Dishonoured

I’ll be honest, I never got far through Dishonoured. I started it several times, and each time something annoyed me enough not to want to go back to it. Although, probably at least two of those times it was the overlong opening sequence that most put me off. If I have to sit through one more cutscene where I’m supposedly being taken to my execution or life imprisonment, I will despair at the quality of writing originality in the industry.

In my first playthrough, the furthest I got was the distillery. It was the first proper level part of Dishonoured, which is linear but partially open-world, with side-quests. I fannied about for a bit, using my magic to shoot across buildings in the steampunk sort of environment, with mediaeval fears of the plague crossed with Victorian technology, Gothic and Middle-Ages architecture, with French Revolution army costumes (think Les Misérables) among the array of creepy cloaks and masks. It fits together remarkably well, making an eerily  atmospheric game.

Once I got into a proper level situation, I started to notice a problem right away. It’s a stealth game in large part, but the stealth options suck. Your most common means of stealthy, non-lethal invasion involved pouncing someone from behind and slowly strangling them. This is extremely slow, and gets dull within about four pounces.

Unfortunately, Splinter Cell this is not; there is no cover of darkness, no set movement paths, no sneaky spaces and conveniently deserted alleyways down which your unsuspecting foes venture alone. It is bright, open, and chock full of vigilant enemies. You can’t just pounce down upon someone and strangle them; you’ll alert the whole lot, and you’ll have to wait for them to calm down before you can hope to do that again. It takes bloody forever.

The only non-lethal weapon at your disposal is the crossbow loaded with sleeper darts. As fun as these are, there just aren’t enough of them. Lethal darts and other means of killing are two-a-penny, but non-lethal is nowhere to be found. I was confused. In other stealth games I’ve played, when the developers wanted you to play non-lethal, they made sure that non-lethal was fun and that it was easy enough, by providing you with enough of a range and quantity of close and long-range non-lethal weapons that there was no real advantage to lethal play. This I have come to expect as convention. A sensible convention, which Dishonoured flouted.

I could have played it loudly and lethally, but I was told by the game that killing a load of people would have Dire Consequences. I’m a bit afraid of Dire Consequences in games, because it usually means “We’re going to make your game unreasonably hard as punishment for having fun.” The Dire Consequences in question involved rats, which feed on people and grow in number; leave dead bodies around and you increase the number of rats. Rather than risk this grim scenario, I put Dishonoured to one side.

The sheer boredom of non-lethal play made me uninterested in playing it a second time. But I was tempted to approach it again when I heard tell on the grapevine that the Dire Consequences could be avoided if you got hold of a particular perk which turned bodies into dust upon death. This would mean there would be no increase in rats, they said, because they would have nothing to feed on. So, armed with this knowledge, I laboriously gathered the necessary materials for unlocking the perk, and turned myself into the Shadow Ninja of Stab-to-Dust.

I made it far further through the game this time, with much fun. I got to use the heavy pirate-style pistol, and a long rapier sword to fight my enemies like a warrior, whenever stealth failed me. So simple was this, when I was caught with my pants down, I didn’t feel the need to reload the game; had I been playing non-lethal, I would have been unable to deal with the situation because there is no face-to-face non-lethal option. Usually, there is a simple hand-to-hand takedown action, but not in Dishonoured. Oh, no.

I also got to use my many lethal darts and the various torture-device traps, which were not very useful in practice but fun in theory. I killed just about everybody on the map who could be considered an enemy, since this was the most convenient option. Merrily, I made my way to the end of the level, feeling pleased that I had been given a way to play that was actually enjoyable. At the end of the section, I discovered that my “chaos level” was high. What is this chaos level? I wondered. It didn’t sound good.

I looked it up online. The chaos level determined the outcome of the game – i.e., how many rats appeared in the city and the overall gloominess of the ending. So, basically, the perk that would logically save us from a grim outcome had no effect at all. It was just a way of hiding bodies from other guards – totally useless, as it doesn’t really matter a damn if they do. If anything, it’s a rather convenient way of trapping dumb NPCs into one-by-one approaching the body and standing still in that spot, whereupon you can pick them all off from afar.

The more I looked into it, the worse it was. If you play at high chaos, more guards appear. Your allies like you less. And your treacherous boatman raises the alarm on the final level, bringing fresh hell down on your head. What the game would look like with all that going on, I didn’t care to find out; in my opinion, a stealth game should never introduce long-term consequences for failures of stealth or non-lethal. It forces a player to reset the game, because all the fun has left it; the fun of stealth is in picking on unsuspecting guards. If they’re all on high alert and have abandoned their positions permanently, you can’t take your time and plan, and the no-doubt intricate design of the map for stealth purposes is instantly rendered unusable.

So I have never returned to Dishonoured and never will. It is a classic case in failing to understand what the target audience want from a game, versus what they don’t want. Lots of weapons and lots of options: good; lots of chastisement, long-term consequences and moral choice systems: piss off.