Dishonored 2

It’s becoming ever more difficult for me to remain positive about the games industry. There exists a growing sense of alienation that has been difficult to shake and up till now accurately characterise. It’s not so much a feeling that most games these days are not aimed at me, although that certainly plays its part, but rather that the underlying design ethos that run through the likes of Dishonored 2 is antithetical to what I consider to be fun and good for gaming as a whole. Development now often seems based around finding ways to keep you playing at almost any cost, even and often to the detriment of the experience itself. You can see it in the psychotic levels of grinding some games have, the open world activities that create nothing but paroxysms of boredom and frustration, systems upon systems that gate your progress and destroy any sense of pacing or excitement.

It’s a disheartening trend where the worship of Mammon has all but taken precedent over everything else. Granted there are shareholders to consider for many developers and their abusive parent publishers, but the knock-on effect is the likes of Destiny or Dragon Age: Inquisition; underwhelming busy work that insults the intelligence with its odious and brazen attempts at artificially extending game time for no appreciable benefit.

It wasn’t something that had bothered me before, as it was largely the realm of MMOs and mobile phones, but now the trend for boring my tits off has become endemic across all sectors of the market. Open world survival clones, free to play competitive shooters, clicker games; you’d have hoped that maybe Dishonored 2 would stand apart from such unpleasant company, but no.

Alas, like so many industries, gaming too is a slave to fashions and trends. Hence crafting, even Dishonored 2 has crafting. It’s not overt, but there it is, collecting junk to make items with variable levels of usefulness. But that isn’t where Dishonored 2 lets itself down. The red mark in its workbook is for its central fib of ‘play it your way’. In essence it sounds nice; giving you freedom to choose your own desired approach, where to stab or sneak, but the freedom it offers is hollow as almost everything in the game wants to dissuade you from being anything other than a ghost.

Firstly, the chaos level meter. When you tie your good and bad endings to the way you play, do not suggest to players that they have the freedom to choose when most people will quite reasonably desire the good ending. Similarly each mission ends with a stats screen where merciful and unseen performances are given approving ticks whilst violence is met with red crosses of disapproval. It’s odd for a game to look down on bloodshed yet at the same time base a great deal of its upgrades around more efficient death dealing.

Not that they necessarily help you all that much as your chances of survival are somewhat undermined by the AIs aggressive and unnerving sense of clairvoyance. Guards in Dishonored 2 are unforgivably quick in spotting you, and even when they don’t they have this uncanny knack for knowing precisely where you are and rushing to your location. For those with a keen eye and the requisite patience, Dishonored 2 may well scratch that hard-core stealth itch quite nicely, but I found the core game-play to be an overly frustrating game of trial and error which wasn’t the case with the previous game. Simply put, it wasn’t fun. The constant need to save and reload destroyed any sense of pacing and each little step in terms of progress wasn’t a Dark Souls-style moment of catharsis and satisfaction, but rather each little triumph was met with a heavy sigh of having had to put up with all the frustration that preceded it.

Of course I could approach it differently, not worry so much about detection and just improvise as I go, but the game penalises you for it, and so it makes logical sense to approach the game in a manner as to avoid such penalties. Alas, in doing so it made the experience an aggravating one, where I’d be spotted multiple times in situations where there was little I could do to anticipate detection. Perhaps I’m just bad at it, but I can’t remember another game where I had this issue. It all smells of not being balanced properly, and instead the game just gives you multiple weapons and gadgets to deal with the inevitable fallout from being seen. It also whiffs of trying to force you into multiple playthroughs; a choice of two characters, two endings, and the mention of the playthrough number on the ongoing stats screen all point towards this conclusion. Where I take issue is that it isn’t so much an incentive for you to try new things and experiment, but rather it functions as a trick, a sly tactic to have the stealth be so tricky that you ultimately bumble through the first run, then, having gotten used to locations and enemy patrols, return for an actual stealth run. Which brings me back to the where this review started; the push to bury players in systems that keep them playing rather than actually enjoying themselves. I resent an experience that takes its central appeal of being super sneaky and then proceeds to dangle it out of reach unless I jump through a number of awkward and unsatisfying hoops of either rote learning with regards to the level design and guard placement or go through the whole thing a second time to actually have fun with it.

A lot of this could have been mitigated if there was a story to be interested in or characters to enjoy being around, but alas here Dishonored 2 is staggeringly inept. The narrative, writing and performances are all want of wit or charm. It’s all so crushingly dull and mechanical, as if it is there out of obligation rather than desire. Both protagonists bore with their plaintive musings and the villains are the usual cadre of one-note moustache twirlers. It’s a game in real need of some levity or camp brio, but instead is happy to settle with boring characters explaining the plot to each other.

One aspect that certainly does mitigate the frustrations is the world itself. The architecture and geography is sublime, where vast Victorian structures sit among the lush trappings of a Mediterranean climate. It seems an incongruous mix, but it works in delivering an atmosphere of melancholic wonderment. Whether by design or not, there is a sense of decay in the air, an acknowledgement that for all the fantastic inventions and creations of the human mind, so too with them comes decline and collapse, where the rust, Bloodfly infestations and near ever present ocean view only serves to heighten this delightful air of faded majesty.

It's rather unfortunate then that the technical elements that underpin this unique atmosphere are so much of a mess. Even with patches the frame rate can be variable, and there's a strange blurriness to objects and buildings seen at a distance. Close up details are nicely textured but it's a shame that for something that would so keenly benefit from top end PC hardware, that it's so poorly optimised and has to suffer needlessly from yet another industry-wide bad habit.

As much as it may appear otherwise, I tried my best to enjoy Dishonored 2. I played around with difficulty settings, tried each protagonist, but somehow only ever found fragments of genuine entertainment. Graphics aside there certainly isn't anything broken, and everything appears designed as intended, but as a fan of the first game it leaves me with some measure of regret in saying that Dishonored 2 is a disappointment. It's an experience that had me in an almost permanent state of wondering if I'd missed something; that maybe I'd been playing it wrong, but at the end I had to ask myself if I had fun, and my honest answer was, not really.