[I had grand visions for this post, but then (of course) work got in the way, and so I have no idea if what follows is coherent or interesting or what. Many apologies.]
Lots to talk about, and some of it has nothing to do with gaming. In fact, I might as well dive in and get this shameless plug out of the way right now: I’ve finally, FINALLY built a website for all my music-doings. Please feel free to visit vosslandiamusic.com and check it out; there will be more content coming soon, but for now it’s, well, what it is.
Back to the subject at hand, now. This was another in a series of inadvertent three-day weekends; I’d been somewhat successfully battling a cold last week but I woke up on Friday having lost the cold war, as it were, and so I stayed home and sneezed and coughed and decided to get caught up on gaming stuff, since the living room was all mine.
Last week I wrote about my Dishonored glitch:
…I completed Slackjaw’s quest, and was on my way to head back to his distillery to turn it in, when the game suddenly told me I’d failed the quest, and even though none of his men were trying to kill me, he certainly was. I didn’t understand what I’d done wrong. Tried re-loading several times, tried entering stealthily as opposed to waltzing right in – but no matter how I entered the zone, as soon as I’d crossed some invisible barrier, the game decided I’d failed. This was very, very frustrating (as you might imagine), and since I didn’t see any solution (beyond waiting for a patch), I decided to take it out of the 360′s tray and leave it alone for a little while. Some quick googling revealed that a lot of people are having the same problem – not everyone, but enough for me to feel like it’s not just my own peculiar problem. That being said, since I don’t know when the patch is coming (if indeed it’s coming at all), I might just take the opportunity to start over from scratch, now that I actually know what I’m doing.
As it turned out, there was a patch ready for me to download Friday morning, but when I loaded my last save, the quest was still glitched out. So I did end up restarting from the beginning, which also made it much easier, since I already knew what I was doing (and had a much better idea of how to do it better). Took no time at all to get caught up to where I’d been glitched, and everything seemed to be working fine at that point. Made much progress, then; I happened to glance at a walkthrough online just to see how far into it I was, and it would appear that if the game has three Acts, my next mission would be the end of Act 2/beginning of Act 3.
Here’s the thing; I kinda don’t know if I care enough about the game to bother finishing it.
And yet the game matters enough to me that I would really like to know why I’m feeling so apathetic about it.
This particular problem is made thornier in that after I took my leave from Dishonored on Friday, I also spent a great deal of time with the first bit of DLC for Borderlands 2, which is absolutely fantastic; and also that my weekend eventually got pretty busy with things wholly unrelated to gaming (see first paragraph above). Also: my rental copy of Forza Horizon should be arriving later this week, which I’m very anxious to get my hands on; and next week comes Criterion’s Need For Speed Most Wanted, which is looking every bit like the spiritual successor to Burnout Paradise that I’ve been craving for years. (And meanwhile my XCOM campaign lurks on in the background.) Basically, I’m very much aware that I’ve got a very limited amount of time in which to give the rest of Dishonored the attention it probably deserves, so there’s a weird sort of pressure there. I fully acknowledge that this isn’t Dishonored’s fault.
HOWEVA. There are some things that are Dishonored’s fault.
Before I get around to killing it, though, let me first sing the praises of the art direction, which are absolutely wonderful. Let me also say that my favorite parts of the game are, basically, everything I do before I have to dispose of my target. I love Blink-ing around* – it’s fun and useful and arguably even more satisfying to pull off than Batman’s quick-evade.** I love exploring every nook and cranny of the environment, which is very much designed to reward such exploration – every open apartment window on a non-ground-level floor holds at least one goodie (and, also, tells some wordless, sad story in its tableau). I love doing reconnaissance, basically, and the game’s tools for performing such recon work are exquisitely designed and endlessly rewarding.
But, yeah, then I have to actually go about my business. And that’s where I run into problems.
The game tells you that it’s better to not kill. But it also gives you lots of ways to kill. And sometimes you run into a situation where there’s nothing you can do but kill, unless you decide to reload your last save, and that can be tedious. Furthermore, as far as I can tell, the game only tells you of the benefits of acting non-lethally during loading screens – nobody in the game actually tells you to not kill anyone. Indeed, your handlers at the Hounds Pit are asking you to kill people in order to advance their cause. Your sidequests generally offer you a way to achieve the same result without killing, and after each mission I’ve gotten a rather handsome reward waiting for me in my room, but I’ve also had to kill a number of guards in order to get where I need to go, too, and nobody gives me much grief about that. It’s not like I’ve gone on a murder spree or anything – my overall chaos meter still reads “Low” at the end of each mission – but I’m certainly not getting the Achievements for mercy, and in any event, that kind of meta-challenge ends up changing the reason why I’m playing in the first place.
**SLIGHT STORY SPOILERS AHEAD, ALTHOUGH THE KEY WORD IS SLIGHT** The story isn’t terribly interesting, either; it’s not bad, but neither is it the sort of tale where I’m wondering what happens next. The supernatural business seems a little hokey. Hell, the assassins who appear in the beginning of the game are very much Blink-ing their way around, which leads me to believe that the Outsider isn’t necessarily laying all his cards on the table, and that’s not terribly surprising. And in looking at that walkthrough I mentioned, I couldn’t help but notice that I’m about to be betrayed, but let’s be honest – that sort of “twist” is something you can see a mile away. **END SPOILERS**
I suppose it was the end of the mission I’d just finished that really soured my attitude. The mission required me to attend a masked ball being hosted by 3 sisters, one of whom I needed to kill/abduct. The recon work in determining which sister to nab was enormously fun, and the mansion itself was a wonder to explore and examine. But then I actually had to do the deed, and it must be noted that the manner in which I knocked out the sister and carried her to her waiting boatman/captor resulted in one of the most unintentionally hilarious chase sequences I’ve ever had the misfortune of participating in. Here’s the point, ultimately: while the poor execution in the woman’s abduction was undoubtedly my fault, it was the game’s reaction to what I did that made me wonder why I’d bothered being so careful and stealthy in the first place. It’s actually a bit difficult to describe just what happened, except to say that in a game that at that point had been remarkably graceful and poised, the game suddenly became very artless and charmless and basically just turned into very obvious AI routines that ultimately were defeated with comically swift decapitations of startled guards. I’m doing a terrible job describing what happened, I know. The result, though, is the important thing – all the grace and skill I performed in my stealthy preparation were rendered moot; once everything went to shit I bulldozed my way to the ending and achieved the exact same result, since my mark was never killed. So why even bother being stealthy? Why bother performing well? Suddenly the rich, detailed world of Dunwall instantly transformed into a clunky collection of polygons and AI scripts.
Now, granted, the game’s artifice had already been made glaringly obvious by the aforementioned glitch. Still, as a regular player of games, you take that stuff as part of the deal; code breaks all the time, the world’s an imperfect place. It’s only when I’d surrendered to the game’s fiction and then had it clumsily torn from my hands that I started wondering just what the hell I was doing with my time.
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* Indeed, I was weirdly disappointed when I jumped over to Borderlands 2 and found that I had to walk everywhere, like a chump.
** I’m blanking on the name of this technique – it’s how you traverse long distances in Arkham City, swinging around, vaguely Spiderman-ish.
Shouts From The Couch 