Arkane Dishonored 2 - Emily and Corvo's Serkonan Vacation

[Infinitron]

http://www.pcgamesn.com/dishonored-2/dishonored-2-character-guide

Should you play as Corvo or Emily in Dishonored 2? A hands-on comparison

We're fast nearing the launch of Dishonored 2 - a game that I sneakily suspect could nab the Game of the Year gong. (You heard it here first if I'm right. If not, just pretend I never mentioned it, yeah?) But before we get all carried away, there's a crucial question that remains: How different is the experience as each of the two player-characters?

The game's creative director Harvey Smith already said that you need to play Dishonored 2 twice to understand it, which is a little disconcerting for those of us who don't have the time to finish, let alone replay, even the most wonderful games (Geralt, I'm sorry). Many of us will only be playing through its 15(ish)-hour campaign once, so the decision of who we pick is a biggie.

On the one hand, there’s trusty old Corvo - the man in the iron mask who introduced us to the joys of Blinking (teleporting, for you philistines who haven't played the first game) and rat possession. Then there’s Emily, the young empress from the original Dishonored who has now grown into a deadly-cool assassin with her own set of unique skills. Who do you go for?

I've played through a single mission as both Corvo and Emily so you don't have to (not that you wouldn't want to), and can confirm that the two are quite different. These are my thoughts on them, both mechanically and narratively. May it guide you to choosing the character that's right for you...

Pick Corvo for the classic experience, or Emily for a swathe of all-new skills
The original Dishonored pulled a the fine balancing act in offering appealing ways to play both aggressively and stealthily. Corvo's bag of unique magic tricks, along with a solid, satisfying melee combat system saw to that. But with the new abilities proffered by Emily Kaldwin in Dishonored 2, it quickly became clear to me that she's the slightly stealthier, more creative character, making Corvo look a bit brutish by comparison (even though all his classic moves are still intact).

I play through the Clockwork Mansion, the fourth mission in the game comprising a beautiful steampunky deathtrap filled with rooms that transform and shift around the house by way of giant cogs. It looks incredible. Corvo's three abilities for this level are Windblast, Blink, and Bend Time. Blink is, of course, the classic teleportation trick that's great for confounding and flanking enemies, though the AI seems more vigilant and wary of the trick this time round.

Pulling off a successful Blink mid-combat is tougher, and I find myself relying heavily on time-bending to give myself the advantage, making peace with the reality that I’m fighting my enemies face-to-face a lot more here than before. Maybe I'm just out of practice, or maybe Corvo's 15-year diet of whale fin pastries and Hagfish caviar (or whatever the social elite of Dunwall eat) has made him a little more heavy-footed than before.

Emily is more graceful, but to define her as the 'stealthy' character doesn't do justice to her inventive array of powers that are as playful as they are lethal. Her three abilities for the same mission are Shadow Walk, Far Reach and Domino. The first of these is the stealthy one, turning you into a shadow-creature that scurries along the ground like an alien (as in Ridley Scott’s Alien). It won't help you escape combat, but if you want to get around quickly while staying undetected, or close ground on an unaware enemy before gutting them, this is the way to do it.


I play as Corvo first then as Emily, and the real fun across my playthroughs starts when I begin toying with Emily's Far Reach and Domino abilities, which showcase the new heights of murderous creativity available to you in Dishonored 2. Far Reach is similar to Blink, but if you use it to target an enemy it throws them into the air and reels them in towards you.

Domino lets you tag enemies so that if you kill one of them, they all die in the same way. I quickly become fixated on seeing how many enemies I cad Domino together before trying to slice one of them in half and watch all of them meet the same comically grisly fate (I manage four), or throwing an enemy in the air with Far Reach and skewering him on my blade as he falls.

Corvo's moveset has nothing on this, and for me feels a little creaky, a little old-fashioned compared to the fresh, flashy moves of Emily. But maybe all this is the developer's intention, as Dishonored 2 has an air of 'passing the torch' from the character who kickstarted the series to the one who has risen from a symbol of innocence to a cold, compelling protagonist who I'm dying to know more about.

On that note...

Pick Emily for a lead role in the story, or Corvo for a supporting turn
Everything about Dishonored 2 presents it as 'The Emily Show'. From the earliest trailers showing off her sinister abilities, to the plot, by way of her actual gameplay, the spotlight is firmly on the assassin empress. Meanwhile Corvo continues doing what he does best, serving his master and lurking in the shadows (he's never cared much for the spotlight anyway).

10-year-old Emily's wellbeing was a focal point in Dishonored; her doodlings - which would be sunny and sweet or dark and violent depending on how you played - stuck with me as a poignant, vivid indicator of Corvo's powerful influence on the young empress. As a returning player, I want to spend some time in her mind, learning about her through her internal monologues and little asides to try and get an idea of how she turned out, which will in turn give clues as to how Corvo went about the events of the first game canonically.

Not much is given away about Emily's psyche in my playthrough, though her comment at the start of the mission - where she admires the beauty of the Clockwork Mansion and hopes that she can deal with her target in a way other than killing him - suggests that there is some compassion beneath that icy exterior.

Inevitably, only one of the two parallel campaigns will be canonical and, based on just about everything I’ve seen, that's likely to be Emily's. Arkane may solve this by converging the two characters for crucial story moments, though this would undermine all the solo actions and assassinations you'll be performing in between. However Arkane decide to solve this narrative conundrum, it had better not end up with the two stories existing concurrently in a quantum physics-y "There's always a girl. There's always a lighthouse" fashion - we're still recovering from the last time a game did that...

That's not to say that Corvo's story will be trivial. There are, after all, 15 years of his and Emily's lives to catch up on. During my playthrough there were hints that we'll get filled in on both characters' inner workings through little interactions with the environment. Prod at a typewriter as Corvo, for example, and he will muse about writing his memoirs; do it as Emily, and she'll wistfully bemoan how there's no way she can send letters to any of her friends. Small insights, sure, but they tease the possibility that Dishonored 2 is as much about learning as the characters' pasts as it is about setting them up for the future.

The Verdict
As someone still full of love for the original Dishonored, I was all set to stand by my boy Corvo when I first heard about this character choice malarkey. But based on my playtime, Corvo feels like the old dog with an old repertoire of tricks - paw, bark, jump - while Emily is the impressionable new pedigree pup capable of pulling off backflips, jumping through fire-hoops, or backflipping while jumping through fire-hoops.

The canine analogy extends to the story itself, if you’ll permit me to stretch it that far. Corvo looks likely to continue in his role as a loyal, subservient guard dog to his daughter and empress; after the many hours I spent protecting and nurturing Emily in the first game, I'm now ready to reward myself by being this person who Corvo's completely given himself to. It's almost as if playing Emily is doing justice to Corvo's efforts in the first game, because now you get to admire his ass-kicking progeny.

There's still a gritty charm to Corvo, whose moves - which were so jaw-dropping back in 2012 - now feel like the rough-and-tumble tactics of an old-school brawler next to Emily's slick new skillset. His comparative stiffness makes him more of a challenge, and there'll probably be people in the Dishonored old guard who'll stand by him. But knowing that I'm a 'single playthrough' type of guy, I'm set on the Emily come D-Day (November 11), and I like to think that if Corvo was standing over my shoulder as I picked her, he would approve.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/09/30/dishonored-2-clockwork-mansion/

The Beautiful Cruelty Of Dishonored 2

Dishonored 2‘s fourth mission is supposedly about infiltrating the home of Kirin Jindosh, a sadistic inventor who must be bumped off or “neutralised” before he unleashes an army of automatons upon the world. But what you’re really doing in the Clockwork Mansion is invading a brain. Having already seen excerpts from a developer playthrough, I had a sense that the building’s rearrangeable mechanical layouts might reflect the character of its architect, much as Bioshock and Portal’s labyrinths do GlaDOS and Andrew Ryan. I was unprepared, however, for how extravagantly Jindosh’s neuroses infest the place, or for how cruel it feels to slip through the cracks in his amazing creation – past the velvet drapes, beneath the lacquered facades and into the whirring schematics of his subconsciousness.



If Dishonored 2 is a game you can “break” by combining gadgets and powers to create absurdly unlikely solutions to problems, the Clockwork Mansion is a space that is terrified of being broken. It’s an opulent expression of a designer’s paranoia. Stick to the mansion’s surface layer, an elegant cluster of halls, corridors and laboratories that change shape at the tug of a lever, and Jindosh’s manner is that of an indulgent tour guide, drawing your attention to this or that furnishing via a PA system, even as he summons robots to electrocute and dismember you. Abandon the main path, however – a simple matter of triggering a room transformation, then using Blink or the new Farreach spell to dash through a gap in the machinery – and Jindosh will lose his cool.

“It’s cold and mirthless outside the walls,” he’ll complain, unable to track your movements, as you pick your way through boiler rooms and enormous gearboxes, searching for one of many entrances to the lab at the mansion’s heart. When you eventually step back into view, perhaps to steal a Bone Charm from a drawer or unplug the whale oil battery powering a forcefield, your adversary’s relief is palpable. Jindosh’s fear isn’t, I think, that the player is out to murder him, but that there should be anything in his realm that escapes his attention. Framed notices to maintenance crews reveal a hyper-awareness to the slightest alteration. “Mind my sensitivities!” declares one. “No whistling while cleaning the windows.”

The mansion’s protean architecture is oddly soothing to behold in motion – ceiling beams pull apart like wings unfolding, stairways collapse and vanish with well-oiled grace – and as you’d expect, working out which lever does what is very entertaining. There’s a marvellous structure a couple of floors down from the entrance – a pint-sized, glass-roofed maze of motorised partitions linked to pressure panels where you’ll find Anton Sokolov, a scientist from the first game who has been abducted to help Jindosh perfect his designs. On one level the mansion’s shifting layout is immensely playful, the work of a team that is luxuriating in the capabilities of a new engine, but it also speaks to an intellect that can’t stay put, that must brood ceaselessly over the world it has created for itself. “Sleep usually eludes me,” Jindosh confesses as you pull the lever that reassembles his bathroom into a bedroom. “My mind won’t stop turning.”

This queasy interplay between environment and antagonist extends to the area’s other NPCs. Some are less relevant to the level narrative – lumpy-faced guards whose sordid histories you can pick at using the Heart of Dunwall, which is still a wonderfully unnerving vehicle for backstory, and a pair of snotty aristos you might possess to reach the lower regions undetected. But there are also the towering Clockwork Soldiers, each voiced by its creator, which talk about themselves continually in a listless third-person.

These self-commentaries can be quite poignant. “The robot is uncertain,” one juggernaut offers as I contemplate it from the rafters, aiming a pistol loaded with explosive ammunition. It’s as though you’re at war with alienated fragments of your enemy’s psyche, which makes the act of subverting a Clockwork Soldier’s programming – either with a rewiring tool, or by blowing the creature’s head off to rob it of the ability to distinguish friend from foe – a little like performing a lobotomy on the fly.

Dishonored 2’s promise, for me, lies not just with the increased size and complexity of its environments or the sunny majesty of its equatorial setting, but with this greater capacity for cruelty. There’s no shortage of simulations that let you toy with AI ecologies from the shadows, but few of them invest the act with much emotional import – they’re flavourless bundles of variables that bounce together in the sanitised name of “fun”. In what I’ve played of Dishonored 2, by contrast, you deliberately assume the role of a predator, let loose on sandboxes that aren’t just generic assemblages of systems but personalities in their own right, endowed with peculiar tics and trappings that arise from the malevolent yet sympathetic people they house.

You can, of course, vary the extent to which you abuse these scenarios – lower bodycounts equal less society-wide Chaos and (theoretically) fewer and more manageable opponents in subsequent chapters – but the art of invading a level like the Clockwork Mansion is fundamentally vicious. You needn’t kill Jindosh to complete the mission, but you do have to break him, shattering the complex architectural mirror he has constructed for himself, in order to get to him. It’s not clear whether all of the new game’s levels will be as fraught with subtext, but for me this already represents a huge advance on the first Dishonored’s exquisite but relatively literal-minded array of townhouses, factory floors and naval fortresses.

Another advance is that you actually feel like a personality this time, where Dishonored 1’s Corvo was a mute, vengeful cipher thrown together to meet the changing requirements of a toolset that was still being perfected. Corvo’s back, of course, but he has a voice now and more importantly, an ally to define himself against – Emily Kaldwin, his daughter and the recently usurped Empress of Dunwall. Emily isn’t quite the Hyde to Corvo’s Jekyll, but she’s certainly a more ferocious and flamboyant choice of protagonist, designed for the player who really enjoys hurtling over the geometry and messing with AI behaviours.

The biggest initial distinction is that Emily’s equivalent to Blink, Farreach, isn’t a teleport-dash but a sort of mystic grappling line – it flings you forward in an arc, preserving your momentum when you arrive at your destination. This caught me off balance at first – I’d latch onto a street lantern above a fortified position, only to skim right past it and into hot water – but the sense of fluidity is irresistible. You might hit crouch as you land to slide, slicing the ankle tendons of a guard as you pass. By contrast, Corvo is more of a stop-start kind of aggressor, pausing time in order to sidle up behind people or carrying out controlled Blinks from cover to cover.

Emily’s skillset is also about manipulating people where Corvo’s powers lean on the element of disguise, or pitting an area’s creatures against its human population. Her Mesmerise skill, for instance, conjures up a cosmic abomination to entrap beholders in a waking nightmare – not quite your average stun grenade, though it serves the same purpose. This isn’t just variety for variety’s sake: it’s the difference between a woman born to rule and a blue-collar hero who had to claw his way out of the rat heap, putting on appearances in order to make his way in civilised society. I’ve never been that convinced by the game’s Outsider deity, the pallid youth who is the source of all magic in Dishonored’s universe, but I do like how deftly his gifts serve to illustrate Corvo and Emily as people.

Emily’s most terrible power of all is Domino, which chains targets together within a certain range so that what happens to one happens to all. The ramifications are often spectacular – at one point I yanked three guards into the air simultaneously with Farreach, disembowelling one as she passed my vantage point while the others tumbled into an abyss. They can also be pleasantly unpredictable. Later, I was closing in on a sentry when he abruptly vanished in a cloud of sparks. I had, it transpired, forgotten that I’d linked the poor soul to another guard in the street behind, who’d managed to wander into a Wall of Light. It’s a delightfully awful ability, both for the slapstick nature of the resulting combo effects, and for the sense that you’re stripping away the world’s class divisions. To murder an area’s overlord by tethering his fate to that of a more easily accessed underling is to carry out a very unceremonious kind of social levelling.

Dishonored 2 is, then, shaping up to be Quite The Thing. As brilliantly grotty and multi-faceted as the new abilities are, it’s the environment itself that has me hooked – these are warrens I’d happily plumb using nothing but my pitiful wits, the crouch button and a foldaway dagger, and you can, of course, play through the entire game that way if you prefer. The only question, again, is whether the game’s other chapters will stand comparison with the psycho-geographical centrifuge that is the Clockwork Mansion – there’s the one from the E3 demo that allows you to warp between two epochs in history, and I know of another that is set in a mining district, where the visibility is constantly changing as dust clouds billow across the layout. All of which sounds tremendous, but in need of a unifying figure to animate the level’s props and give them meaning – a soul I can negotiate with and ultimately, lay to rest.

 

[sexbad?]

 

[Multidirectional]

Looks like another challenging game!

 

[sexbad?]

It looks like a lot of fun

 

[Excidium II]

I'll have fun waiting for this to get cracked.

 

[Sodafish]

I hope that's on noob mode because otherwise open combat looks laughably easy.

 

[Excidium II]

^
expecting it to be remotely hard lmao

 

[Sodafish]

No, but at least in the original if you started a fight on hard mode on level ground with 3 or 4 opponents you could actually sustain some damage, even if you are reasonably good. Player in the above video is shit and still ends up killing himself more than anything.

 

[prodigydancer]

Player in the above video is shit

 

[Siel]

The player doesn't look too good but playing with a controller might not help.
And yes, it was confirmed theses press demos were played on Easy.

 

[Sodafish]

And yes, it was confirmed theses press demos were played on Easy.

OK then.

 

[Siel]

I'll have fun waiting for this to get cracked.

Unless you can hack denuvo you will play it next year.

 

[udm]

1:33

 

[toro]

And yes, it was confirmed theses press demos were played on Easy.

OK then.

There is no difference between Easy and Hard mode: enemies will have more health and they will inflict more damage but you'll be using the same strategy and the same powers to chop off their health. In other words Hard mode will be equivalent to More Tedious Mode (as it was in the first game).

There is no way to make this game difficult with the current design philosophy behind it: you are the apex predator in a world filled with dumbdown AI. They should give the same powers to the AI opponents and implement a really nasty hunter-AI to make it more difficult. Which I doubt it (even Daud was piss easy).

Anyway, at least in this game it seems you can destroy robots without increasing the Chaos status.

 

[HoboForEternity]

why are they just stand around while the player is slaughtering them? i hope it is staged or easy mode

 

[toro]

why are they just stand around while the player is slaughtering them? i hope it is staged or easy mode

RadiantAI in action. Just ask sexbad?

 

[sexbad?]

 

[Sodafish]

why are they just stand around while the player is slaughtering them? i hope it is staged or easy mode

RadiantAI in action. Just ask sexbad?

Should rename it FabulousAI.

 

[Neanderthal]

Player got a skateboard strapped to their back or someat? That slidin around everywhere looks well fuckin stupid.

 

[Siel]

Eternal discussion about how the AI is bad when no video game has ever got it right.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-10-04-dishonored-2s-approach-to-level-design

When is a layer not a layer? Dishonored 2's intricate approach to level design


Last week, Aoife and I paid a visit to Bethesda's offices in London to get hands on with Dishonored 2; we had a couple of hours to fully explore the clockwork mansion level as we learned how to use Emily's powers and got reacquainted with Corvo now he's learned to talk.

The clockwork level itself is quite impressive. It also seems like a real statement, emphasising that the opulent, Victorian inspired visuals that so characterise Dishonored are more than just set dressing; as you go about the house, you pull levers to reconfigure the environment around you with a satisfying series of clicks, clanks and whirs. Reconfiguring the house, of course, opens up different pathways to your target - in this instance, the renowned inventor Kirin Jindosh. It's a strong reminder that while Dishonored 2 (and the original Dishonored) may not be a puzzle game, it's sure as hell built like one.

I spoke to lead level designer Christophe Carrier at EGX to explore the design ethos behind Dishonored 2 and, indeed, the clockwork mansion. Before we dive into that though, you might want to watch the video first in order to get a good sense for what the level actually is.




As you may have gleaned from our wildly differing approaches to the same level, Dishonored 2 is all about supporting player choice. Players can confront everything head on or sneak around the sides, and then there's also the question of powers to consider; Dishonored 2 allows you to refuse the Outsider's offer of occult magic powers for the first time, allowing you to play the entire game as an ordinary, squishy human.

I asked Christophe how one goes about designing a level with those different approaches in mind - does he start with those people who aren't going to use any powers at all and then layer it up for the people who will? How does one go about building something like that? "Well that's the challenge of course," he began, shifting in one of the NEC's most comfortable plastic chairs, "but to answer your question we don't work with layers. When we make the level, we build the basics first; the main buildings, the balconies and the apartments and then on top of that - well it's kind of a layer [laughs]. While I'm talking I'm realising that it's a layer but we are digging deeper into it and we add or remove things. Entrances, new paths, and of course we had to deal with the no power players to that they have an experience that is as fun as all the other people.

"I try to play the game in no power [mode] as much as possible to give the player the same fun as if they were using the powers. And it's more difficult of course, but it's as fun I think. For example, somewhere where you could go by blinking or far reaching, you have to find the way to go up or down and it's more hidden - you have to search your environment and I think for a no power player, it's fun to have to find solutions like that. it's not a puzzle per se, but the pleasure comes from 'Yeah, I found it! That's where I have to go with no powers.'"

Whether using powers or not, the clockwork mansion is certainly an environment that rewards exploration. I played through the mission three times and - as I discovered in conversation after the session - still managed to miss a whole chunk of stuff hidden away. While it inevitably means that players often miss entire swathes of the level, Christophe explained that this is very much part and parcel of the Dishonored experience.

"You know, the thing that is really awesome for us is to see players talking to other players saying 'what did you do? I went there but had to do this - no! You could do this and you know, take this window' and they go 'oh I'll try this next time' and that stuff we call the coffee machine talks... in my work, when I hear that, I'm so happy to hear that from players; that they're not playing the same game. That's one of the things I love about working on Dishonored - that you can see everyone is doing something different, but they have equal fun.

"You know at Valve they have an entirely different perspective. They say - as far as I remember, it was a long time ago - they say everything we do should be seen by the player. Right? And I totally respect that because you put a lot of work into a game so you want to show everything you've done. For us, we have to accept that some players will never see an entire part of the level - so that's different. But, at the end of the day, it encourages replayability - because when a player hears from other players that they didn't see the same thing, they have the feeling that they probably missed something - or maybe that it was an entirely new way to do a level and it's like playing an entirely new game, I'm not sure, but this kind of thing is really fun."

 

[Makabb]

and dark messiah still got better combat

 

[LESS T_T]

"You know at Valve they have an entirely different perspective. They say - as far as I remember, it was a long time ago - they say everything we do should be seen by the player. Right? And I totally respect that because you put a lot of work into a game so you want to show everything you've done. For us, we have to accept that some players will never see an entire part of the level - so that's different. But, at the end of the day, it encourages replayability - because when a player hears from other players that they didn't see the same thing, they have the feeling that they probably missed something - or maybe that it was an entirely new way to do a level and it's like playing an entirely new game, I'm not sure, but this kind of thing is really fun."

There were pretty fun arguments around this back then: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/i_valve_080606

Eurogamer: As good as Half-Life 2 was, it's not really a game that ever rewards the player for exploration. There were times when you could go off the beaten track and look at some deserted building - especially on the coast - but there'd actually be no reason to waste time doing that. You'd find nothing. There'd be no scribbled notes or anything that might flesh out the details or give you any more information on the back story, and that's disappointing for players that like to poke around in the dark corners of games. Why don't you reward the more persistent player for this?

Gabe Newell: What we try to do is get people through as much entertainment as possible. This is an argument I have with Warren Spector; he builds a game that you can play through six different times. So that means that people pay for the game, but don't get to play five sixths of the game, which I feel is a mistake. You spend all of this time to build stuff that most players will never ever ever see, and I feel we try to maximise... I mean, I understand the exploration impulse and we try to make people happy doing that because it's an important part. Exposition, exploration, combat and so on are things that we need to make sure are present, but if only one per cent of your customers see this cool thing that takes five per cent of your development budget, that's not a good use of resources.

Robin Walker: Playtesting drives a lot of this. Often, you'll watch a playtest and something incredibly cool happens, and the first question you ask afterwards is how can we make sure all of our customers see that? They'll say 'the gunship nearly crashed on me when I shot it down and I had to jump to the side to dodge it and that was incredibly cool'. How can we make sure that happens to almost everyone?

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/i_warrenspectorpt1_270606?page=2

Eurogamer: There's a certain irony that you're working with Valve when it's clear that Gabe Newell has an almost polar opposite design philosophy to yours. As you know, he firmly believes that gamers should get to experience "as much entertainment as possible", but that making something where players may miss five sixths of the game is a "mistake". He says, "You spend all this time to build stuff most players will never ever see." That's a pretty wholesale rejection of your company's mantra of allowing players to craft their own unique experiences through in-game choices, don't you think? Who's right here?

Warren Spector: Well, I'M right, of course! No, seriously, there's clearly room for a variety of approaches to game design - god, it'd be boring if we all believed the same stuff and made the same kind of game! Fact is, I've been having this argument with Gabe for, oh, let's see... how long have I known him? Nine years? Yeah, all that time. And before that, I used to argue with Richard Garriott and others at Origin about the same damn thing. I'll go to my grave believing I'm right.

But, really, I find the idea that one design philosophy is "right" and another "wrong" (or even that one is better than another) incredibly odd. I mean, is Star Wars better than The Godfather? Is Lord of the Rings better than Goodfellas? Should Stephen Spielberg make nothing but action-adventure movies because they make more money than his more "serious" efforts? Should we elevate Tom Clancy or Dan Brown to the top of the writing heap and stop reading Shakespeare? Does anyone think all music should be aimed at the top of the Billboard charts? I sure don't want to live in a world where everyone sounds like Britney Spears... oh, wait, I already do... Anyway, you get my point...

Eurogamer: Is it really a waste of development time to give player choice, and how do you persuade the player to come back and play things a different way? Rather than miss out on five sixths of the content, tempt them to play the game six times...

Warren Spector: Wow, lots of points to address here - this is going to take some words...

First, and most trivial, I've never said that players should see one-sixth of your content. My "rule" has always been that every player should see about 75 per cent of your content, with another 25 per cent reserved for unique player experience. That's kind of a dopey measure, in a sense, because it implies that the best way to differentiate player experience is to handcraft a lot of paths through a map and a bunch of branching dialogue for NPCs to spout.

There are other ways to get at unique experience that don't require massive amounts of hand-crafted content. But I do believe that generating some content, knowing everyone won't see it, has huge value.

For players, a multipath/multisolution game offers the knowledge that if they're clever they will see and do things no one else has ever seen or done. How can you not want to play a game like that? A year after we shipped Deus Ex, I saw someone solve a particular game problem in a way I'd never seen anyone try before, and I was sitting there with him wondering if his solution would work. I mean, I helped make the game, and I'd played through that part of the game a hundred times and watched probably a thousand playthroughs and I was seeing something I'd never seen before. No game-on-rails or rollercoaster ride can possibly touch that for a thrill!

And check out the forums where people talk about how they solved a particular problem and others respond in amazement that they'd never thought to try that approach. Listen to people debate what one endgame choice said about you as a person, as opposed to what another endgame would have said...

That is so much cooler than listening to people agree how cool it was when they all killed some monster in exactly the same way, or got across some chasm in exactly the same way, or solved some goofy puzzle in exactly the same way.

Beyond that, multipath/multisolution games offer players who aren't great at combat, say, another option (stealth, dialogue, hacking - whatever).

They can keep playing your game instead of throwing a controller or mouse across the room in frustration. I mean, not to pick on Half-Life 2 (which I happen to enjoy immensely), but if I'm not good enough to get past an enemy or a carefully crafted puzzle my only option is to stop playing, and maybe never buy another Half-Life game. In Deus Ex (for another example I enjoy immensely!) if you can't fight your way past a problem, try something else.

Something else will work. (There were no puzzles in DX, so I can't address that - we only had problems, and problems, by their very nature, are open to solution in a variety of ways.) Anyway, giving players ways to keep playing your game seems like a good idea to me. How is that a waste of time and money?

So, to try to wrap this up in something less than book length, I don't believe it's ever a waste of time to give players real choices, rather than fake ones. If all you're doing is putting players on rails and rocketing them through your story, why not just build a roller coaster or make a movie? If the only choice a player gets to make is which weapon to use to kill a bad guy, you've completely wasted that player's time. Roller coaster rides are immense amounts of fun, but really, all they do is provide an adrenalin rush and a moment's distraction from the workaday world. Games can be more. Movies are terrific storytelling devices - I love movies - but movies already exist. I don't need to make them. (Well, I kinda want to produce a movie someday, but that's another matter entirely...) If all you're doing is telling yourstory to players (with the added attraction of getting to pick a gun once in a while), why bother?

If you're not "wasting" development time by allowing players to explore your world, advance the plot their way, test behaviours and see the consequences, I believe you're wasting players' time - and that's a far, far worse sin than wasting some time and dollars on stuff some players might not see.

It would an interesting case if this Warren Spector/Valve project (later known as a Half-Life 2 episode) actually got released.

 

[sullynathan]

How come no guards notice when you left a window open? Decade old games had that