How does Dishonored compare to the OG Thief series?
Blah, I’m upset and frustrated with Dishonored, and I don’t have total confidence that Dishonored 2 will solve the core issues with the first game.
Dishonored and Thief are extremely different games overall. They can’t be directly compared, because a lot of the thief-like elements were stripped from Dishonored in development.
Basically, Thief is all about detection. They have different sections of floor with varying light levels or sound levels, and you gotta try to balance between staying in the dark and staying silent. It’s about paying attention to how visible you are, and avoid guards investigating sounds. You can also use sounds to lure guards around.
In Dishonored, they threw the sound and light levels out the window. Dishonored stealth is all about not standing in a vision cone. There’s a crazy low threshold for enemies spotting you and investigating, or spotting you and flat out becoming agressive, and they never investigate anything except mostly spotting you, which usually leads to them just spotting you outright, so the game is kind of all about just watching enemy patrol patterns and teleporting through them. And if an enemy partially spots you, you can blink out and they won’t even investigate. If an alert is raised, it’s really easy for all the enemies in the whole level to swarm you, then you shoot them all dead because you’re crazy overpowered.
The stealth AI in dishonored can’t be manipulated in any way. You can’t really use throwables or shoot things without everyone going on a full alert. They might not know where you are, but it’s basically an alert, as if you had already been seen and got out of sight.
Beyond that, dishonored enemies aren’t made to fight you on fair terms once they detect you. They’re made to be run away from, so you can beat them up really easily with even basic weaponry on the highest difficulty. They all have really long startup to shooting guns at you. They’re not made like a typical FPS enemy even though the player has an arsenal of weapons that is as strong or stronger than a typical FPS player character. They don’t take cover, they don’t run from explosives, they don’t run from swarms of Rats. They just have no reactive behaviors to the player. All the guns and arrows stun the enemies really effectively, and do a ton of damage. If you have enough ammo, you can shoot everyone dead, no problem, easy. There’s no reason to engage with all the crazy combination techniques, the norm is overpowered, and I did play with the ultimate difficulty mod.
And the player has very few options other than to butcher all the enemies, which then leaves the level empty of enemies. You have basically no stealth distraction options, and the enemies don’t really pay attention to that type of thing in the first place.
If you want a Thief successor, play The Dark Mod. Dishonored is disappointing, and I’m not seeing signs the sequel is better yet.
Celia Alexis Wagar's CritPoints 