Shall we meet for whiskey and cigars tonight?

I did. As someone who grew up reading Wells and studied the Victorian era in depth it really was a pretty shit approximation of an Oddworld-esque Victorian world. They clearly didn't do much research into the actual depths of the Victorian era's atrocities and went for the low hanging fruit of 'kill all the poor'. It was a very flat and dry game even if you explored the lore, because it was just "Even poor man rapeman bad man" if you used the Heart on civvies.

Attached: EaDpaULXYAAmBbX.jpg (524x759, 54.62K)

That's just it. Not only did the sequel not improve on the mediocre storytelling and characters, but it doubled down and just ripped off its story entirely.

>As someone who grew up reading Wells and studied the Victorian era
kek

Attached: kek.png (500x453, 402.3K)

the only thing impressive about Dishonored is the art director who also was in charge of City 17

>They clearly didn't do much research into the actual depths of the Victorian era's atrocities
Almost as if the game doesn't take place in Victorian London and is about a rat plague, witches and black magic.

The game is set in an alternate Victorian era. It's literally set in the 1800s. It applies, and if you don't like that go read the artbook, where they directly reference/source Victorian era advertising, writing, and period art itself.

The whole manufacturing side of Dishonored, the spooky factories that are a big part of its supposed 'message' and its general theme, are just the first 5 minutes of the 1960s Oliver adaptation BUT WITH STE- I MEAN WHALEOIL PUNK TECH DUDES
Pretty much.

>how
game engine change
>why
for one flashy mission, the phase mechanic.

There is no "message" in Dishonored. The world is entirely alien and none of its events can be applied to the contemporary real world.

You aren't as intelligent as you think you are.

Read two nations for insight into british class based issues of the 1800s dickins used emotion and fiction 2 nations used reality.
Or for a general view of europe, read the persuit of power

Are you fucking retarded. That dude just explained how the art direction sourced the Victorian era. Doesn't sound very alien to me. Yeah it has whale oil and steampunk shit, but it still sources quantifiable periods of human history.

>engine change
Did you somehow miss the fact that Arkane has literally never used the same engine twice? Arx Fatalis is proprietary. Dark Messiah is Source. Dishonored is Unreal3. Dishonored 2 is idTech. Prey is Cryengine.

How old was your sister again?

>Dinga Bakaba
>Dingus Baka

>persuit

They went way too far with the technology in dishonored 2 to the point where it kind of broke my immersion. If you can have robot soldiers then why can't you have automatic weapons?

That mechanic was pretty fucking cool though. As was the Clockwork Mansion.

There's a very clear and very sophomoric message in the contrast between The Void and Outsider-related magic (which is represented as dark, chaotic, and madness-inducing, but overall 'natural') and the 'Industrial' side of things, which is shown to exploit the natural elements of the Void (whales, their oil which is never stated if it's just magic or very efficient at burning, bonecharms and whalebone etc) for nothing more than advancement and profit, usually to the detriment of poor/normal people, or even the detriment of powerful people.

The Outsider is implied to give you your Void powers in the original game as part of this -- it's a move of pure chaos rather than a pointed 'go stop the conspiracy'. He's throwing a lit fuse into a powder keg, and it's only up to Corvo whether he blows up the right people or not, because that's the nature of the Void -- chaos. Natural, raw chaos akin to survival-of-the-fittest, but chaos nonetheless.

The whole fucking subplot of Sokolov slowly turning from an Establishment-loving cantankerous old boot into a bit of a softer, more benevolent person who wants to distribute his rat plague cure for free rather than just grind up slaves to make a marketable vaccine is meant to make this very clear to players: Industrialism and profiteering bad.

The whale slaughterhouse in the DLC is also really meant to hammer this home, and is 100% inspired visually and tonally by Rupture Farms from Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, which had the exact same message of overindustrialization exploiting nature to extinction.

>The game is set in an alternate Victorian era
The game is set in its own fucking universe, the Empire of the Isles ≠ Earth, there's nothing "alternate" about it.

Is Dishonored 2 really that bad? I couldn't give a fuck about the world or the shitty lore or characters. Is the actual game bad?

>the spooky factories that are a big part of its supposed 'message
What the fuck are you even talking about, Dishonored's message is quite literally just "power corrupts". That's it. The fact you can't grasp that is pretty telling.

Gameplay was good, only thing bad was the story and lack of optimization

And The Witcher sourced medieval polish lore. Doesn't mean it takes place in Poland.

No it's pretty fun and you have more tools and powers to work with.

>Is the actual game bad?
Given that the game is a mix of every aspect of it, yes. If you mean strictly the gameplay, it's the same as D1 with some QoL changes.

At no point do the horrors the world depicts come across as any kind of propaganda. It's not a A bad B good juxtaposition, it's just bad, bad everywhere for the sake of creating a miserable world. Dishonored is an edgy franchise, that's it.

It's a classic soul/souless situation.

It's done very dryly and flatly though, that was my original point. There is no reason for the player to be invested in any of it. I like dark settings but Dishonored was both a mixture of too pussy and too dark for me to take anything away from it. I didn't give a shit if Emily lived or died because she was a clearly artificially innocent child in a world that had no meaning. Nobody in Dishonored matters. Nothing they do will matter. When you make a completely pointless setting like that there's nothing to be taken from the plot and no investment or immersion to be found.

They should have just fed Dishonored 1 with DLC forever, if it was even half as good as daud stuff it would still be top tier.
>That mechanic was pretty fucking cool though. As was the Clockwork Mansion.
it was, and i could maybe meet it half way with sacrificing tightness of gameplay for neat mechanics - but they didn't even do that, to this day D2 runs like a pile of festering dogshit.
and i'm not just talking 'muh low fps', that shit can be accounted for

I didn't say that. I said that being sourced from the real world means it can't be "completely alien" and divorced from reality.

And I'm not that user.