Why Dishonored is my Most Anticipated Game This Year

If you’ve been following Dishonored on IGN, you probably read Charles’ “Death at a Dinner Party” adventures earlier this year, in which he crashed a masked ball and caused total chaos, attracting the whole city’s attention by murdering guests and throwing canisters of explosive whale oil at guards. I sat down with the exact same mission recently, and was a bit concerned that I’d have nothing new to write about. How wrong I was.

Everything was different. For me and Charles, literally not one single thing, apart from the mission itself, was the same. This has instantly made Dishonored my most-anticipated game of this year. This is the first game I’ve played since Dark Souls last year that hasn’t patronised or restricted me for one second, instead just pushing a set of tools and powers into my hands with an avuncular wink and leaving me to do what I want with them. It gives you freedom, it gives you options, and it lets you work things out for yourself.

Here’s the first difference: I made it through the whole scenario without killing anyone. Not even my assassination target. (Well, I did kill a few rats by possessing them for so long that their tiny brains exploded, but that doesn’t count.) Here’s the second: I didn’t find the equipment menu, so I played for more than an hour without the incredibly useful instant-teleport Blink power or any weapons. Here’s the third: because I took a wrong turn on my way to the mansion garden party I was supposed to be infiltrating (my sense of direction is legendarily awful, in games as in real life), I discovered a whole neighbouring area of slum-houses that I wouldn’t otherwise have known existed.

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I like to play Dishonored like a spy, rather than a superhero

I like to play Dishonored like a spy, rather than a superhero. That’s in line with how I approach most open-world games - I like digging around in people’s diaries for information in Skyrim (and digging around their houses for possessions to liberate. I hacked into and read several thousand mundane emails on the computers of corporation employees in Deus Ex. I like to explore a place and hunt for the tiny details hidden in basements and dusty old books and peeling propaganda posters on the walls. Dishonored’s Dunwall is rich with this detail. If you take your time, avoid attention and keep your eyes open, you can really drink it in.

The premise of this mission – the same one shown at Quakecon and Gamescom – is an assassination during am exclusive masked ball hosted at the Boyle family mansion. Lady Boyle is your target, but the problem is, there are three Lady Boyle’s and all of them are in similar creepy porcelain-doll costumes of different colours (the game randomises the mission each time, too, so you can never be 100% sure which Lady Boyle should be the object of your stabby assassin affections.) There are three options (that I could work out, anyway): find out which is guilty, kill all of them, or kill one at random and hope for the best.

Infiltrating the mansion’s grounds is a mission in itself; the night streets are patrolled by police and Tall Boys, those heavily-armoured striders with the power to vaporise you on sight. You begin the mission on a boat in the nearby canal, and you have to work out how to get in by yourself. It’s gratifying that the game doesn’t give you hints; it doesn’t tell you which way to go, and no button brings up a magic light-trail showing you the best way in. You can swim through the sewers and try to find an inlet to the mansion. Getting up to the rooftops and climbing the fence is a more obvious solution.

I got chased into an alleyway after being spotted in the water by guards and accidentally discovered a slum-house with stairs leading promisingly upwards. Upon entering, I noticed a few prone bodies in the neighbouring room; I did not expect them to suddenly spring to life, run at me and cough black plague-goop into my face whilst blood streamed from their eyes. These people are the Weepers, the diseased poor of Dunwall whom the government has been systematically exterminating. You won’t find them in the opulent mansions where the rich are hiding away – they hide in the slums, evading the Tall Boys.

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You can never be 100% sure which Lady Boyle should be the object of your stabby assassin affections

You’re supposed to feel sorry for these guys, but man, they behave a LOT like zombies, with all the moaning and the stumbling and the blood and the spontaneous attacking – not that you can’t empathise with zombies, but they’re terrifying. I ran away upstairs and climbed out of a window, taking in as much of the decaying building as I could. Soiled mattresses were lying about everywhere, with plague information pamphlets and posters trodden into the floorboards. When I got into the roof, I realised that – fortuitously – I was right opposite the Boyle mansion, and one of the windows was open. Leaping between the windowsills, I climbed into the guardhouse and scouted it out. I’d managed to make my way in without having to scale any walls, swim through any sewers, steal an invitation or kill anyone. And now, after stealing them from a hook on the wall, I had the keys to the whole place.

You’re undercover at the party, where your masked-assassin outfit blends into the other guests’ fancy-dress ensembles. You can walk around more-or-less freely, listening to conversations (apparently one of the absent society ladies likes to get carnal with her male siblings and nephews) and scoping out your potential targets. The first Lady Boyle I meet is rather… over-friendly, leading me willingly away to a secluded assassination-friendly bedroom after a glass of punch on the promise of some drunk party-sex. Feeling massively uncomfortable about either murdering her without proof or jumping into her bed (the game wouldn’t let me, anyway), she eventually got bored with the masked guy hanging awkwardly around in her room and wandered off, at which point I read through her diary and stole some jewellery. The diary contains no allusions to illicit murder-worthy activity, making me think she probably wasn’t my target after all.

The other rooms upstairs are locked, so I head back downstairs to look for a way in. There’s a rat scuttling about in the grand ballroom; after possessing it, I head into the first vent I can find and emerge in a room that controls the giant security forcefield barring the way up the grand stairway. If I could find a hacking module, I could modify it to fry anyone who walks through it, which sounds massively entertaining but not enormously helpful to my goal of causing as little chaos as possible.

It’s after I’ve met all of the Lady Boyles stalking the party in red, black and white costume that a guest in a scarecrow-esque mask approaches me and whispers that he knows who I’m looking for – and that he’s in love with her, and understandably would rather I didn’t stab her to death. He promises to take her away and keep her safe if I deliver her unharmed to the basement. It doesn’t sound… entirely above-board, but at least I wouldn’t have to kill anyone.

Getting into the other Lady Boyles’ bedrooms is easy once I’ve found some more rats in the cellar to possess and scuttled through the mansion’s network of vents. Another diary reveals my true target: it’s the Boyle in black. Now I just have to get her to the basement and send her away with her lover without alerting anyone by striding through the party with an unconscious body draped across my shoulders.

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Oh. Well. It looks like I’ve accidentally delivered someone into a life of imprisonment and possible sex-slavery

This turns out to be pretty easy. I just walk straight up to the Boyle in question and tell her I’m out to murder her unless she comes to the basement, right now, a request to which she acquiesces with surprisingly little consternation. I knock her out in a quiet spot and sprint the rest of the way down to the basement before the guards stroll past. Once we’re there, the masked guy from earlier is waiting on a barge to take her back out into the canal. “She’ll have a long time to learn to love me back, now,” he says, calmly sailing away to wherever on earth he’s going with the unconscious Lady Boyle prone on his boat. Oh. Well. It looks like I’ve accidentally delivered someone into a life of imprisonment and possible sex-slavery. But at least I didn’t kill anyone.

It’s only when I’m comparing experiences with others later on that it becomes clear how unusual this experience of Dishonored was. Some players were relying on magic to teleport them across rooftops, facilitate an escape from the Tall Boys or possess guards to open doors for them. Others got eaten by fish in the canal. Most were causing violent chaos, turning the party into a colourful disaster, summoning hordes of voracious rats to nibble at the attendees. Not one other person found the slums, or the force-shield hack, or managed to make it through without killing. You could play that same mission five or six times and never do anything the same.

And that is exactly why this is the most interesting game of this year.

Keza MacDonald is in charge of IGN's games coverage in the UK, and expects the end of her year to be totally dominated by supernatural assassination (and probably a bit of Wii U). Follow her on Twitter and IGN.

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Pokemon Mystery Dungeon 3DS Announced

Almost all of today's Nintendo news has been centered on the Wii U, but amidst the chaos of price and release date announcements for the new home console, one piece of interesting 3DS information came to light – the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series is coming back. Nintendo announced a 3DS sequel for the series via Japan's CoroCoro magazine, and its title translates roughly as "Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Magnagate and the Infinite Labyrinth."

The CoroCoro issue went on to showcase images of the game which confirmed a 3D visual style and the presence of Unova region Pokemon. You can select Snivy, Oshawott, Tepig, Pikachu or Axew as your starter.

The "Magnagate" mentioned in the subtitle, meanwhile, refers to a type of portal in the game that teleports your Pokemon team into dungeons – you can create new Magnagates by using an included AR feature and scanning things. What things to scan? We don't know yet. Could be specialized QR codes, like Pokedex 3D. We'll have to wait and see.

Nintendo of America hasn't had anything to say about the game yet, but it's probably a safe bet that it will be localized for Western audiences. Most Pokemon titles are, and the Game Boy Advance and DS systems got a total of five Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games between them. So again, safe bet.

We'll go ahead and pencil it onto your TBA 2013 list, NOA.

Lucas M. Thomas is IGN Nintendo's wise old sage, having worked to cover the worlds of Mario, Link, Samus and all the rest of the Big N's creations for over six years here. You can follow him on Twitter.

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Guild Wars 2 Review

You expect to see only fields of grazing deer and idle monsters but when you turn the corner, there’s chaos. Crowds crush together, jumping around and blasting spells and swinging huge weapons. You join in, and though all possibility for any real coordination is lost in the frenzy, a sense of community, of belonging, solidifies as everyone strives to destroy a shared target. In Guild Wars 2, ArenaNet builds these event into every single one of its zones, teasing you to explore by instilling a sense that despite Tyria’s colossal size, another surprise isn’t far away.

There’s no global player versus player combat in main zones where you’ll level up to the 80 cap, and in that sense, the sense of working toward shared goals for shared rewards is reinforced. Like Turbine’s The Lord of the Rings Online, Guild Wars 2 establishes a friendly, inviting atmosphere by setting everyone on the same path to vanquish a seemingly invincible evil, and effectively removes many of the genre’s tedious restrictions to cooperate. There are no long lines to wait in, no cliques of high level players lording their seniority over the rest, no wristbands required to see the most interesting stuff, everyone can easily take part in the cyclical, world-spanning party.

Anyone who’s played Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning and Rift should be familiar with the idea of public questing, which ArenaNet utilizes to achieve spectacular effects in Guild Wars 2. More than serving as simply another bit of busywork, the events fill out the fiction of each zone, requiring those present to do things like aid ill-tempered Asuran scientists in a fight against colossal fiery destroyers in a volcano’s superheated stomach or defend a drowsy mountainside shack from rampaging steam-powered creatures. Events are often linked, so what begins as a simple kill quest could eventually turn into a full-on centaur invasion of an otherwise peaceful township, making each task more exciting because it could be lead to some sinister and undiscovered threat.

These events serve as Guild Wars 2’s primary form of quests. They activate in every zone regularly, and at low levels involve simple kill, escort or collection tasks. While the initial event tasks may not be especially memorable, they effectively bind your cause to everyone else’s and set the tone for the rest of the experience. There are no hoops to jump through to participate in an event. You don’t have to group up and make sure everyone’s on the same step. There’s no waiting around for a group that’s already engaged the enemy to finish up so you can beat up the mob when it respawns. Instead, when something happens, you just show up and play.

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In higher level zones the events become more complex in nature, until, in the level 70 through 80 areas, you get zone-wide stories culminating in thrilling climactic encounters in ominous coral-lined battlegrounds. Even before reaching those, the outcomes of events beyond the starting zones gain significance as entire in-game structures can be destroyed and rebuilt, and waypoint travel through contested territory temporarily blocked. These events never seem to cease, making Tyria feel chaotic and vaguely plausible, a place where the forces of good and evil don’t simply wait around for your permission to act.

You get experience and virtual currency for partaking in these roving battle parties regardless of which stage you happened to walk in at. By stripping away restrictions to join and generously blanketing all involved with rewards, ArenaNet provides ample motivation to bunch up and share the storytelling experience as NPCs shout orders and crack jokes while monsters attack. It brings the whole world together so naturally that there’s rarely a lonely moment, and anytime the in-game interface lights up with notifications and you see a big cluster of players, it’s always a joyous event.

One drawback of this system is, though the social experience and spectacle of the bigger event chains can be exhilarating, the gameplay doesn’t really match up. After running an event multiple times and learning the story and its mechanics, the initial sense of wonder melts away, and most are left doing the same old dull skill rotations over and over. Often such a big crowd gathers at an event that it’s easy to get lost in in the fireworks of spell effects and slashing of giant weapons, making it difficult to tell what effect you’re really having in the overall battle. As social storytelling devices the events are brilliant, but in making the experience accessible to all, sophisticated gameplay was sacrificed.

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Aside from events, the world of Tyria is dotted with quest givers represented by hearts on the world map, and the tasks they offer are more standard MMO fare. There’s still no quest log associated with these NPCs; their demands can be met by simply standing near them and completing specific tasks like rousing lazy workers, mending fences, killing enemies and retrieving artifacts. Compared to the hyperactive pageantry of the event system, the gameplay of the heart tasks feels tedious, despite ArenaNet’s frequent implementation of alternate skill bars to add variety. They’re something to do instead of something worth doing, which even ArenaNet appears to recognize because heart tasks appear nowhere in the post-level 70 zones.

Still, event chains and heart tasks are often built to overlap, so not too much time must be spend taking care of Guild Wars 2’s busywork. Better yet, nearly everything in Guild Wars 2 awards experience, from mining to jumping up the sides of mountains to reach vista points to leveling your crafting skills by discovering recipes for stuffed mushrooms and cheese pizza. If someone else in the world is already attacking an enemy, you can attack too and still claim loot and experience. If someone is already mining ore, that doesn’t prevent you from mining it as well. So not only are other players barred from attacking and killing you in the PvE world, they’re prevented from inconveniencing you, which casts off a significant amount of unnecessary tension usually associated with MMO play. You’re constantly showered in positive reinforcement, given items or experience or currency or all three for nearly everything, and yet it never seems excessive to the point where the rewards lose their significance.

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