Dishonored.

I've been killing like there is no tomorrow.

i know, it's s weird phenomenon, but apparently there are tons of people who are like "o shit i forgot to preorder" and they'll pay right after release day

though right now the going rate's only about $10, last week it would've been $15

Bought this game. Pretty cool so far! The combat isn't floaty like in Skyrim. More engaged. The fact that you can either kill everyone or no one is great.

it reminds me a lot of deus ex-- i'm really enjoying it so far

going super stealth low chaos good ending route (preferred play type in stealth games anyway)

I am going high chaos so far, mostly because I have made a few uh errors.

There are a lot if empty bottles in this game.

I try stealth but I end up getting caught and killing everyone anyway.

the option to turn objective markers off is a fuckin brilliant innovation. i had to turn them back on for a second b/c the game wanted something really specific and it was totally jarring--like i was playing call of duty. i like it when dishonored is like, "go talk to havelock" and i have to traipse all over the level looking for him. old school shit.

this came over the weekend (yesss) and i binged on it yesterday, got through the prison and the first main mission. going stealth all the way, but i did kill a few people early on when i didn't know what i was doing/had no powers, and to help out semi-honest citizens.

i played that first assassination over and over -- first time i made it all the way out to the dock (with all this loot from the workshop etc) before realizing i was supposed to do something with the overseer's unconscious body, then i tried many times to pull off sleep-darting both the target and the dude you were supposed to save, then i settled for poisoning the target and hiding the other one in the 'safe' dumpster.

SPOILERS i branded that guy in the interrogation room

the option to turn objective markers off is a fuckin brilliant innovation.

oh i'm going to try this. i love that there's not a map (right?), it's way more fun to wander around and try to figure out the layout of the city/buildings.

SPOILERS i branded that guy in the interrogation room

i did that once just to see it, but the guards found me right afterward. part of my problem was that i didn't know you could blink while carrying a body.

anyone ever play arx fatalis? was it good?

blink is so much fun to use.

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

...

my 2nd run-through (already ha) i'm going more lethal "high chaos" but still decided to save that other dude. i flipped the poison, waited for that conversation to finish (the overseer succumbs) then sleep-darted the captain. as i carried the captain out on the exterior ledge, i overheard two guards talking about how the meeting is 'taking so long, better check'. i leave the captain on the ledge, go back in the room, grab the overseer's body, leave HIM hidden on the ledge, take the captain to the dumpster, and go from there. no alarms! really cool moment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eqOMI8_txw

I gain great satisfaction from humanely putting the sleeper hold on people and them throwing them off a ledge where they will certainly die.

haha yes i'm p sure those count as kills

yow, that's a good looking murder simulator

you're insane! What if one of those guards were the father of three kids?! What's their mother gonna say?!

Mikkel Svendsen 7 minutes ago

this is fun but the American accents in very British locations are jarring.

on mission 2, i found granny rags walking around in an alley with a bunch of weepers. seemed like she was chill with them, but once they spotted me they tore her apart? huh.

i'm finding that i don't mind missing out on the crazy murder-related powers and weapons, stealth vibes all the way.

the gradual and escalating differences between violent and stealthy paths is pretty cool fyi. by the final mission things are very different.

playing this, I've remembered how bad I am at stealth. that's an ending I'm never gonna see.

does the violent path get more difficult wrt combat? bc i found that stealth was very difficult (but satisfying to persevere) but when stealth failed i never had any trouble killing everyone (before reloading)

ha, i'm the opposite, i don't think i could even play this game violently. whenever i get in a fight i get shot in the back within about five seconds (i'm on the "return to the tower" mission btw).

Tried to do the lady Boyle mission non lethal. Failed miserably.

Just killed the whole party.

stealth vs violence is a dumb binary, why can't it be murderous stealth vs non-lethal stealth vs balls-out slaugher vs i dunno run-past-everyone-to-the-objective

when i did my high-chaos run i was still pretty quiet about it. that 'disappear the corpses' power is handy!

Fun decision when you get to decide how the giant arc welder functions.

^just finished that part.

Tried to do the lady Boyle mission non lethal. Failed miserably.

ha that was my favorite one, also the one i did the best at stealth-wise (ghost etc). i wish there were more missions with a disguise mechanic.

while it turns out that i really enjoy not killing people, i've slipped up a few times late in the game out of necessity (not having sleep darts) and justification (i.e. "he's an assassin and knows the game, and i don't have any sleep darts", granny rags etc).

that mission is great!

you can pickpocket anyone and pick up any valuables and people say humorous cynical things but don't care. the subtext is that everyone is there to get a piece of the rich family anyway, it's pretty funny.

i've been doing forza but i need to finish my 'no kill' run

also it's a plague party

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/1f/MasqueOfTheRedDeath%281964film%29.jpg/220px-MasqueOfTheRedDeath%281964film%29.jpg

so how com every time i run this it performs FIRST TIME SET UP and spends ten minutes INSTALLING DIRECT X STEP 1 OF 1?

That's a pretty common steam problem, I've had it with other games before too. Best workaround is usually to dig into the game folder, find the exe, and launch it direct without starting steam in the first place. Doesn't always work but it's fixed the problem more often than not for me.

Btw I think I gave up on this today, haven't even finished mission 2 but I'm just not having any fun with it. Playing stealth is just too hard for me, I spent a lot of time being super harsh on myself, saving after every guard takedown, reloading every time I got spotted...but that just became a massive slog, I was reloading every 2 minutes. So after spending probably 3 hours on what should've been an hour's worth of game, decided screw it, I'm just going to kill everyone, only to find that it's kinda boring playing that way too, not least because ammo is so tight.

Also, I know I was excited about the level design maybe being similar to half life 2...but actually it feels a bit too similar, it's almost a retread.

A mixture of both has been good for me. Stealth seems to have become much more important later in the game.

So after spending probably 3 hours on what should've been an hour's worth of game

three times the gameplay! value for money!

I'm kinda of doing ok stealth-wise, blink power is a great help. stopping time should be even better, though then i guess mana instead of ammo will become a problem.

done with my stealth run. i love this game but i don't know if i have the chops/interest in doing a violent run. maybe if all your video game friends didn't make you feel so shitty about it!

i did really enjoy not having to kill anyone though, it makes other games seem one-dimensional (like the trailers for Far Cry 3, where you can either stealthily kill some people before openly killing everyone, or just openly kill everyone right away!). maybe this is a sign of getting old.

did you manage it completely kill-free?

almost, but like i said above i slipped up a couple times when i was out of sleep darts/low on resources. i panicked and took out a couple guards and assassins rather than get discovered, also granny rags. i definitely killed less then 10 people total.

fucking "clean hands" achievement is bugged! got all the way through without a death, no achievement.

Finished this, got the good ending (probably killed < 10 people). Spent a lot of time saving & reloading but that was ok, or at least it was ok when I remembered to save regularly and didn't have to replay massive chunks of the game. It was fun, not AWESOME fun but the using powers to aid in stealth lifted it above yr run of the mill fps. Very strong HL2 vibe. The Outsider himself I thought was a) a jerk and ii) a pointless plot/tutorial device. Might have a go at a balls-out speed death run.

My memory of half-life 2 is basically 100% "save every 10 seconds" but I am a wuss so there.

manual + frequent saving is not a negative for me (although fwiw i thought the auto-saves in both HL2 and Dishonored worked pretty well).

Auto save not frequent enough for stealth runs in dishonored, basically 90% of my gameplay was like:

choke one guy, sneak for two mins, try to choke next guy, get spotted, reload...
choke one guy, sneak for two mins, try to choke next guy, get spotted, reload...
choke one guy, sneak for two mins, try to choke next guy, get spotted, reload...
choke one guy, sneak for two mins, OK MAYBE I WILL SAVE NOW

Saving took took long. Maybe I should have installed to hard drive.

i feel like i generally don't have the time to play a game enough and get stealthy. it's also a bit emotionally/morally unintuitive - like in the second city by the docks i overheard some rotund jerk throwing his weight around at his workers, like threatening and hassling them, so far as videogame morality goes, i did the right thing by maiming him fatally and throwing him into the sea. but all the workers ran away screaming and i was the bad guy! sad!

haha. that's very realistic!

i definitely save it for when i have a decent block of time to get into it, but you can deal with rooms or scenarios as smaller chunks, and i love that you can save at any moment.

i was a bit unimpressed by how it looked, to begin with, possibly in comparison to witcher 3, but there's definitely some really nice character to the buildings and the cities.

looking forward to getting this, though i just dropped $$ for titanfall 2

plan to do one bloodless run-through with i guess corvo, and then a straight murderous run-through with emily