Anonymous User asked:
say a thought about Dishonored. maybe multiple
Dishonored rules, obviously. Here are some selected thoughts I have had about Dishonored.
- It is insane how well they migrated Dishonored 1’s systems from UE3 to id tech for Dishonored 2. Everything feels the same, except D1’s cool camera animations for locomotion didn’t make it across, which is a bummer but a small one.
- Dishonored has some of the best level design around. I don’t think they did anything crazy tools-wise except use brushes, which probably they were used to coming from Source. This was at a time where most people had switched to modular meshes, which, yeah, don’t let you do level design. Folks think they do but they don’t.
- It’s interesting replaying the games (which I recently have been doing) having now known and worked with Raf Colantonio and some of the rest of the team. They make immersive sims the only way that really works – systems-first, “design” second, with a big leap of faith that your systems, once finished, are going to output a good time. Raf said once that they only “found the fun” on Dishonored like a few months before ship, which is wild but also just what has to happen, I think, to make an imsim.
- Dishonored’s expansions are the best expansions there are. I always want this type of thing – an immediate followup from a dev who, having just shipped almost this exact thing, is now incredible at it. Everyone should always do this. The best Half-Life 1 chapter is Uplink, the standalone Half-Life demo Valve made right after they shipped Half-Life. It’s better than anything in the main game. A friend at Valve at that time told me that a bunch of them, right after HL1, just wanted to roll straight onto HL2 on all the same tech, but there was a “fancy new technology” mandate from on high. I want to visit the parallel universe where they were permitted to do that, instead of condemned to dev hell for years.
- Dishonored impresses the hell out of me narratively for a lot of reasons, but my favourite is: It has a character who’s basically the Gman, the Cigarette Smoking Man; famously a trope that if you attempt to resolve it you’ll fuck it up and make the whole setting retroactively less interesting. In Death of the Outsider, they resolve it without fucking it up. Amazing.
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