The Hidden Blade Assassin's Creed in Depth

If they let me keep my abilities this time, I'll actually buy it.

Full announcement
Post-announcement interview
Post-announcement interview, after trailer

As far as I'm concerned Assassin's Creed and I are done. I'm married to Dishonored now.

Pretty much yeah, I freaking feel you.

I AM VERY EXCITED ABOUT THIS ANNOUNCEMENT

I AM VERY EXCITED

I TRIED TO HIDE IT BUT I FAILED

I AM VERY EXCITED

I legit loled at the villain using his last two seconds of life to make the fastest ever "don't kill me or you're just as bad as me!" speech. Definitely seems like it's still Dishonored, in that aspect. (Tho there is a new writer on it whose work I've liked in the past so I'm a bit optimistic the story will be better)

Will be cool to see gameplay. Based off the trailer it seems like it will mostly just be similar powers w/ better production values, but it's hard to tell what's changed stealth-wise which is what I'm most concerned with.

During the announcement I was so certain that they were going to do a 180 and say "so we made a new thing that's kind of like Dishonored".

Yawn.

This game did nothing for me last time... wait, it did less than nothing. It only made me angry and unfulfilled.

To each his own, yeah? Dishonored was one of the most fantastic individual experiences I've had in this life, right up there with sitting beside my friend on a rooftop looking at stars at night and the first rollercoaster I ever went on, so that's why my excitement for it is so real. It's probably not for everyone, though.

I've commented on it somewhere around here if you want to find it. I won't derail this thread and your excitement to talk about why I didn't like it.

I'm glad that people are excited about SOMETHING around here at least.

That's what she said!!

And that's my addition to this thread...

I enjoyed the game but definitely dislike some things about it. Not as sharp a no-takedowns stealth experience as Hitman Absolution, which I played directly afterwards. It was really easy to ghost, and I can see why that might disappoint some.

Dishonored already has some great things going for it.

Good stealth- especially helped with the leaning and blinking and hiding under tables.

Focus more on melee than ranged- that's what I don't like about so many first person games out there. Too many guns. In Dishonored we get wonderful takedowns instead.

Creative abilities and combinations- the Creative kills Trailer says it all. Summon a rat swarm, plant a trap on one rat, possess the rat and spring the trap on an enemy.

Navigation- Jumping in first person games is a little hard because you'd have to look down to see exactly where you land, but in Dishonored an indicator tells you to jump when you're standing in front of an object and you jump right onto it. And of course blinking is an awesome feature.

Replayability- no need to elaborate on the no kills and no detection runs.

videoworthiness- ghost runs and awesome creative kills.

All in all one of the best first person game I've played. Now if the sequel can be at least half as ambitious.

I played some Absolution, but lost interest. It had a great system, but the gameplay was too slow for me. Now I've played Splinter Cell for PS2 which was also slow, but it's different when you're hiding in the dark and when you're in plain sight. And sure you don't have to be slow, but it's greatly encouraged. Plus the lack of climbing gave a sense of less freedom. So when you're walking around and blending so much, it feels like you're almost always in an AC1 investigation. That may not seem fair, and it probably isn't, but that was my experience with it.

Wow. This trailer immediately made me realize I needed to play Dishonored. Boy, is it a great game! I remember playing Far Cry 4 and being amazed – but now I realize almost everything I liked about it was stolen from three year old Dishonored. Shangri-La, the masks of overseers, takedown chains, air assassinations, animal exploits, etc. It’s just such a blatant steal.

I can’t wait to see what they do with DH2.

*attempts to control hype* … Nah, my self-imposed game curfew isn’t worth it. At all.

You can jump up on specific ledges, but yes, in general it's more about finding the right path than acrobatics. I like being limited in that way, partially because it makes you feel more like a normal person, and partially because the lack of easy traversal is part of why the level design is so much more complex and challenging: you can't easily bypass the geometry of the level like you can with Blink.

In Dishonored I often feel like I'm cheating, flying by over these complex guard patterns. In the Hitman series, you feel like you earned whatever you accomplished.

I'd agree with that.
The two games deliver on different fantasies, even while both are ostensibly just about Stealth Assassination.
The "cheater's high" and sense of bending reality to your will that Dishonored gives differs from the accumulation and release of tension the Hitman games excel at. They both have their place in my repertoire and I'm looking forward to both.

yeah, they both appeal to different people, and that's totally fine!

Having beaten the last DLC of Dishonored yesterday, I can officially get hyped for Dishonored 2. Would have finished it a while ago, except I couldn't load some recent saves. You'll certainly understand Dishonored 2 more if you play the DLCs first (lets say it seems to continue the story from there, according to what I've seen in a recent trailer).

During the beginning of the Brigmore Witches DLC, when you fight Corvo, I tried finding a way to defeat him, since the closest you get is an animation where he counters your finishing move. The save from Knife of Dunwall DLC can carryover, so I unlocked Bend Time level 2 and Summon Assassin; but alas, those powers don't show up on the weapon wheel till after the fight. Last option would be to try attacking Corvo from behind and see what happens when his health is down all the way.

I have beaten Dishonored 2 now (Corvo Attano - Low Chaos - Powers Accepted) and I can confirm that if you play the DLCs, a certain plot twist will strike with MUCH bigger impact. Those DLCs are genuinely good, too.

A saw your Day 1 video on youtube, Daz. I'm glad you're having fun with this game.

A few questions for DAZ.

1. Do you keep unlocked abilities in replays, or is it like the save files from the first?

2. Do the new features make the game easier, even unnecessarily?

3. Most importantly, why the heck did you play through the whole game in just a few days? It sounds like you rushed through it, unless you were playing an average of ten hours a day.

1. There is no Mission Replay option right now, the only way you can "replay" missions is by loading an old save. So, implicitly, you don't get to keep your powers. I don't know why they removed the Mission Select option (except maybe because of differences in Emily/Corvo), but Arkane are patching in NewGame+, Custom Difficulty Sliders, and a Mission Select in December. One big change in this game is that there are a lot more Runes scattered throughout the world, they really littered these things everywhere compared to Dishonored 1. That makes sense because there are also many more things to spend those on.

2. The new features don't make the game much easier because the AI is so much harder than it used to be. Hard in Dishonored 2 is Very Hard in Dishonored 1. Very Hard in Dishonored 2 is freaking ridiculous, you have to play the game like Thief 1 just to stay undetected. They see you SO quickly and their damage REALLY hurts. Basically, the new features make tackling certain encounters "easier," but it doesn't feel that way. Most of the time, it feels like the same amount of difficulty as Dishonored 1 had on Very Hard. Maybe a little harder. To put it another way, I died many more times while playing Dishonored 2, than I did while playing Dishonored 1. Many, many more times. Generally, the new additions feel natural and now I can't imagine Dishonored without them. Combat Choke is great, but it's meant for saving yourself when only one guy has seen you and his friends aren't around. Fighting groups Non-Lethally is really not feasible, or it's super, super, super hard. Air KO is really great, it's a natural extension of Air Assassinate but for a Low Chaos player. Slide Kill and Slide KO are also really great, but they're situationally useful.

3. I didn't rush through it, I was playing an average of ten hours a day. I basically got a weird work schedule this week due to some management stuff going down, so I had like three days of break in a row, basically. And I just. Went. Ham. I really did take my time to explore and look at stuff, the game is quite awesome and I wouldn't be able to make myself play a Dishonored game in that sloppy, get-through-it-quick way unless I've already played it a bunch and I'm speedrunning it. I easily spent like, two or three hours in some levels. I'm excited to see it all again as Emily, and to play it again after that with No Powers.

Glad to hear they made the game harder instead of easier. I feared it would end up like AC2, which responded to complaints of how the first made stealth and stealth kills frustrating (I mean seriously, in AC1 if a guard is suspicious of course he'll block your stab attempt, but no, AC2 had to give you a short window after being seen, in addition to double assassinations).

Also glad to hear about more knockout moves.

Yeah, it really feels like they made Dishonored 2 even more complex than Dishonored 1. Even in terms of branching narrative. There are what I assume to be four "main" endings, but each of those has Variants depending on certain Key Actions you've done throughout the game (and the game doesn't tell you what those are, but I have some suspicions after 1.5 playthroughs). So all in all there are like around twelve-ish possible endings you can get, or more according to some sites. I'm really not sure but that sounds insane to me. Knowing the different actions that can "change the Timeline" though, it's not so hard to believe.