Dishonored.

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.

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...

Yeah this is exactly why I stopped.

It's a bit unfair to blame the game for that tbh, it's a combination of overconfidence (hoping to pull off spectacular stealth feats first time around, and thinking you can go ages without saving) and carelessness (failing miserably at spectacular stealth feats, and goddamn forgetting to save). The game really tries to help you out, the guards are incredibly myopic, predictable, and stupid. Playing through again in full on violence mode there's no doubt it's easier, but you still can't charge in all guns blazing, you will get attacked on all sides and taken down.

Things from this I would like to see in the mythical next HL2 (or any fps): multiple paths - a second playthrough is great for really discovering richness of the world and the different options open to you; optional goals; and being able to climb over things higher than your knee.

I dunno, one of the great things about Half-life is how well it tells its story, which is kind of tied up in being single-path (albeit with big open setpieces). Optional goals are mostly covered by achievements these days - EG the garden gnome one in Ep2.

Not sure how the optional goals detracted from the story, they were more like bonus sub-plots, as well as offering alternative means of completing the main missions. They could only make for a richer experience imo.

I kinda hated this.

I just ordered it

Anyone play the new DLC?

Last three posts = mainstream gaming in 2012

Started this tonight. Why the fuck do all the characters have american accents

dude, count your blessings. you get john slattery and brad dourif, not a bunch of assholes doing their british.

^this

Hmm, there is that.

Same half dozen phrases repeated ad nauseum suck in any accent.

"Things are going from bad to worse"
"Indeed I believe so"

"Shall we meet for whiskey and cigars tonight?"
"Indeed I believe so"

"Guard duty again"
"Indeed I believe so"

I do like all the Theif-y bits in this.

I love how dense the levels are in this- reminds me of Minerva: Metastasis (and Adam Foster's other maps for HL2). I'm still really, <i>really</i> fucking bad at it, though; even with Darksight I'm having problems finding holes in the guards' patrol patterns.

the new dlc is so good, or at least the first two parts are. after playing Bioshock Infinite it's so fun to interact with a world that feels fully realized. also i assassinated a whale.

wut!

Super sold on this game

i am getting way too reliant on blink lvl 2 and sleep darts tbh. which is making this archive level painfully hard.

spent probably way too much time on the kennels last night. digging the fact that the game def punishes you for doing stuff mindlessly, like pulling any lever you see etc. first time in the kennels i pulled all the gate switches thinking the dogs would fuck over the patrolling overseers, and then duh, just had a shit ton of wandering guard dogs to deal with instead. or the "hmmm i have a key to a pantry i should obv open it despite all the stuff here about starving rats OH FUCK STARVING RATS EVERYWHERE."

got this and borderlands 2 for my bday today o_O

solid birthday presents imo

yeah that should keep you busy for a while

i am so into this game at this point - doing the stealth playthrough vibe right now, and unlike every other game like this, i am actually really excited by the idea of going through it a second time going all killing lethal. also just figured out that grenades are awesome for getting rid of rat swarms.

weirdly small map imo though. end up retracing a lot of the same ground, but the little mods and changes (like these asshole assassins suddenly fucking w/me on rooftops and shit) make it feel interesting to roll through an area a second time. equipment upgrades seem mostly pointless though. blink + better jump + see through walls deal is the shit

it's pretty fun. i'm not that far in yet but i'm enjoying it. so far my mode is "stealth until i get frustrated and then i kill people"

i played for ten minutes and found lots to like
but the next chance i'll have to play a game of that AAA variety will likely be in the late fall
i hate being a grownup

i love this game so goddamn much

true story: i normally hate stealth mission shit, like really really hate it, but this seems to have gotten it totally right. honestly i think that comes mostly down to blink, if that wasnt there this would suck, but theres just an incredibly rich amount of pathways thx to that - like every mission has a ton of different ways to navigate the map, and a ton of different ways to do what you need to do. rat tunnels, underwater passageways, all the pipes and ductwork, rewire tools, etc. it's a pretty perfectly realized game.

SPOILER KINDA MAYBE
best example yet of this is the fact that you dont even need to lower the drawbridge at all if you don't want, despite that being a mission goal or whatever, just thread your climbing and cross the absolute top of the thing. thats awesome design imo, in the best tradition of letting the player do whatever the fuck they want to do.

i just started playing this finally and after having my expectations ruthlessly suppressed regarding the game itself and the stealth in particular, i have been delighted to find that it is unputdownable fun, kind of bringing into contrast how little i was enjoying the very putdownable bioshock infinite

i like this game but i feel guilty whenever i give up on stealth and just kill people. i feel like i should try harder to be stealthy.

Okay, I put in a few hours here. it is VERY deus ex. i like it a lot but it's making me feel like i'm in completionist mode. And yeah, i'm constantly restarting if I needlessly kill people. Even weepers!

n/a, stealth gets much more doable once you double upgrade blink, the see through walls thing and agility. the turning point for me was the archive level, which kind of works like a upper level stealth tutorial in a lot of ways, teaches you to kind of nail down your blink aiming while still keeping your head on a swivel thx to the multiple guard paths.

this was very good! they didn't do a lot wrong. it was an appropriate length and i was fully into it the whole way. were it any longer that might have changed, as for the back half of the game i had all of the powers etc that i wanted and i ran out of upgrades that i cared about, so it was just as you were from that point onwards, no development. i rooted out every rune and bone charm* just for the fun of it but i ended up with like 20 unused runes. they were so many upgrades and powers focused on killing ppl, but really not killing ppl was the key ingredient of the game, and if you just wandered through taking dudes out i can't imagine it being too much fun. great level design was essential to keeping things interesting and they did a really good job on that.

*i missed one bone charm, which was in the lord regent's gaff. it seemed to be right behind a wall that there was no way around? i am sure there was a cool secret passage i missed out on but i ended up choking every mofo on that floor and dumping them all in the toilet and i still couldn't find anything when i had a free run of the place

I found it pretty fun taking dudes out the whole game. I was a monster.

what happens when the world becomes more "dark and chaotic"? is it just a bunch more rat swarms and plague dudes? i was toying with burning thru in rambo mode to find out.

yup, more rats, more weepers. i think some of the ambient dialogue is 'harder', and the little princess gets bratty. it's kind of worth it.

ok cool thx, that is persuasion enough for me

protip: doing a violent playthru is still 95% a stealth playthru, cos the combat is legit difficult, esp against 3 or more dudes. the perk where you can backstab and make the body dissolve is key imo