith
Would Thief or Deus Ex have been even close to what they were if the developers had gone with the "silent protagonist" trope?
Gotta say, I never found Deus Ex' JC Denton a particularly interesting character, and his voice acting was only better than that of some other characters by default. Having said that, not giving him a voice wouldn't have worked for that game. Thief, on the other hand, was much improved by Garrett and his personality - which doesn't mean that every game has to work with this. For me, they're simply two different tools in the storyteller's box, and each does a different thing. Corvo worked for me as a blank slate onto which I could project my own thoughts and feelings, but so did Daud as an actual, interesting personality.
Silent Corvo really didn't work for me. The blank slate idea doesn't really work as he does interact with quite a few people, but you're never able to actually decide how those interactions pan out (except in a very broad sense in that you can fail to do side missions, or depending on the chaos level). The bit that really stood out for me was the duel that Pendleton stiffed you into doing. When I got back from that mission I wanted to slap him or something, but all I could do was meekly accept the reward he offered.
Half-life kinda pulls it off (barely in the case of the second game, though they do lampshade it) but any game where you frequently interact with characters needs to have some way of expressing yourself (Though, conversely, the Brigmore Witches had less of that).
I felt the same way with Half-Life too. Eons ago in games like Dark Forces or Quake, your primary interaction with other entities was killing them. There wasn't a ton of need for the player-character to plunge into an in-mission eulogy. Nowadays, with deeper backstories and more interaction, it's started to feel really weird when I have to give other characters the mute treatment.
I've noticed I don't have this problem in games like the recent Fallout titles. I think that might be because I'm actually building a character from the ground up.
You're not a mute character in Fallout, though, because you have all the dialogue choices. You might not have an actual voice, but you certainly communicate.
That's true, though like in Dishonored, whatever you "say" to other characters is dependent on the player's choices. The player-character him or herself never talks, as far as I can remember, without the player's initiative.
That's not to say I really want Gordon Freeman speaking during the next Half-Life game. I've come to imagine he's communicating through other means, like ASL or little LEDs on his suit, maybe like Commodore Pike from Star Trek. I mean, speaking Gordon could work, but I would want an explanation as to why he was quiet before, and not some lame retcon like "his mouth was full of marbles this whole time!"
The thing is.....there's a fundamental narrative difference between Half Life and games from the "Looking Glass" school of thought. The former is fundamentally about the concept of "false" player agency, where the player is allowed to feel temporarily in control when in reality everything Gordon does is subtly manipulated by a higher power. As such taking away Gordon's speech is consistent with that by taking away yet another means of interaction and control over the world. Deus Ex/Dishonored are heavily focused on how the player character's actions can impact the world.....and allowing the player character to speak helps with that because it equips the player with another means to influence the game world.
All this is making me want to play HL2 again.
Here's to hoping this one won't be so insanely grim-dark.
Dishonored wasn't grim dark.
Telepathy is not mind reading. It is the direct linking... ...of nervous systems... ...separated by space.
Wrong terminology, right sentiment. It was beyond depressing.
I dunno, I got the lollipops and rainbows ending so I can't really agree with that.
Which was literally 30 seconds of an 8-10 hour game. The rest of it involves plague, rats, starvation, tyranny, the government killing off its own citizens, corruption, torture...you name it.
It was grim and dark, but not necessarily grimdark.
It wasn't really that grim and dark. Thief is much more grim and dark.
Telepathy is not mind reading. It is the direct linking... ...of nervous systems... ...separated by space.
I think the tone in Thief, plus the music and the fact that 99% of the time was nighttime made it seem the gloomier one. I'd go and say that as premises go Dishonored's was OMFG SO SADDER, but that's just me.
Aesthetically maybe not, but the setting was plenty grim. And anyone who tried using the heart on various characters would have had a glimpse of something much darker than most other games on the market. That shit was bleak, yo.
Thief did not, for the most part, have things like packs of scavenging rats devouring corpses within moments or piles of burning bodies in the streets.
Yeah, definitely one of the most distressing and nihilistic games I can remember.
Most games are horrific or gross but too dumb to realise so it becomes sort of charming. Or the mechanics are a little too silly and light so you can distract yourself. Zombie stuff mostly falls into this category. So too Bioshocks.
Dishonoured somehow topped all of them, despite trying to be fun all it could in the same sorts of ways as other games. They really outdid themselves with the sheer hopelessness of everything.
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