Bethesda Thursdays
Over at PC Gamer, Duncan Harris is still keeping up with his Illusionist playthrough of Skyrim, and Richard Cobbett has wrapped up his “Week of Madness” exploration of the game with a bunch of zany screenshots and some music. Oh, and Bethesda have admitted that they learned a valuable lesson about DLC with that whole horse armour thing for Oblivion. Good on them.
Perhaps somewhat more interesting, however, at least on the Skyrim front, is news of good progress being made by the suddenly-come-to-light Skywind mod, which aims to re-create Morrowind in the Skyrim engine.
Oh, and for what it’s worth, the California Literary Review doesn’t think that Boston should be the setting for Fallout 4, on the grounds that the game has traditionally been presented with a frontier/Western theme and setting. Apparently, nobody at the California Literary Review ever played Fallout 3.
Now let’s be honest…you’re all just reading this to find out what’s new and interesting as regards news about Arkane Studios’ Dishonored, aren’t you? That other stuff is mostly just fluff, isn’t it?
Well, you’ll be happy to know that Bethesda very kindly released Dishonored’s The Drunken Whaler, a twisted version of a traditional a sea shanty. Fans of the series are invited to remix the song as they see fit, and a contest is even being held. The submission deadline is September 28th, so don’t delay!
A new trailer has also been released, showcasing more of the game’s creative assassination techniques as well as its…rat mines. Whatever those are.
Finally, Arkane’s executive producer Julien Roby gave a couple of interviews recently, to games.on.net. Nothing particularly new and revelatory to be found in either, sadly.
You didn’t read the California Literary Review article, did you?
Nothing particularly new and revelatory to be found in either, sadly.
Not true.
One of the other games that’s not Borderlands that has my head spinning is Arkane Studios open-ended stealthy dystopian steampunk adventure, Dishonored. In my own time with the game at Gamescom, I was tremendously impressed at the many, many, many options available to complete just a single mission. In the Lady Boyle mission, I found that that at least one solution was practically handed to you – something that surprised me. Turns out it was for a reason.
In playtesting, Arkane found that people just weren’t all that able to go about finishing the mission using their own heads. without at least some sort of clue, people would just wander about aimlessly, hoping for the mission to complete itself.
“People would just walk around. They didn’t know what to do. They didn’t even go upstairs because a guard told them they couldn’t. They’d say ‘Okay, I can’t go upstairs.’ They wouldn’t do anything,” explained Arkane’s Julien Roby to Games.On.net.
As a result, you might find a few solutions pretty much handed to you on a silver platter – but fear not, those needn’t be the best solution. Often, the least obvious route is the most rewarding, and there will still be numerous angles from which to tackle any given scenario.
“We try not to lead the player by the nose, but at some point we found that if we don’t give a little information, people just get lost and don’t know what to do. It’s just overwhelming,” he said. “So we tried to add this element that gave just a hint, to help a little. But we try to do it as little as possible.”
As a case in point, while I loved every second I had with Dishonored at Gamescom, a friend from another publication hated it – because he just couldn’t figure out what to do.
I hope Bethesda places F4 in the east. They can screw up the story as much as they want over here. I’m not buying that trash. At this point, I have absolutely no faith Bethesda can make a good story. Good engine, pretty graphics, decent gameplay mechanics- ok. But they have no idea what a story is.
“Fallout 3 will feature hundreds of unique endings…” We all knew that was going to be bs. Surprise, surprise.
Just please, guys, leave the real Fallout to Obsidian. They did a much better job with NV than Beth did with F3. That is, if Obsidian doesn’t just stick with making a better game with Wasteland 2.
Of course, will Fallout 4 still use SPECIAL, or switch to a variant of Skyrim’s system…
*shrugs* Still pretty apathetic until Bethesda hands it to Obsidian again.
That’s rather unlikely to happen after what happened with New Vegas…
Am I the only one that reads the Bethesda posts and has no interest at all in Dishonored? I always look through for other non-Dishonored news, and just ignore that part.
It’s not really a SURPRISE. After all, you do more with The Elder Scrolls than most others that comment around here.
As to whether you’re the only one…well, hopefully someone will speak to that. Dishonored just looks cool for how much raw non-linear gameplay it purports to offer.
I think it is the “it purports to offer” part. I just don’t think it is going to offer much to Ultima/RPG fans, and I think it will be a lot more linear than people are expecting. Being able to do something a variety of ways is one thing, non-linear games are another.
Define “non-linear”.
Thief was a linear series of missions, but it would be hard to call the Thief games “linear”.
I think I’m spoiled when it comes to non-linear. Ultima games kind of redefined what it meant. Hence why fans tended to get annoyed when they couldn’t take off in any direction they wanted and do whatever they wanted.
Elder Scrolls takes it even further. However, Ultima seemed to do it better, since it manages to have a storyline you actually care about while allowing you to roam free (and do most things at any point in time).
Games like Deus Ex, etc (and what Dishonored seems to be) I wouldn’t call non-linear. If you are put into a certain mission, without any real control, that is linear. Sure, you can roam around anywhere within that location and do things in different ways, but you still have little/no control over where you go or what you do. I play Adventure games for their stories and characters, and they are generally extremely linear. I don’t see a lot of point playing a linear game that doesn’t offer the same depth of story. If I don’t get to choose my story, it needs to be a damn good one.
OK, I see what you mean. Certainly this will be no Ultima. Maybe a bit of Ultima Underworld.
It is a bit of a definitions thing. I suppose Dishonored meets that category of “non-linear”, in that you are given specific missions…or at least, from the sound of it, specific assassination targets. How you go about effecting that assassination is left up to you, and it sounds like the variety of approaches and methods is absurdly wide.
That said, the map suggests a pretty big world, though whether it’s an open world (in the traditional meaning) is something I can’t speak to.
That doesn’t prove that it’s non-linear or linear, of course, but it opens up the possibility of the former a bit, if in fact the area(s) associated with the endgame(s) can be accessed from the get-go and with a bit of cleverness.
Meh, to me it looks better than Skyrim, but I’m still not all that interested.
Then again, I also didn’t like the theif games.
Uh -oh! What happened to New Vegas?
You know, I like to pretend New Vegas was the actually Fallout 3. Since the NV plot was based on Van Burean, it kinda -was- Fallout 3.
The fact that Bethesda screwed Obsidian over?